MFAH to show 50 van Gogh masterworks
The museum’s exhibit will be an exclusive presentation of paintings from two Dutch museums that includes portraits, landscapes and still lifes to illustrate key passages in the artist’s life.
The British are coming this week, for “Tudors to Windsors,” a major exhibition of royal portraits featuring artworks that have never before left London’s National Gallery.
But come March, expect Dutch fever to overtake the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston for the opening of “Vincent Van Gogh: His Life in Art.”
Blame it on the ear and stories of madness. Or the dramatic brushstrokes. Or Don McClean’s 1971 hit song “Starry,
Starry Night.” Aside from Claude Monet, with his landscapes of water lilies and haystacks, no Impressionist continues to fascinate museumgoers as much as Van Gogh. But the popular story tends to focus on the artist’s troubled final years.
This exhibition begins earlier — about seven years before Van Gogh’s death, to trace “a rich and complex narrative” defined by his tremendous drive to become an artist, said curator David Bomford.
MFAH director Gary Tinterow calls the show “a vivid portrait of Van Gogh’s evolution as an artist.”
The show is a coup for the Houston museum — an exclusive presentation of 50 masterworks from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo that includes portraits, landscapes and still lifes to illustrate key passages in the artist’s life, from his early sketches to his final paintings.
Largely self-taught, Van Gogh got a relatively late start: He was 27 and had worked without success as an art dealer, a teacher, a bookseller and a minister when he took up painting in 1881.
His first major painting, “The Potato Eaters,” one of his most iconic early paintings, will be on view alongside sketches and other works sensitive to the harsh life of rural peasants that Van Gogh observed in the village of Nuenen from 1883-85. His focus shifted to portraiture and a brighter palette after he went briefly to an art academy in Antwerp, then moved to Paris to live with his brother, Theo, where he also became inspired by Japanese woodcuts.
Two years of city life proved enough. The Van Gogh most people recognize emerged in the late 1880s in Arles, works from the late 1880s, his time in Arles, full of bright light and the colors of southern France. And that famous incident in which he sliced off one of his ears, before admitting himself to Saint-Paul de-Mausole, a psychiatric asylum in Saint-Rémy, in May 1889.
“Irises,” one of the iconic paintings from that period, is among the works that will be on view; along with “Ears of Wheat,” one of the latest works in the exhibition, painted in the early summer of 1890 after Van Gogh left SaintRémy for Auvers and produced a flurry of landscapes. He committed suicide on July 27, 1890.