Van Gogh show drew record attendance

They didn’t come to fisticuffs, but Van Gogh beat King Tut.

The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston reports that “Vincent van Gogh: His Life in Art,” which closed Friday, drew a record crowd of more than 230,000 visitors during its 16-week run. That figure surpassed the daily average set eight years ago for “Tutankhamun: The Golden King and the Great Pharoahs.”

The King Tut exhibit may have been shimmering with gold objects — one of its highlights was a 10-foot statue of the pharoah from a funerary temple — but van Gogh’s name is apparently golden, no matter what’s behind it.

The last two galleries of the MFAH’s van Gogh exhibition were spectacular, including “Irises” and other paintings. But the MFAH presentation was a bit of a challenge as well, limited mostly to lesser-known works because the most iconic paintings — including “Starry Night Over the Rhône,” “Sunflowers,” “Shoes,” “L’Arlésienne, “At Eternity’s Gate” and “Prisoners Exercising” — were already reserved by London’s Tate Modern for its van Gogh exhibition, which is up through Aug. 11.

Collaborating with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the KröllerMüller Museum, Otterlo, now retired MFAH curator David Bomford juxtaposed paintings and drawings of more than 50 landscapes, portraits and still lifes to unpack van Gogh’s artistic journey. “It was an extraordinary mixture of wildness and discipline,” Bomford said.

It could not have hurt that the MFAH supplemented its show with an Instagrammable playroom designed for children but just as enticing to adults, full of immersive displays that allowed people to pretend they were characters in the most famous, missing paintings.