A photomontage with the young Vincent (front), Theo (right), Theo's wife Jo Bonger and their son Vincent, set against Van Gogh's Almond Blossom (February 1890) Courtesy of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Adventures with Van Gogh is a weekly blog by Martin Bailey, our long-standing correspondent and expert on the artist. Published every Friday, his stories range from newsy items about this most intriguing artist to scholarly pieces based on his own meticulous investigations and discoveries.
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam will mark the 50th anniversary of its opening in 1973 with a series of major exhibitions celebrating the artist. Established with the collection inherited by Vincent's brother Theo, it is by far the world's most popular museum devoted to a single painter.
This represents a spectacular achievement for an artist who is renowned for only selling a single painting during his lifetime. The museum typically welcomes around 2 million visitors a year, although last year the figure was just 1.3 million because of the lingering impact of Covid-19.
Usually the museum dedicates one or two exhibitions a year to Van Gogh's work, with the remainder on other artists, mainly from the late 19th century. But in 2023 Vincent himself will be celebrated with three major shows, which will doubtless help win back the crowds.
The year will kick off with Choosing Vincent: Portrait of a Family History (10 February-10 April). Billed as a story of "doubt, setbacks, pride and triumph", the exhibition sets out to examine how Theo, his wife Jo Bonger and their son, also named Vincent, helped the painter win global recognition—including through the founding of the Amsterdam museum.
Van Gogh's Landscape at Twilight (June 1890), with the château of Auvers-sur-Oise in the distance Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The most ambitious exhibition will look at the artist's time in Auvers-sur-Oise, the village just north of Paris where he spent the last months of his life. Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise: His Final Months opens in Amsterdam (12 May-3 September) and then travels to the Musée d'Orsay in Paris (3 October-28 January 2024). It will include just over half the 74 paintings that he completed in the 70 days before his suicide in July 1890.
Van Gogh's The Bridge at Courbevoie (May-July 1887), a view by the Seine Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
The other major two-venue exhibition will be Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape, which focuses on how Vincent and his contemporaries painted by the River Seine on the outskirts of Paris. This show should be a revelation, following detailed research on these riverscapes. It will first be presented at the Art Institute of Chicago (14 May-4 September) and then at the Van Gogh Museum (13 October-14 January 2024).
Van Gogh's Country Road in Provence by Night (May 1890), dominated by a pair of cypresses Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo
Americans will also have a unique opportunity to discover the paintings of cypresses, a motif that the artist discovered in the south of France. Van Gogh's Cypresses, also based on fresh research, is coming up at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art (22 May-27 August).
Back in the Netherlands, the first exhibition ever on Van Gogh's stay in the far north of the country will be mounted at the Drents Museum in the provincial capital of Assen. Van Gogh in Drenthe (11 September-7 January 2024) is expected to reassemble all five surviving paintings and most of the drawings and documents that date from the artist's period in this remote area during the autumn of 1883, 140 years ago.
Van Gogh's Drawbridge in Nieuw-Amsterdam (October 1883), a watercolour of the view from a balcony at the inn where the artist stayed Courtesy of the Groninger Museum, Groningen
Visitors could combine the Drenthe exhibition with a trip to nearby Hoogeveen and Nieuw-Amsterdam, the villages where Van Gogh painted. In Nieuw-Amsterdam he lodged at a small inn, which now hosts the Van Gogh House. Recently closed for renovations, it is due to reopen on 17 June.
In Nuenen, in Brabant province in the very south of the Netherlands, Vincent spent nearly two years living in his parents' house at a crucial time when he seriously set out to become a painter, in 1883-85. An existing visitor centre there is being expanded to create the Van Gogh Village Museum, scheduled to open on 16 May. The museum stands directly across the road from the parsonage where Vincent's father served as rector.
Cover of Atlas Van Gogh in Brabant by Ron Dirven and Helewise Berger; the Dutch edition is to be published in March by W Books Courtesy of W Books
The most important new Van Gogh book of the year may well be the Atlas Van Gogh in Brabant, describing the villages where Vincent was brought up and later worked—primarily Zundert, Helvoirt, Etten and Nuenen. Written by Brabant specialists Ron Dirven and Helewise Berger, it will be published in Dutch by W Books on 30 March, the 170th anniversary of the artist's birth. An English edition should also be on the way, hopefully later this year.
Another publication coming out in March is Vincent's Arles: As It Is and as It Was, with the University of Chicago Press. Author Linda Seidel acts as a guide to the places immortalised by Van Gogh in this Provençal city.
The Van Gogh Museum, overlooking Amsterdam's Museumplein (Museum Square) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
And to celebrate Vincent's legacy, everyone is invited to Amsterdam’s Museumplein (Museum Square). Just to the south of the city centre, it borders the Van Gogh Museum, the Rijksmuseum and Stedelijk Museum. On 2 June the grassy square will host a birthday party marking the 50th anniversary of the Van Gogh Museum.
Martin Bailey is the author of Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame (Frances Lincoln, 2021, available in the UK and US ). He is a leading Van Gogh specialist and investigative reporter for The Art Newspaper. Bailey has curated Van Gogh exhibitions at the Barbican Art Gallery and Compton Verney/National Gallery of Scotland. He was a co-curator of Tate Britain’s The EY Exhibition: Van Gogh and Britain (27 March-11 August 2019).
Martin Bailey’s recent Van Gogh books
Bailey has written a number of other bestselling books, including The Sunflowers Are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh's Masterpiece (Frances Lincoln 2013, available in the UK and US), Studio of the South: Van Gogh in Provence(Frances Lincoln 2016, available in the UK and US) and Starry Night: Van Gogh at the Asylum (White Lion Publishing 2018, available in the UK and US). Bailey's Living with Vincent van Gogh: the Homes and Landscapes that Shaped the Artist (White Lion Publishing 2019, available in the UK and US) provides an overview of the artist’s life. The Illustrated Provence Letters of Van Gogh has been reissued (Batsford 2021, available in the UK and US).
To contact Martin Bailey, please email [email protected]. Please note that he does not undertake authentications.
Read more from Martin's Adventures with Van Gogh blog here.