Exhibitions

The Denver Art Museum may kill me for doing this — I didn’t ask permission or tell them in advance — but I want to share with you some of the Learning Moments (I think that’s what they are calling them) the museum’s staff has developed for Becoming van Gogh, the exhibition I wrote about yesterday. I couldn’t fit them into my article. But like the wall about terracotta at the Met’s current Bernini exhibition, I think they are models of what museum-goers should be able to see. And I’d like to see them posted online as well — so people can go back to them.

The Denver exhibit is, remember, a scholarly show — it explains how van Gogh became van Gogh.

One of the large panels talks about Charles Bargue’s Drawing Course, “a three volume do-it-yourself manual with an emphasis on drawing the human figure. Van Gogh got hold of the set and within six months he diligently copied all 197 plates at least once and all sixty of the nude poses at least three times.”

Later, we learn in the same panel that only two of his Bargue drawings survive — because van Gogh’s mother threw the rest away! What child or parent isn’t going to relate to that?

Timothy J. Standring, the curator, could not borrow either of the two surviving drawings, but he was able to find a copy of the Barque book — at Oberlin College, which agreed to lend it to the exhibition.

A second panel is about color. Van Gogh said “A good understanding of [color] is worth more than seventy different shades of paint.” He wrote to his brother, Theo, explaining his ideas about color and saying he was preoccupied by color. The panel goes on:

Somehow Van Gogh hit upon a way to experiment with color by winding different colors of yarn together. This astonishingly simple, cheap, and yet effective method kept the colors separate, just as Van Gogh kept his colors separate on the canvas in short, side-by-side brushstrokes of unmixed paint.

Van Gogh’s original balls of yarn are in the collection of the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

A third panel is about the perspective frame he built for himself, which he used throughout his career.

And a fourth is about his episodes at a drawing class that used plaster casts, which he hated. But why are his figure drawings from these classes of a woman’s backside? “Van Gogh and his new friend, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, were assigned seats typically reserved for the weaker students: looking at the sculpture’s backside.”

These tidbits qualify as what some editors refer to as “cocktail party conversation” — which is to say that they are memorable, fodder for casual conversation, buzzy — yet they are enlightening about van Gogh. Even if you knew about these facts before, they’re worth being reminded about.

When I started this post, I intended to upload the panels for you to view. But, it turns out, they are too big for this website.

You will just have to visit the Denver show yourself. Or get the catalogue.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum (Canal with Women Washing)

 

People on the coasts, especially the East coast, are spoiled when it comes to the art they can see. During the summer, I was astonished to learn from Timothy J. Standring (pictured), a curator at the Denver Art Museum whom I have known for years, that his mile-high city has never been home to exhibition focused on Vincent van Gogh. Of course, the museum had mounted exhibitions with a van Gogh or two — but never one centered on this most revered and popular artist.

Standring told me about his efforts to remedy that, with the result being an exhibition set to open on Oct. 21 titled Becoming van Gogh. It includes nearly 70 paintings and drawings by van Gogh and 20 by other artists, like William-Adolphe Bouguereau, Sir Hubert von Herkomer, Jules Dupre and Emile Bernard, that van Gogh studied.

In organizing, Standring had a big handicap: the Denver museum doesn’t own a single work by van Gogh. He had to borrow everything. It was not an easy feat, and I lay out more about the challenges and how he overcame them in an article in tomorrow’s Wall Street Journal titled Becoming van Gogh: A Show Built Stroke by Stroke.

Yet one of the best things about this exhibition is its theme: far from being a greatest hits, it unfolds a theme that has not been explored here in depth before. “We wanted to draw away from the focus on his craziness and instead focus on his internal process of artistic decisions,” Standring says.

Or, as the press release put it:

By focusing on the stages of Van Gogh’s artistic development, Becoming Van Gogh illustrates the artist’s initial foray into mastering draftsmanship, understanding the limitations and challenges of materials and techniques, learning to incorporate color theory and folding a myriad of influences, including the work of other artists, into his artistic vocabulary. No other exhibition has focused so intensely on Van Gogh’s personal growth and progression as he developed his own personal style.

Along the way, people doubted that Standring could pull this off — even his own museum directors and, at some points, the Van Gogh Museum, which pretty much has to approve all van Gogh exhibits. But it cooperated with Denver, providing curatorial assistance, despite the long odds, because part of its mission it to take van Gogh to places where he is not well known.

The show won’t, can’t, travel — it’s in Denver only. That’s another reason why, aside from the curators’ scholarship and creativity, this exhibit, well, exhibits the good fellowship that is evident among many European painting curators. I know some of them went to bat for Standring.

That’s it for tonight, but I will return to this show — there’s another reason why it’s notable.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of the Denver Art Museum