To mark its 2 hundredth anniversary, the Nationwide Gallery presents the exhibition “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers” (14 September 2024 ‒ 19 January 2025)
Supply: Nationwide Gallery, London · Picture: Vincent van Gogh, ‘Starry Night’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ will discover how the poetic creativeness and concepts related to love advanced into central themes for the artist. In Arles, for instance, Van Gogh designated the general public park in entrance of the Yellow Home (by which, in 1888, Van Gogh rented 4 rooms) as a Poets’ Backyard, envisioning Italian Renaissance poets Petrarch and Boccaccio strolling there. A few of Van Gogh’s most superb work and drawings of the time are related to this concept, and pairs of lovers seem in work corresponding to ‘Starry Night’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
In Could and June of 1889, after Van Gogh was admitted to the Saint-Paul de Mausole hospital in Saint-Rémy, he imagined the asylum’s overgrown backyard as a secluded web site for lovers. He painted spectacular compositions depicting views of the grounds. The exhibition will present how this idealising, euphoric exploration of the asylum backyard contrasts dramatically with works from the autumn when Van Gogh as an alternative related the exact same location along with his and his fellow sufferers’ sufferings.
In Arles, in late summer season of 1888, Van Gogh deliberate to brighten his Yellow Home with ‘The Poet’s Backyard’, the ‘Sunflowers’, ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Lover’. These work had been instrumental in his conception of an ornamental scheme that rapidly grew past the partitions of the Yellow Home.
‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ will present how the artist sought to create necessary compositions for exhibition in Paris, initially in 1889, 12 months of the Exposition Universelle, when he hoped to show them as a cohesive group alongside works by fellow avant-garde artists.
The exhibition will discover how Van Gogh’s selections for these works mirror his excited about portray in collection, his repeated references in letters to pendants, his use of opposites or contrasts to create concord and cohesion. The artist continued to pursue these concepts later in Saint-Rémy, as his works turned more and more identified in avant-garde circles.
