Van Gogh: The Adventure of Becoming an Artist Opens at Kyusyu National Museum
FUKUOKA.- The exhibition Van Gogh: The adventure of becoming an artist will opens in Japan, featuring masterworks from the Van Gogh Museum and Kröller-Müller Museum collections. The exhibition includes such highlights as The bedroom and The sower (Van Gogh Museum), and The Ravine and Portrait of Joseph-Michel Ginoux (Kröller-Müller Museum).
The exhibition gives an impression of the methods and techniques Van Gogh used in developing his style and technique, and of the artists who influenced him in this development. Paintings by some other famous artists are therefore also on display. Though these works were not all seen by Van Gogh, they give an impression of the working methods that were prevalent at the time.
- A girl stands in front of Vincent van Gogh’s “The Bedroom”, which was carried out of Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for the first time, during a preview held ahead of the exhibition of his works at the Kyushu National Museum in Dazaifu, southwestern Japan. The Dutch post-Impressionist painter’s 36 oil paintings along with 32 prints and drawings are touring three Japanese cities of Tokyo, Dazaifu and Nagoya from October to April 2011 for a series of exhibitions, marking the 120th anniversary of his death. AP Photo/Kyodo News, Kazufumi Nagao.
Artistic experiments
Throughout his career, Van Gogh displayed great intrepidity when it came to artistic experiments. He was eager to learn and inventive, and the more he grew in artistic skill, the more proficient he became in using materials and techniques to produce the effects he sought. He learned a lot from other artists. Sometimes this was because he knew them personally and exchanged information with them, as was the case with Anthon van Rappard, Anton Mauve, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Paul Signac, Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin. But he also read about the working methods of other artists, such as Eugène Delacroix, and studied old masters like Frans Hals, Rembrandt and Rubens by visiting museums whenever he had the opportunity.
Research methods
The exhibition also focuses on the research methods that make it possible for us to discover artists’ techniques, such as X-ray photography, infrared reflectography and pigment analysis.
Dates and locations
Van Gogh: The adventure of becoming an artist will be held at two different locations in Japan:
1 January 2011 – 13 February 2011: Fukuoka, Kyusyu National Museum
22 February 2011 – 10 April 2011: Nagoya, Nagoya City Art Museum
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