In 2023, humanity will celebrate the 170th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s birth. Many noteworthy events are timed to coincide with this occasion. Here are just a few of them.
If online poster stores are to be believed, Vincent van Gogh is the most popular artist in the world. Auction sales of the master’s original works attest to the extraordinary demand for his paintings. (By the way, the painting Orchard in Blossom, Bordered by Cypresses, created in 1888 in Arles, was sold for $117.1 million at the sensational Christie’s auction in November 2022, where the collection of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen was exhibited.) Van Gogh left such a vast and varied legacy that exhibitions of his works take place regularly. However, 2023 will be a special year when it comes to exhibitions.
And it’s not just the round number that is to blame. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the chief custodian of the artist’s heritage, has decided to join the festivities and celebrate 50 years since its foundation. It has numerous events planned, including an impressive open-air theatrical and musical extravaganza on June 2, the museum’s birthday.
The whole year will be filled with busy exhibitions. The first one, Choosing Vincent, which was dedicated to the artist’s family and ran until early April, will give way to Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months, organized in collaboration with the Musée d’Orsay (it will be open from May 12 to September 3 and then move to Paris). Thanks to more than 70 works exhibited together for the first time, visitors will be able to “follow” the artist from his arrival in Auvers-sur-Oise on May 20, 1890, to his very last days.
Finally, from October 13 to January 14, 2024, Van Gogh along the Seine will explore the creative relationship between the artist and his colleagues Paul Signac, Georges Seurat, Émile Bernard, and Charles Angrand, who, like him, came to the Parisian suburb of Agnières to paint the landscape that was rapidly changing from idyllic to industrial. It is believed that it was thanks to Signac’s influence that Van Gogh’s palette became lighter and his circle of painting subjects broadened. Before opening in Amsterdam, the exhibition will be displayed at the Art Institute of Chicago from May 14 to September 4 under the name Van Gogh and the Avant-Garde: The Modern Landscape.
Van Gogh’s spell will be cast over almost the entire world. If you miss the spring exhibition at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome, which will run until May 7 and feature about 50 works from the Kröller-Müller Museum collection, including the artist’s famous 1887 self-portrait, you might be better off trying your luck in East Asia. The Shanghai Museum is hosting European painting masterpieces from the National Gallery of London—from Botticelli to Van Gogh—until May 7. If you can’t go to Rome or Shanghai, fly to New York. The Metropolitan Museum of Art will be exhibiting about 40 works depicting cypresses, so fondly loved by the artist, from May 22 to August 27.
But back to the Netherlands. The town of Nuenen in North Brabant, where Vincent spent two years in his father’s house and where he first seriously considered becoming an artist, invites everyone to the Van Gogh Village Museum, which will officially open its doors on May 16. It was in Nuenen that the artist, inspired by the local scenery and conversations with the ordinary people of Brabant, created his famous masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (1885).
June 17th will mark the opening of the renovated Van Gogh House in Nieuw-Amsterdam, in the province of Drenthe. The artist lived and worked in the former hotel building in the northern province for just two months in 1883, leaving behind five paintings and numerous drawings from that period. You can see them at an exhibition at the Drents Museum in Assen from September 11, 2023, to January 7, 2024.
Photo: Shutterstock.com; vangoghmuseum.nl
