“Van Gogh, Drawn Lines”, a new exhibition at Vienna’s Albertina, promotes itself with a list of superlatives - the most expensive exhibition ever in Austria and the first Vincent van Gogh show in Vienna for 50 years.
More daring, though, is its claim to shed new light on a painter who must be the world’s favorite, if the number of reproductions is a guide. The exhibition, open since Sept. 5, sets out to show Van Gogh as a great draughtsman whose skills with line played a decisive role in the success of his painting.
The Albertina, whose own collection is primarily of sketches, has amassed an array of 140 Van Gogh paintings and drawings from museums and private collectors in 16 countries. The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo have loaned so many works, you have to wonder whether they are left with blank walls. The whole show is insured for an inconceivable 3 billion euros ($4.2 billion).
There are cases where the drawing is on show but not the painting to go with it, or vice versa. Still, there are also canvases and drawings that were unfamiliar to me because they are in private collections or far-flung museums such as Detroit or Honolulu. Among those rarely on public view is “Garden in Auvers”, painted in the last weeks of the artist’s life, an extravagantly dotted canvas with purple and red flowerbeds tilted at odd angles.
The show spans Van Gogh’s short career, starting with the early years in the Netherlands, where he focused on depicting peasant life and dark landscapes in charcoal drawings and oils with the kind of muted colors typical of the old Dutch masters.
It then breaks out in a burst of color, the period when Van Gogh went to Paris and first encountered the work of the impressionists. He realized that his own palette was old-fashioned and conventional in comparison with this vibrant new style. Perhaps the best-known painting on display from that era is his self-portrait in a straw hat.
The last rooms cover the wheatfields, cypresses and olive groves of his two years in Provence, where he suffered increasing sickness and insanity, eventually leading to his suicide in Auvers-sur-Oise near Paris, in 1890 at the age of 37.
Van Gogh first went to Provence in search of the brilliant light and landscape of Japan. He was a big admirer of Japanese colored woodcuts, which are the inspiration for the dots, dashes and squiggles of his drawings. The magical reed pen-and-ink drawing of “Boats at Sea” (1888) is comprised of meticulous spots, swirls and curved short lines in varying shades.
Reed pen-and-ink drawings like this and “The Sower” (1888) were created from the painting he had produced earlier, proof that Van Gogh valued his drawings in their own right, not merely as templates for a painting. Painted during a fierce mistral, “The Sower” shows a brilliant sun above a windswept wheatfield.
The drawing Van Gogh produced for Theo has, if anything, more drama and intensity than the painting, even without the penetrating colors. The sun is bigger in the sky, the lines of the wildly disheveled field more heavily accentuated, and the sower himself looks more purposeful.
Where the exhibition at the Albertina works best is in showing that each line of Van Gogh’s, whether in the drawings or paintings, was disciplined, exact and planned.
Seeing the two juxtaposed, it becomes clear that no matter how thick his paint, how intense his colors or how tumultuous and fizzing with wild energy his fields and skies can be, Van Gogh’s bold brushstrokes are not the product of uncontrolled madness. The precision of his drawing is there in his paintings, too.
His creeping mental illness may have affected his way of perceiving the world, but in no way did it impair his control over the meticulous execution of his work. (Bloomberg)