Large Vincent Van Gogh exhibition: The Song of Songs of Painting

The path to the museum leads through seemingly untouched nature. The Hoge Veluwe National Park is one of the largest contiguous natural areas in the Netherlands, a quiet forest and heath landscape with purple, rolling hills; early in the morning, dewdrops glitter in the spider webs like precious silver jewelry.

So you arrive in an exalted mood in the huge but modestly nestled art area of ​​the Kröller-Müller Museum in the landscape, which has continued to grow since it opened in 1938 and will soon receive a new extension by star architect Tadao Andō. The 25-hectare sculpture garden is one of the largest of its kind; nature and art come unusually close here.

The entire complex and the world-famous collection go back to the insatiable passion for art of Helene Kröller-Müller, born in Horst near Essen, daughter of a steel industrialist, who acquired a total of 11,500 art objects with her wealthy husband's money. She developed a particular soft spot for the work of Vincent van Gogh, who was little appreciated at the time. Her first significant purchases in 1909 were three works by him: “Sunflowers”, “The Sower” and “Still Life with Bottle and Lemon”.

Over the years she eventually accumulated 88 paintings by van Gogh, creating the artist's largest private collection, only the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is even richer. The collector brought together works from all creative periods of van Gogh's ten-year painting career. Many of these treasures are often exhibited around the world; after all, van Gogh is one of the most popular painters of all time.

The fact that the museum's entire holdings are now brought together in the exhibition entitled "Van Gogh: All Our Pictures" is a stroke of luck that it uses in a very unconventional way. What the simple title already promises is fulfilled: the images are not forced into a complex, contemporary curatorial concept, but are not simply lined up chronologically, but are juxtaposed in groups or pairs and sorted according to themes. This is often, but not always, illuminating.

It is particularly successful when the painter's sudden artistic development becomes evident in an almost startling way. When the sharp eye and the still tamed painting style of the early van Gogh are followed by the color explosions of the late one, the drilling into the details, into branches, roots and flowers, which at the same time frees itself more and more from the representational, dissolves into color and light.

What is most surprising, however, is that this exhibition rejects the usual pathologization of the painter without concealing his mental illness. His art is not seen here as a battleground for illness or as an expression of inner conflict. This ultimately romantic cliché is deliberately undermined here by showing that art was an anchor of stability for van Gogh and a medium for his basic spiritual impulse. As a pastor's son, he satisfied his father by initially wanting to become a pastor himself, before his brother Theo convinced him to pursue a career as a painter.

As if painting were for van Gogh a sublimation of his essentially spiritual mission, the exhibition now examines three themes that it borrows from the New Testament Song of Songs of Love, namely faith, hope and love. Based on these biblical values, the exhibition looks at van Gogh's artistic development, "instead of focusing on the myths that surround his life," explains restorer Renske Cohen Tervaert during the tour.

At first glance, this concept may seem a bit naive, but the accompanying wall texts with quotes from van Gogh's correspondence and even a sermon from his time as a clergyman prove that van Gogh was by no means a l'art-pour-l'art artist, but actually wanted to provide consolation with his art.

And this show is a true celebration of painting, whether you allow yourself to be reached spiritually or not. It's not just the world-famous images - and merchandising motifs - that fascinate with their incredible power in the original, such as the "Bridge in Arles" or the "Café Terrace in the Evening" as well as the early "Potato Eaters" in earthy brown tones with their rough faces. The portrait studies of the farmers' faces from this period are also fascinating, capturing the precarious reality of life of the rural population with both compassion and incorruptible harshness.

Van Gogh did not romanticize nature either, but rather saw in it an equivalent of the “struggle of life” that he wanted to “express,” for example in “gnarled black roots.” Proof that painting was a way out of suffering for him is the enchanting picture “The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy” from 1889, painted during his stay in the psychiatric clinic, where, according to a quote from his letter, he did not feel locked up, but “in the right place”.

The loosely colored picture “Griefing old man – at the gates of eternity” from May 1890 is shocking and like a reminder of his own torment. In the same month, shortly before his return from Provence to the north, where his life was to end in July near Paris as a result of a pistol shot, he painted “Country Road in Provence at Night” as a triumphant farewell picture to his beloved south, a vibrant fantasy landscape with cypresses that... of iconography as - admittedly ambivalent - symbols of hope for eternal life.