Philadelphia Museum Of Art: Van Gogh Up Close

Philadelphia is the only U.S. venue for this major traveling exhibition. Tickets on sale December 1, 2011. Van Gogh Up Close (February 1 — May 6, 2012) “I…am always obliged to go and gaze at a blade of grass, a pine-tree branch, an ear of wheat, to calm myself,” Vincent van Gogh wrote in a letter to his sister, Wilhemina, in July of 1889. An artist of exceptional intensity, not only in his use of color and exuberant application of paint but also in his personal life, van Gogh was powerfully and passionately drawn to nature. From 1886, when van Gogh left Antwerp for Paris, to 1890 when he ended his own life in Auvers, van Gogh’s feverish artistic experimentation and zeal for the natural world propelled him to radically refashion his still lifes and landscapes. With an ardent desire to engage the viewer with the strength of the emotions he experienced before nature, van Gogh radically altered and at times even abandoned traditional pictorial strategies in order to create still lifes and landscapes the likes of which had never before been seen. Van Gogh Up Close, a major exhibition organized by the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Canada, presents a group of the artist’s most daring and innovative works that broke with the past and dramatically altered the course of modern painting. Made between 1886 and 1890 in Paris, Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers, the works in the exhibition concentrate on an important and previously overlooked aspect of van Gogh’s work: “close-ups” that bring familiar subjects such as landscape elements, still lifes, and flowers into the extreme foreground of the composition or focus on them in ways that are entirely unexpected and without precedent. The exhibition includes more than 40 landscapes and still lifes, which have not been seen together or identified before as critical to our understanding of van Gogh’s artistic achievement. Van Gogh Up Close, including major loans from museums and private collections in Europe, North America, and Japan, will be seen in the United States only in Philadelphia (February 1-May 6, 2011) before traveling to the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, its only Canadian venue, in the summer of 2012.