Van Gogh shines in Rome: exhibition extended

Since its opening (October 8th, 2022), more than 400,000 visitors have taken part in the major exhibition dedicated to Van Gogh at Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome. An exhibition that, since its opening, has recorded record numbers. It includes Van Gogh’s great masterpieces but there is also an incredible wealth of scientific content, in-depth studies on each theme, his letters, and entertainment. It is an exhibition of great depth accompanied by spectacular staging, the winning formula to make it an extraordinarily successful event. The exhibition has been sold out for a long time but requests continue unceasingly from all over the world. This is why the exhibition management has decided to extend it until May 7.
The story of one of the world’s most renowned artists is told through his most famous works, including his famed Self-Portrait (1887). Born in the Netherlands on 30 March 1853, Vincent Van Gogh was an artist of extreme sensitivity who led a tortured life. His bouts of madness are famous, as are his long stays at the Saint Paul psychiatric hospital in Provence, the episode of the severed ear, and the epilogue of his life, which came to an end on 29 July 1890 with his suicide – a pistol shot to his chest in the fields of Auvers – at only 39 years of age.
In spite of a life permeated with tragedy, Van Gogh painted a disturbing series of masterworks, accompanying them with sublime writings (his famous “Letters” to his brother Theo Van Gogh) and inventing a unique style that made him the most renowned painter in the history of art.
Through 50 works from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo – home to one of the largest holdings of Van Gogh works – and an abundance of biographical testimony, the Rome exhibition reconstructs his human and artistic story in order to celebrate his universal greatness.
The chronologically organized exhibition itinerary makes reference to the periods and places where the painter lived: from the Netherlands to his stay in Paris, then Arles, and on to St. Remy and Auvers-Sur-Oise, where he put an end to his tortured life. His impassioned relationship with the dark landscapes of his youth and the sacred study of working the land generated figures acting in the grimness of everyday life, like the sower, potato pickers, weavers, woodcutters, women engaged in housework or carrying heavy sacks of coal, or digging the earth, with attitudes of awkward sweetness, expressive faces, and toil understood as inescapable destiny.
All these are an expression of the greatness of Van Gogh’s world, and its intense relationship with the truth. Particular emphasis is given to the period of his Paris stay, when Van Gogh devoted himself to a careful exploration of colour in the wake of the Impressionists, and a new freedom in choosing subjects as he conquered a more immediate and chromatically vibrant language.
His interest in human physiognomy also grew, becoming a determining factor also in his production of a numerous series of self-portraits, pointing to his wish to leave a mark of himself, and to his conviction of having acquired, in his technical experience, a fertility quite greater than in the past. The 1887 self-portrait with a blue background and touches of green, on view in the exhibition, is from this period. In it, the artist’s image stands out in three-quarter profile, his penetrating gaze towards the viewer showing an unusual pride not always evident in Van Gogh’s complex output. His rapid brushstrokes and stretches of paint laid one alongside the other betray his ability to have a frighteningly complex, tumultuous idea of himself pierce through the image.
The immersion in southern light and warmth starting in 1887 generated even larger openings towards chromatic excesses, and chromatism and strength of his line are reflected in his rendering of nature – hence the return of the image of The Sower done in Arles in June 1888, with which Gogh signaled that something could be added to that expressive sphere only through a metaphysical use of colour.