Fifty Van Gogh masterpieces in Rome for long-awaited exhibition on the famous Dutch painter


From October 8, 2022 to March 26, 2023, Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome will host an exhibition dedicated to Vincent van Gogh, featuring fifty masterpieces from the Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo.

In Rome, Palazzo Bonaparte will host one of the most anticipated exhibitions of the year: in fact, it will kick off on October 8, 2022, and will be open until March 26, 2023, the exhibition Van Gogh. Masterpieces from the Kröller Müller Museum dedicated to Vincent van Gogh. On the eve of the 170th anniversary of his birth, the Roman exhibition venue offers an itinerary with fifty works from the Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo to tell the human and artistic story of the famous Dutch painter.

Born in Holland on March 30, 1853, Vincent Van Gogh lived a tormented life, between his bouts of madness, long hospitalizations in the psychiatric hospital of Saint Paul in Provence, and the episode of the severed ear, which ended on July 29, 1890, when he was only thirty-seven years old, with a gunshot wound to the chest in the fields of Auvers.

The Otterlo museum holds many of Van Gogh’s masterpieces, and through them, the exhibition at the Palais Bonaparte will trace the painter’s Dutch period, his Parisian sojourn, and those in Arles, St.Remy and Auvers-sur-Oise.

From the passionate relationship with the dark landscapes of his youth to the sacred study of the work of the land spring figures acting in severe everyday life such as the sower, potato pickers, weavers, woodcutters, women intent on domestic tasks or fatigued carrying sacks of coal or digging the ground; sweetness, expressiveness of faces, fatigue understood as inevitable destiny. All these are expressions of the greatness and intense relationship with the truth of van Gogh’s world.

Particular attention is given to the period of the Paris sojourn in which the painter devoted himself to a careful search for color in the Impressionist wake and to a new freedom in the choice of subjects, with the conquest of a more immediate and chromatically vibrant language. His interest in human physiognomy is also strengthened, which is also decisive in the creation of a numerous series ofself-portraits. It is from this period that theSelf-Portrait on a Blue Background with Green Touches of 1887, on display in the exhibition, is from this period, where the artist’s image stands out in three-quarter view, his piercing gaze turned toward the viewer showing an unusual pride. Rapid brush strokes, the strokes of color laid side by side make visible the ability to penetrate through the image a tumultuous and complex idea of self. Immersion in the light and warmth of the south, beginning in 1887, generates even greater openings to chromatic excesses, and the chromaticism and force of the stroke are reflected in the rendering of nature. Here then is the return of the image of The Sower made in Arles in June 1888. And so The Garden of the Hospital at Saint-Rémy (1889) takes on the appearance of an intricate tumult, while the descent of a Ravine (1889) seems to swallow up all hope and the depiction of a Desperate Old Man (1890) becomes an image of fatal despair.

The exhibition is curated by Maria Teresa Benedetti and Francesca Villanti, is produced by Arthemisia and produced in collaboration with the Kröller Müller Museum in Otterlo, under the patronage of the Lazio Region, the Municipality of Rome - Department of Culture and the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands. The catalog is published by Skira.

For info: https://www.mostrepalazzobonaparte.it

Hours: Daily from 11 a.m. to 9 p.m.

Image: Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait, detail (April-June 1887; oil on cardboard, 32.8 x 24 cm) © Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo.

Fifty Van Gogh masterpieces in Rome for long-awaited exhibition on the famous Dutch painter
Fifty Van Gogh masterpieces in Rome for long-awaited exhibition on the famous Dutch painter


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