Till 19 January 2025, the Nationwide Gallery of London is holding the exhibition “Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers”
Supply: Nationwide Gallery, London · Picture: Vincent van Gogh, ‘Starry Night’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ explores how the poetic creativeness and concepts related to love advanced into central themes for the artist. In Arles, for instance, Van Gogh designated the general public park in entrance of the Yellow Home (through which, in 1888, Van Gogh rented 4 rooms) as a Poets’ Backyard, envisioning Italian Renaissance poets Petrarch and Boccaccio strolling there. A few of Van Gogh’s most wonderful work and drawings of the time are related to this concept, and pairs of lovers seem in work reminiscent of ‘Starry Night’ (1888, Musée d’Orsay, Paris).
In Might and June of 1889, after Van Gogh was admitted to the Saint-Paul de Mausole hospital in Saint-Rémy, he imagined the asylum’s overgrown backyard as a secluded website for lovers. He painted spectacular compositions depicting views of the grounds. The exhibition reveals how this idealising, euphoric exploration of the asylum backyard contrasts dramatically with works from the autumn when Van Gogh as an alternative related the exact same location along with his and his fellow sufferers’ sufferings.
In Arles, in late summer time of 1888, Van Gogh deliberate to embellish his Yellow Home with ‘The Poet’s Backyard’, the ‘Sunflowers’, ‘The Poet’ and ‘The Lover’. These work had been instrumental in his conception of an ornamental scheme that shortly grew past the partitions of the Yellow Home.
‘Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers’ reveals how the artist sought to create vital compositions for exhibition in Paris, initially in 1889, yr of the Exposition Universelle, when he hoped to show them as a cohesive group alongside works by fellow avant-garde artists.
The exhibition explores how Van Gogh’s decisions for these works replicate his enthusiastic about portray in sequence, his repeated references in letters to pendants, his use of opposites or contrasts to create concord and cohesion. The artist continued to pursue these concepts later in Saint-Rémy, as his works turned more and more recognized in avant-garde circles.
