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Van Gogh Superstar
| Article
# : |
17480 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
Date : |
7 / 1990 |
2,551 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
Today, major works by the Dutch-born Post-Impressionist artist Vincent Van Gogh (1853-1890) sell for tens of millions of dollars each. Need we be reminded that a certain portrait recently fetched the exorbitant sum of $82.5 million at auction, the highest price ever paid for a work of art? During his lifetime, however, the now-legendary painter exhibited only a handful of his canvases and managed to sell, at most, one or two.
In this, the centennial year of his death, the once-neglected Van Gogh is being honored throughout his native Holland with a year-long celebration, the centerpiece of which is the most extensive exhibition of his art ever assembled. Comprising nearly four hundred paintings and drawings, this immense retrospective is divided between two museums: the paintings (135 of them) are at the Rijksmuseum Vincent Van Gogh in Amsterdam, and the drawings (248) are at the Rijksmuseum Kroller-Muller in Otterlo, a town about two hours east of the capital.
Such a show could not have been mounted outside of the Netherlands; the two host museums have, respectively, the world's largest and second largest holdings of works by Van Gogh and alone account for more than half of the artworks on view. In order to secure loans from private and public collections in Europe, the Soviet Union, and North America, the Dutch government was obliged to insure the exhibition for the unprecedented sum of $3 billion. It seems doubtful that such an undertaking will again be attempted in the near future.
Generally, when an artist attains superstardom serious interest in his work is replaced by hollow idolatry. The challenge for Van Gogh's art in this
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