The Detroit Institute of Arts became the first American art museum to acquire a van Gogh when it bought an 1887 self-portrait of the artist.
'Van Gogh in America' worth a trip to Detroit Institute of ArtsDETROIT, Michigan — Vincent van Gogh wasn’t always a cultural rock star whose paintings sell for millions and whose images draw huge crowds to immersive digital sound and light shows circulating around the globe.
Organized by Curator Jill Shaw, head of the museum’s Department of Modern and Contemporary Art, the show, on view through January 22, recounts a decade-by-decade history of exhibitions, collecting, and media responses to van Gogh in the U.S. in the first half of the 20th century. Tormented by a mental illness that has never been precisely diagnosed, van Gogh died in 1890 at age 37 in Auvers-sur-Oise, France, from a self-inflicted gunshot to his abdomen.With 74 works by van Gogh, including some of the most famous and beloved paintings in the world, the Detroit exhibition offers a chance for full immersion in authenticity.
Among them is the Art Institute of Chicago’s “The Bedroom,’’ painted in 1889. The museum acquired it in 1926 as part of a gift of 24 artworks that included four supposed van Goghs, one of which was a fake. Clips from the film, shown on a screen in the same gallery, include a scene of Douglas-as-van Gogh painting alongside the Rhone River at night while wearing a straw hat festooned with candles. The image suggests that the artist was in the grip of mania when he worked, an idea Shaw disputes.
When he died, van Gogh left most of his work to his brother, the art dealer Theo van Gogh, who died less than 6 months later, leaving everything to his then-28-year-old widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and their infant son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. The next four van Gogh acquisitions by American museums were made by heartland institutions including the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City ; the Saint Louis Art Museum ; and the Toledo Museum of Art .
This clashes with the actual chronology of van Gogh’s work itself, which evolved with a powerful sense of direction over 10 years from the gloomy palettes inspired by the Hague School, a group of contemporary Dutch painters, to the artist’s embrace of light and color after he encountered the Impressionists and post-Impressionists in Paris in 1886.
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