Vincent Van Gogh: A New Way of Seeing

"My dear brother,

"the painter's household with its great and petty vexations,

"with its calamities,

"with its sorrows and griefs,

"it has a certain good will in its favour, a certain sincerity,

"a certain genuinely human quality.

"And I ask,

"'What most makes me a human being?'

"Zola says, 'I, an artist,

"'I want to live life to the full,

"'want to live without ulterior motive,

"'naïve as a child... no, not as a child, as an artist,

"'with good will.

"'Just as life unfolds, so I will find something in it,

"'so I'll do my best in it.'"

There were a number of reasons why we felt

a rehang, a new presentation of the permanent collection,

was necessary.

The previous presentation had some shortcomings,

particularly with regards to the person of the artist.

When we first started out,

What is the importance of Van Gogh? Why is he still appealing to so many?

What is it in his art that appeals to our emotions so much?

What did he want to say with his art?

Van Gogh is a phenomenon so when people enter the museum,

they will already have an idea about Van Gogh.

They probably will have

his most important paintings in their heads

or they know about his troubled life.

So it's really a challenge for us

to have them look beyond the sunflowers,

to have them look beyond the suicide.

We really hope

that when they come here they will discover

that the story is much more intricate

and has a lot deeper meaning.

I think the rehang makes it clear Van Gogh was not an isolated genius

who just fell from heaven and just was.

He was an artist who developed,

who took lots of cues from the artistic world around him.

He lived and worked in a context within a network of other artists.

He exchanged ideas with them.

He was inspired greatly by earlier generations of artists

and, of course, subsequent generations were also inspired by him

and we also want to show Van Gogh in that sort of continuum

and really show

what, on the one hand, made him an artist of his time

and, on the other hand, also what makes him special

with regards to the art and artists around him.

The man and the artist are one. It's not two separate identities.

So we do address some of the myths.

We discuss his illness, what we know about it.

We discuss his suicide.

We give all the information we have assembled as an institution.

It's not an illustrated diary that we are presenting here.

It's the oeuvre of one of the greatest artists of all time.

We put the focus back on the art

by giving more attention to the myths as well.

That sounds contradictory

but I think it really helps in understanding

what makes Van Gogh so important and special.

Vincent's brother, Theo, was an art dealer in Paris

and he supported Vincent all his life.

So when Vincent died Theo owned over 450 paintings

and many hundreds of drawings by Vincent.

After the death of Vincent and Theo, and his mother as well,

my grandfather inherited the entire collection.

And in the '30s he decided to bring half of his collection

to the municipal museum of art, the Stedelijk Museum, in Amsterdam.

The other half he had in his home, hanging on the walls

and in, as we say nowadays, a walk-in closet.

200 paintings by Vincent van Gogh, 500 drawings

and Vincent's letters to Theo

and also many hundreds of contemporaries

like Paul Gauguin, Émile Bernard.

And he had the idea, together with his mother,

to keep the collection together

and to get the collection accessible for everybody.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam opened in 1973.

After Theo's death

his widow Jo started to read the letters

Vincent wrote to his brother Theo.

And while reading them

she noticed they were of huge importance to art history

because Vincent and Theo had a very close relationship,

very intimate,

and Vincent already wrote letters to his brother

before he became an artist.

And the last letter is dated five days before his death.

So we know all about the development of Vincent as an artist,

about his doubts, about his influences,

about his relations with his peers, his contemporaries, everything.

The letters are an enormous treasure for us

because in the letters Van Gogh talks so much

about his becoming an artist,

what moved him, what inspired him.

He refers to hundreds and hundreds of works of art,

to literature, to music, to religion,

all the sources of inspiration that he used.

The letters are extremely well written so it is really a joy to read them

in Dutch or in French, or in English even.

He writes in various different languages depending on the correspondent

and on the place where he writes them.

And you really get a very comprehensive picture

of who he was as a personality,

his trials and tribulations, his joys and fears.

In that sense the letters are an essential aspect

of our understanding of Van Gogh the person

and also of Van Gogh as an artist.

We have so many works by Van Gogh.

It's amazing. We have over 200 paintings.

So you really can follow his development as an artist,

as a person, his intentions,

technique developing, materials.

There is a lot to discover

for us as researchers but also for the visitor.

Being the Van Gogh Museum - that's what it says on the can -

you expect when you enter to encounter Van Gogh.

And we did that in a rather drastic way

by presenting him just with a series of self-portraits,

12 self-portraits in one room,

so you really come eye to eye with Van Gogh.

It has immediately a strong impact

and then you enter the story.

"My dear brother,

"people say, and I'm quite willing to believe it,

"that it's difficult to know oneself,

"but it's not easy to paint oneself either.

"Thus I'm working on two portraits of myself at the moment,

"for want of another model,

"because it's more than time that I did a bit of figure work."

His face in itself, of course, is an icon.

Everyone knows his face.

Maybe they figure there might be an ear missing,

but of course there's not.

For him in the first place they were just practice.

But it's also a sort of artistic and maybe even psychological research.

I paint self-portraits and I know a lot of other artists who do.

We do it because, for a start, the model is always there.

He's for free.

And the model doesn't mind too much

if you take liberties and you're testing out something.

You are not compromised

by the need to get a likeness.

You are at liberty to explore

how you are going to use paint to shape a face

and to communicate character and feeling

as well as reproduce the geography

of a human physiognomy.

Because it's potential for him to explore

stylistically what he wants to do

and because capturing a human presence on canvas

is a great achievement.

Those are the paintings in any gallery, I think...

It's the faces people instinctively look towards

because we are always programmed to be looking for other people.

I don't think you could surmise that by painting himself

he was engrossed in the idea of his own identity

or the trauma that we might imagine he was exploring about himself.

I think he was just painting the model that he knew best.

It's a bit funny to talk about "Van Gogh"

because actually he wanted to be named as "Vincent"

and we know him as "Van Gogh".

But he signed his pictures all with "Vincent",

partly because he didn't like the family name,

partly, perhaps, this is also a tradition with great masters.

Rembrandt is also a first name.

Van Gogh had the personality of a driven man, a man obsessed,

somebody who wanted to achieve something in life.

Partly that had something to do with his character.

He was a man who had emotions, strong emotions.

If you were to go out with him to the pub,

you would have, within five or ten minutes,

not fighting but perhaps fighting in words

because he would immediately try to convince you of his opinions.

The testimonies we have of his parents, for instance,

say that from early on, when he was still a kid,

there was always something with him.

It also had to do with his mood. He could easily change moods.

Even also in later life we have testimony

of the Zouave lieutenant in Arles in 1888.

He remembered afterwards

that in fact he was quite a gentleman and a soft man as well,

an interesting man,

but he could suddenly change his mood just like that.

Vincent van Gogh was born in 1853

in the rural Dutch village of Zundert, near the border with Belgium.

He was the eldest son in a family of six children

and his father was the local Protestant preacher.

Vincent attended a boarding school

where he was well educated, learning several languages.

From an early age Vincent loved nature

and being surrounded by the natural world.

He would often go on long walks,

exploring the rural landscape around him.

He also loved to read

and this was the normal thing in the 19th century.

If you belonged to the middle class, you read.

Especially in a Protestant family where the word is very important,

you read.