WHAT: “Becoming Van Gogh”

WHEN: October 21 – January 20, 2013

WHERE: Denver Art Museum, 100 West 14th Avenue Parkway, Denver, Colorado

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: Vincent Van Gogh seems to be having a moment – or a decade. In 2008 MoMA staged “Van Gogh and the Colors of the Night,” and earlier this year the Philadelphia Museum of Art produced “Van Gogh Up Close.” Now, it’s the Denver Art Museum’s turn, and it’s taking a direction all its own. “Becoming Van Gogh” has been more than five years in the making, and brings artwork on loan from over 60 public and private institutions worldwide that help piece together the complex story of the artist’s journey from mastering traditional mediums to vibrantly expressive works that were arguably way ahead of the avant-garde of his era.

Curator Timothy Standring, along with the help of Louis van Tilborgh, Senior Researcher of Paintings at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum (currently under renovation and temporarily housed at the Hermitage Amsterdam for seven months), has brought together 70 paintings and drawings from Van Gogh alongside the work of artists he was inspired by. The combination reveals both the source of his influences and the moment he decided to buck tradition. Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec’s “Portrait of Francois Gauzi” (1886-87) and Paul Signac’s “Quay at Clichy” (1887), for example, completed when Van Gogh was living in Paris, exposed him to trends like impressionism and pointillism, which he eventually made his own.

Highlights of Van Gogh’s work in the show include the charcoal rendering of the statue “Venus” (1886), which best demonstrates the artist’s mastery of traditional drawing techniques and contrasts strongly with “Self-Portrait with Straw Hat” (1887), an oil painting comprised of his iconic violent, bold, and thick brushwork of bright colors. The Parisian period (1886-1888) stands out as the time his focus turned towards artistic and aesthetic exploration rather than social, concentrating on color and texture and leaving behind the works we’ve most come to associate with the iconic artist. 

To see images from Denver Art Museum's "Becomming Van Gogh" show, click on the slideshow.