Amsterdam - Van Gogh Museum

Vincent van Gogh - Wheat field with reaper (F618)

 

Vincent van Gogh - Weizenfeld mit Sensenmann

 

The Van Gogh Museum (Dutch pronunciation: [vɑŋˈɣɔx mʏˌzeːjʏm]) is a Dutch art museum dedicated to the works of Vincent van Gogh and his contemporaries in the Museum Square in Amsterdam South, close to the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum, and the Concertgebouw. The museum opened on 2 June 1973, and its buildings were designed by Gerrit Rietveld and Kisho Kurokawa.

 

The museum contains the largest collection of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings in the world. In 2017, the museum had 2.3 million visitors and was the most-visited museum in the Netherlands, and the 23rd-most-visited art museum in the world. In 2019, the Van Gogh Museum launched the Meet Vincent Van Gogh Experience, a technology-driven "immersive exhibition" on Van Gogh's life and works, which has toured globally.

 

History

 

Unsold works

 

Upon Vincent van Gogh's death in 1890, his work not sold fell into the possession of his brother Theo. Theo died six months after Vincent, leaving the work in the possession of his widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. Selling many of Vincent's paintings with the ambition of spreading knowledge of his artwork, Johanna maintained a private collection of his works. The collection was inherited by her son Vincent Willem van Gogh in 1925, eventually loaned to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where it was displayed for many years, and was transferred to the state-initiated Vincent van Gogh Foundation in 1962. In the years following her husband’s death, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger organized exhibitions of Vincent van Gogh's work in the Netherlands and abroad, significantly contributing to his posthumous recognition.

 

Dedicated museum

 

Design for a Van Gogh Museum was commissioned by the Dutch government in 1963 to Dutch architect and furniture designer Gerrit Rietveld. Rietveld died a year later, and the building was not completed until 1973, when the museum opened its doors. In 1998 and 1999, the building was renovated by the Dutch architect Martien van Goor, and an exhibition wing by the Japanese architect Kisho Kurokawa was added. In late 2012, the museum was closed for renovations for six months. During this period, 75 works from the collection were shown in the H'ART Museum.

 

On 9 September 2013, the museum unveiled a long-lost Van Gogh painting that spent years in a Norwegian attic believed to be by another painter. It is the first full-size canvas by him discovered since 1928. Sunset at Montmajour depicts trees, bushes and sky, painted with Van Gogh's familiar thick brush strokes. It can be dated to the exact day it was painted because he described it in a letter to his brother, Theo, and said he painted it the previous day 4 July 1888.

 

Art thefts

 

In 1991, twenty paintings were stolen from the museum, among them Van Gogh's early painting The Potato Eaters. Although the thieves escaped from the building, 35 minutes later all stolen paintings were recovered from an abandoned car. Three paintings – Wheatfield with Crows, Still Life with Bible, and Still Life with Fruit – were severely torn during the theft. Four men, including two museum guards, were convicted for the theft and given six or seven-year sentences. It is considered to be the largest art theft in the Netherlands since the Second World War.

 

In 2002, two paintings were stolen from the museum, Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen and View of the Sea at Scheveningen. Two Dutchmen were convicted for the theft to four-and-a-half-year sentences, but the paintings were not immediately recovered. The museum offered a reward of €100,000 for information leading to the recovery of the paintings. The FBI Art Crime Team listed the robbery on their Top Ten Art Crimes list, and estimates the combined value of the paintings at US$30 million. In September 2016, both paintings were discovered by the Guardia di Finanza in Castellammare di Stabia, Italy in a villa belonging to the Camorra drug trafficker Raffaele Imperiale. The two artworks were found in a "relatively good state", according to the Van Gogh Museum.

 

Buildings

 

The museum is situated at the Museumplein in Amsterdam-Zuid, on the Paulus Potterstraat 7, between the Stedelijk Museum and the Rijksmuseum, and consists of two buildings, the Rietveld building, designed by Gerrit Rietveld, and the Kurokawa wing, designed by Kisho Kurokawa. Museum offices are housed on Stadhouderskade 55 in Amsterdam-Zuid. Depending on the season, sunflowers are displayed outside the entrance to the museum.

 

Rietveld building

 

The Rietveld building is the main structure and houses the permanent collection. It has a rectangular floor plan and is four stories high. On the ground floor are a shop, a café, and an introductory exhibition. The first floor shows the works of Van Gogh grouped chronologically. The second floor gives information about the restoration of paintings and has a space for minor temporary exhibitions. The third floor shows paintings of Van Gogh's contemporaries in relationship to the work of Van Gogh himself.

 

Kurokawa wing

 

The Kurokawa wing is used for major temporary exhibitions. It has an oval floor plan and is three stories high. The entrance to the Kurokawa wing is via a tunnel from the Rietveld building.

 

Collection

 

Works by Vincent van Gogh

 

The museum houses the largest Van Gogh collection in the world, with 200 paintings, 400 drawings, and 700 letters by the artist.

 

The main exhibition chronicles the various phases of Van Gogh's artistic life.

 

His selected works from Nuenen (1880–1885):

Avenue of Poplars in Autumn (1884)

The Potato Eaters (1885)

 

His selected works from Antwerp (1886):

Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette (1886)

 

His selected works from Paris (1886–1888):

Agostina Segatori Sitting in the Café du Tambourin (1887)

Wheat Field with a Lark (1887)

View of Paris from Vincent's Room in the Rue Lepic (1887)

 

His selected works from Arles (1888–1889):

The Zouave (1888)

Bedroom in Arles (1888)

The Yellow House (1888)

Sunflowers (1889)

 

His selected works from Saint-Rémy (1889–1890):

Almond Blossoms (1890)

 

And his selected works from Auvers-sur-Oise (1890):

Wheatfield with Crows (1890)

The permanent collection also includes nine of the artist's self-portraits and some of his earliest paintings dating back to 1882.

 

A newly discovered work has temporarily gone on display. Van Gogh created three unknown sketches of peasants, which were then used as a single bookmark. Stylistically, they can be dated to autumn 1881.

 

Works by contemporaries

 

The museum also features notable artworks by Van Gogh's contemporaries in the Impressionist and post-Impressionist movements and holds extensive exhibitions on various subjects from 19th Century art history.

 

The museum has sculptures by Auguste Rodin and Jules Dalou, and paintings by John Russell, Émile Bernard, Maurice Denis, Kees van Dongen, Paul Gauguin, Édouard Manet, Claude Monet, Odilon Redon, Georges Seurat, Paul Signac, and Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

 

Meet Vincent Van Gogh Experience

 

The Van Gogh Museum manages an official Meet Vincent Van Gogh Experience, described as a travelling "3D immersive exhibition" using technology and computer audio-visual techniques to cover the story of Van Gogh's life through images of his works. The first "experience" was in 2016 in Beijing, and it has since been toured globally to Europe, Asia and North America.

 

The Meet Van Gogh Experience does not present original artworks, as they are too fragile to travel. The "experience" was designed in collaboration with the London-based museum design consultancy, Event Communications (who designed Titanic Belfast), and it won a 2017 THEA award in the category of Immersive Museum Exhibit: Touring.

 

Visitors

 

The Van Gogh Museum, which is a national museum (Dutch: rijksmuseum), is a foundation (Dutch: stichting).

 

Axel Rüger, who had been the museum director since 2006, left the museum in 2019 to become secretary and chief executive of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. The Van Gogh Museum announced that Managing Director Adriaan Dönszelmann would act as general director until a new director is appointed.

 

Since 2000, the museum had between 1.2 and 1.9 million visitors per year. From 2010 to 2012, it was the most visited museum in the Netherlands. In 2015, the museum had 1.9 million visitors, it was the 2nd most visited museum in the Netherlands, after the Rijksmuseum, and the 31st most visited art museum in the world.

 

The Van Gogh Museum is a member of the national Museumvereniging (Museum Association).

 

(Wikipedia)

 

Reaper (French: faucheur, lit. 'reaper'), Wheat Field with Reaper, or Wheat Field with Reaper and Sun is the title given to each of a series of three oil-on-canvas paintings by Vincent van Gogh of a man reaping a wheat field under a bright early-morning sun. To the artist, the reaper represented death and "humanity would be the wheat being reaped". However, Van Gogh did not consider the work to be sad but "almost smiling" and taking "place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold".

 

The first painting (F617), which is thickly impastoed, was started in June 1889. Work on the piece resumed in early September after the artist suffered a mental breakdown from which it took him several weeks to recover. Van Gogh then created two more stylized versions (F618 and F619) in early and late September 1889. He referred to the paintings as simply faucheur, 'reaper', and said that the first was done from nature as a study, while the second, similarly sized version was "the final painting" completed in his studio. He came to prefer the original, and intended the third smaller version as a keepsake for his mother or one of his sisters.

 

Background

 

In May 1889, Vincent van Gogh (1853–1890), a Dutch painter, moved to the Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, France, to commit himself at Saint-Paul-de-Mausole, a psychiatric asylum which was previously a monastery. This presented Van Gogh with a completely different landscape from which to draw inspiration. While Saint-Remy was only 25 kilometres (16 miles) from Arles, his previous residence, it lies below the low massifs of the Alpilles in contrast to the vast plains of Arles.

 

Van Gogh's bedroom window framed a view of an agrarian landscape that became the focus of the artist's work. A wheat field was located below his window encircled by a wall and hills in the background. The artist made at least 14 paintings and just as many sketches of the scene.

 

Composition

 

First painting (F617)

 

Van Gogh began painting Reaper (F617) in late June 1889. He first mentions the painting in a 25 June 1889 letter to his brother Theo van Gogh where he describes it as "a wheatfield, very yellow and very bright, perhaps the brightest canvas [he has] done". He writes that it was among 12 paintings on which he was currently working. The painting is mentioned again in a 2 July 1889 letter:

 

The latest one begun is the wheatfield where there's a little reaper and a big sun. The canvas is all yellow with the exception of the wall and the background of purplish hills.

 

In the painting measuring 73 cm × 92 cm (29 in × 36 in), the reaper is depicted with just a few brushstrokes of blue in swirling yellow wheat that leaves an outline of the figure in green. His sickle is only a single brushstroke and barely visible.

 

With the 2 July letter, Van Gogh included around ten sketches of the paintings he was working on at the time, including a sketch (F1546) of this painting. The painting appears to have been mostly completed by then.[6] However, Van Gogh was making further changes to the work while he described it in more detail in a later letter to his brother written on 4–5 September 1889:

 

I'm struggling with a canvas begun a few days before my indisposition. A reaper, the study is all yellow, terribly thickly impasted, but the subject was beautiful and simple. I then saw in this reaper – a vague figure struggling like a devil in the full heat of the day to reach the end of his toil – I then saw the image of death in it, in this sense that humanity would be the wheat being reaped. So if you like it's the opposite of that Sower I tried before. But in this death [there is] nothing sad, it takes place in broad daylight with a sun that floods everything with a light of fine gold. Good, here I am again, however I'm not letting go, and I'm trying again on a new canvas.

 

Before writing the letter quoted above, the artist had suffered a severe mental breakdown. In July 1889, he was confined in the asylum for six weeks and was only permitted to paint again in late August. While writing the 4–5 September letter, he touched up the first painting, which he described as a "study", and began working on a new version.

 

Second painting (F618)

 

Van Gogh appears to have completed the second painting in a single day and taking breaks to write the letter on 4–5 September 1889. In a later part of the letter, he announces: "Phew – the reaper is finished, I think it will be one that you'll place in your home".

 

He initially preferred this version over the earlier study. He described it as:

 

[A]n image of death as the great Book of Nature speaks to us about it – but what I sought is the "almost smiling". It's all yellow except for a line of violet hills – a pale, blond yellow. I myself find that funny, that I saw it like that through the iron bars of a cell.

 

The "almost smiling" is a reference to an expression used by Théophile Silvestre to describe the death of Eugène Delacroix. Silvestre's eulogy of Delacroix had made an impression on Van Gogh according to a letter he wrote in 15 August 1885 to the painter Anthon van Rappard. Van Gogh also quoted the eulogy in other letters.

 

There were significant differences between this second painting and version started earlier in the summer. This version was less yellow, with a sky that is more greenish in color, and the Sun was more conical and higher in the sky. He added a small tree near the left edge of the painting along the hills in the background and removed the pile of sheaves from the foreground. Van Gogh eventually came to believe the original painting created from nature was better than the replica which he had intended as "the final painting". The second painting, at 73.2 cm × 92.7 cm (28.8 in × 36.5 in), was almost the same size as the first. Both the first and second version of the painting were still drying on 19 September 1889 and he was not able to include them in the batch he shipped to Theo on that date. The paintings were eventually included in the batch he sent on 28 September, by which time he had completed a third version of the painting.

 

Third painting (F619)

 

In late September 1889, Van Gogh painted reduced versions of several of his earlier works, including a replica of the Reaper similar to the one he made earlier that month, smaller versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses and Bedroom in Arles, and what he called "a little portrait of me", Self-Portrait Without Beard. In particular, he wrote on 6 September 1889: "I really want to redo the reaper one more time for Mother, if not I'll make her another painting for her birthday". This third version of the painting, also known as The Wheatfield behind Saint Paul's Hospital with a Reaper, or La moisson, 'the harvest', was smaller at 59.5 cm × 72.5 cm (23.4 in × 28.5 in). The painting was completed and drying by 28 September and, in December 1889, was sent to Theo along with several other small replicas.

 

Provenance

 

Van Gogh died about a year after creating the paintings. His brother, Theo, died a few months later and the two later paintings came to the possession of Theo's widow, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (later Johanna Cohen Gosschalk-Bonger). The original study was in 1890 either gifted to Paul Gauguin or traded in exchange with the French artist. In 1899, the painting was acquired by Ambroise Vollard from Gauguin's art dealer Georges Chaudet. The piece was then acquired by the art collector Émile Schuffenecker who passed it down to Amédée Schuffenecker, who in turn sold it to Helene Kröller-Müller in April 1912. It has since been in the collection of the Kröller-Müller Museum.

 

Van Gogh-Bonger and her son loaned the second painting to museums in Amsterdam. In 1909, she loaned the piece to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. After her death in 1925, her son continued to loan the piece to the Rijksmuseum. On 22 October 1931, the painting was loaned to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Ownership of the painting was transferred to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation on 10 July 1962 and eleven days later an agreement was reached between the foundation and the State of Netherlands for the preservation and management of the painting as part of a new Van Gogh Museum. While the new museum was built, the painting remained at Stedelijk Museum until 2 June 1973 when it was placed on permanent loan to the Van Gogh Museum.

 

While Van Gogh intended the third and smaller version of this painting as a gift for either his mother or one of his sisters, it is not known if the painting ever reached them. In May 1902, Van Gogh-Bonger sold the third painting to the German art dealer Paul Cassirer, and it became the first work by Van Gogh to be held by a German museum. The same year, art collector Karl Ernst Osthaus of the Museum Folkwang acquired the painting for his collection in Hagen, Germany. Since 1922, it has been a part of the museum's collection in Essen.

 

(Wikipedia)

 

Das Van Gogh Museum ist ein Kunstmuseum am Museumplein im Amsterdamer Stadtteil Oud-Zuid, Stadtbezirk Amsterdam-Zuid, das am 2. Juni 1973 eröffnet wurde. Es beherbergt die größte Sammlung mit Werken des niederländischen Malers Vincent van Gogh. Seit dem 1. Mai 2013 ist das Museum nach Umbau und einem vorübergehenden Umzug in ein anderes Gebäude wieder zugänglich. 2016 hatte das Haus 2.076.526 Besucher und gehört damit zu den meistbesuchten Kunstmuseen der Welt.

 

Geschichte

 

Als van Gogh 1890 mit 37 Jahren starb, hinterließ er mit etwa 900 Gemälden und 1.100 Zeichnungen ein umfangreiches Werk. Hiervon hatte er nur wenig verkauft und einige Arbeiten an Freunde verschenkt. Seinen Nachlass erbte sein jüngerer Bruder, der Kunsthändler Theo van Gogh. Dieser hatte neben den Werken von Vincent auch Arbeiten von Künstlern wie Paul Gauguin, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Léon Lhermitte und Jean-François Millet gesammelt. Nachdem Theo bereits ein Jahr nach seinem Bruder verstarb, verwaltete seine Witwe Johanna van Gogh-Bonger das Erbe. Sie kehrte in die Niederlande zurück und organisierte erste Ausstellungen mit Werken Vincent van Goghs und trug wesentlich dazu bei, den Künstler einer größeren Öffentlichkeit bekannt zu machen. 1905 fand die erste große Ausstellung im Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam statt, während sich das Rijksmuseum geweigert hatte, Leihgaben mit van Goghs Werken anzunehmen. Da van Gogh häufig mehrere Versionen des gleichen Themas gemalt hatte, konnte Johanna van Gogh einzelne Bilder der Sammlung verkaufen, ohne den Gesamteindruck wesentlich zu schmälern. Sie war es auch, die frühzeitig die Veröffentlichung der Briefe Vincent van Goghs in mehreren Sprachen vorantrieb. Nach ihrem Tod 1925 erbte ihr Sohn, der Ingenieur Vincent Willem van Gogh (1890–1978) die Sammlung. Er stellte verschiedenen Museen Werke als Leihgabe zur Verfügung, bevor er 1960 die Vincent van Gogh Stiftung gründete und ihr die Sammlung übergab. Zunächst gelangten die Bilder als Dauerausstellung ins Amsterdamer Stedelijk Museum, bevor 1973 das Van Gogh Museum eröffnet werden konnte.

 

1991 war das Van Gogh Museum Schauplatz eines aufsehenerregenden Kunstraubs, bei dem 20 Gemälde im Wert von mehreren Hundert Millionen Euro entwendet wurden. Dank einer Reifenpanne des Fluchtfahrzeugs konnten die Gemälde aber kurz nach der Entdeckung des Raubs von der Polizei sichergestellt werden. 2002 wurden bei einem Einbruch die Van-Gogh-Gemälde Stürmische See bei Scheveningen und Die Reformierte Kirche in Nuenen gestohlen, sie wurden 2016 wieder aufgefunden. Die im Haus eines neapolitanischen Drogenbarons sichergestellten Malereien konnten erst mit Zustimmung der Italienischen Justiz im Januar 2017 nach Amsterdam zurückkehren.

 

Gebäude

 

Das Museum besteht aus zwei Gebäuden. Der ursprüngliche Bau geht auf einen Entwurf von Gerrit Rietveld zurück. Nach seinem Tod im Jahr 1964 wurde der Bau von seinen Partnern J. van Dillen und J. van Tricht fortgeführt und nach Fertigstellung am 2. Juni 1973 eingeweiht. In diesem Gebäude ist heute die ständige Sammlung untergebracht. 1999 wurde ein Ergänzungsbau für Sonderausstellungen eingeweiht, der vom japanischen Architekten Kishō Kurokawa in Form einer Ellipse entworfen wurde. 2015 wurde der Ausstellungsbau durch einen neuen, großflächig verglasten Eingangsbereich ergänzt, dessen Entwurf ebenfalls aus dem Büro des 2007 verstorbenen Kurokawa stammt. Beide Gebäude sind durch einen unterirdischen Übergang miteinander verbunden.

 

Sammlung

 

Das Museum besitzt über 200 Gemälde Vincent van Goghs aus allen Schaffensperioden und 400 seiner Zeichnungen. Zu den ausgestellten Hauptwerken gehören Die Kartoffelesser, Das Schlafzimmer in Arles und eine Version der Sonnenblumen. Außerdem bewahrt das Museum den Großteil der Briefe Vincent van Goghs auf. Auch findet sich in der Sammlung die Suizidwaffe van Goghs, eine verrostete Lefaucheux à broche. Die von Theo van Gogh begonnene Sammlung mit Werken anderer Künstler des 19. Jahrhunderts wurde mit Stiftungsgeldern kontinuierlich ausgebaut, sodass das Museum heute auch Werke von Alma-Tadema, Bernard, Boulanger, Breton, Caillebotte, Courbet, Couture, Daubigny, Denis, Gauguin, Israëls, Jongkind, Manet, Mauve, Millet, Monet, Munch, Pissarro, Puvis de Chavannes, Redon, Seurat, Signac, Toulouse-Lautrec, van Dongen und von Stuck besitzt.

 

(Wikipedia)

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