Reviews

Kunstmuseum Basel still hosts the spectacular exhibition showing the world’s first complete survey of landscape paintings by the legendary Vincent van Gogh. Seventy paintings – both world-famous key works and paintings little known to the genera l public thus far – promise to provide new access to Van Gogh’s art.

Fischerboote bei Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, Mai / Juni 1888 Öl auf Leinwand | 51 x 64 cm Van Gogh Museum Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

The landscapes in which Van Gogh lived were seminal influences on both the man and his work. This will be the first exhibition to highlight the continuity of his artistic quest exclusively through his landscape paintings. We will, for example, see the earth tones of Van Gogh’s early Dutch work gradually give way to a more luminous, colour-oriented technique after his encounter with contemporary French art in Paris, and find him going on to achieve intensely heightened hues in Arles. But it is in Saint-Rémy that his work finally reaches a consummate degree of tension, with every element of the landscape seemingly seized by a sort of inner agitation. The last period of his life, in Auvers, once again represents a new artistic beginning. Using cooler, more broken tones, Van Gogh creates a cycle of wide, panorama-format paintings dedicated to the landscapes of northern France.

Sommerabend, 1888 Öl auf Leinwand | 74 x 92 cm Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur, Geschenk von Dr. Emil Hahnloser, 1922 Foto: Kunstmuseum Winterthur, Winterthur

This first comprehensive presentation of Van Gogh’s landscapes allows the artist’s contextual understanding of his works to emerge. Van Gogh translated his original thematic interest in nature’s cyclical quality into a principle of series and cycles of works. These cycles and the forms with which he variously experimented are partially reconstructed in the exhibition. Introducing the sower and the mower, and using subjects like blossoming fruit trees and the corn harvest, he emphasised nature’s cycle of continual renewal.

Throughout his brief artistic career, Van Gogh created works celebrating the uniqueness and beauty of nature’s glory. The exhibition presents the complete vista of van Gogh’s world: village and urban landscapes, gardens, parks and fields, olive groves and vineyards. The artist’s intense inner connection with nature is documented through a host of outstanding works including The Wheatfield from the Honolulu Academy of Arts; Peach Blosssom in the Crau from The Courtauld Gallery, London; and The Olive Trees from The Museum of Modern Art, New York.

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Further information

Vincent van Gogh – Zwischen Erde und Himmel: Die Landschaften