Chicago Museum to Host Unique Van Gogh-Gauguin Exhibition in 2001
March 13, 1999 - 0:0
CHICAGO Chicago will host a unique exhibition exploring the relationship and collaboration between Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh and his French counterpart Paul Gauguin, the Art Institute of Chicago announced Thursday. The exhibition will be the first to explore the extended dialogue, played out in paintings, between two towering figures in the history of modern art, said its curator, Douglas Druick. Van Gogh and Gauguin: the Studio of the South, jointly organized by the institute and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam thanks to a 1.5-million dollar grant from Chicago-based telecom giant Ameritech, will run from September 22, 2001 to January 13, 2002. On display will be between 120 and 150 masterpieces by the two masters, borrowed from museums and private collections across the United States, Europe, Japan and Russia. Van Gogh alone completed more than 800 paintings - an average of almost two a week.
But organizers said they were selecting only those works that reveal how the two men reacted and responded to each other. Their interaction was not unlike a great tennis match between two potential world-class players, the game of each pushing inspiring the other to new performance heights, said Druick. There's a tendency to think of their interchange as being an experience of two months in Arles, he added.
What we're setting to prove is not only that this began earlier and even more importantly it continued after their two months together and in a way that defined the works we know them best by, he added. The Art Institute of Chicago boasts one of the world's most comprehensive collection of French impressionist works. It will be the only U.S. venue for this unprecedented exhibition expected to draw 600,000 to 750,000 visitors from around the world.
Attendance is expected to rival and possibly surpass those at the institute's wildly popular exhibitions for French impressionist masters Claude Monet in 1995 and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1997. Organizers stressed the complexity of mounting such an ambitious undertaking for which planning began two years ago. Van Gogh, who took his own life in 1890 at the age of 37, and Gauguin (1848-1903) established a sort of artistic commune in Arles, southern France where they worked together for two months in 1888. (AFP)
But organizers said they were selecting only those works that reveal how the two men reacted and responded to each other. Their interaction was not unlike a great tennis match between two potential world-class players, the game of each pushing inspiring the other to new performance heights, said Druick. There's a tendency to think of their interchange as being an experience of two months in Arles, he added.
What we're setting to prove is not only that this began earlier and even more importantly it continued after their two months together and in a way that defined the works we know them best by, he added. The Art Institute of Chicago boasts one of the world's most comprehensive collection of French impressionist works. It will be the only U.S. venue for this unprecedented exhibition expected to draw 600,000 to 750,000 visitors from around the world.
Attendance is expected to rival and possibly surpass those at the institute's wildly popular exhibitions for French impressionist masters Claude Monet in 1995 and Pierre Auguste Renoir in 1997. Organizers stressed the complexity of mounting such an ambitious undertaking for which planning began two years ago. Van Gogh, who took his own life in 1890 at the age of 37, and Gauguin (1848-1903) established a sort of artistic commune in Arles, southern France where they worked together for two months in 1888. (AFP)