Van Gogh is in Rome with Van Gogh Masterpieces from the Kröller-Muller Museum, at Palazzo Bonaparte until March 26, 2023.
Vincent Van Gogh: an artist of international fame, undervalued during his lifetime but celebrated after his death, he was and continues to be one of the most important and beloved figures in 20th-century art.
The Artist of the Humble
Van Gogh was born in Zundert, in the Netherlands, on March 30, 1853.
His life was marked by tragedies and mental health issues, yet it was also characterized by an impressive artistic output. Approximately 900 paintings and over a thousand drawings are attributed to him: self-portraits, landscapes, still lifes of flowers, paintings with cypress trees, representations of wheat fields and sunflowers.
The number of works created is even more extraordinary considering that Van Gogh, despite having started drawing as a child, decided to fully dedicate himself to art only in adulthood, beginning to paint systematically at the age of 28.
Thus began his career, portraying subjects familiar to him, related to peasant life, laborers, the poor, and workers.
Van Gogh, from a young age and especially due to the strict upbringing imposed by his father – a Protestant minister – experienced the lives of the humbler classes, developing a strong sense of empathy, almost a vocation that drove him for much of his life to be particularly close to them.
The Exhibition: Van Gogh Masterpieces from the Kröller-Muller Museum
In conjunction with the 170th anniversary of his birth, Palazzo Bonaparte in Rome hosts Van Gogh Masterpieces from the Kröller-Muller Museum.
The event exhibition, one of the most anticipated in Italy for 2022, focuses on the life and artistic career of Van Gogh, retracing the most significant places and moments: Holland, his stays in France in Paris and Arles, up to St. Remy and Auvers where, unfortunately, as is well known, he took his own life with a gunshot at the age of just 37.
The exhibition is, in short, a chronologically divided journey through 50 works from the Kröller-Muller in Otterlo displayed across the two floors of Palazzo Bonaparte.
It starts from his youth and the dark landscapes of those years, to the paintings featuring the workers of the land, including the sower, the potato gatherers, the weavers, the lumberjacks, the women engaged in domestic tasks or exhausted from carrying sacks of coal or digging the ground.
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Van Gogh Masterpieces from the Kröller-Muller Museum follows and explains, in detail, the artistic growth of the painter and the influences that led him to become one of the most beloved artists of all time: from the realism of Millet and Corot, to pointillism and Japanese prints.
In the exhibition, particular attention is given to Paris, a fundamental stay for the artist.
Here he was indeed overwhelmed by the ferment of the cultural life of the French capital and took the opportunity to study and deepen all the artistic currents of that period, Impressionists and Divisionists above all, without ever adhering to any of them.
On the contrary, he translated the teachings received into a personal and unique style.
Right in Paris, he created his Self-Portrait of 1887 with tones of blue, green, and azure, one of the cornerstone works on display at Palazzo Bonaparte.
Everyone who visits Rome until March 26, thanks to Van Gogh Masterpieces from the Kröller-Müller Museum, will be able to fully immerse themselves in the world of the Dutch genius.
