Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers review – eye-aching, heartbreaking and unmissable

National Gallery, London
Gathering together 61 of Vincent van Gogh’s masterpieces from around the world, the National Gallery’s once-in-a-lifetime show lets the art speak for itself

At the National Gallery’s vast new Van Gogh exhibition, visitors will be able to see a painting of 1889 whose title, Undergrowth, speaks not of sunflowers, but of untrammelled weeds – and by extension, perhaps, of the dense scrub of the unconscious. Born of his fascination with the raggedy garden of the hospital at Saint-Rémy, to which the artist had admitted himself after several breakdowns, this picture is covered all over by ivy – a rapacious thug of a plant, sinister and bullying. The ground has long since been carpeted, and now the trunks of the trees, clustered together here as if in solidarity, are also on their way to full colonisation, the vines creeping ever upwards. Some small patches of the scene are miraculously dappled with sunlight, but the feeling overall is one of viridescent doom. The longer I looked, the more breathless I felt: as if I, too, were being strangled.

A certain wooziness may, though, be a natural consequence of a show like this. In its entirety, it’s almost too much. The first major exhibition at the National Gallery to be devoted to Van Gogh – its staging marks the gallery’s bicentenary – it comprises no fewer than 61 works, almost every one of which is worth 10 minutes, at least, of your time (if only). What incredible loans. Portrait of a Peasant (1888), a painting of an old gardener, Patience Escalier, with a green-tinged beard, has never before left the Norton Simon collection in Pasadena, California. The Philadelphia Museum of Art has sent Sunflowers (1889), enabling it to hang beside the National Gallery’s Sunflowers (1888) for the first time since they were in the artist’s studio; together with La Berceuse (The Lullaby, 1889), which has travelled from the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, these form a triptych, as the artist always intended. Among several pictures from private collections, meanwhile, is Trees in the Garden of the Asylum (1889), a gorgeously restrained painting whose framing device – more tree trunks, this time cropped at both ends – speaks richly of Van Gogh’s admiration for Japanese woodblock prints.

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from The Guardian https://ift.tt/If8hoMq