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Wednesday, March 28, 2012

Van Gogh, Up Close-ish

Funniest thing about the exhibition Van Gogh Up Close at the PMA is that a whole section of paintings from a private collection had to have spacers to keep the audience a certain distance away.

There were also a couple of cheap side-galleries with relatively weak excuses for their existence, i.e. Van Gogh hated photography, so let's show you what he probably hated. The one on Japanese influences and Hiroshige was awesome, and also taken almost directly from the Van Gogh Museum's section on it. But it's worth seeing stuff like this:


Ando Hiroshige, Kameido Ume (Japanese apricot) Garden, 1857

See here for Van Gogh's version.

Nonetheless, lots of other good stuff going on with the paintings themselves:
Cut Sunflowers, 1887, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City

It's difficult to find some of the works from the show, since they didn't show many of his most famous works but had a whole slew of studies of underbrush and grasses--the grasses actually being my favorite and reminding me of Leonardo's study of hair, but with a greater sense of how he uses color and texture in light of visual movement.


Almond Blossom, 1890, Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam

This is the final piece of the show, showing an immense sense of control--it fully displays his chosen style, but also shows an amazing amount of restraint in the coloring of the background in contrast to his much more motley scenes in the rest of the show.

Unfortunately, it is impossible to get a sense of the color of this painting without seeing it in person. Going through the gift shop afterwards made this painfully obvious. A google search is even worse: Ouch. +1 points for Wikimedia, who did the best job by far.

Oh, and just to add some Van Goghnatomy:


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