Fifty works by Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) from the collection of the Van Gogh Museum are now on tour in Japan and South Korea. The exhibition Van Gogh in Paris: New Perspectives will run for more than a year and travel to a number of host museums. The exhibition opened at Huis ten Bosch in Nagasaki on 29 July and will move on to the Seoul Arts Centre in Seoul, the Municipal Art Museum Kyoto, the Miyagi Museum of Art Sendai and the Hiroshima Prefectural Museum of Art. The exhibition will include a number of world-famous works by Van Gogh, such as By the Seine, In the café: Agostina Segatori in Le Tambourin, Wheatfield with partridge, A crab on its back, Café table with absinthe, and Self-portrait with grey felt hat.

New insights
The travelling exhibition is based on Van Gogh in Antwerp and Paris: New Insights, presented at the Van Gogh Museum in the summer of 2011. The exhibition in Japan and South Korea showcases the results of the museum’s art-historical and technical research on paintings from Van Gogh’s Paris years in its own collection. The new insights formed the basis for the earlier exhibition at the museum in 2011. They led to new interpretations of some pieces, while others were redated. The technical research also furthered our understanding of Van Gogh’s artistic development.

Warm relations
There are close ties between Japan and the Van Gogh Museum, thanks in large part to Van Gogh’s own admiration for Japanese printmaking. In the travelling exhibition, research results will be woven into the display of Van Gogh's works, in a mode of presentation that is new to culture lovers in South Korea and Japan. In the almost forty years of its existence, the Van Gogh Museum has organised several exhibitions in Japan and two in South Korea.

The collection on the move
The exhibition in Japan and South Korea is an offshoot of the essential renovation work on the building at Museumplein, as a result of which the collection is temporarily exiled from its museum. In addition to the travelling exhibition, another large section of the collection, including works on paper, objects and letters as well as some 75 masterpieces by Van Gogh, will be displayed at the Hermitage Amsterdam from the end of September onwards, in the show entitled Vincent: The Van Gogh Museum in the Hermitage Amsterdam.