Ahead of its reopening, the Van Gogh Museum has been working hard behind the scenes on a new exhibition programme.
The Potato Eaters opens on 8 October 2021 and Van Gogh and the Olive Groves – planned for this summer – has been postponed until 11 March 2022.
The exhibition Here to Stay: A decade of remarkable acquisitions and their stories, of which a digital preview opened online in March, will be on display in full once the museum reopens, and has been extended until 12 September 2021.
A decade of remarkable acquisitions and their stories
On display now until 12 September 2021. Exhibition Wing.
Here to Stay features a large selection of artworks that have been added to the acclaimed museum collection in the past 10 years. The exhibition introduces the full extent of the Van Gogh Museum’s collection area: from paintings and drawings to prints, sculptures and letters.
Most of these remarkable artworks are not by Van Gogh, but rather by his contemporaries. Here to Stay features a surprising array of artists: major names including Edvard Munch, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Claude Monet and Edgar Degas, but also lesser-known artists such as Henri Guérard and Adolphe Appian.
Aside from the artworks themselves, the stories behind the acquisitions play a central role. Curators offer a glimpse behind the scenes, explain why a museum collects works and why it is so important that museums continue to do so, and also introduce their personal take on the artworks.
Collectors, museum supporters and 10 Amsterdam residents also introduce their favourite acquisitions from the past decade. By introducing the stories of a range of people, including an older resident of the Museum Quarter, a secondary school student, a youth worker from the District of Nieuw-West and the Amsterdam City Poet, the museum offers visitors different perspectives on individual works.
In an app created especially for Here to Stay, which can be opened using the QR code at the beginning of the exhibition, visitors can select the stories they would like to read, and in which order.
In March, during the lockdown, the museum revealed a selection of the key works and stories from Here to Stay online.
From 8 October 2021 to 16 January 2022. Exhibition Wing.
This autumn, the Van Gogh Museum presents The Potato Eaters, a tribute to Vincent van Gogh’s masterpiece. This exhibition explores the origins of the remarkable painting and reveals Van Gogh’s ambitions when he created the artwork.
Van Gogh saw The Potato Eaters as a showpiece, and hoped to break into the Parisian art market with the work. In this exhibition, visitors will discover that Van Gogh was not only a self-taught, struggling artist but also an ambitious man who meticulously prepared his work. He spent months preparing for the figure painting, and his countless preliminary studies are the main theme of the exhibition.
Van Gogh’s choice of subject was also significant, as with this artwork, he wanted to present himself as a painter of peasant life. Despite his great ambition, the work was not well received, and it did not bring Van Gogh the success for which he had hoped. The Potato Eaters focuses on Van Gogh’s perseverance, how he dealt with criticism, and what the painting meant to him.
From 11 March to 12 June 2022. Exhibition Wing.
In 2022, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and The Dallas Museum of Art are organising an exhibition focusing on the significant group of paintings of olive groves that Van Gogh produced during his year-long stay at the asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence.
Van Gogh and the Olive Groves reunites the series of works on this subject, created by the artist between June and December 1889, for the first time. The exhibition also presents new insights into Van Gogh’s painting technique, materials and use of colour in all 15 paintings of olive groves.
The exhibition will first be on display at the Dallas Museum of Art (from 17 October 2021 to 6 February 2022), before opening at the Van Gogh Museum in spring 2022.
On display now. First floor of the permanent collection.
For Erratic Growth, a presentation featuring works from the museum collection, four Beeldbrekers (‘ReFramers’) selected several of Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and letters with which they identify.
The Beeldbrekers are a group of young Amsterdammers who lend their perspectives and expertise to help make the Van Gogh Museum more inclusive. In this personal presentation, the Beeldbrekers explore growth – not purely positive or linear – in Van Gogh’s life and work, and explore how this corresponds with their own experiences.
On display now. Third floor of the permanent collection.
The continuous presentation Van Gogh Inspires currently features work by Dutch artist Jan Robert Leegte. In this presentation, Leegte takes an innovative approach to nature and the landscape.
The plein-air painting technique of Van Gogh and his contemporaries is replaced by an algorithm that ventures into the wilderness of the internet to return with a random image of nature.
This image is subsequently compressed into a digital impression of the delocalised landscape. The algorithm constantly retrieves an infinite stream of images, therefore creating an endless sequence of algorithmic impressions.