Van Gogh at the Van Gogh Museum [antikvár]

Introduction The Van Gogh Museum Wlien, dm-ing a three-day excursion to Amsterdam in October 1885, Vincent van Gogh paid a visit to the recently opened Rijksmuseum, the young artist could not possibly have imagined that in less than a century, on 2 June 197g, an entire museum on Amsterdam's Museumplein would be dedicated to his own artistic legacy. In the two decades that have elapsed since its foundation, the Van Gogh Museum has grown into one of the most popular institutions ofits kind in Europe, a place of pilgrimage for miUions seeking the unique experience of standing face to face with one of the nineteenth century's most fascinating artists. Though it was in France that Van Gogh lived and worked from 1886, and there that he carved out a place for himself in the annals of Post-impressionism, only a modest portion of his prodigious oeuvre remained in that country. Alter the artist's death, his brother Theo's widow took most of the unsold drawings and pictures back with her to Holland. Thanks in part to the superb collection that Hélene RroUer-Miiller amassed in the early twentieth century, over a third of the master's oeuvre found a permanent home in his native land. Besides the museum thai bears his name, the municipal museums of Amsterdam, The Hague and Rotterdam, as well as numerous smaller museums scattered about Holland, proudly preserve important Van Goghs. The eollecUon of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is far and away the largest and most representative of the artist's oeuvre. U includes seven sketchbooks and some six hundred original letters from Vincent to Theo, in addition to over two hundred paintings and 580 drawings, all on permanent loan from the Vincentvan Gogh Foundation. The Museum also houses work by friends and colleagues which Theo, who dealt in art, and Vincent eithei' purchased or acquired through exchange. This so-called Theo van Gogh Collection makes it possible to present the oeuvre of Vincent van Gogh in a broader context, while forming in turn the basis of the Museum's acquisition policy. Over the past few years the Van Gogh Museum has been actively redefining itself as an institution where, with Van Gogh as the pivotal figure, a broad swath of European art of the later nineteenth century is presented in all its diversity. In this respect the Museum forms an ideal link between its neighbours on the Museumplein: the Rijksmuseum, devoted primarily to Dutch fme and appUed art up to approximately 1900, and the Stedelijk Museum, with its international twentieth-centuiy collection. At the lime Ihe Van Gogh Museum was founded, a museum dedicated to a single artist was still something of an anomaly. Since then the foundation of the Musée Picasso in Paris has Metier de Naaii, Portrait dratvittg of Theo van Gogh (iSj7-iS9i)in 1SS9