The Van Gogh museum, a family affair
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In 2023 the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam celebrates its first 50 years of life with three exhibitions staggered throughout the year and focusing on the artist’s life. The first “Choosing Vincent” until April 10, wants to shed light on everything that happened between the painter’s disappearance and the achievement of worldwide fame which at the end of the 60s materialized with the project of a museum dedicated to him. Story of a family love and his passion for art, at all costs.
Vincent van Gogh’s short earthly life ended in 1890, when just thirty-seven years old, he committed suicide with a gunshot to the heart. In the few days of agony, during which he will never regain consciousness, at his bedside was Theo, his brother. The support of his whole life, from Paris rushes to the nearby village of Auvers-sur-Oise (where Vincent lived, hospitalized in a psychiatric hospital) to assist him, helpless, even in this tragic final moment. On the other hand, he had always done it, the two brothers always close, despite their differences in character and different lifestyles: Vincent, a brilliant artist with a difficult character, Theo, a successful art dealer, with a more peaceful bourgeois life.
The two brothers
United since childhood, in the relationship with the strict father, a Calvinist pastor, who probably hoped that the eldest son would follow in his footsteps, and in front of the children of the various villages where they went to live following their father’s career, sent on a mission to Brabant in the hope of breaking the compact Catholic front of the southern province, converting some souls to the Reformation. Isolated children, different from the others, and perhaps for this reason so united. And the special relationship between the two brothers will also be transmitted to Johanna Bonger whom Theo will marry in 1889. For her it will be obvious to “adopt” Vincent too and, without jealousy, she will indulge in the husband in caring for and taking charge of his brother-in-law. But the marriage does not last long: Vincent’s nervous illness and suicide prove to be the coup de grace for Theo, already undermined by syphilis, who will die six months after his brother in a nursing home for nervous illnesses in Utrecht, leaving his widow with little Vincent Willem of almost a year of life.
The sister-in-law
The painter’s disappearance is, in a certain sense, the beginning of his fame thanks to Johanna who inherits the Paris apartment with about 200 unsold works of her brother-in-law and without listening to the advice of those who told her to throw them away, she prefers to believe Theo and to his unconditional faith in his brother’s artistic abilities. She keeps everything, but not only that, she begins a tireless work of promoting the artist’s works, an activity that will also take her to New York in 1915 (after having moved Theo’s remains from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise, having them buried next to to Vincent’s grave) and will engage in the translation of the close correspondence of the two brothers until 1925, the year of his death.
Grandson
It is at this point that the painter’s nephew of the same name comes into play, for whose birth, the enthusiastic uncle will paint “Almond branch”, not surprisingly, chosen as the opening work of the inaugural exhibition of the jubilee, “Choosing Vincent” . The engineer Vincent Van Gogh (during his years at the polytechnic he kept the “Marina a Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer” painted in 1888 by his uncle hung on the wall of his simple student room) will grow up with other job aspirations far from the world of art but keeping the mission that his mother had passed on to him (already in 1914 they had together lent 200 of Vincent’s drawings to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam for an exhibition). His political ideas related to the Social Democratic Student Club lead him to come into contact with the group “Kunst aan het Volk” (art to the people) which had the aim “to bring art to the working class”, an ideal that will play an important role in the decisions he will take regarding the extraordinary artistic legacy of the family. Two years after the death of his mother, the engineer van Gogh stops selling his uncle’s works and moves from Amsterdam to the village of Laren, in a villa that he builds with a special space to house the family art collection (which also included paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec, Manet and Gauguin). In his dining room, on the other hand, he keeps about twenty canvases obviously indispensable for him, including “The Potato Eaters” (1885), “The Sunflowers” (1889) and “The Yellow House” (1988). The canvas “Almond branch” will instead end up in the children’s room and Johan, one of them, having become an adult, declares himself amazed that the painting had never been damaged by their throwing pillows. The engineer will continue in his mission which, in 1930, will lead to the great exhibition at the Stedelijk Museum: 95 paintings, 150 drawings and watercolors will create a memorable event creating a strong link between the civic museum and the Van Gogh family who, in 1945, as thanks for the conservation of the collection in a bunker during the war, will give him the portrait of “Agustine Roulet called la Berceuse”, painted by his uncle Vincent in 1889. But it was in 1960 that the engineer through the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation will finally come to an agreement with the Dutch state: the permanent loan of the entire collection in exchange for the construction of a museum building that could house it worthily. The very important project is entrusted to one of the most important architects of the moment, Gerrit Rietveld, who will design it as a “sober palace of light” on the land made available by the Stedelijk Museum. The engineer Vincent and his three sons (the fourth partisan was killed by the Nazis shortly before the end of the war) remain in the foundation and witness the birth of the new museum which, in addition to the collection of family paintings, will also house drawings, letters, books and items owned by the painter. On 3 June 1973 the Van Gogh Museum was finally inaugurated and until 1978, the year of his death, the engineer Vincent Willem van Gogh visited it every day.
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