November, 2022
The Uffizi Gallery, the Louvre, the Vatican Museums, the Peggy Guggenheim Museum, the Vatican, the Sistine Chapel, the Accademia Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Phoenix Art Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Museum of Modern Art, the Guggenheim NYC, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Barnes, the Rodin Museum, the Georgia O’Keefee Museum, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the National Gallery, the Hirshhorn, Meijer Sculpture Gardens, and the University of Michigan Museum of Art (are there more?).We’ve been to art museums all over the world, and have had the good fortune to enjoy in-residence collections as well as special exhibitions dedicated to a single artist or movement/genre of art. We’ve been able to enjoy the latest, greatest craze of “immersive” art displays – to be surrounded by an ever-changing collage of an artist’s work through the eye of an ever-passing timeline.
Barbara has taught Brian so, so much about art and artists, and whether chasing after street art, rambling through outdoor sculpture gardens or spending a few hours in a museum it’s something we so enjoy together. Dig?
The Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) holds the distinction of being the first public museum in the United States to purchase a painting by Vincent Van Gogh. It all started in 1922 when the museum purchased Self-Portrait, a painting that is still part of the museum’s permanent collection; therefore, it is only fitting that 100 years later DIA would produce a new exhibition showcasing 74 authentic Van Gogh. Van Gogh in America is “a retrospective of Van Gogh’s slow rise to fame in the United States and the incredible efforts by, first, the DIA, and then several other museums that would bring him to superstardom.”
It’s always curious to open up our mind to an artist’s metamorphosis – the impact of friends and the passage of time on their art, their innovation, and what happens when an artist steps away from their “style” and picks up another artist’s brush. Can we always tell who is the artist?
Following our thorough enjoyment of Van Gogh in America, we’ve decided to ask you, the reader of this blog: Van Gogh or Not Van Gogh? Please submit your answers on a 1×3 index card mailed to Jonathan “Hagrid” Swift, The Leaky Cauldron, 13 Diagon Alley, London, England, more simply through the blog’s comments section or any other damn way you want to contact us.
So don’t be shy…yeah you, over there in (fill in city or Country of choice) give it a shot. So what if you’re wrong…it’s not like there’s some trash talk blog for art to which we would attempt to humiliate you – right? Ah, you’re probably wrong more than half of the time anyway – so get on with it. Just no cheating.
Were Van Gogh and Gaugin lovers? Did he hang with Toulouse-Latrec at Moulin Rouge?
Johnny Depp, Ronnie Wood, Tony Bennett, Lucy Lui, Joni Mitchell and Jim Carrey are incredibly talented painters who have sold paintings commercially.
Confused yet?
Dr. Seuss, Norman Rockwell, and Maxfield Parrish were famous illustrators who also painted.
(PS – Does The Signature “Vincent” In The Corner Help At All? PPS – Vincent Price Was A Renowned Artist)
Pointillism?
Monet? Manet? Seurat? Van Gogh?
Did you know that Ulysses S. Grant, Dwight Eisenhower, Jimmy Carter, and George W. Bush love(d) to paint?
Did you know Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec earned a living as a poster artist long before his paintings became famous? Robert Crumb is another famous poster artist. He is best known as a graphic cartoonist and musician.
Barbara and Brian
It’s not what you look at that matters, it’s what you see.“ – Henry David Thoreau
Aimless Wanderings 
Van Gogh is one of my all time favorites (as you may well have guessed from our holiday card a few years ago with a Van Gogh quote!). One of Marty’s favorite (and one of my favorites as well because it’s a bit different than what you might expect of him) Van Gogh artworks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skull_of_a_Skeleton_with_Burning_Cigarette#/media/File:Vincent_van_Gogh_-_Head_of_a_skeleton_with_a_burning_cigarette_-_Google_Art_Project.jpg
Pre-pandemic, one of my favorite places to go in the city was the Barnes museum. The collection is enormous and cluttered and overwhelming, and it’s wonderful, especially as an amuse-bouche of sorts, prior to a trip to MOMA. There are a lot of works at the Barnes that give a clear representation of some of the artists’ progression between pieces you can view at Barnes – and pieces featured at MOMA. (I love that nugget of insight when you can see a piece that looks like it was the first draft for another more fully fleshed out piece.) But what I fell for: some wonderful Van Gogh pieces, and I spent the better part of a year learning about Van Gogh as an artist, as a human.
LikeLike
Since no one is playing your guessing game – I’ll participate. Trick question – I believe they are all Van Gogh. I’m familiar with most of these artworks, though I had not always seen the sketches that pre-dated the paintings (but having seen the paintings, I can only imagine that the sketches of those paintings are also his). Some day, I would love to go to the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam. Rik has been to Amsterdam, but I don’t think he went to the Van Gogh museum!
LikeLike
Appreciate your 2 comments….and you’re right in stating that all are Van Gogh. I tried to create red herrings with random comments, but who knew you were so much of a fan and much more of an expert than Barbara or I? Just amazing how prolific he was in the last year or 2 before his death, and how his mania is ever so present in his work during that time period.
LikeLike