Old Vineyard with Peasant Woman, Vincent van Gogh (1890) (EMPIRE LINES x Van Gogh Museum)

Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum, unpacks how the artist encountered Japan in Europe, and how woodblock prints shaped his perspectives in the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise, an ‘artist’s colony’ on the outskirts of Paris.

Unlike other post-Impressionists like Paul Gauguin, Vincent van Gogh never travelled outside of Europe. He didn’t need to; for him, the idea of ‘exotic’ places was often enough to inspire his vivid practice. van Gogh found ‘foreign’ inspirations in cities like Paris and London. His paintings were displayed at the same time as the Paris Universal Exhibition (1889) and as an avid collector of Japanese prints, he also attended the city’s new Asian art exhibitions. Exposure to artists like Katsushika Hokusai shaped his perspectives on his own local environment, his elongated forms, and his surprising use of the colour blue.

But it was in the countryside - and the rural village of Auvers-sur-Oise - where Vincent van Gogh realised these various influences in their most vivid visual forms. Here, he spent just 74 days before his death, but produced a painting per day - and was close to the global recognition he gets today. Following their landmark Van Gogh and Japan (2018), Van Gogh Museum curator Nienke Bakker talks about their new exhibition, the first ‘serious’ study of the end of his life, how Vincent’s landscapes combined both local and global images, plus the often unequal relationship between rural and urban spaces.

Van Gogh in Auvers. His Final Months runs at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until 3 September 2023, and then the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, until 4 February 2024.

For more, read my article in The New European: https://www.theneweuropean.co.uk/the-exhibition-that-re-frames-van-goghs-last-days/

WITH: Nienke Bakker, curator at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. She is a curator of Van Gogh in Auvers.

ART: ‘Old Vineyard with Peasant Woman, Vincent van Gogh (1890)’.

PRODUCER: Jelena Sofronijevic.

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