USA: ART - Vincent van Gogh's drawings and their influence on his paintings are the focus of an upcoming exhibition in New York City

An upcoming exhibition at The Metropolitan Museum of Art in the Big Apple seeks to depict the immense value that Dutch artist Vincent van Gogh placed on the craft of drawing. Titled "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings", the exhibition comprises 113 works by the artist, selected from public and number of loans from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. This is the first major exhibition in the United States ever to focus on van Gogh's drawings. Retrospective in scope, the exhibition traces the evolution of van Gogh's draftsmanship over the course of his decade-long career and how it impacted and influenced his paintings. He created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything, from wheat fields and boats to nudes and corridors'. The curators of the exhibition are Colta Ives and Susan Alyson Stein. "This exhibition is a rare, in America, unique opportunity to appreciate Vincent van Gogh's works as a draftsman. Curiously, he's not known for his original and innovative drawings although they occupy the pivotal part in his artistic process," Stein said. Highlights of the exhibition include a rare self-portrait, titled, "Self-Portraits", which is supposed to be one of only two such drawings known, and a brush and oils, black chalk on pink laid paper titled "Corridor in the Asylum". The latter painting is one of the three interior views van Gogh executed in September 1889, during his recovery from his mid-July attack, the only works done in Saint-Remy in which the asylum itself is the subject of the composition. Largely self-taught, van Gogh believed that drawing was "the root of everything." At the outset of his career, he felt it was necessary to master black and white before attempting to work in color. "During these early years he commented that drawing is the root of everything. He also said drawing is the backbone of the painting, the skeleton that supports the rest, and throughout his career, he continued to rely on his draftsman's fist to meet the demands of particular subjects, and for practical, economic, and artistic reasons would freely alternate between the brush and the pen to create works of art that indeed lose very little of their power in translation from one form of expression to another," Stein said about the early part of the artist's career. Van colour used drawing to practice interesting subjects or to capture an on-the-spot impression, to tackle a motif before venturing it on canvas, and to prepare a composition. Yet, very often, he reversed the process by making drawings after his paintings to give his brother and his friends an idea of his latest work. Over a three-week period, between mid-July and early August in 1888, he reproduced some 30 of his paintings in pen-and-ink drawings, which he sent to two artist friends and to his brother Theo. A number of the highly stylized presentation drawings are on view as par of the exhibition. They include multiple renditions of key motifs like "Boats at Sea" and "Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer". The exhibition will open on October 18 and will remain on view through December 31.

ITN Source | October 15, 2005

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