by Jon Lackman | 26 April 2009 | Modern, Museums
Seventy of van Gogh’s landscapes from the late 1880s are on view through September in Basel’s Kunstmuseum, in an exhibition billing itself as “the most important European art event in 2009″ and expecting a half-million visitors…
The landscapes’ palettes track the artist’s progress over a course of seven years through the Netherlands (“earthy hues”), Paris (“lighter and color-flushed”), and the south of France (“intensely luminous”), inspiring largely praise from appreciative reviewers.
In the NZZ, Samuel Herzog discusses the show by means of an extended metaphor of Heideggerian apple-eating (“When one eats an apple, it sometimes happens that one’s teeth bite into the core of the fruit”), while Gerhard Mack sees “A serenity and freedom not associated with self-destruction or despair…Van Gogh’s landscapes went through the painter’s body before alighting on the canvas.”
See also Patricia Gnasso (Le Matin), Natividad Pulido (ABC.es), Judith von Sternburg (FR), DPA, France 2, a slide show at Le Monde and another at Le Temps, and Antoine Duplan (L’Hebdo).
Catalog contributors include Carel Blotkamp and Gottfried Boehm (“the brushstroke is the expression of an inner dynamic that corresponds to a sensation”), among others.
