Gogh Crazy

For the last few months, the Denver Art Museum has had a special exhibition on display entitled Becoming Van Gogh. It assembles works on loan from collections all over the world, and is said to be a one-time only event that won't be touring to other locations. My boyfriend and I had been wanting to see it, and just got in at the wire, the day the exhibit is scheduled to close.

Well, specifically, the morning the exhibit is scheduled to close. Early morning. Unable to expand the special presentation in days, the Denver Art Museum decided to accommodate more people by expanding their hours. The choice times had long ago been snatched up, which is how I found myself up before dawn this Sunday morning, to get to the museum by 5:30 am.

The emphasis of Becoming Van Gogh was on the evolution of his style in the relatively short 10-year period in which he was an active artist. The exhibit was divided up in a mostly chronological way, with early examples of pencil sketches, through his introduction of color, an early rejection of Impressionism (and later embrace of Neo-Impressionism), before finally arriving the vivid and contrasting colors for which he was ultimately known.

The exhibit included several paintings from other artists, hung side by side with van Gogh, to highlight moments where a new influence came in to affect his style. His earliest pencil sketches were interesting to see, his own efforts to self-train, as he labored through every page of an art book of sample sketches -- the 1880s version of "draw this bunny and we'll tell you if you're an artist." Moving through the gallery, you can see the clear influence on him by Japanese woodblock prints, pointillists like Georges Seurat, and more. There were also works by contemporaries he counted as friends, including Toulouse-Lautrec.

A particular advantage of seeing van Gogh's work in person is that you can perceive the way he layered paint -- a technique he truly found only halfway through his short career. Thick globs of paint are piled in some areas of his images and smoothed flat in others, and are a significant part of the overall effect that could never be noticed looking at a photo of the painting.

I'm honestly not sure I was in full "art appreciation" mode at 5:30 in the morning, but I'm still glad that I was able to see the exhibit while it was here in Denver.