No matter how many van Gogh exhibitions there are - and they average at least one major show a year; no matter how many books are written (Amazon pulls up more than 7,000 titles in a simple search); no matter how much is known about the 37-year life of this painter (and a lot is known), there always seems to be more to find out, more to see, more to understand, more to absorb and feel and question.
"I think these big guys just have the ability to reengage you," said Joseph J. Rishel, the Philadelphia Museum of Art's senior curator of European art before 1900. Rishel cocurated "Van Gogh Up Close" with Jennifer A. Thompson, associate curator of pre-1900 European art; independent curator Cornelia Homburg; and Anabelle Kienle, assistant curator of European and American art at the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa. The show, consisting of 46 paintings from various sources and about 30 prints and photographs, travels to Ottawa after it closes here May 6.
"How many times have you seen Hamlet? How many times have you seen Cosi fan tutte? They still engage," Rishel continued. "These things can be reinvented and reinvented and reinvented. There are always new ports of entry."
This seems particularly true with van Gogh, whose celebrity is of a magnitude that far outstrips virtually every other cultural figure outside of an elite group of dead pop stars.
What is the allure?
Some of it may be found in the Myth of the Tortured Artist, which now shrouds van Gogh almost to the point of mummification. Some may lie in the visceral recognizability of his imagery.
For curators such as Rishel and Thompson, it is the artistry and intellect of the paintings. Their work on this exhibition has focused on the extraordinary burst of creativity and experimentation during the last four years of van Gogh's life. He died in 1890 from a gunshot wound.
