The sense of passionate engagement with nature, with everyday manifestations of life in all its profuse and glorious variety, is the difference. "Van Gogh Up Close" connects us to the artist's immersion in the natural world, which at times reaches devotional intensity.
We not only see how closely he examined nature, down to the level of butterflies and panicles, we also feel an emotional current that passes from eye to hand to canvas.
"Van Gogh Up Close" reveals the essence of the artist's mystique and of his enduring popularity more effectively than any other exhibition of his art that I can recall, including the last one in Philadelphia, a portrait show in the fall and winter of 2000-01.
To appreciate why this is so, one needs to recall the principal stages of van Gogh's tragic life and career, which I'll get to presently. But first, the particulars.
The exhibition was conceived by Cornelia Homburg, an independent scholar and expert on the artist who serves as guest curator. It's such a fruitful idea, and one that so touches the heart of van Gogh's emotional life, one wonders why it took so long to be developed.
The exhibition was organized by the Art Museum and the National Gallery of Canada in Ottawa, whence it travels after closing here May 6. Joseph J. Rishel and Jennifer A. Thompson are the Art Museum's cocurators.
Although installed in the museum's largest special-exhibition space, "Up Close" is modest in size - 46 paintings and 30 works on paper by other artists and photographers that illuminate van Gogh's possible sources.
These ancillary sections include a stunning display of Japanese woodblock prints, most by the 19th-century master Utagawa Hiroshige.
