Prospero | Modern art

Munch and van Gogh finally meet in Amsterdam

By K.S.C. | AMSTERDAM

AXEL RÜGER, the russet-haired director of the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, is a confident man. And this ambitious new show feels very much a product of that confidence. It is, after all, the first time Edvard Munch and Vincent van Gogh, near-contemporaries and equally iconoclastic painters, have met.

A few months ago this tête-à-tête would have seemed inauspicious if not wildly unlikely. What is now the entrance to the exhibition space was thick with builders’ dust and rubble; the new glass atrium, which also contains the cloakrooms and gift shop, only opened to the public on September 5th. The sheer value of the works by the two painters proved a challenge too. One of the four versions of Munch’s “The Scream” was sold for $120m in 2012 to Leon Black, an American financier. It was recently announced that “Landscape Under a Stormy Sky”, painted by van Gogh in 1889, a year before his death, is expected by Sotheby’s to reach between $50m-$70m at an auction in New York in November. The cost of the insuring the 130-odd works on view—around 60 by each artist plus some by contemporaries—threatened to derail the project until the Dutch government agreed to help foot the bill. The combination of the two projects, says Mr Rüger cheerfully, “nearly pushed everyone involved to the brink of insanity.”

Edvard Munch. Self-Portrait with Palette, 1926. Private collection.
But the show, a collaboration between the Van Gogh museum and the Munch museum in Oslo, where it was on view last year, has a swagger that belies such teething problems. The walls of the space, echoing both artists’ bold use of colour, are decked out in crimson, regal purple and a pale minty turquoise. The hang is well-paced and uncluttered, allowing the works breathing pace and a bit more room for the many visitors expected to descend on the exhibition for a chance to see masterpieces including “The Scream”, “Madonna”—by Munch— “Patience Escalier” and “Self Portrait with a Grey Felt Hat”—van Gogh—side by side. To allow for the inevitable crush, the works’ titles are printed in larger font above, rather than beside, the paintings, so they are legible from further away.

The show does much to tease out the similarities between the artists. Born a decade apart—van Gogh in 1853 near the Belgian border and Munch in a small Norwegian village in 1863—both came from artistic backwaters. Munch had more training, but it wasn’t until both artists travelled to Paris (missing each other only narrowly on two occasions, like a plot line from an absurd rom-com), and spent time among the Impressionist and Neo-Impressionist artists that they began developing their respective styles. Their traditional, naturalistic early work quickly began to show the influence of artists like Gaugin, Manet and Signac. Bold use of complementary colours and looser, almost abstract brushwork crept into their repertoires.

The struggles of both artists with bouts of anxiety and depression are betrayed by morbid themes, claustrophobic proportions and fevered palettes. Van Gogh once wrote that “colour expresses something in itself”. In his “The Bridge at Trinquetaille” (1888) and Munch’s “Self-Portrait with a Bottle of Wine” (1906) the nauseous combinations of greens, oranges and yellows are almost overpowering.

But both artists were too talented and individualistic to let other influences overwhelm them. Where van Gogh’s used impasto brushstrokes so thick the paint was almost moulded onto his canvases—particularly evident, for example in the lush green shades of “Undergrowth with ivy” (1889) [detail pictured, above]—Munch preferred a thinner, runnier medium. Even where the museum has placed paintings with obvious parallels side-by-side, as in the case of the two self-portraits that open the show (“Self-Portrait as a Painter”, by van Gogh,1887-88 [detail pictured, top]; “Self-Portrait with Palette”, by Munch, 1926 [pictured, top right]), or the two “Starry Nights” (1888 and 1922-24, respectively), their distinctions shine as brightly as their similarities. If the show has a fault it is that their desire to draw parallels between the two are occasionally so bald it almost makes you wince. These two starry-night-crossed lovers were destined to meet, the introduction doesn’t need to be forced.

“Munch: Van Gogh” is at the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam from September 25th until January 2016

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