Word: exhibition
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Everything brightens as the exhibit moves to the Paris and Arles years of the late 1880s. Even the walls of the museum change from somber blue to yellow, van Gogh's favorite color. In Paris, van Gogh was busy but poor, so he often used himself as a model. Seven of his self-portraits appear in the exhibit, more than have ever been seen together before...
...Roulin family - Joseph Roulin, postal worker, his wife Augustine, and their three children, all friends of van Gogh - becomes his primary subject. This is the largest collection of the Roulin family portraits ever seen together - 17 in total, including seven different versions of 'The Postman Joseph Roulin.' Granted, the exhibit was conceived in part because the Detroit Institute of Arts wanted to show off one newly acquired version, but the museum-goer gets a little lost in the mass of paintings of this family...
Easy to overlook in this section of the exhibit, due to the focus on the Roulin family, are two subjects unusual for van Gogh, 'Italian Woman' (1888?) and 'The Zouave' (1888), which offer a different side of the artist from his portraits of weavers and peasants...
...Arles section, van Gogh's tragic life at last truly emerges in full force. Fascinated by the idea of an artist colony, van Gogh begged Gauguin and Bernard to join him in Arles. The three exchanged portraits. Yet the MFA exhibit only shows the self-portrait van Gogh sent to Gauguin, which portrays him as a thinking man, deeply committed to art, in vibrant, unrealistic colors suggesting a remove from reality. If the curators had borrowed van Gogh's portraits of Gauguin and Bernard from Amsterdam, a much clearer reflection of van Gogh's insecurities and hopes might have emerged...
Nonetheless, the exhibit offers an explanation of van Gogh's breakdown after working with Gauguin in Arles for two months. Van Gogh, after a heated argument, mutilated his ear. Yet only one image of the artist without his ear appears in the exhibit - an important curatorial decision. Instead of focusing on van Gogh as 'the crazy artist who cut his ear off,' the exhibit moves on to the tragedy of what this fit implied for van Gogh - as the exhibit undersores, van Gogh is more than a mad genius...