AMSTERDAM — While Vincent Van Gogh has become almost as famed for his troubled mind as for his paintings, a new exhibition in the Van Gogh Museum seeks to remind us there was more method than madness to his style.
In honor of the publication of a new compendium of all the artist’s known correspondence, the museum has put more than 100 personal letters in which he discusses his craft on display alongside the actual paintings.
Museum director Axel Ruger said the exhibit, opening today, is arranged to make a visitor feel “as if you are being led through the collection with Van Gogh giving commentary on his own work.” Seeing the letters next to the paintings underlines Van Gogh’s professionalism, which is sometimes overlooked amid spectacular biographical details such as his mental illness, his apparent amputation of part of his own left ear after a quarrel, and his suicide in 1890 at age 37.
The compendium includes all 820 known letters by Van Gogh, tracing his youth and late start as a painter to his spectacular blossoming in the late 1880s.
