Van Gogh Up Close has opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and art lovers can get a better sense for the mind behind the artist's great works.
Cornelia Homburg, one of the curators of Van Gogh Up Close, a new show at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, says she finds it "very difficult when an artist’s acts as an artist are exclusively viewed through the fact that he was a disturbed person." So the show ignores that person and instead takes a close look at how van Gogh, the systematic artist, liked to look closely at things, and how that made a crucial contribution to the history of modern art. One wall shows him paring his still lifes down to essentials.
Others have him zooming ever further -- onto a lone moth, a flowering branch -- or trying his hand at the classic undergrowth scenes called sous bois. His innovations are set into the context of the era’s photography and Japanese prints. Revisionist art history has revised the madman from sight. The works of art "are sufficient in themselves," says Joseph Rishel, Homburg’s co-curator.
Original source: The Daily Beast
Read the full story
here.