¡°Van Gogh & Japan¡± concerns a love affair of creative misperceptions between temporally and geographically distant admirers. Van Gogh (1853-1890) never went to Japan, though he idealized it briefly as a utopia in which artists worked communally in converse with nature.
Attempting to establish what became a short-lived artists¡¯ collective in Arles from early 1888, Van Gogh described a town surrounded by fields of spring flowers as a ¡°Japanese dream.¡± He wrote to his sister that he no longer needed Japanese paintings: ¡°Here in Arles, I am in Japan.¡± This fanciful outlook transposed a cheerier disposition upon what were famously troubled times for the artist.
The exhibition¡¯s focus is the bric-a-brac of Van Gogh¡¯s Japan fetishism from around 1886-1890. These include Japan references culled from his letters; Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints; illustrations he copied, such as the cover of the May 1886 Paris Illustre Le Japon; and Japanese imagery adapted to oil paintings, like the gaudy and incongruous collage of ¡°Courtesan (after Eisen)¡± (1887). Further mention must be made of the ukiyo-e exhibition Van Gogh arranged in a favored cafe in 1887, and the inspiration he received from Pierre Loti¡¯s novel, ¡°Madame Chrysanthemum,¡± in 1888.
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