RA Magazine Winter 2009

Issue Number: 105

Behind the scenes

Vincent van Gogh, 'Self Portrait as an Artist', January 1888. Oil on Canvas, 65.5 x 50.5 cm. Signed and dated on the stretcher lower right: Vincent / 88. Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation). This exhibition is organised by the Royal Academy of Arts in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam Few visitors to ‘The Real Van Gogh’ will be aware of the enormous effort and expertise needed to put together such a complex show. Martin Gayford talks to the RA’s new Director of Exhibitions Kathleen Soriano and Curator Ann Dumas about the art and craft required to present the artist’s creative mind at work

An exhibition, like a film or a play, is a feat of organisation and teamwork. It starts with a core idea – in the case of ‘The Real Van Gogh’, it was to combine the artist’s paintings with related letters and sketches to mark the publication of a new edition of his famous letters.

At the Royal Academy around 65 canvases, 30 drawings and 40 original letters by Van Gogh have been assembled to reveal how each image developed in the artist’s mind. ‘We’ve worked hard for three years to bring together such a significant range of loans at the Royal Academy,’ says Kathleen Soriano, the RA’s new Director of Exhibitions. ‘This is a serious exhibition that looks at Van Gogh in a way that he has not been seen before.’

Some of the works in ‘The Real Van Gogh’ have not been shown together for many years. The exhibition’s curator, Ann Dumas, is particularly proud of cases where she has brought together a painting with a letter in which Van Gogh sketches and describes the same subject, along with a related drawing. In a sequence such as this, viewers can virtually see Van Gogh’s creative processes in action: ‘I’m thrilled we could borrow Cypresses, of 1889, with its related letter-sketch and drawing,’ she says. ‘The letters have made me look at his art differently. Now I see that both his words and his painting have the same immediacy of expression. What comes across is his incredibly intense response to nature – a kind of epiphany – an exaltation of nature that never gets tarnished. When he was young, he wanted to be a preacher. Then he channels his religiosity into his art. In the swirling forms and the sky of a painting like Cypresses, we can see the way the brush work illuminates the whole composition and is an extremely direct response to what he sees and feels.’

The two drawings and the oil painting were all made around 20 to 25 June, 1889, and depict an almost identical clump of swirling conifers, with a crescent moon above and the Alpilles mountains in the background – but each has small differences. The position and size of the moon, for example, shifts in each image. ‘I’m very happy with cases like this where we got all three: painting, drawing and letter-sketch,’ says Dumas. ‘Technical analysis suggests that, in this case, he didn't necessarily do the letter and drawing after the painting: it was more dynamic, he might have worked on them all together.’

Part of a curator’s skill lies in persuading the owners of wonderful – and valuable – images to lend them for months at a time. Exhibitions, like inter-governmental relations, are often a matter of reciprocal favours and goodwill. If a great museum, such as our National Gallery or the Metropolitan in New York, lends works to another institution, it can expect a positive response when it asks for something in return. Lenders can also be persuaded by a strong intellectual argument around the need for a precise work for a specific exhibition, which is why the curatorial rationale behind a show is so crucial.

The Van Gogh Museum, for example, is flooded with loan requests every day. As Ann Dumas points out, ‘The RA is a wonderful venue, with beautiful galleries right in the heart of London. It also has a very good reputation and has done many outstanding exhibitions over the past 30 years, and people respect that.’

From the beginning, the exhibition had generous support from the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, which is staging a related show this autumn (until 3 January 2010). This was crucial since it has the largest collection of Van Goghs in the world and an overwhelming majority of his letters.

‘Early on, they said they would lend twelve paintings and about 35 to 40 letters. So we had a foundation on which to build the show,’ said Dumas. For example, the exhibition will show the painting The Sower, of 1888, one of Van Gogh’s most famous works, alongside a letter (above) which has a sketch made after the painting to give his brother Theo an idea of how it looked. Both were lent by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. The sketch stresses the bold simplification of the painting’s composition and Vincent adds a description of the colours: ‘Here’s a croquis [sketch] of the latest canvas I’m working on, another sower. Immense lemon yellow disc for the sun. Green-yellow sky with pink clouds. The field is violet, the sower and the tree Prussian Blue.’

Such substantial loans from the Van Gogh Museum made it easier to coax other owners to lend their Van Goghs to the RA. Yet there are many reasons why they might not wish to part with a Van Gogh, even for a few months. In the case of smaller public galleries, Dumas says, ‘Often I was asking for their only Van Gogh, and it was therefore difficult for them to lend.’

In addition, Van Gogh is an extremely well-loved artist, which means that at any time there will be a number of exhibitions being held or planned throughout the world, and consequently owners are frequently asked to lend. How did the RA overcome that problem?

‘The arguments that we have made for the inclusion of particular works have been incredibly strong,’ says Kathleen Soriano. Dumas’ long track record as a curator includes a number of high-profile exhibitions – ‘The Private Collection of Edgar Degas’ at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1997 and, at the RA, ‘1900: Art at the Crossroads’ and ‘From Russia’. For the Van Gogh show, she put a huge amount of effort into persuading owners to lend.

‘Naturally, people can be suspicious that you are just trying to make a popular exhibition that is going to bring a lot of people through the door but does not have any real intellectual or scholarly content. That’s absolutely not the case with this exhibition. I really tried to put that across,’ says Dumas. First, she made personal visits. ‘I think in a case like this, where the loans are difficult, it is very important to visit the museums and collectors from whom you are trying to borrow.’ In the event the show is displaying work from almost 80 museums from around the world.

The visits were followed up with formal requests. Dumas wrote unusually detailed letters that amounted to mini-scholarly essays, explaining the importance of each work when she was requesting a loan. ‘I put a lot of thought into each, writing long justification paragraphs, quoting from Van Gogh’s letters.’

Her efforts slowly paid off. ‘One of the very best letter-sketches is an early one from 1882. The letter contains a watercolour of a road receding into the distance, with a pollarded tree. There’s also an independent watercolour directly related to it, Pollard Willow (1882) and it came on the market a couple of years ago and was bought by a private collector. It was an extremely difficult loan to secure. I had to go back many times, and it has finally come through. I think that is a great juxtaposition – they have never been seen together before.’

Selecting the works and negotiating the loans, however, are only a part of the process.
An exhibition such as this involves, as Soriano puts it, ‘many layers of complexity’. It requires not just art historical scholarship and visual flair, but also the negotiating skills of a diplomat and the logistical planning of a factory manager or military quartermaster. In addition, specialist expertise is required in such subjects as lighting, transportation and design.

The provenance of each work has to be checked to ensure that the owner has a valid legal title – to show that it was not looted by the Nazis, for example. Major art institutions around the world now have an obligation to do this.

‘The RA has set up its own provenance panel of internal staff, which has approved status from the Department of Culture Media and Sport, and which is required to research each loan and agree that it is ethical to include,’ says Soriano.

The considerable costs of mounting such an exhibition come partly from moving so many fragile objects around the world. Many of the works must be accompanied by couriers and conservators. For insurance reasons, only a small number of works can travel together, so instead of being accommodated on one or two flights from, say, the US, the loans may have to be spread across twenty such journeys.

The works of art have their condition assessed by conservators at regular points throughout their transportation and exhibition. Since Van Gogh used heavy layers of impasto and often cheap materials, the paint – a living, organic material – is given particular attention. Then the works must be installed quickly – often in the presence of the lender’s courier.

The installation of an exhibition of this scale and importance can take weeks and involves many individuals. The curators are responsible for the actual placement of the works in the gallery – which might change more or less radically from the initial plan, depending on how the works look in situ. The movement, holding in place, final hanging and installation of the exhibits is done by specialist art handlers.

All of the works of art must be arranged so that they can both tell the story of the exhibition and be experienced simultaneously by hundreds of people. ‘We are aware that, because of the detail in these fascinating letters, visitors are going to spend a fair bit of time in the exhibition. So we are considering creative approaches to visitor flow, particularly in the first few rooms, where people will be orientating themselves, reading the letters and clustering around the drawings,’ says Kathleen Soriano. Further on, there will be a reading room, which will provide a pause, where viewers can read Van Gogh’s letters both online and in the new edition.

The works on paper – requiring low light – will be shown alongside oil paintings that will need to be more strongly illuminated. ‘You are asking people to pay attention to something quite small, while at the same time being able to see something that’s much larger, in close proximity,’ says Soriano.

The designer, Ivor Heal, will have to find solutions to these challenges – placing large-print titles above the paintings, and building special cases for works on paper – to avoid creating bottlenecks, while making the show look good.

In the end, these efforts should be seamless. The visitor should only be aware of the masterpieces that are being brought together for this once-in-a-lifetime show, and what they reveal about the mind and eye of Vincent van Gogh.

• Visit the exhibition microsite for The Real Van Gogh: The Artist and His Letters

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