Here is another outstanding article featured by ArtNet, written by Sarah Cascone.
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The Van Gogh Museum is celebrating the artist’s favorite color in a show dedicated to his sunflowers, wheat fields, and more.
Vincent van Gogh, Wheatfield with a Reaper, 1889. Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“How beautiful yellow is!” Vincent van Gogh wrote in an 1888 letter to brother Theo van Gogh that began “Sunshine, a light which, for want of a better word I can only call yellow—pale sulfur yellow, pale lemon, gold.”
Now, the artist’s affinity for yellow is the starting point for a unique exhibition at his namesake institution, Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, that presents the bright golden hue as an integral part of his artistic legacy.
Van Gogh’s famed sunflowers series, his sprawling wheat field landscapes, and even the straw hat accessorizing a number of his self-portraits all prominently feature yellow. During his time in Arles, Van Gogh even lived, famously, in what’s simply dubbed the Yellow House, notably painting both the colorful exterior and his sleeping quarters, the composition anchored by his yellow bed frame.
But the show doesn’t just explore Van Gogh’s use of yellow. It delves into the color’s appearance in the work of 19th- and early 20th-century masters such as Marc Chagall, Wassily Kandinsky, Hilma af Klint, Paul Signac, Kazimir Malevich, and J.M.W. Turner, and even features a light installation by contemporary artist Olafur Eliasson, extending the conversation about yellow into the present day.
Cuno Amiet, The Yellow Hill (1903). Collection of the Kunstmuseum Solothurn, Switzerland. Photo by David Aebi.
“Normally you would not put them together because they’re not from the same time or the same art historical movements, and so you have these really interesting combinations,” Ann Blokland, the museum’s curator of education, said in an interview. (It’s also an opportunity to bring other creative voices into a single-artist museum.)
What’s in a Color?
We think about yellow as being cheerful and optimistic, associated with warmth and energy, but it is also associated with cowardice. And it can seem sickly—and even invoke madness, as in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s 1892 short story “The Yellow Wallpaper.” But what did it mean to Van Gogh?
Vincent van Gogh, The Yellow House (The Street), 1888. Collection of the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam.
“For Van Gogh, the sun is life-giving,” Van Gogh Museum chief curator Edwin Becker said.
The yellow glow of the Provençal sunshine animated Van Gogh’s work during the 15 months he lived in Arles in 1888 and ’89, before tragically taking his own life in July 1890.
“It’s crucial, the color yellow,” Blokland said. “A lot of Van Gogh’s iconic paintings that he painted in Arles have a lot of yellow in them.”
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