AMSTERDAM — At the end of Vincente Minnelli’s 1956 film, “Lust for Life,” Vincent van Gogh, portrayed by Kirk Douglas, stands in a wheat field in France and slashes his paintbrush across a canvas. With crows flying wildly around him, he shouts, “It’s impossible!” before shooting himself.
This enduring image of van Gogh — as an isolated genius who expressed his emotions directly through paint and paid the ultimate price for his passion — has helped make him one of the world’s most popular artists.
But curators at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam think that it is time for this artist’s profile to get an update: to focus more on van Gogh the serious artist, not van Gogh the myth. To that end, they have redesigned and rehung the museum’s permanent collection to present a more nuanced view.
It won’t be easy to change perceptions: Many people can’t divorce the dramatic facts of van Gogh’s personal life (the severed ear, the suicide) from his artworks. That scene in “Lust for Life,” which shows van Gogh’s emotional breakdown during his creation of the 1890 “Wheatfield With Crows,” was “so powerful that a lot of people still expect the museum to have that painting exhibited as his last painting,” said Leo Jansen, a curator of paintings at the museum from 2005 until this year. (Most scholars agree that the artist’s last canvas was actually “Tree Roots,” also from 1890.)
The Van Gogh, which owns more of the artist’s work than any other museum — including 200 paintings, 500 drawings and 900 letters — has spent about 10 years planning the reorganization of its collection, which had remained largely static for 25 years. After being closed for seven months for a building renovation, it reopened in May 2013 with a temporary exhibition. In recent months, curators have gradually put in place a permanent display that mingles in works by other artists to create a new context. The configuration, designed to last at least 10 years, was completed late last month.
“It’s more a total picture now,” said Maite van Dijk, a curator of paintings at the museum. The permanent installation previously grouped its van Gogh paintings on a single floor and arranged them in order of creation.
While there are about the same number of his canvases on display (about 100), including masterpieces like “The Bedroom” (1888) and “Sunflowers” (1889), the collection now spans four floors of the main wing and is interspersed with works by artists who influenced van Gogh’s aesthetics, as well as with his own drawings and letters.
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