AMSTERDAM.- From 26 October to 27 January 2008 the presentation Van Gogh and Bernard: An artist’s friendship is being held in the Van Gogh Museum. Paintings, drawings and letters shed light on the intensive exchange of ideas and art works between the two artists. This began during Van Gogh’s stay in Paris (1886-1888), and was later continued in a lively correspondence. The presentation takes its cue from the recent publication of Vincent Van Gogh’s letters to Emile Bernard: Vincent van Gogh: Painted with words. The letters to Emile Bernard.

In Paris Van Gogh became friends with the fifteen-year younger Emile Bernard. They painted together, helped each other to make contacts and exhibited jointly. Both were seeking artistic renewal and incorporated influences from Japanese graphic art and neo-impressionism into their work. Several paintings in the exhibition offer examples of how they used techniques characteristic of Japanese graphic art, such as bright colours, a simple division of the picture plane and unexpected cropping. When Van Gogh departed for the south of France in 1888, the two kept each other up to date on one another’s progress and artistic musings. Their work reveals how different they were as artists, but they admired one another’s talent and frequently exchanged paintings. On show is the self-portrait Bernard dedicated to his ‘friend Vincent’ and several paintings after sketches that Van Gogh had sent him. Also featured in this presentation are brothel scenes that Bernard drew specially for Van Gogh, collecting them in an album and sending them to him. Modern writers and artists such as Emile Zola and Edgar Degas had elevated brothels and prostitutes to the level of legitimate artistic subject. Bernard and Van Gogh - both regular visitors to brothels themselves - had a shared interest in this theme.

The correspondence between the two petered out in late 1889 following an artistic difference of opinion, but they remained friends. After Van Gogh’s death in July 1890 Bernard became an enthusiastic champion of his friend’s work, writing articles about him, organizing Van Gogh’s first solo exhibition in Paris and publishing the first collection of Van Gogh’s letters in book form. In doing so he paved the way for Van Gogh’s later fame all over the world. The exhibition also sheds light on the far from insignificant role Bernard played in this regard. In a letter to the art critic Albert Aurier just four days after Van Gogh’s death, Bernard gives a moving account of Van Gogh’s funeral and urges Aurier to write about him, ‘so that everyone knows that his funeral was an apotheosis, certainly worthy of his great spirit and great talent.’

The highpoint of the exhibition is Van Gogh’s painting Strolling couple executed in 1888. In his first letter to Bernard from Arles Van Gogh wrote of a ‘a study I really want to do something with: sailors with their sweethearts coming back to town, outlined against an enormous yellow sun with the strange silhouette of its drawbridge. To show what he meant, Van Gogh included a detailed sketch in his letter, complete with notes giving Bernard an idea of the colours to be used. But Van Gogh was not satisfied with the painting when it was completed. He cut the canvas into pieces, saving just a single fragment depicting a sailor with his arm around his sweetheart. This wonderful work, held in a private collection, will be on show to the public for the first time during this exhibition. By displaying this canvas in combination with a depiction of the sketch in the letter - in the same format as the original - and a landscape with drawbridge painted by Van Gogh shortly afterwards in the same place, visitors to the exhibition are given a unique opportunity to see Van Gogh’s way of working close at hand.

The original letters are owned by The Morgan Library & Museum in New York. They are on public view there through January 6, 2008 in the exhibition Painted with words.

Publication - Vincent van Gogh: Painted with words. The letters to Emile Bernard by Leo Jansen, Hans Luijten and Nienke Bakker. The Morgan Library & Museum/Van Gogh Museum/Rizzoli, 384 pages, 200 illustrations, bound. Price: € 40.