VIENNA.- The Albertina’s large autumn exhibition is presenting Vincent van Gogh from an entirely new perspective: the show unites both the painter and draughtsman Van Gogh, and its 150 works illustrate how much the artist’s expressive brush work in the paintings was prepared by his dynamic draughtsmanship.

Although Van Gogh, who described the hardship of peasants and workers out of a feeling of sympathy, had originally wanted to become a draughtsman and illustrator, he finally was to revolutionise the art of his century as an artist obsessed with colour, freeing it from the principle of the imitation of reality, as well as from the academies’ dictates of idealness. After he moved from the Netherlands to Paris in 1886, and even more so during his two last years in southern France, Van Gogh’s palette brightened notably. The brownish hues of Salon painting suddenly gave way to the purity of glistening colours. This new colouristic intensity resulted from the artist’s immediate perception of things – he was now working outdoors, in the scorching sunlight of Provence, where he directly confronted himself with his motifs.

Nevertheless, Van Gogh’s original desire to be a draughtsman had an impact on the way he dealt with colour and applied it to the canvas. By the time of his suicide in Auvers in 1890, a comprehensive and intensive drawn oeuvre had accumulated; the drawings and watercolours influenced Van Gogh’s painting style profoundly, and it became a personal idiosyncrasy of his that he drew with the brush he had previously dipped into the paint, or that he applied the expressive coloured lines and dots to the canvas directly from the tube. The large, highly finished pen srawings and watercolours are equal in artistic accomplishment to Van Gogh’s paintings in all respects. The Albertina’s Van Gogh exhibition does not distinguish between the painter and the draughtsman. In fact, the comprehensive show, assembling 50 paintings and 100 of the most impressive watercolours and drawings from more than 60 lenders around the globe, intends to demonstrate the interdependence between painting and drawing, as well as the correlation between
Van Gogh’s new approach to colour and the expressive linear style he developed, both of which form an irresolvable creative unity.

This exhibition was compiled in collaboration with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and is the largest presentation of the artist’s oeuvre since the jubilee exhibition in Amsterdam in 1990. Moreover, it is the first Van Gogh show in Austria for more than half a century. Lenders such as: Van Gogh Museum (Amsterdam), Kröller-Müller Museum (Otterlo), Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York), Musée d’Orsay (Paris), National Gallery of Art (Washington), Guggenheim Museum (New York), Puschkin Museum (Moskau), Armand Hammer Museum (Los Angeles) and private collections.