Chronological hooking is clear and aerated

The multiplication of reproductions of paintings by Vincent Van Gogh, these images everywhere, on major advertising placards to the lids of boxes of chocolates would tend to make us forget a crucial virtue of painting: the feeling to see it in true. At Basel, Kunstmuseum is a master-stroke by bringing together 70 tables if popular Dutch painter. And there, not only it sees his painting, its thickness, its density but still includes it, a little - be modest - what is happened in the brain tormented artist for a certain absolute. It is not always "icons", the most famous paintings that we will be rightly seen in reproduction in the past, but this has an advantage: our gaze opens on Van Gogh with perhaps fewer preconceptions. Chronological hooking is clear and aerated. Normal: the Museum has emptied a majority of its permanent collections, which are also exposed in voluntarily dense style and disorganized, but few succeeded, the Schaulager Foundation, on the outskirts of the city (1).

The demonstration of the Kunstmuseum focuses on the landscape. The most important part of his work is devoted to this type. It covers a broad period life of Van Gogh, from 1883 to 1890, the year of his twenty years of his death. Curiously, as noticed by the curators of the exhibition, the painter blames himself to have a natural tendency to landscapes. At Arles, in 1888, he wrote to his brother Theo: "I'm the reproaches to did not end for not yet having figures here."For him, painting of figures would be more prestigious. Its beginnings are still classic dark Dutch landscape tradition. Hues are in the Maroons, but are already cleaned. Vincent arrives in February 1886 in Paris, world art centre. He lives in Montmartre. It includes the mills of his native country and develops a taste for a certain "atmospheric infinite." The sky is the largest part of the composition. His palette is free. Colors start to explode. In the spring of 1887, "alley along the River near Asnières" or, in the summer of the same year, "Sunny day" in a swatch of green and yellow is clearly an expression of a Post-Impressionist influence. Is Van Gogh as a lone marginal but, at this time, he came into contact with a number of artists: Gauguin, of course but also Seurat and Signac, Pissarro. He has assimilated all the influences of the new paint and they find themselves, reconstructed on his canvas. Colour keys are short and distinct, oriented on the basis of a common management.

"Fou roux".

In February 1888, however, he believes that the city and its excesses are harmful. He travelled in the South and first to Arles. He started collecting Japanese prints, which fascinate phenomenally, and his early paintings of the provençal spring are based on the genus. He began work on the sense of a special, almost magical light in his "flowers garden with trees. Van Gogh dare. In October 1888 he painted "fields of vines. Close-up, three quarters of the canvas are occupied by a vine ceps which appear to be embossed. The dough is thick and black, twisted shrubs. The remaining quarter is devoted to a sky blue gradient marked by thick brush keys. At Arles, the artist is nicknamed "the mad red". He is interned in the hospital local, excluded and solitary. Voluntarily, he went to Saint-Rémy in a nursing home. There, when his mental health permits, he painted olive trees and cypress because, he entrusted to his brother, it is more "vendor" to English customers. "I know what they seek."It is in place in its representations system whirlpools and eddies, little faithful to nature. It justifies "the seeks style, drawing more male and more voluntary.1890: ultimate step in Auvers-sur-Oise to Dr. Gauchet.". He painted 60 tables in seventy days. At the height of the evil being, on 27 July, he turns a gun against himself.

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