Van Gogh National Gallery exhibition receives starry reviews

A new Vincent Van Gogh exhibition at London’s National Gallery has received rave reviews from critics.

The Guardian, The Telegraph, Time Out and The Times all sang the exhibition’s praises – with each critic awarding it five stars.

The show opens on 14 September, and features more than 60 pieces painted by the Dutch artist, who died in 1890 aged 37.

The Times called it a “once-in-a-century” show, while The Guardian said it was a “riveting rollercoaster ride from Arles to the stars”.

The exhibition – named Poets and Lovers – includes a Sunflowers painting which has not travelled outside the United States since it was acquired in 1935.

It his part of a triptych of works being presented together – two Sunflower paintings, with La Berceuse, a painting of a maternal figure, in the middle.

Its presentation is significant as Van Gogh suggested having the paintings shown this way to his brother, Theo, before he died.

Dr Gabriele Finaldi, the director of the National Gallery, said the show is the gallery’s first exhibition entirely dedicated to Van Gogh, and that “museums and collectors had been astoundingly generous in lending great paintings to this show”.

In her review, Laura Freeman of the Times said she was usually “sceptical about ‘once-in-a-century’ exhibitions” but added: “In this case, believe the hype”.

“This is a beautifully put-together exhibition about a blisteringly original vision,” she wrote.

“The paintings don’t invite you to look at them, they ambush you and demand it.”

The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones was similarly complimentary in another five-star review, commenting that the “daring” show “loves him as he deserves”.

“Van Gogh, here, is the first completely rule-breaking modernist and he just gets ever more radical,” he said.

Time Out’s Eddy Frankel said: “How much light can you pack into a painting? How much love, despair, hope, anxiety? In the case of Vincent Van Gogh, the answer is: infinite.

“This mesmerising show of kaleidoscopic, emotional art brings together work from the last two years of his life, years spent in Provence turning painting inside out and mentally falling apart in the process,” he wrote.

He concluded: “This isn’t the painting of light like the impressionists, or of reality, this isn’t literal representation, it’s the painting of emotion, and that’s why it’s good: because it means something.”

The Telegraph’s Alastair Sooke compared the exhibition to music, remarking that the paintings would “be bangers, enticing you onto the dancefloor in a jiffy”.

He continued: “The show also marks 100 years since the gallery’s acquisition of Van Gogh’s resplendent Sunflowers (1888), and, thanks to some brilliant hustling on the part of its curators, Cornelia Homburg and Christopher Riopelle (who’ve assembled a stunning array of 61 works, including a least eight from private collections), it represents a crux in the 19th Century Dutch artist’s career.”

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, at the National Gallery, London, opens 14 September.