Van Gogh as a pop star: he leaves on a world tour of shopping malls

In 2017, the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam had brought some works of the Dutch seventeenth century to Schiphol Airport. This year, the Van Gogh Museum did not want to be outdone and also wanted to look for an unusual place to bring Vincent van Gogh’s genius, which will soon be leaving for a tour of the... shopping malls. With a difference: real works ended up there in the airport, while high-fidelity reproductions will go in the malls. This is the Van Gogh Museum Editions Pop-up Tour initiative, which has the stated goal of “exploring new ways to share Vincent’s masterpieces with a global audience.”

The question the Van Gogh Museum has been asking is: how to make sure that the museum’s collections can be available everywhere, but without jeopardizing the collection, since several masterpieces are so delicate that moving them would be a very dangerous gamble, but still taking into account that not everyone can travel to Amsterdam? The answer is, indeed, Pop-up tours, which will show visitors very high quality, three-dimensional reproductions(van Gogh’s painting is indeed dense and textural and cannot be flattened to two dimensions), life-size: “an exclusive tribute to van Gogh’s genius and his original, unique approach to art,” they explain at the museum.

So, like a true pop star, van Gogh’s genius has set off on a world tour that had its first stop in Philadelphia (it will end on October 14) and will then touch Short Hills, Houston, Boston, Hartford, Denver, and Los Angeles. Entirely new initiative? Not really: in Italy, where we never miss such operations, van Gogh’s paintings have already entered a shopping mall: it happened this summer in La Spezia, at “Le Terrazze” shopping center, where the Van Gogh Shadow exhibition was held, an exhibition of animated reproductions of paintings by the great Dutch artist. Ways to introduce art to everyone, or yet another commercial gimmick that trivializes art history? To readers the answers...

Pictured: Willem van Gogh, great-grandson of Theo van Gogh (Vincent’s brother), illustrates one of the reproductions of his famous relative’s paintings on the Philadelphia leg of the tour.

Van Gogh as a pop star: he leaves on a world tour of shopping malls

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