Van Gogh in Vicenza, Marco Goldin's latest panettone exhibition.

Review of the exhibition “Van Gogh between the Grain and the Sky,” curated by Marco Goldin, currently underway in Vicenza at the Basilica Palladiana (by Federico D. Giannini).

"Before beginning to talk about the van Gogh exhibition in Vicenza, the new exhibition-entrepreneurial project of Marco Goldin and his Linea d’Ombra, a brief premise needs to be advanced: this time the starting point would not be, as with some of his other exhibitions, atrocious jumbles along the lines of the dreadful “Tutankhamun, Caravaggio, van Gogh,” nor would it be trumped-up thematic jumbles in the style of "the Impressionists and snow,“ nor would it be improbable and risky overviews of portraiture ”from Raphael to Picasso." None of this: for the autumn exhibition at the Basilica Palladiana, Goldin was able to count on a decidedly substantial nucleus of drawings and paintings by Vincent van Gogh (Zundert, 1853 - Auvers-sur-Oise, 1890), most of which came from the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, Holland.

Of course, this is nothing particularly original or innovative, given the Kröller-Müller’s well-established and traditional habit of lending large portions of its van Gogh collection en bloc, and the situation in Vicenza is anything but unprecedented, since the first major exhibition on van Gogh held in Italy, the 1952 exhibition at the Palazzo Reale in Milan, also made extensive use of loans from the Dutch institution: However, it must be emphasized that the attribute “great,” on which much of the adjective that accompanies the exhibition in Vicenza seems to be based, means everything and nothing, and establishing who holds the record in “greatness,” whether the 1952 exhibition or the 2017 one, is a matter for futile combat de coqs, to be left willingly to those who love this kind of sterile dispute.

In any case, re-proposing in 2017 an exhibition from sixty years ago (albeit with the ratio of paintings to drawings reversed: then there were more paintings than drawings; in Vicenza, on the other hand, the opposite happens), with all the necessary updates, would not be a deplorable operation in itself: only a couple of years back, the re-edition of Arte lombarda dai Visconti agli Sforza, curated by Mauro Natale and Serena Romano (who programmatically wanted to draw inspiration from the 1958 review of the same name by Roberto Longhi and Gian Alberto Dell’Acqua), was a meritorious operation, at least in our opinion. Therefore, this is not the issue. Continue reading the review by clicking here

Van Gogh in Vicenza, Marco Goldin's latest panettone exhibition.

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