Städel Museum, Schaumainkai 63, 60596 Frankfurt am Main (Germany)
The Städel Museum sits on the south bank of the Main, a short walk from the old town. On a grey December afternoon, the building was crowded — the kind of crowd that gathers around a name everyone already knows, or thinks they do.
Making Van Gogh: Geschichte einer deutschen Liebe was not a retrospective. It was a historical argument. Van Gogh died in 1890 having sold almost nothing. Within a decade, German gallery owners, collectors, critics and museum directors had turned him into the defining figure of modern art. The show traced how that happened.
The answer, more than most accounts acknowledge, was a woman. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger — Jo — was the widow of Van Gogh’s brother Theo, who died just six months after Vincent. She inherited everything: hundreds of paintings, thousands of letters. She catalogued them, edited them, had them published, and spent decades placing Van Gogh’s work in the hands of the collectors and institutions that would make him famous. Without Jo, the myth does not get built. It was the most important thing the exhibition said.
The Van Goghs themselves carried the rooms. The early Nuenen portraits — peasant faces from 1885, dark backgrounds, strong features, a face that gives nothing away. These were paintings made before Paris, before the colour broke open, before anyone was paying attention. They are not easy works. They do not ask to be liked.
Then the self-portrait from 1887. This was the work on every poster, every catalogue cover, the face the exhibition chose to put into the world. In the room it held that position without difficulty. The palette had changed — Van Gogh was in Paris by then, absorbing Impressionism, the short divided brushstrokes visible in the jacket, the background. But the gaze refuses all of that. Whatever was happening technically, the eyes are somewhere else entirely — looking at you, or through you, or at something you cannot see. The face is so present it is difficult to remember you are looking at paint.
Field with Poppies (1889) — the Städel has owned it since 1908. That fact sits alongside the painting quietly. Van Gogh painted it during his stay at the Saint-Rémy asylum, from the window or just outside. One of the most distressing periods of his life. The canvas does not show that. Red poppies, green fields, a view that keeps going.
Alongside the Van Goghs, some seventy works by German artists — Kirchner, Beckmann, Jawlensky, Modersohn-Becker, Münter, August Macke — were placed as evidence. These were the artists who looked at Van Gogh and understood something the French had not yet fully processed. Macke’s Zwei Mädchen showed it directly — the colour, the directness, the refusal of academic finish. The debt is there in every brushstroke.
And then, set apart: Tischbein’s Goethe in the Roman Campagna (1787). The great German portrait of the great German writer. Its placement was not decorative. Van Gogh received the same treatment Goethe received — turned into a national symbol, a myth, a usable story. The exhibition showed who built that story, how deliberately, and at what cost to the paintings themselves.
Walking out into the grey Frankfurt afternoon, the question stayed with you: how much of what we see when we look at Van Gogh is the painting, and how much is what Jo van Gogh-Bonger built from the wreckage of two deaths?
Artène covered Making Van Gogh: Geschichte einer deutschen Liebe , 8 December 2019.