Throughout the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic, people have longed for the return of shared public arts experiences that can bring us together.
To that end, Vincent van Gogh is coming to the rescue.
The Dutch-born painter — who changed art with the vividly colorful Post-Impressionist landscapes, still lifes and portraits he created in the late 1880s while living in France — is providing the artistic jolt we need to put a big, art-oriented experience back into our lives. One of the world’s most recognized artists, van Gogh died at age 37 in 1890 by a self-inflicted gunshot wound, long before his fame began.
This year, “immersive” van Gogh exhibits from five international presenters are coming to cities across the United States. Cincinnati isn’t on the list, but other nearby cities are, including Indianapolis, Columbus, Cleveland, Chicago, Detroit, Nashville and Pittsburgh.
The exhibitions create all-encompassing, multi-sensory indoor environments by pairing the latest in digital technology with images recreated from van Gogh’s paintings.
ARTnews traces the sudden U.S. demand for these shows to the inclusion of a van Gogh-themed Parisian extravaganza at Atelier des Lumières in a 2020 episode of Netflix’s Emily in Paris. In Europe especially, light art and digital art have been sources of innovation and spectacle, similar to the way Montreal-based Cirque du Soleil has developed new circuses.
Artnet.com had tracked some 40 cities that were set to see at least one of the van Gogh exhibits as of June 1. Some, like New York and Detroit, will get two.
“Unfortunately, we are not aware of the Vincent van Gogh exhibits coming to the Cincinnati region,” Danielle Wilson, Cincinnati USA Regional Chamber’s vice president of strategic marketing and communications, tells CityBeat via email.
The exhibitions have remarkably similar names. According to ARTnews and travel media website afar.com, they are: Immersive Van Gogh, from Toronto-based Lighthouse Immersive and featuring a creative team that includes Massimiliano Siccardi, who has been an artist in residence with Paris’ Atelier des Lumières; Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience, from partners Exhibition Hub and Fever; Beyond Van Gogh: An Immersive Experience, from Montreal’s Normal Studio; Imagine Van Gogh: The Immersive Exhibition, from French art directors Annabelle Mauger and Julien Baron; and one company with an outlier moniker, Australia-based Grande Experiences, the presenter of Van Gogh Alive.
Perhaps the most ambitious van Gogh exhibition, in terms of a traditional art museum’s embrace of this new technology, is at Newfields, the Indianapolis Museum of Art. It’s also one of the few that’s being held in a museum. The institution has converted its entire fourth floor into The Lume (Newfields stylizes the name in all capital letters), a permanent space for digital art exhibitions. It opened July 27 with an inaugural van Gogh presentation, which will be on display until May 2022, after which The Lume will work on presenting other, similar digital art shows.
[PHOTOS: Inside Immersive Van Gogh Exhibition THE LUME at Indianapolis’ Newfields]
To the museum, digital technology is a way to expand its audience and lure non-traditional visitors.
“It is an invitation for people a little intimidated to come into a museum,” Johnathan Berger, deputy director of marketing and external affairs at Newfields, tells CityBeat. “This is a way they can look at art differently. This is just a very engaging way to introduce people to art.”
The museum developed The Lume in partnership with Australia’s Grande Experiences. This is Grande Experience’s first permanent Lume space, but it has another set for a September opening in Melbourne, Australia, and is seeking more.
“The cultural scene is vastly changing as visitors demand new experiences,” Bruce Peterson, founder and CEO of Grande Experiences, says on his company’s website. “We have been at the forefront of this movement globally as our popular exhibitions have quickly moved from artefact-based to multimedia, to multi-sensory and now to very experiential.”
Newfields’ Berger says that “this is something we’ve been working on for five years, finding the right group to partner with. We’re terribly excited about exploring this way of viewing art.”
On a walk-through preview of the Indianapolis show with Berger ahead of the opening, we quickly entered into an altered environment. Almost 30,000 square feet of space is devoted to 150 high-definition projectors displaying 3,000 images from such van Gogh masterpieces as “The Starry Night,” “Sunflowers,” “Self-Portait,” “Irises,” “Almond Blossoms” and 26 others. Because the work is in the public domain, Berger explains, The Lume can reproduce images without having to get permission from whomever owns the original paintings, though it does give credit to them.
This is not a static slideshow that you sit and watch in an auditorium while a narrator talks, zooming in and out of overviews and closeups of details as they explain the trajectory of the artist’s career. But it has a visual flow, telling the story of van Gogh’s life in its own way.
While this exhibition does have areas with traditional interpretative text about the artist, it is also meant to be entertaining and have a 21st-century visual wow-factor. You can set your own pace as you pass through galleries and down corridors as a 40-minute digitized program plays all around you — including on the floor. That is followed by four five-minute commissioned featurettes from contemporary Australian filmmakers influenced by van Gogh, and then the whole loop is repeated.
You’ll want to keep moving, even if it’s just to whirl around at times to catch all the action. Images are projected onto all available surfaces. And by using features such as enlarged close-ups, animation-like elements, music and more, van Gogh’s “Starry Night” swirls, butterflies flutter, water ripples, flowers dramatically bloom and more. There’s a lot going on. Yet at the same time, the exhibition is telling a story about the artist’s life.
Artfully selected Classical music comes out of the approximately 60 speakers, including Vivaldi’s “The Four Seasons,” Erik Satie’s “Gnossienne No. 1,” the lovely “Flower Duet” from the opera Lakmé, and 13 more (there’s a Spotify playlist of the musical choices). In a separate room called Gogh Play, you can use a bit of goggle-less virtual reality to learn about the artist’s impasto painting technique. You can also stop at a van Gogh-themed café for an alcoholic beverage or pose at a replica of his bed (inspired by his paintings) for a selfie.
There’s even a scent. “It’s kind of an earthy smell, a little bit of floral, and it’s just very subtle and kind of puts you in the space of these van Gogh paintings,” Berger says.
A big surprise awaits toward the end of the exhibition. It’s a concluding gallery with just three oil paintings from the museum’s permanent collection. Created by giants of French Post-Impressionism, they are lined up on a wall like three siblings proudly waiting for a group photograph: van Gogh’s 1889 “Landscape at Saint-Remy (Enclosed Field with Peasant),” Paul Gauguin’s 1888 “Landscape near Arles” and Paul Cézanne’s 1885 “House in Provence.”
They compel you to look closely and appreciatively. They also make you think about the enduring power of traditional visual art — paintings. When you’re looking at greatness, there’s nothing like the real thing.
“When you come in and see our van Gogh and our Gauguin and Cézanne, all painted around the same time and in the same area, you really start to see the greatness,” Berger says. “So we will have paintings from the museum in these (future) shows. That’s what we do, who we are.”
And, he adds, that makes the Newfields show different from “every warehouse exhibit popping up in Chicago or around the world.”
About halfway through this exhibition’s run, Newfields’ currently displayed van Gogh painting will be swapped out for his “Sheaves of Wheat,” which will arrive from the Dallas Museum of Art as part of a temporary exchange.
Outside the museum, the Garden has special van Gogh floral displays. And 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park, another section of the Newfields campus, is a beautiful and tranquil place to wander through the woods and along the lakeside. It also has a wonderful art installation called “Park of Laments” by Chilean artist Alfredo Jaar. It’s hidden by the park’s greenery, and you have to walk through a short concrete tunnel to reach a quiet, open space shaped by limestone-filled gabion baskets and bordered by trees. It’s every bit as immersive as The Lume, even though it’s a very different experience. It makes a great conclusion, and a lasting memory, for the trip to Newfields.
Because the Indianapolis Museum of Art has The Lume, the immersive exhibition could raise questions within the world of art museums, since the van Gogh images it shows are reproductions. Thinking of this, CityBeat asked if the Cincinnati Art Museum would host such a show. Its director Cameron Kitchin says through a museum spokesperson that it wouldn’t be a good fit.
“Not a fit for the museum because we try to show original artworks whenever possible and reproductions/representations only in rare circumstances,” says Jill Dunne, the museum’s director of marketing and communications, via email. However, Dunne says Kitchin told her that “these experiences (and other inclusions of art in popular culture like in movies, videos, etc.) are good things because they raise awareness of artworks, including those at the Cincinnati Art Museum. Great artworks are powerful and exposure to them, even in non-traditional ways, can add greater gravity and appreciation of the actual artworks.”
In Columbus, this may be playing out in real life — a traditional van Gogh show with original work is coming to the Columbus Museum of Art and will partially overlap with an Immersive Van Gogh one. The latter occurs Oct. 28-Jan. 2 at an as-yet unannounced location. Meanwhile, Through Vincent’s Eyes: Van Gogh and His Sources will be at the art museum Nov. 12-Feb. 2.
“An exhibition of this size takes multiple years of planning, so this has been part of our schedule for quite some time,” Betsy Meacham, Columbus Museum of Art’s director of strategic engagement and communications, says. “The exhibition is organized in partnership with the Santa Barbara Museum of Art. A shared exhibition, it will be presented at each museum with two distinct curatorial perspectives and two accompanying books.
“We only recently became aware of the Immersive Van Gogh show coming to Columbus when it was publicly announced this past spring. We hope that members of the community will want to take advantage of both ways to experience the art of van Gogh in Columbus this fall.”
Not everyone is enthusiastic about this national invasion of the van Goghs. Some critics who have seen shows outside of Indianapolis have found the whole concept questionable as art.
When Immersive Van Gogh opened in Chicago in February at the Lighthouse ArtSpace at Germania Club, Chicago Tribune reviewer Steve Johnson found a surprising precedent.
“It’s an updated version of the 1970s Pink Floyd laser light shows projected onto planetarium ceilings late on weekend nights for audiences of dubious sobriety,” he wrote. “But instead of the borderline skeezy rock culture undertones of a Floyd show, making it about an artist ... puts a veneer of high culture on the whole thing. Tonight’s head trip is being sponsored by your college’s core curriculum requirement in humanities and the arts.”
In fairness, Brown also found qualities to like in the exhibit, ending his review with, “It’s not the same as seeing an actual van Gogh canvas, but it is pretty impressive at starting a kind of dialogue with them.”
Incidentally, if Brown’s reference to those old Pink Floyd laser light shows brings back fond memories, get ready. Like Vincent van Gogh, the band’s popularity is only growing with time, leading to spin-offs of their original work. The new Vogue Multicultural Museum in Los Angeles will open The Pink Floyd Exhibition: Their Mortal Remains on Sept. 3, featuring artifacts, stage sets and private collections shipped to the United States from Great Britain.
The Lume’s Vincent van Gogh show at Newfields, the Indianapolis Museum of Art, is open now and is scheduled to be on display into May 2022. Timed tickets are required; prices for adults are $25 for the general public and $20 for museum members. The ticket allows access to the entire Newfields campus, which includes other museum areas, the outdoor Gardens and 100 Acres: Virginia B. Fairbanks Art & Nature Park.
For more information about The Lume, its current Vincent van Gogh experience and to buy tickets, visit discovernewfields.org.
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