Netherlands Guide
Amsterdam
The Van Gogh Museum
Opening time: Daily 10am–6pm, Fri until 10pm
Price: €10, children 13–17 years €2.50, combined ticket with Rijksmuseum, including current exhibition, €25
Website: www.vangoghmuseum.nl
The Van Gogh Museum, comprising a fabulous collection of the artist's (1853–90) work, is one of Amsterdam's top attractions. It occupies two modern buildings, with the kernel of the collection housed in an angular building designed by a leading light of the De Stijl movement, Gerritt Rietveld, and opened to the public in 1973. Well conceived and beautifully presented, this part of the museum provides an introduction to the man and his art based on paintings that were mostly inherited from Vincent's art-dealer brother Theo.
The ground floor of the main museum displays works by some of Van Gogh's well-known friends and contemporaries, many of whom influenced his work – Gauguin, Millet, Anton Mauve, Charles Daubigny and others – while the first floor has paintings by the artist himself, displayed chronologically, starting with the dark, sombre works of the early years like The Potato Eaters and finishing up with the asylum years at St Rémy and the final, tortured paintings done at Auvers, where Van Gogh lodged for the last three months of his life. It was at Auvers that he painted the frantic Ears of Wheat and Wheatfield with a Reaper, in which the fields swirl and writhe under weird, light-green, moving skies. A few weeks after completing these last paintings that Van Gogh shot and fatally wounded himself.
The two floors above provide back-up to the main collection. The second floor has a library and study area with access to a detailed computerized account of Van Gogh's life and times, plus a number of sketches and a handful of less familiar paintings. The third floor features more drawings and sketches from the permanent collection as well as notebooks and letters. This floor also affords space to relevant temporary exhibitions illustrating Van Gogh's artistic influences, or his own influence on other artists.
To the rear of Rietveld's building, and connected by a ground-floor-level escalator, is the ultra-modern curved annexe, an aesthetically controversial structure completed in 1998. Financed by a Japanese insurance company – the same conglomerate who paid $35 million for one of Van Gogh's Sunflowers canvases in 1987 – this provides temporary exhibition space. Most of these exhibitions focus on one aspect or another of Van Gogh's art and draw heavily on the permanent collection, which means that the paintings displayed in the older building are regularly rotated.