Sunflowers (van Gogh)
The painting Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase was painted by Vincent van Gogh in Arles (southern France) in August 1888 . It is part of a series of images with the same motif: Five Sunflowers ... , Fifteen Sunflowers ... , Three Sunflowers in a Vase .
The series was created in preparation for the arrival of his painter colleagues Paul Gauguin and Emile Bernard . Vincent hoped to found a colony of painters in Provence with them and other artists . In his letter to brother Theo in 526 , Vincent wrote: “In the hope that I will live with Gauguin in our own studio, I will take a series of pictures for it. Nothing more than big sunflowers. .. So if I do this plan there will be a dozen pictures. The whole thing is a symphony in blue and yellow. I work on from sunrise every morning. Because the flowers wither quickly and the whole thing has to be painted in one go ”.
The cool background of this picture lets the sunflowers, which appear "shining", remind of their importance. Also due to the perfection of the yellow flowers, in contrast to the simple and inconspicuous environment, the picture appears bright and friendly.
Van Gogh added three more pictures to the sunflower series in January 1889 (two pictures entitled Fifteen Sunflowers in a Vase and Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase ).
In 1912 the Neue Pinakothek in Munich acquired the picture with twelve sunflowers from 1888 as part of the Tschudi donation from the series.
On March 30, 1987, Yasuo Gotō ( 後 藤 康 男 ; 1923–2002) of the Japanese insurance company Yasuda (today: Songai Hoken Japan ) bought one of the later pictures from the sunflower series at Christie's in London for the record price of 24.75 million British pounds. The picture hangs today in the Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art in Tokyo . After the auction, a controversy arose over the authenticity of the picture. The art historian Geraldine Norman advocated the thesis that the painting was a forgery by the painter Émile Schuffenecker , who was entrusted with the restoration of the original in 1901. This view has been contradicted by various sides. In the official result lists of the auction houses, however, this picture is no longer listed as an original painting by Van Gogh.
The bright, chrome-yellow sunflowers, however, turn brownish over time. The German Electron Synchrotron Desy in Hamburg found out that this is a reaction of the yellow dye ( lead (II) chromate ) to UV light and tries to restore the original color.
The pictures of the sunflowers
Three Sunflowers (August 1888) Private collection, USA
Twelve Sunflowers in a Vase (August 1888) Neue Pinakothek, Munich
Fifteen Sunflowers (August 1888) National Gallery of Art, London
Twelve Sunflowers (January 1889) Philadelphia Museum of Art
Fifteen Sunflowers (January 1889) Seiji Togo Memorial Sompo Japan Nipponkoa Museum of Art, Tokyo
Fifteen Sunflowers (January 1889) Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam
Movies
- The Japanese animated film The Sunflowers of the Inferno from the Detective Conan series revolves around Van Gogh's sunflower pictures. Part of the plot is a version of the motif that is in Japan.
See also
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ A b Christian Lenz: The New Pinakothek Munich . Ed .: Scala Publishers Ltd. Revised and updated edition. CH Beck, London 2007, ISBN 978-3-406-51188-2 , French Impressionists, pp. 109 .
- ↑ dpa: Chemical reaction affects Van Gogh paintings, Internet source: https://www.welt.de/wissenschaft/article12543117/Chemische-Reaktion-setzt-Van-Gogh-Gemaelden-zu.html , last call: 2. July 2016
- ↑ Koldehoff, Stefan: Gauguins Diebstahl und van Gogh's answer, In: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, October 16, 2013, p. 40