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Van Gogh only got one major review in his career, and he was mystified by it. When the critic Albert Aurier described his six paintings in the 1890 Brussels exhibition of Les XX as the product of a ‘terrible and distraught genius’, the artist responded that, far from being a genius, he was ‘very secondary’ and that his sunflowers – now in the National Gallery – were no different ‘from so many pictures of flowers more skilfully painted’. If he were alive today he would probably have protested at the National Gallery making an exhibition of his work the high point of its bicentenary programme, but he would have liked its focus on his inspirations rather than his distress.
This is not the Vincent and Paul show: its preoccupations, and style, are entirely Vincent’s
The show, which covers the artist’s period in Provence from February 1888 to May 1890, takes its subtitle, Poets and Lovers, from a pair of portraits painted in Arles in 1888.
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