Heat & Beauty: “Imagine Van Gogh” and the Collision of Art Media

Van Gogh once wrote “It is with the reading of books the same as with looking at pictures; one must, without doubt, without hesitations, with assurance, admire what is beautiful.”

Imagine Van Gogh – Starry Night (2021)

The traveling exhibition, Imagine Van Gogh, promises an opportunity to appreciate Van Gogh’s beauty in a new and immersive way. 

Van Gogh had always struck me as a little kitsch. Starry Night was lovely, but Sunflowers felt too at home in the wallpaper of a bed and breakfast bathroom. 

My resistance to Van Gough was unmerited and lazy. I freely admit that I was shortsightedly ignorant. It was the enthusiasm of my sister that brought me to Imagine Van Gogh. 

I even more freely admit that the experience changed me. 

Entering the warehouse, I stepped into darkness. Ticket attendants carried flashlights and directed us across a vast black space. The air was filled with recognizable classical music and we inched towards a split in the curtain through which light spilled. That journey across the void, enveloped by the sound and transported to another space, stoked an excitement in me. We were entering something special. The light drew my eyes where the artistic directors intended. I was approaching something that someone had carefully arranged to be appreciated. 

At the curtain, a woman welcomed us. 

She gestured inside to the twelve framed placards suspended from the high ceiling, itself hidden in darkness. Each placard was a deep rich colour with white text on it. Lights hung from above illuminating each side and casting a geometric shadow beneath each one.

Imagine Van Gogh – The Placards (2021)

The woman invited us to begin with the placard on our right and weave our way back and forth. Each one told a part of Van Gogh’s story, the history behind some of the pieces we would eventually see, and the artistic directors’ motivation for presenting the collection as they had. 

My first impulse was to begrudge the delay. I had come for the immersive Van Gough experience. I was not here to read. But wishing to understand exactly what the curators had in mind, I stuck with it, resisting the urge to skip ahead. 

Making my way from one hanging frame to another, I was slowly moved. The concise and nimble prose guided me through his time in seminary, his love affair with a woman in Amsterdam, the faithful support of his brother, Theo, and his conscious decent into mental unwellness. 

I had never before been curious about the dutch painter. By about the fifth placard, I was well and truly hooked. I had sunk myself into the narrative and became very interested in his passion and his plight. A man with this pain, this endurance, and this quiet gratitude he expressed for his brother and his medical caregivers was one that now deeply interested me.

Reaching the final placard, I was wholly invested. The introductory journey primed me to appreciate Van Gogh’s perspective with eagerness. It also promised a self-directed space of discovery and freedom, where observers might move throughout the room to take in whichever part of the pieces most drew them. 

I passed through the next curtain, keen to take it in. 

White curtains hung from nearly forty feet in the air, falling all the way to the floor. Projectors hidden behind those curtains cast images standing over two stories tall. In the centre of the room, a curtain was also suspended in a diamond-shaped pillar and bore the same projected images. The floor, too, was awash in projected patterns resonant with the images on the walls. 

Imagine Van Gogh – Bedroom in Arles (2021)

Some paintings held still while others panned from one side to another, or scrolled vertically to provide a narrower field of focus. Every forty seconds or so the paintings and floor pattern would swap out for another collection. Save for the black void where the ceiling was hidden, the whole room was flooded with strokes of colour. 

People were all over the room, most standing, some sitting, just a few wandering around as the placards had invited. 

And this was the moment when I first felt betrayed. 

Instead of being free to explore the exhibit and focusing on what drew me in, the exhibit happened to me. The images passed by, with leisure to be sure, but with unyielding determination giving only about forty seconds for each view.

This reality struck me most sharply when Starry Night appeared. Any serenity in the room vanished. Everyone leapt to action. Poses were struck. Phones swiftly changed hands. Selfies were snapped. Groups rearranged themselves. 

And then it was gone. Starry Night remained on the projection screens for the same forty seconds as every other painting that day. 

There was no allowance for the enthusiasm visitors had for this particularly beloved piece. No time to explore its movement. No margin to sit with it. No space to “admire what is beautiful” as Van Gogh himself once urged. 

This was a marked contrast from the contemplative trudge through the maze of framed paragraphs. Where my own agency led me through the previous instalment, the projected compendium marched forward irrespective of my meditations. This was not at all like the “reading of books” to which Van Gogh had compared viewing art. 

Instead, admiration was squeezed out by a panicked scramble for photos.

Which brings me to the second way I felt betrayed. 

Leaving the room of well lit, deeply saturated placards, I entered a space that was dimmer than I anticipated. The lower level of brightness and lower degree of colour saturation was underwhelming. 

The full immersion was breathtaking in a way, but I was not sure that these projections were something worth being immersed in. 

Recounting the experience to a friend, I concluded off-handedly: “I mean, I’m glad to have seen a bit of Van Gogh.” He pulled up short and asked: “But did you really see Van Gogh?”

White Roses, Vincent Van Gogh – Metropolitan Museum of Art (2022)

He put his finger squarely on a component of my frustration. I was fully immersed in a replica of the actual Van Goghs. His brush strokes were visible, but interrupted by the pixels that composed the copy. Because of the projections’ dimness, his colours came through with a certain thinness. 

It struck me that the introduction of an additional medium altered the way I experienced Van Gogh’s art. For each piece, Van Gogh had already communicated via paint and canvas or pencil and paper. Imagine Van Gogh delivered replica’s of those images via an additional medium: projected digital photography. 

I later wondered out loud – to looks of horror – whether this was perhaps just a step above Google the images myself. I was not actually seeing the paintings themselves. I was seeing photographs of them. The exhibit was able to offer me a much larger viewing experience which did encourage a sense of awe. 

But the introduction of another medium makes me doubt it is indeed a step above Google. The panning, zooming, and advancement through the series of images borrowed conventions of film. It was a timed and curated experience designed to happen to you, a presentation that is prearranged. 

If I called up photographs of art on my own web browser, I could linger. I could consider and examine as long as I liked. In this warehouse, I could regard the piece only as long as the exhibit allowed me. 

To be sure, If I visited the Museum of Modern Art in New York, there might be crowds preventing a clear view of the real Starry Night. I may only manage to jostle my way to the front of the crowd for a brief look or an extended viewing interrupted by the press of people around me. But even with those factors, I would have the opportunity to look longer than forty seconds. 

This raises the question of what effect each medium is intended to have, and the implications of putting two or more media in conversation with each other. 

Film is beautiful. It is a favourite artistic medium for many of us. The ways that it creates an experience of momentum, pacing, sound, and tension are distinct and powerful. 

Paintings and drawings are qualitatively different. The experience of colour, light, movement, and tension are communicated through still images that a viewer considers at their leisure. The timing, the momentum is not preselected. That is up to the viewer. 

The two media are powerful in their own spaces. To put them in conversation with one another, the implications should be considered. Will the effects they are designed to created mutually enhance each other? Is there an opportunity for cross pollination that might uncover fresh perspectives. 

Shoes, Vincent Van Gogh – Metropolitan Museum of Art (2022)

Conversely, different effects can work at cross-purposes. Their strengths can push against one another, immobilizing them rather than moving the viewer as they were intended to. 

I fear that happens with Imagine Van Gogh. 

Where the artwork of Vincent Van Gogh is designed for contemplative consideration, immersive film projection is designed to envelope a person with an experience that sweeps them away.

Standing in that warehouse, the whole thing felt like a well-intentioned, tastefully designed missed opportunity. 

I would prefer to stare at a Van Gogh (or even a replica) for as long as I felt I needed. I would love to be immersed in filmed sequences designed to carry me away. But together, these elements did not enhance one another. 

Van Gogh wrote at another point: “A great fire burns within me, but no one stops to warm themselves at it, and passers-by only see a wisp of smoke.”

I am one of those passers-by. So far, I have only seen those wisps of smoke. But that is one of the things that has changed. I have felt his heat. I now recognize the warmth that Van Gogh can offer and want to find comfort and rest in it. 

Just a few months after this experience, I visited the Met in New York and viewed several real Van Gogh pieces. I was deeply moved as I sat with each one. Is it too sentimental to say I could feel the heat of his fire, the beauty of his passion, emanating from the canvases where he truly spread his paints? If so, it would serve me right for thinking Van Gogh was kitsch.

I am grateful to the creators of Imagine Van Gogh. They attempted a collision of media in the hopes of creating a new experience. Their hall of framed stories genuinely moved me. They successfully attracted me to the work of a Dutch genius I had previously dismissed. 

I hope they revisit the immersive experience with images designed for the movement of film. Their thoughtful risks are suggestive of a worthwhile innovation.