PHOTO: HENK VEENSTRA

How Van Gogh came to Groningen

PROPOSITION

‘How Van Gogh came to Groningen’ will be on display at the Groninger Museum from 30 November 2024 until 5 May 2025.

The in-depth publication under the same name, edited by Mariëtta Jansen, Anneke de Vries, and Belle de Rode, will also be available in bookstores on 30 November and is published by WBOOKS. See also: How Van Gogh came to Groningen

PHOTO: HENK VEENSTRA

Jan-Wiegers / Kirchner’s bedroom - 1925

Vincent van Gogh / self portrait 1887

When an exhibition featuring 128 paintings opens in the Groninger Museum in 1896, Groningen experiences an unprecedented period of prosperity. The Museum has just been built, the Stadsschouwburg theatre has been open for ten years, and the Groningen Central Station has only just been completed. The crates with paintings can be transported by train for the first time.

They were created by a painter who, six years after his death, is gaining increasing recognition in the art world but is still far from being appreciated by the general public: Vincent van Gogh. Still, his work caught the attention of a group of Groningen students, and it was on their initiative that Van Gogh’s paintings were brought to Groningen. Until then, such a large exhibition of his work had not been seen anywhere.

The Droste effect
Over 125 years later, guest curator Mariëtta Jansen, project manager Belle de Rode, and the rest of their team at the Groninger Museum are creating a Droste effect. On 30 November, ‘How Van Gogh came to Groningen’ will open, an exhibition about the remarkable exhibition organized by students back then. The new exhibition not only tells the story of how it came to be but also reveals the impact Van Gogh had on Groningen afterwards. It explores the impact on Groninger professors – who started collecting the painter’s work after the exhibition – and on local artists who would later become famous: the painters of De Ploeg.

The seed of the exhibition was a remark made by Andreas Blühm, the current director of the museum and Professor at the University of Groningen, Jansen explains. ‘One day, I was talking to Andreas about Van Gogh, and he said: “There have already been so many exhibitions about him that you cannot really do anything new”. Then I thought: we will see about that.’

Van Gogh’s influence on De Ploeg
Between 2008 and 2020, Jansen was already affiliated with the Groninger Museum, at that time serving as the curator for ‘De Ploeg and art of the twentieth century’. She had often noticed that the early Ploeg paintings appeared to be influenced by Van Gogh’s work. Her conversation with Blühm was the final nudge she needed to research the connection between Van Gogh and De Ploeg. And so she discovered the exhibition from 1896, organized by students who had also set up seven other exhibitions about different artists.

How were those exhibitions created back then, and what was on display? That is what Jansen and De Rode are trying to reconstruct in the new exhibition. They will, of course, show paintings – works by Van Gogh, as well as those by symbolists Johan Thorn Prikker and Jan Toorop. The latter had a significant influence on Groningen as well, says Jansen. ‘He was the symbolist.’

Fin de siècle
But the new exhibition is about so much more than the art. De Rode: ‘The fin de siècle was a time when people began to see things differently. Van Gogh symbolizes that new perspective; he was always searching for the truth, the essence of things.’ That spirit was also present in the academic world, which plays a significant role in the exhibition. The artistic and academic worlds increasingly intersected at the end of the nineteenth century, says De Rode. ‘You see this, for example, in the fact that the students who organized the exhibition were not studying art, but were ‘just’ studying medicine or law. And the professors who became passionate about art often came from very different fields. For example, Gerard Heymans came from psychology, Jan Willem Moll from botany, and Anton Gerard van Hamel was a professor of French.

One of the students would later become a famous historian: Johan Huizinga, who became well known for his book The Autumn of the Middle Ages, also wrote his autobiography My Path to History at the end of his career in 1945.

Less support
Jansen and De Rode, both art historians, also studied at the University of Groningen, but each in a different period. Jansen received her degree in 1987: ‘I took quite a long time to finish my studies; that was still possible back then. I did not think much about finding a job.’ ‘That was quite different in my time,’ says De Rode, who graduated in 2021. ‘We often look ahead. How do you network, where are you going to end up?’ Their field is now somewhat less esteemed than in Jansen’s time, De Rode thinks. ‘You can sense that there is less support for art nowadays.’ Jansen thinks so too: ‘I can still remember what they said to me: Are you going to study Art History? Ah, a hobby study.’

In the preparations for the exhibition, they complemented each other, De Rode says. ‘Mariëtta is a historical detective.’ Jansen: ‘And Belle knew how to translate this into to the exhibition. I was really grateful for that because it is impossible to showcase 128 paintings, but there have to be enough.’

Groningen today
De Rode came up with ways to connect the exhibition with present-day Groningen. ‘We wanted to bring the guys behind the exhibition more to life because we only know Johan Huizinga a bit. Therefore, I asked the Groningen illustrator Megan de Vos to create a large mural of the students from that time.’ She also asked current students to lend their voices to the exhibition. In the audio tour, you can hear various stories, featuring quotes that they recorded. There is also a wall with works by the recent alumni of the Minerva Academy. ‘The young people who organized the Van Gogh exhibition back then gave a boost to art in Groningen. Nowadays, it is still a city with a very active art academy. Artists continue to inspire each other from generation to generation, and we wanted to show that as well.

Suspenseful
This exhibition is a ‘bold project’, Jansen says. ‘This is not an everyday exhibition. It is not an overview of the life of artist A or B, but the result of an idea, a personal research project, that is connected to the history of the Museum itself. That is exciting because you do not know if it is embraced by the public, but we believe in it. As a museum, you also have to continue deepening your own story.’

In 1896, students from the University organized an exhibition about a certain
Vincent van Gogh at the Groninger Museum. This event at the fin de siècle had a big impact on artists from Groningen, such as those of De Ploeg, as well as on art collectors. Alumnae Mariëtta Jansen and Belle de Rode, in turn, created the exhibition ‘How Van Gogh came to Groningen’.

TEXT: DORIEN VRIELING