VAN GOGH, GAUGUIN, BERNARD EN COPENHAGEN

One of art history's most dramatic events culminated when Vincent van Gogh (1853 -1890) in 1888 cut a chunk of his ear and thus put a bloody end to the nine-week intense collaboration with Paul Gauguin (1848-1903) in the "Yellow House "in the south of France Arles.

Van Gogh, Gauguin, Bernard. drama in Arles  depicts the background of the two artists fateful confrontation and  introduces the lesser known Émile Bernard (1868-1941) as a major catalyst for the highly-charged discussions about art that not only had heat in the yellow house but was converted into epoch-making painting.

The "electric discussions" which van Gogh called them, were therefore place not between two, but three artists. They acted especially during 1888, now through their correspondence, now through cooperation between Gauguin and Bernard in Brittany and then between Gauguin and van Gogh in Arles. Later, they resumed their correspondence in 1889. The artists were so most pairs, but the third party was still always present as a voice in the discussions. First, via letter to writing, partly through experimental works used as arguments in pictures.

From a distance, you might think that Van Gogh, Gauguin and Bernard had common objectives of creating a new visual language. It was far from the case - although van Gogh one time believed it. For where van Gogh believed that the new age artist would paint such a subject, as he saw it before him, believed Gauguin and Bernard that he should portray the basis of memory and imagination.

The schism between van Gogh's faith representation of the external world and Gauguin and Bernard's loyalty to the inner world steeped in dream and fantasy was finally so abysmal that for van Gogh ended up in human tragedy. It is this choice between reality, of fidelity and realism on the one hand and dream, myth and abstraction on the other hand, the exhibition focuses on.

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