You’ve almost certainly seen Vincent van Gogh’s famed 1889 painting Bedroom, since the masterpiece from the artist’s career has been printed and reproduced thousands of times, from art history textbooks to coffee mugs. But, unless you’ve visited the Art Institute of Chicago where the painting has been on display, you've likely never seen the original. But now's your chance. Starting today, the Norton Simon Museum in Pasadena has the painting on display, marking the first time its been on view on the West Coast. The museum describes the powerful work as, “a meditation on friendship, hope and crushing disappointment.”
Bedroom is actually the second of three paintings of the same interior scene. The first was painted by Van Gogh in his famous Yellow House in the south of France, capturing the optimistic mood of his tidy room just before the arrival of his friend and mentor Paul Gauguin. Within months, his life would turn upside down—perhaps you’ve heard of an incident involving an ear—and he would find himself alone in a new room, in a mental asylum. While there, he pulled out the damaged painting of his former bedroom and decided to re-do it. The Bedroom now hanging in the Norton Simon is that version. He would go on to make one more attempt at the painting, one of his final canvases before his death in 1890.
Back at Bedroom’s home base in Chicago, the Art Institute recently staged an exhibition dedicated to all of Van Gogh’s “Bedrooms” series of paintings, which brought the entire collection together for the first time, along with new research into the artist’s complicated life and practice. The curator of that show, Gloria Groom, will be traveling to the Norton Simon on January 7 to deliver a presentation that puts Bedroom into context.
Van Gogh’s Bedroom on Loan from the Art Institute of Chicago will be on display from December 9 to March 6 at the Norton Simon Museum, open noon to 5pm Monday, Wednesday, Thursday and Sunday and noon to 8pm on Friday and Saturday.
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