Get an inside look at the immersive van Gogh exhibit in Virginia Beach that everyone is talking about

“Beyond Van Gogh: The Immersive Experience” is where paintings move, an installation designed for people who wouldn’t ordinarily meander through museums.

“There’s always this idea that for some people museums can be intimidating,” said Fanny Curtat, one of the curators, who was in Virginia Beach for the show’s recent opening. It is one of three touring the United States; worldwide, the shows have sold more than 5 million tickets.

A professor of art history at the Université du Québec, Curtat helped select about 300 pieces of the 850 or so that van Gogh is known to have produced. The show begins with his biography, then introduces viewers to his early work, including “The Potato Eaters,” which is filled with dark colors and feelings of destitution. The exhibition progresses to the vibrant and fluorescent paintings for which the Dutch painter is best known.   

The exhibit stretches the work digitally into gigantic proportions. One of van Gogh’s most famous works, “The Starry Night,” is a canvas less than 3 feet square. Here it is projected in 3D on 20-foot screens.

The enhancements are intended to bridge the gap between van Gogh’s 19th century world and the digital age. In addition to casual art observers, Curtat said, the installation is meant to entice aesthetes and people like herself.

“Because, if they’re like me,” she said, “it’s like the fantasy of being inside a painting.”

The show covers 30,000 square feet, filling two rooms. Soft music plays, with a little Édith Piaf and a lot of violins.

“The beginnings”

The first room is filled with informational panels that detail van Gogh’s life set against swatches pulled from his paintings. The fragments are enlarged to highlight his brushstrokes and technique.

Impressionist painters like Claude Monet used thin layer upon thin layer of oil paint. Van Gogh was different.

“He’s not really blending the colors, he’s really putting them side by side,” Curtat said, pointing to the hues on a panel.

He meticulously built paintings with a signature energetic, almost frantic, feel. Like Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, van Gogh falls between eras.

“So, it’s about changing perspective,” Curtat continued, still motioning to the panels, “and seeing how these technologies can add to the experience.”

The panels tell how van Gogh was born in 1853 in the Netherlands, where he taught himself to draw landscapes of the farmland that surrounded him.

He became an art dealer in 1872 when he and his brother, Theo, were hired by the same dealership. Theo thrived, but Vincent did not. He considered going into the Protestant clergy; after all, his father had been a preacher. Disappointment followed, however, when van Gogh found he lacked the disposition needed for the pulpit.

It wasn’t until 1880 that he devoted himself to being a professional artist.

A dark world

The second room of the exhibit is a large oval. Twenty-foot-high screens carry a 35-minute, looping video that starts with the artist’s earliest works.

“You really, truly have an arc that the show is built on,” Curtat said.

“At the beginning, you have a starkness that he’s reproducing, because that’s what the art world was about at one point,” she said. Paintings with earthy and dark tones are the type of works van Gogh would have been exposed to in the Netherlands.

One, “The Potato Eaters,” depicts a poor family dining on potatoes, huddled around a single dim oil lamp. But more than mere examples of artistic style, such early work also provides insight into themes that spanned the breadth of van Gogh’s career as he never stopped choosing common, everyday people as subjects.

A shift to light

His work brightens with his move in 1886 to Paris, where he was exposed to Impressionist painters.

Parisian cityscapes begin to fill the walls of the exhibit hall. Instead of dark greens, there are beiges. Viewers are surrounded by an urban neighborhood. A windmill next to a stream running through the town starts to spin — thanks to computers. Then the walls are filled with images of buildings, and the camera pans upward, giving the audience a sense that it is flying, up, through the painting and its canopy of structures.  

Van Gogh’s exploration of brightness starts with Paris, Curtat said, “but it’s just the pure explosion of color when he gets to the south of France.”

By 1888, van Gogh had grown tired of buzzing streets and manmade facades, and moved to the countryside town of Arles.

Part of the rich blue river in his “Starry Night Over the Rhône” is displayed around the installation, giving viewers a sense of being surrounded by water, a sense of what van Gogh might have felt when capturing the scene.

Portraits and flowers

Next the exhibition walls fill with the portraits.

“He’s always described as this isolated figure and as being not good with people,” Curtat said.

Van Gogh often couldn’t afford to pay models and painted the likenesses of the people he knew.

“A lot of people loved him, and he loved a lot of people,” Curtat said, while recognizing that the famously troubled artist still had his faults. “Although, he wasn’t always good at communicating with people. Sometimes, he was too intense.”

The dozens of portraits illustrate that van Gogh did have a strong community of supportive acquaintances.

“In life and in painting too,” he wrote to Theo in 1888, “I can easily do without the dear Lord, but I can’t, suffering as I do, do without something greater than myself, which is my life, the power to create.”

“Portrait of Doctor Félix Rey” flashes into view not far from the “Portrait of Postman Roulin” and a portrait of the artist’s green-eyed mother. Although Curtat argues that van Gogh tends to be portrayed in cliched terms, with the narrative of the tortured genius, the exhibit does include the self-portrait he made after he cut off his own ear in 1888. He killed himself about six months after completing it.

Soon the exhibit’s portraits are replaced by paintings of flowers in vases.

He painted flowers like he painted people, Curtat said.

“He paints what he sees but not what he sees in the sense of atmospheric. It’s more what he perceives, what he feels.”

On one wall, fragments of other flower paintings creep like growing vines from around the edges of the canvases. Simultaneously, on an opposite wall, pieces of sunflowers spin and wrap around each other in tie-dye style, before everything is overtaken by a new image of swirling almond blossoms. The petals float over the whole exhibition space — its walls and floor and even over viewers’ shoes.

When the stars in “Starry Night” finally make their appearance, those swirling, and now digital, cosmic whirlwinds actually start to twinkle.

Colin Warren-Hicks, 919-818-8139, colin.warrenhicks@virginiamedia.com

___

If you go

When: 10 a.m. to 8 p.m. Tuesdays through Thursdays; 10 a.m. to 9 p.m. Fridays and Saturdays; 10 a.m. to 7 p.m. Sundays through Sept. 2.

Where: Virginia Beach Convention Center, Exhibit Hall D. 1000 19th St.

Tickets: Start at $33.99 for adults; $23.99 for children ages 5 through 15; children 4 and younger get in free.

Details: vangoghvirginiabeach.com