My Immersive Van Gogh Experience
Not as great as I thought it would be
My sister and I went to the Immersive Van Gogh Experience in Denver. Overall, it was a bit of a letdown.
The whole experience took probably half an hour. We were in a room with a bunch of mirrored art installations that blocked some of the views. The Van Gogh art pieces they used were some of his more popular ones. I think there were about 40 pieces in the immersive experience.
The music they paired with the art was beautiful. I feel like it truly made up for the rest.
Here’s why I think they could have done a better job.
Van Gogh lived only 37 years and he started painting at the age of 27, in 1881. In his last decade, he created over 2000 pieces of art, with over 800 oil paintings. Many of them had recurring themes, like his starry nights and self-portraits.
Most of his earlier paintings were dark and somber using mostly blacks, browns, and other earth tones.
At this point in his life, he’d been through a lot. His family was controlling, but sent him away to school, making him feel isolated. He tried his hand at various jobs, but failed at most and didn’t keep them long. He professed his love to a couple of women who either didn’t or couldn’t love him back. He moved around a lot trying to find himself. It’s possible that this was how he saw the world; no joy, and little color.
In 1885 he had the opportunity to sell some of his pieces to an art dealer in Paris, but in the end, they weren’t selected because there wasn’t enough color. Impressionism was in vogue, which was typified by its use of bright colors. The Potatoe Eaters is a perfect example of his lack of color at the time.
Van Gogh apparently took that criticism to heart and started studying color theory in 1886. Thus, he expanded his color pallet with blue and green hues. He also attended a couple of art exhibitions that showed off Pointillism (using dots of color like we do with pixels now) and Neo-Impressionist works. Despite all of this, he was reluctant to add color to his works.
During his studies, he had little money and would spend it on art supplies or bread, tobacco, and alcohol. Consequently, his health began to decline.
In early 1887, he decided to try his hand at Pointillism. He used this idea in one of his self-portraits. Though they aren’t purely dots, the brush strokes are much shorter than some of his other pieces.
In 1888, Van Gogh was tired of Paris, or possibly his health was affecting him, so he moved to Arles in the south of France. This gave him renewed vigor as he became enchanted with the area. In a little under a year, he produced 200 paintings and more than 100 drawings. He used a lot of yellow, ultramarine (a deep blue), and mauve (a pale purple) during this time.
At one point he rented a yellow house that was completely unfurnished. He then painted a series of still-lifes to decorate the house. Two of his most popular pieces, Starry Night Over the Rhône and Café Terrace at Night, were painted here. He also painted the still-life of the house he rented, The Yellow House.
Also during this time, he invited a painter, Paul Gauguin, that he met in Paris down to Arles to stay with him. This was mostly to create an artists’ collective. Van Gogh had dreamed of working with other artists to create great works.
Gaugin arrived in October 1988, but their relationship quickly deteriorated. In December of the same year, they had an altercation, though the exact events are unclear. Gaugain stated that Van Gogh came at him with an open razor, but it was never corroborated. Van Gogh returned to his room at the Yellow House where he began hearing voices. This is when the infamous incident of cutting his ear off happened. There is debate as to how much of his ear he cut off.
He bandaged his head, wrapped the cut piece of his ear in paper, and delivered the package to a woman at a brothel. He lost an enormous amount of blood and was found the next morning by a police officer, who took him to the hospital. There, a doctor patched him up and made the determination that he’d essentially had a mental breakdown.
Van Gogh was placed in hospital care and Gaugain fled back to Paris. He eventually returned home in January 1889, but continued to have hallucinations. In March, the police shut down the house because the townspeople complained about his behavior, calling him the redheaded madman. He returned to the hospital until he voluntarily entered an asylum in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, in April.
In Saint-Rémy, he had two cells. One of those cells he used as a studio. This is where The Starry Night was painted, among many others. He also spent a lot of time working on interpretations of other artists’ work.
In May 1890, he decided to leave the facility and move closer to Paris, where he spent his last 70 days. During this time, he created 70 oil paintings. On July 27, 1890, Van Gogh shot himself in one of the wheat fields near where he was staying. There were no witnesses. He managed to walk to his house and was attended by a couple of doctors. They did the best they could, but Van Gogh succumbed to an infection on July 29, 1890.
One of his last pieces was of a wheat field.
That’s quite a bit of history for a man who lived to be as old as I am now. Maybe the immersive experience did what it was supposed to; creating enough curiosity about the painter to go get online and research his life.
But it doesn’t change the fact that both my sister and I came away feeling like the experience was lacking something. It would have been more interesting if they’d used more of his work. Or if they had different experiences in different rooms. They even could have done a progression experience where it started from some of his earliest ones to his later ones, showing the changes from the artist’s growth in skill and technique.
At the very end, after the gift shop, there were some TV screens in a hallway that gave an extremely brief overview of his life. That portion was what truly made me curious about Van Gogh. It mentioned that he’d created over 2000 pieces of art in his short lifetime. It made me wonder where all those other pieces were, and why they hadn’t been used.
As my sister said, “It would have been an excellent intro to the rest of the exhibit.”
Before all this, I knew of only a few paintings and that he cut off his ear. Now I know much more about the man and his other artwork.
