Technical life experience degree

Anyone who missed the blockbuster "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South" as installed at the Art Institute of Chicago (the works are now at their second and final venue in Amsterdam) missed one of the best art-museum exhibitions ever. Despite the drastic downturn in tourism resulting from the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks only days before the opening, the exhibition drew 690,951 visitors, ranking it among the highest-attended events in art-museum history.

At the core of this exhibition are the works painted during an eight-week period at the end of 1888 when Gauguin joined van Gogh, who earlier that year had leased a small building in Arles in the south of France. With Gauguin's expenses covered by van Gogh's art-dealer brother, Theo, the Dutch artist could begin to realize his vision for the future of art as a shared enterprise nurtured far from the urban centers of modern Europe. Although the experiment ended abruptly when van Gogh's mental health collapsed just before Christmas, prompting Gauguin to flee back to Paris, it was nevertheless a milestone in the evolution of modern art beyond Impressionism.

Most important for this exhibition, however, are the deeply personal and highly intellectual exchanges between Gauguin and van Gogh, as evidenced so abundantly in their art before, during and after their time together as housemates. Predicated in one way or another on conversations or correspondence between two of history's greatest artists, the expressively charged paintings and sculpture in "Van Gogh and Gauguin" gained added fascination when displayed in studiously selected groupings. The works were installed well up on the walls to enhance visibility for crowds of visitors. In consideration of how these works were made in dialogue with one another, visitors benefited from the freedom to go back and forth among them, rather than proceeding from one work to the next without turning back, as is encouraged by today's most common exhibition format. Fewer rather than more works were grouped in each gallery whenever possible. In all, 21 galleries were put at the service of 135 works. At every turn, the organizers, Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, provided an abundance of ancillary information--maps, photographs, even meteorological records--in creatively designed formats. Visitors to "Van Gogh and Gauguin" were, in effect, guided through an elaborately illustrated book, with the primary illustrations "come to life" as master paintings in the galleries. While it was possible to ignore all these art-history props and just take in the works, the curators nevertheless made it clear that the art on display had been gathered together with a special purpose in mind for highly informed viewers.

Everyone involved with this project deserves applause for the venture's high-mindedness, increasingly rare with the unprecedented commercial pressures bearing down on today's museum exhibition programs. In their thoughtful installation, Druick and Zegers gave pride of place to the artists' own words, the bedrock evidence for the issues at stake. Both artists were fine writers. Like snippets of a neo-Victorian decorative frieze, excerpts from their correspondence and critical texts were printed large on the walls above the works of art. To the extent that the densely didactic installation could be categorized as a "documentary," the excerpts were the talking-heads' narration.

The installation's climax came halfway through the exhibition, where visitors encountered a full-scale model of the trapezoid-shaped studio shared by van Gogh and Gauguin in the famous so-called Yellow House in Arles (destroyed in World War II). Visible through a scrim wall, the room was made to look as it might have in late November or early December 1888, which is when Druick and Zegers propose that van Gogh and Gauguin painted simultaneously from the same model, Madame Roulin, the postman's wife. Comparing the reconstructed room with many of the paintings on display, visitors to the exhibition could not help but realize that what van Gogh and Gauguin shared most deeply as artists was a disregard for pedestrian visual information. Although in historical fact the interior walls of the Yellow House studio were white, the pictures painted there all show colored walls. Van Gogh portrayed Madame Roulin against a yellow wall. Gauguin, working only a few feet away, recorded her against a blue one.

The small size of the room, however, tells far more about the artists' interactions with each other than do any specific painted details. For such oftentimes larger-than-life personalities as van Gogh and Gauguin, the roughly 240-square-foot studio was a tight fit, even if the latter was accustomed to cramped ships' quarters from his experience in the merchant marine service in the late 1860s. The very best sort of educational exhibition accessory, this reconstructed Yellow House interior heightened awareness of the dynamic intimacies between the works of art made during the final two months of 1888. Even more, however, the room was an effective symbol for the exhibition's overall subject: the intellectual merger of these two artists, whether they were together literally in this particular room or not.

In the exhibition and, even more so, in the remarkable catalogue, Druick and Zegers build a convincing case that the artists shared intellectual territory for years, and not merely during the two months in Arles. Carefully scrutinizing works made both before and after the experimental partnership in late 1888, Druick and Zegers present the largest possible story: how the artists initiated an exchange by correspondence and conversation, even as they anticipated sharing a studio, and how their exhilarating two-month-long cohabitation ordeal was indelibly prolonged in recollection for the rest of their lives.

Before I comment on some of the core issues in "Van Gogh and Gauguin," it seems appropriate to mention the proliferation of reconstructed historic rooms in recent art exhibitions. Most notable, perhaps, was the inclusion in the Museum of Modern Art's 1998 Jackson Pollock exhibition of a reconstruction of his barn studio in East Hampton, enabling visitors to appreciate the surprising degree to which the artist was bodily constricted as he made large-scale works spanned with sweeping gestures. Other recent exhibitions have re-created historic display rooms, so today's viewers might recapture how particular kinds of art first came to be seen. Among the best examples, in 1999 the Whitney Museum of American Art's "The American Century: Art and Culture 1900-1950" included a partial reconstruction of Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery, the Surrealist showcase space designed by Frederick Kiesler, where works by Pollock first began to attract notice in the early 1940s. Remarkable props at the service of museums' educational mission, rooms like these are the culmination of a quarter century of sweeping change in exhibition design, departing more and more from the premise, old-fashioned today, that great works of art are best left to speak for themselves.

A detailed account of the evolution of the art museum exhibition in the age of blockbusters would have considerable interest. One key witness to the changes during this period is Chicago architect John Vinci, designer of the "Van Gogh and Gaugnin" exhibition. Vinci has played this role at many Art Institute exhibitions since 1971. For example, he was the designer for "Toulouse-Lantrec Paintings," which I organized for the Art Institute's centennial in 1979, when exhibition design was far less complex. We used no wall text panels, maps or photo blowups in 1979. There was no recorded headset tour, nor any reading rooms (the latter first became standard exhibition features in the late 1980s). With fewer exhibition-related products to sell back in 1979, the size of the shop for Toulouse-Lantrec merchandise was negligible by today's standards. For "Van Gogh and Ganguin" in Chicago, the shop was more than three times the size of the Yellow House. Of the 109 works in the "Toulouse-Lautrec Paintings" catalogue, only 20 were reproduced in color. For the "Van Gogh and Gauguin" catalogue, however, not only are all 135 works in the exhibition reproduced in color, but so, too, are scores of works not included, endowing this publication with a shelf life and an educational ambition far beyond that of the physical exhibition it records. This rich type of book exemplifies a trend away from the catalogue format standard since the 1970s with detailed entries for the exhibited works alone.