Tuesday, February 16, 2016

Sleep in Van Gogh's Bedroom

To promote its current show "Van Gogh's Bedrooms," The Art Institute of Chicago has created a replica of Van Gogh's bedroom at Arles which he painted three times. The museum is bringing together all three paintings in an historic showing.

The replica bedroom is listed on Airbnb here and is actually available for nightly stays! The listing is amusingly written from the point of view of the master himself:

"I'm charging $10 for no other reason than that I need to buy paint. However, I will be happy to provide you with tickets to my exhibition at the Art Institute of Chicago. "


Van Gogh painted this room three different times. The Art Institute's site elaborates:

Vincent van Gogh’s bedroom in Arles is arguably the most famous chambre in the history of art. It also held special significance for the artist, who created three distinct paintings of this intimate space from 1888 to 1889. This exhibition—presented only at the Art Institute of Chicago—brings together all three versions of The Bedroom for the first time in North America, offering a pioneering and in-depth study of their making and meaning to Van Gogh in his relentless quest for home.

Van Gogh painted his first Bedroom just after moving into his beloved “Yellow House” in Arles, France, in 1888. He was so enamored with the work, now in the collection of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, that after water damage threatened its stability, he became determined to preserve the composition by painting a second version while at an asylum in Saint-Rémy in 1889. Identical in scale and yet distinct from the original, that second work is now one of the icons of the Art Institute’s permanent collection. Van Gogh created a smaller third version, now at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, as a gift for his mother and sister a few weeks after making the second. While the three paintings at first appear almost identical, when examined closely, each reveals distinct and unique details.


http://www.artic.edu/exhibition/van-goghs-bedrooms

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