Van Gogh: Fields - The Field with Poppies and the Artists' Dispute

Vincent van Gogh arrived in Saint-Ramy-de-Provence in 1889 to be voluntarily treated for psychiatric illness. Poppyfield was one of the first pictures that the artist painted that year of the countryside surrounding the asylum, and it continues the leitmotif of fields which runs throughout his oeuvre. Van Gogh's mind was rooted in the cycles of nature, from the mythical sower to the flowering corn to the autumnal reaper. What The Poppyfield and the Artist's Protest also reveals is the artistic possibilities hidden in his conception of the landscape, in the perspectival effect of depth and the accentuation of the canvas's surface. More than 50 paintings and drawings by the Dutch artist are represented here, all of them a tribute to van Gogh's idiosyncratic interpretation of the landscape. Additionally, this publication discusses the particular situation of Poppyfield, which was acquired by the Bremen Kunsthalle in 1911 amid the protests of German artists who were against the arrival of French modernism in German museums. Bremen curator Gustav Pauli, with the support of artists like Max Lieberman and Wassily Kandinsky, defended the purchase.