Vincent Van Gogh - Sunflowers

About the Print

Van Gogh painted sunflowers repeatedly, obsessively, across two distinct periods of his life. The 1889 version -- this one -- was made in Arles, in the south of France, during what was simultaneously the most productive and most destructive period of his career. He was painting at a pace that alarmed people around him. He was also unravelling.

The sunflowers were never really about sunflowers. Van Gogh used yellow the way other painters used light itself, as something that could carry emotional weight independent of what it was describing. The flowers in this painting are at different stages -- some opened fully, some drooping, one or two already dying. He signed his name on the vase. It's one of the few works he considered complete enough to sign.

The exhibition poster format -- "VAN GOGH / SUNFLOWERS / 1889" -- is a deliberate aesthetic choice. It references the tradition of museum print reproductions, the kind sold in gallery shops after you've stood in front of the original and needed to take something of it home. That's what a good reproduction should feel like.