Art Review: London’s National Gallery ‘Poets and Lovers’ Show on 200th Birthday

It’s the National Gallery’s 200th birthday, so I’m in London covering what seems to be a moment of both vacuity and splendor. The place was certainly packed, with even the Dutch galleries seeming more like beehive Amsterdam than Friesland in February, so flat and so rural that you can skate across the province. To its great credit, the NG, founded in 1824, is high and dry. Poets and Lovers, the anniversary year’s Champagne pop, gathers 61 works by Vincent Van Gogh. The art’s dazzling and uplifting, but the scholarship’s gooey. Like many action heroes, he’s had a lot of sequels lately.

There’s yet another David Hockney exhibition, this one comparing him to Piero della Francesca. Hockney’s a national treasure here, but he’s been matched over the past few years with Matisse, the Impressionists, Hogarth, and Van Gogh, every artist, it seems, but my own local heroine, Grandma Moses. Enough, already. Much, too much, already. As I walked through both exhibitions, I felt that I was expected to be wowed by big names when fresh, good ideas are what I like with what I acknowledge are many of Van Gogh’s best things.

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Brian T. Allen

Brian T. Allen is National Review’s art critic.

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It’s the National Gallery’s 200th birthday, so I’m in London covering what seems to be a moment of both vacuity and splendor. The place was certainly packed, with even the Dutch galleries seeming more like beehive Amsterdam than Friesland in February, so flat and so rural that you can skate across the province. To its great credit, the NG, founded in 1824, is high and dry. Poets and Lovers, the anniversary year’s Champagne pop, gathers 61 works by Vincent Van Gogh. The art’s dazzling and uplifting, but the scholarship’s gooey. Like many action heroes, he’s had a lot of sequels lately.

There’s yet another David Hockney exhibition, this one comparing him to Piero della Francesca. Hockney’s a national treasure here, but he’s been matched over the past few years with Matisse, the Impressionists, Hogarth, and Van Gogh, every artist, it seems, but my own local heroine, Grandma Moses. Enough, already. Much, too much, already. As I walked through both exhibitions, I felt that I was expected to be wowed by big names when fresh, good ideas are what I like with what I acknowledge are many of Van Gogh’s best things.