LACMA's New Van Gogh Debuts Dec. 21
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| Vincent van Gogh, Tarascon Stagecoach, 1888, as shown at Museo Nacional de Arte, Mexico City, last year. LACMA, gift of Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. Photo: hamburguesasencilla |
Los Angeles will get its first view of LACMA's new van Gogh, Tarascon Stagecoach, starting Dec. 21. The painting will initially be part of "Collecting Impressionism at LACMA," a year-long show running through Jan. 27, 2027. The exhibition of over a hundred objects will also debut Monet's The Artist's Garden, Vétheuil, part of Jerrold Perenchio's bequest of Impressionist and Modern works.
The van Gogh is a gift of the Henry and Rose Pearlman Foundation. In February, that collection gets its own exhibition, "Village Square: Gifts of Modern Art from the Pearlman Collection to the Brooklyn Museum, LACMA, and MoMA" (Feb. 22–July 5, 2006). Tarascon Stagecoach will be moved to "Village Square" for its L.A. run and then travel to the Brooklyn Museum in fall 2026.
Both LACMA shows will be in the Resnick Pavilion.
Comments
I am thankful for Brooklyn and MoMA to have qualified as keepers of this master picture.
> will be in the Resnick
> Pavilion.
I wonder how Impressionist-era artworks will be dealt with? I assume they will be exhibited in the Geffen next to older periods of European works, but with Govan's LACMA, who knows?
The permanent collection of modern since 2020 has been in the Broad/BCAM, which originally was for contemporary. Not sure if Eli Broad in 2008 inserted a condition to his donation that the building bearing his name had to contain post-1940s art only. If so, legal agreements in the world of museums have grown increasingly porous (eg, Barnes Foundation).
A Van Gogh, etc, in either the Resnick or BCAM will be in a more traditional (friendlier?) setting, whereas works in the Geffen will be competing with lots of gray concrete and windows.
However, the previous buildings didn't help the museum either, so change was necessary. But now LACMA's biggest challenge in the future is to not be cheapened by the mindset of hip and funky (TikTok!) instead of the so-called encyclopedic.
Speaking of which, I recall when I was in the Metropolitan, its galleries for older periods of European art - or Louvre-style - had way fewer visitors than its galleries for Impressionist art.