AI Brian Sewell's verdict* on the Van Gogh show? Vapid, arrant nonsense

Our late art critic was renowned for his excoriating reviews. In a one-off experiment, we asked AI what he would say about the National Gallery’s latest exhibition

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V an Gogh: Poets and Lovers at the National Gallery is yet another insipid exercise in sentimental hagiography. This exhibition, which purports to explore the artist’s “intimate” relationships through a series

of portraits and floral studies, is in fact a shallow indulgence in romanticism — the worst kind, pandering to the emotions of the casual visitor while glossing over the profundities of Van Gogh’s art. It seems the National Gallery has decided to package him as the patron saint of unrequited love, his works reduced to greeting cards for the emotionally overwrought.

The title itself — Poets and Lovers — reeks of mawkishness. One expects poetry in Van Gogh’s brushwork, but what does “lovers” add, save to titillate those who prefer their artists to suffer romantically as well as mentally? This framing does a disservice not only to the works on display but to Van Gogh himself. The artist’s portraits — L’Arlésienne and Joseph Roulin among them — are not declarations of sentimental attachment, but rather exercises in psychological and emotional depth, framed with a startling precision of colour and line. But in this exhibition, their complexity is reduced to footnotes in a trite narrative of affection, with Van Gogh cast as a lovelorn figure pining for recognition.

Of course, we are presented with the inevitable floral still lifes — Irises and Roses, works of dazzling chromatic intensity. Here, too, the exhibition insists on an unnecessary emotional overlay, as though Van Gogh’s use of colour needs to be explained away as an expression of yearning or loneliness. How tiresome. The accompanying texts are riddled with florid prose, invoking the usual clichés about Van Gogh’s “inner turmoil”.

Myth of the doomed lover