London’s National Gallery to stage landmark show on modernism in 2023

A new exhibition of more than 100 paintings and sculptures by masters including Pablo Picasso, Vincent Van Gogh and Piet Mondrian are set to go on display at the National Gallery next year.

The Art Newsletter said that although exhibitions are rarely announced so far in advance, it is scheduled to run from September 2024 to January 2025. 50 works are expected to be on display, mainly paintings, along with some drawings. This will make it the largest Van Gogh exhibition in the UK since the Royal Academy’s 2010 show, which attracted 411,000 visitors.

Among the high-profile exhibits expected to be displayed, is Van Gogh’s Garden of the Asylum, (November 1889) from the Folkwang Museum in Essen. It depicts a walled enclosure where the inmates would take their exercise under the trees, with a distant view of the hills of Les Alpilles.

This painting shows the garden of the clinic in Saint-Rémy where Van Gogh spent a year. He worked there regularly when his illness meant he was not allowed to venture outside. Van Gogh wrote to his friend Bernard about this painting: ‘You’ll understand that this combination of red ochre, of green saddened with grey, of black lines that define the outlines, this gives rise a little to the feeling of anxiety from which some of my companions in misfortune often suffer, and which is called “seeing red”.’