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I spent 6 months defending Van Gogh to my art group, then visited the museum in Amsterdam and walked out confused
I always argued Van Gogh was the most overhyped dead painter and everyone just liked the story of the ear and the sadness. So last month I went to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to prove my point, and honestly some of those paintings hit me way harder than I expected. Now I'm stuck because half the group says I finally get it and the other half says I sold out. Did anyone else flip their opinion after seeing the real thing in person?
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hannah_wells27d ago
Watched my buddy do almost the exact same thing last year. He talked trash about Monet for ages, said it was all blurry nothing and greeting cards, then his wife dragged him to the Orangerie in Paris and he stood in front of those water lily rooms for like 40 minutes without saying a word. Came back and told our group he still thought the gift shop stuff was cheesy but the big panels were a whole different animal. His take was that seeing them small in books or on a screen flattens everything out, and the size plus the paint thickness plus the way the light hits it does something a photo can never do. Nobody accused him of selling out, they just figured he finally saw them for real instead of judging from reprints. So you didn't flip on Van Gogh as a person or cave to hype, you just ran into the difference between a painting and a picture of a painting. That's not selling out, that's paying attention.
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