Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers Film

Gain privileged access to the National Gallery’s blockbuster exhibition, Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers, in this incomparable, new documentary film by EXHIBITION ON SCREEN. 

Through January 19, 2025, the National Gallery, London, is hosting the UK’s largest Van Gogh exhibition and once-in-a-century show, 200 years after the museum’s opening and a century after acquiring its first Van Gogh works. The exhibition explores the two years and three months that Van Gogh spent in Arles and at the asylum in Saint-Rémy, located in the south of France. During this time, he painted with remarkable productivity, driven by an intense creative fervor that sometimes bordered on agony. This film is a chance to reexamine and better understand the iconic artist, who is not only one of the most beloved artists of all time but perhaps the most misunderstood.

“Wouldn’t it be nice to experience such a stellar show from the comfort of a plush upholstered chair, perhaps with a salty snack and a glass of something cool and clinking? Ready the popcorn for the film version of Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers by Exhibition on Screen. Every brushstroke and ridge of impasto is reproduced with extraordinary fidelity. There are no crowds, no queues, no takers of selfies. This is an excellent, insightful, immaculately filmed documentary”.
– Laura Freeman, Times Weekend Review

Explore the passion that drove one of the world’s favorite artists to change art forever. The combination of exhibition and film rewrites the narrative and celebrates Van Gogh’s genius without exploiting his suffering. This film is a chance to reexamine and better understand this iconic artist. Focusing on his unique creative process, Exhibition on Screen, Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers explores the artist’s years in the South of France, where he revolutionized his style. Van Gogh became consumed with a passion for storytelling in his art, turning the world around him into vibrant, idealized spaces and symbolic characters.

Poets and lovers filled his imagination; everything he did in the South of France served this new obsession. In part, this is what caused his notorious breakdown, but it didn’t hold back his creativity as he created masterpiece after masterpiece. Explore one of art history’s most pivotal periods in this once-in-a-century show.

EXHIBITION ON SCREEN 
2022 represented a milestone for Exhibition on Screen as the award-winning company celebrated a decade of bringing art films to cinemas across the world. It was then in 2023 that it broke box office records with Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition, which became the highest grossing art documentary in UK history. Since its launch, Exhibition on Screen has released over 35 films and sold more than six million cinema seats across the globe – from London to Los Angeles, Berlin to Brisbane.

Exhibition on Screen creates cinematic journeys into the personal and creative lives of history’s best-loved artists and their work. Amongst the roster to date are deep dives into the life and careers of Vermeer, Frida Kahlo, Edward Hopper, Rembrandt, Matisse, Munch and Monet, to name just a few.

THE NATIONAL GALLERY, LONDON
The National Gallery is one of the greatest art galleries in the world. Founded by Parliament in 1824, the Gallery houses the nation’s collection of paintings in the Western European tradition from the late 13th to the early 20th century. The collection includes works by Artemisia Gentileschi, Bellini, Cezanne, Degas, Leonardo, Monet, Raphael, Rembrandt, Renoir, Rubens, Titian, Turner, Van Dyck, Van Gogh and Velázquez. The Gallery’s key objectives are to care for and enhance the collection and provide the best possible access to visitors. Admission free. 

VAN GOGH: POETS & LOVERS
Sep 14,  2024 – Jan 19, 2025
The National Gallery owns two of Van Gogh’s (1853-1890) most famous paintings, Sunflower and Van Gogh’s Chair which can be seen in its first exhibition devoted to the artist. Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers is the first exhibition anywhere to focus on the artist’s imaginative transformations. It includes over 60 works and loans from museums and private collections around the world, including important pictures from the Kröller Müller Museum, Otterlo, Netherlands, the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam, and the Musée d’Orsay, Paris. Groups of Van Gogh’s most ambitious canvases and works on paper explore the artist’s creative process and his sources of inspiration. Dwelling on his time in Arles and Saint-Rémy in Provence (1888 -1890), the exhibition investigates the artist’s fascinating practice of turning the places he encounteredinto idealised spaces in his art, thus crafting a deeply resonant and poetic framework for his oeuvre. The exhibition also shows how portraits played a vital role, as Van Gogh assigned his models symbolic meaning within his artistic universe such as the Poet and Lover of the exhibition’s title.

More information at https://nationalgallery.org.uk/  nationalgallery.org.uk 

David Bickerstaff (Director / Co-Author)
David Bickerstaff is an artist, actor, director, editor and writer. He has produced many films for Exhibition on Screen, including other features on Van Gogh, as well as Degas, Canaletto and many others. He also runs ATOMICTV, an organisation showcasing of many of his media projects (https://www.atomictv.com).

Phil Grabsky (Producer / Co-Author) 
Phil Grabsky is a BAFTA-winning British documentary filmmaker who has received multiple awards for his directing, writing, producing and cinematography. He and his company Seventh Art Productions are behind cinema films such as Muhammad Ali – Through the Eyes of the World, In Search of Beethoven, In Search of Mozart and the landmark My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years in Afghanistan, which won more than a dozen awards including Best Single Documentary at the 2022 Television BAFTAs and was also BAFTA nominated for its cinematography. He has made over 250 films which have played in cinemas and on TV and digital platforms worldwide. In 2009, Phil and his colleagues began work on a new arts genre for the cinema: Exhibition on Screen. This brings major art exhibitions – and the intimate biographies of the artists – to cinema, mainstream television and home entertainment platforms worldwide. The Guardian newspaper said of Exhibition on Screen: ‘Just occasionally something will crop up that restores your faith in humanity’s future. Exhibition on Screen is a global phenomenon’. Exhibition on Screen now plays in 1500 cinemas and 60+ countries worldwide and has produced 36 films on artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Vincent van Gogh, Rembrandt, Hockney, Frida Kahlo, Raphael and many more. The early 2023 release of VERMEER – THE GREATEST EXHIBITION was an extraordinary success and is the most successful documentary film on an artist ever released in the UK (and worldwide) and in the top 20 of any genre of documentary ever released in the UK.  

Website: exhibitiononscreen.com

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