GO VAN GOGH! DUTCH ART MASTER DRAWS THOUSANDS OF ADMIRERS.

Byline: Anthony Breznican Associated Press 

Vincent van Gogh looked a little surprised.

The painter stared with a bemused eye from his ``Self-Portrait as an Artist'' as nearly 4,000 starry-eyed admirers clutched $24 tickets for the opening of ``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' Sunday at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art.

Though the troubled, lonely artist sold few paintings during his life, this exhibit has brought him rock star-like status despite the absence of popular works such as ``The Starry Night'' and van Gogh's famous still-life flowers.

``I wanted to see those famous ones, but this show is beautiful,'' said Mary Ann Downs, 40, of Thousand Oaks. ``My daughter asked, Why are you crying, Mom?''

Museum officials expect nearly 900,000 people to attend the show during its four-month stint in Los Angeles. An estimated 450,000 attended the display in Washington, D.C., this fall.

``This is once in a lifetime, never again will so many works be traveling abroad,'' said Willem van Gogh, chairman of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. He is the great-grandson of the painter's late brother, Theo van Gogh.

The paintings left for the United States only after workers began renovations on the artist's museum in Amsterdam, Willem van Gogh said. This is the second and last American stop before the paintings return to Amsterdam on May 16.

Opening-day visitors joked and jostled each other like fans at a football game while waiting in hourlong lines to see 70 of the Dutch impressionist's masterpieces.

``Go van Gogh!'' Denise Willson, 40, cheered as she waited in line with her husband and two friends. ``If you have an ear for art, go van Gogh

''

Eager shoppers at the museum gift-store snatched up cards, posters and everything from van Gogh pop-up books to refrigerator magnets.

``How cool is it to be a kid and have a van Gogh lunch box?'' said Chicago tourist Laura Grisolano, 34, while hoisting an armload of three lunch boxes, two T-shirts, a pencil case and a framed print for her husband, who could not get a ticket.

John Rowe shelled out $110 for a framed print of ``Wheatfield of Crows.''

``I think this one is even larger than the real one,'' he said, leaning against the frame. ``The other paintings at my house will get a lot more cramped on the wall.''

The mood was far more somber inside the five-room exhibit, where the first section featured many of van Gogh's earlier, darker works such as ``Skull of a Skeleton with Burning Cigarette'' and ``The Potato Eaters,'' a depiction of five gaunt peasants dining under a dim oil lamp.

``I'm scared,'' one young girl said to her mother after leaving the room.

Carolyn Willis Vena, 60, a Los Angeles artist, said she enjoyed the paintings from van Gogh's years in Paris, where he adopted the bright colors and brisk strokes of the impressionist movement.

``He had a way of looking at a field of wheat and seeing so much more than other people. That translates in his art,'' she said. ``I think he was sort of crazy, and he was alone and saw things differently, while most of us would just see what the rest of society saw.''

Enthusiasts were also offered an ``audio tour'' of the exhibit in which they were given a tape that included a history of van Gogh's life as well as explanations of each painting.

Many clustered around well-known works such as ``The Bedroom,'' a wide-angled perspective of van Gogh's brightly colored bed and night stand.

``His brush strokes were so thick,'' said Oskar Ulloa, 25. ``Seeing it in person . . . it's almost like looking at a sculpture.''

Also attracting large groups was ``Wheatfield with a Reaper,'' a death metaphor in which van Gogh had explained was a ``vague figure fighting like the devil in the midst of the heat to get to the end of his task.''

``I see in this reaper the image of death in the sense that humanity may be the wheat he is reaping,'' van Gogh wrote to Theo in 1889. ``But there's nothing sad in this death, it goes its way in broad daylight with a sun flooding everything with a light of pure gold.''

He committed suicide a year later at age 37. His career lasted only 10 years.

CAPTION(S):

2 photos

PHOTO (1 -- color) Ticket holders wait to enter the 9 a.m. viewing of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Vincent van Gogh exhibit on Sunday. The show continues until May 16.

(2) A visitor hurries to the van Gogh exhibit at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, which began Sunday.

Charlotte Schmid-Maybach/Special to the Daily News