L.A. TO DRAW MAJOR SHOW OF VAN GOGH.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

In the largest survey of Vincent van Gogh's career outside The Netherlands in more than a quarter century, officials said Monday that the Los Angeles County Museum of Art will host 70 of the artist's paintings in an exhibition opening here January 1999.

``Van Gogh's Van Goghs: Masterpieces from the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam'' will present paintings from the world's largest repository of works by the eccentric Dutch artist (1853-90), whose tragic life and career have become virtually synonomous in this century with the idea of unappreciated artistic genius.

The exhibition's only other appearance will be at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. The National Gallery is organizing the show with the Van Gogh Museum, in collaboration with LACMA.

``Van Gogh's Van Goghs'' will run Oct. 4, 1998, through Jan. 3, 1999, at the National Gallery and at LACMA from Jan. 17 through April 4, 1999.

``LACMA is pleased to be uniquely suited to bring an exhibition of this scale and importance to Southern California and the Western United States,'' said Andrea Rich, LACMA's president and chief executive officer. ``This extraordinary event will be only the first of several such exhibitions that LACMA will be offering to the people of Los Angeles and our region in the next few years.''

The exhibition promises to be the sort of cultural blockbuster that draws long visitor lines and makes gift-shop cash registers sing.

Drawn entirely from the Van Gogh Museum's holdings, the exhibition will illustrate all phases of Van Gogh's poignantly brief career: from his somber, earth-toned early works depicting the hard lives of Dutch peasants; to his Paris-inspired Impressionist period; to the effusively colorful landscapes he produced in Arles, St. Remy and Auvers; to the writhing, tormented paintings that preceded his suicide in 1890.

It will include such iconic masterpieces as ``Potato Eaters'' (1885), ``The Bedroom'' (1888), ``Self-Portrait as an Artist'' (1888), ``The Zouave,'' ``The Harvest'' (1888) and ``Wheatfield with Crows'' (1890). Several works never before seen in the United States also will be on view, such as ``Scheveningen Beach in Stormy Weather'' (1882), ``Head of a Peasant Woman'' (1885) and ``Flying Fox'' (1886).

``Bringing the world's greatest art to our community is a major part of LACMA's mission,'' said Graham W.J. Beal, the museum's director. ``The Van Gogh exhibition permits us to underline that commitment and re-establish our long tradition of providing unparalleled artistic experiences in Los Angeles.''

With a collection of some 200 paintings and more than 500 drawings and 700 letters, the Van Gogh Museum was founded by the artist's nephew, Dr. V.W. van Gogh in 1973. Its holdings, on loan from the Vincent Van Gogh Foundation, also include significant works by other 19th-century artists.

``Only a visit to Amsterdam in the past 25 years could equal the experience visitors will have when they see these breathtaking works created during the intensely productive years of Van Gogh's brief life,'' said Earl A. ``Rusty'' Powell III, director of the National Gallery and former director of LACMA. ``His uncompromisingly insightful self-portraits, his deeply sympathetic depictions of working Dutch folk, and his discovery of radiant light and the Mediterranean landscape are represented in (these) works.''

The U.S. exhibition will take place during a period when the Van Gogh Museum will be closed to the public for renovation and construction of a new wing. After that time, it is expected that the museum will have sufficient room to display the bulk of its collections, making future outside exhibitions rare, an official said.

Details of how to purchase tickets to the LACMA exhibition will be announced this summer.

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Photo

Photo: detail of ``Potato Eaters,'' 1885

Courtesy of Van Gogh Museum