5 June 2014
Photo exhibition 'The World of Van Gogh: Photographs by Emmy Andriesse' in the Van Gogh Museum.
The birth a hundred years ago of Emmy Andriesse (1914-1953), the important, pioneering photographer of the first half of the twentieth century, is a perfect occasion for the Van Gogh Museum to show her outstanding photographs from our collection in the exhibition The World of Van Gogh: Photographs by Emmy Andriesse.
Not long before she died, Andriesse made the photo series called The World of Van Gogh. She went to Provence and Auvers-sur-Oise to document in photographs the themes and subject matter of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings sixty years earlier. Like the painter, she showed great interest in the common people and their everyday lives. "The result is a series of wonderful photographs in the spirit of Van Gogh's paintings and drawings, but above all, showing Andriesse's personal strength: her talent to capture the world around her at the very right moment. These photographs show how Van Gogh keeps inspiring artists, even after his death", according to museum director Axel Rüger.
Emmy Andriesse trained as a photographer in the period of the "New Photography" in the 1930s. Pioneering photographers discovered their own camera style, capturing objects in surprisingly new ways: by means of extreme close-ups, odd perspectives and an emphasis on the material. In this context, Andriesse developed her own personal style and was mainly interested in capturing human conditions, best represented by the famous photographs she took during the Dutch Hunger Winter (1944/1945). Not only in her final series The World of Van Gogh, but in her entire oeuvre did she portray ordinary people with perfect honesty and respect, giving anonymous people a highly individual face.
The exhibition The World of Van Gogh: Photographs by Emmy Andriesse will be shown on the second floor of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam until early October 2014.
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