Van Gogh, 1947

Abstract The 1947 Vincent Van Gogh retrospective held at the Musée de l’Orangerie, Paris, may seem to be a relatively obscure moment in the history of exhibitions. Yet some artistic and cultural ventures coming out of the show have had interesting afterlives. This article looks at how three productions – a Pathé newsreel story, Van Gogh Exhibition, 1947 (1947); Alain Resnais’s short film Van Gogh (1948); and Antonin Artaud’s pamphlet Van Gogh, Le Suicidé de la société (1947) – supplement and mediate the Paris exhibition. The exhibition appears, in turn, as a spectacle and social phenomenon (Pathé), a material basis for a narrative about the power of the imaginary in art and life (Resnais), and a dramatization of the impasse between the aesthetic and the social (Artaud). The article highlights the disparity between the logic of supplementarity that unfolds in the vicinity of the 1947 exhibition, where irreducibly elusive or mythic visions of aesthetic exposition predominate, and the double-edged models of supplementarity that circulate in present-day curatorial frameworks.