Yellow. Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour

Sun, corn and sunflowers

Van Gogh exclaimed ‘How beautiful?yellow?is!’ while he was in the South of France. During this period, the colour became an essential part of his work: the warm, brilliant yellow of the wheat fields, the blazing sun and the famous Sunflowers (1889). The Sunflowers launches the exhibition’s exploration of what the colour meant to artists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Yellow fever

Yellow is the ideal colour to convey sunlight and warmth. Before Van Gogh and Paul Signac made yellow shimmer, William Turner used it to capture the sun so exuberantly that critics claimed he must have been suffering from yellow fever. Around 1900, yellow was also associated with modernity and daring, thanks to the innovative and even somewhat scandalous French novels with striking yellow covers. Artists depicted these books as a symbol of modernity. As it is so bold, yellow was a perfect colour to attract attention. It took on a more personal, spiritual dimension for artists such as Hilma af Klint and Wassily Kandinsky, who associated yellow with an inner sense of sound and music. Yellow can be a changeable colour: sometimes it is warm and joyful, at other times glaring and impure. It is precisely this ambiguity that makes yellow such a fascinating subject – a colour for artists with courage.?

Contemporary yellow: Olafur Eliasson

Olafur Eliasson combined several light installations especially for Yellow. Beyond Van Gogh’s Colour, which invite visitors to immerse themselves and experience yellow in a direct, sensory way. This site-specific installation will be on view in the Netherlands for the first time. The Van Gogh Museum has collaborated with a range of surprising partners for this exhibition, including students from the Conservatorium van Amsterdam, fragrance experts from Robertet from Grasse and designers from RAW Color. Yellow comes to life through sound, scent, form and light.