Event | Projection Tue 24 Mar 2026
18h30

Hervé Gauville presents a lecture-screening based on his book  L’Attrait de Vincent Van Gogh, (The Appeal of VvG), exploring the ways in which cinema has appropriated and reinterpreted the figure of the painter.

 

Hervé Gauville is a writer and art critic. Former head of the visual arts section at the newspaper Libération, he also contributed a regular cinema column to Artpress magazine and taught at the Geneva University of Art and Design (course entitled Arts plastiques & cinéma). He has published numerous writings on art as well as several literary works.

At a time when filmed biographies are multiplying—and painters’ biopics in particular—it is worth recalling that one of the most illustrious among them has been the subject of hundreds of essays, both literary and cinematic. Cinema was born five years after the death of Vincent van Gogh. Ever since, documentaries and fiction films have competed in their efforts to recount his life and approach his art.

Viewing Van Gogh through the lens of a camera differs fundamentally from the observation and analysis practiced by the art historian, the critic, or the amateur. It is hardly surprising that there are almost as many Van Goghs as there are filmmakers who have portrayed him. After all, do the painter’s some forty self-portraits not reveal as many different facets of his face? The so-called Self-Portrait at the Easel bears little resemblance to the Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.

Following the adventures of a life bordering on legend is a way of tracing the shifting discourse surrounding the painter—and, more broadly, art itself.

Rather than compiling an exhaustive list mixing museographic videos and educational documents, a deliberate choice was made to focus on nine films produced over the span of half a century, roughly from the centenary of Van Gogh’s birth to that of his death. What these films share is that they are first and foremost works of cinema. The painter serves as their pretext rather than their goal. In doing so, they prioritize cinematic art before seeking to render justice—if such justice is even required—to their subject, their “motif.”

In return, like a mirror held up to the camera, the Van Gogh figure illuminates cinema in its pursuit of authenticity and, above all, autonomy. What is at stake, then, is creating work with and through the work of a painter—that is, a fellow artist. And in the proliferation of images, Vincent gradually disappears, persisting all the while in his art.