Van Gogh Self-Portraits review: An intimate and harrowing look at an artist facing fatal collapse

Comprising only 18 works, this show at London’s Courtauld Gallery is tiny. Yet its emotional scale is massive

Vincent van Gogh (1853 – 1890), Self-Portrait with Grey Felt Hat (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)

It’s hard to imagine a more sure-fire crowd-pulling exhibition than this one. Van Gogh may have peaked as “the world’s favourite artist” (I’m expecting at any minute to hear Andy Warhol is now filling that role), but the Vincent formula of joyful art and tragic life story (he shot himself aged 37) has lost none of its power to compel. Everyone from primary school children to the absolute dons of painting, the Hockneys, Kiefers and Doigs, “loves” Van Gogh. How can you not?

And the self-portraits, where the artist is looking into the depths of his very being, are surely the place to encounter Van Gogh’s art at its rawest and most intimate.

Bringing together 15 of Van Gogh’s 35 painted self-portraits, this exhibition at London’s Courtauld gallery is – incredibly – the first devoted to this aspect of Van Gogh’s art. Since his death, Van Gogh has been retrospectively diagnosed with a whole range of problems, from bipolar and borderline personality disorders to epilepsy, severe alcohol poisoning and sunstroke. During the three years in which the show’s works were painted – 1887 to 1890 – he arrived in Paris, travelled to the south of France where he created his most famous works, mutilated his own ear and checked himself into an insane asylum back in northern France, before killing himself in July 1890. This is, of course, well-trawled territory, and the exhibition adopts a more sober, academically credible approach, wanting to dispel the idea that these paintings are “simply outpourings of raw emotion as the artist faced himself in the mirror” – an idea perpetuated not least by Kirk Douglas’s eye-rolling performance in the film Lust for Life.