Few artists are in demand as much as Van Gogh, making it increasingly difficult to mount exhibitions with outside loans. Yet the shows continue, giving pleasure to millions. Despite the appetite for “immersive experiences”, nothing beats seeing the real thing. Here we present the first comprehensive preview of exhibitions opening in 2025.
Boston, March and Amsterdam, October
Van Gogh’s Portrait of Joseph Roulin, Arles (early 1889)
Museum of Modern Art, New York (gifts by exchange, 1989)
What promises to be the most revealing Van Gogh exhibition of the year will be devoted to the portraits of the postman Joseph Roulin and his family. These were painted between the summer of 1888 and early 1889. Roulin, who worked at the Arles railway station and drank with Vincent at the Café de la Gare, became the artist’s closest friend in Provence.
Van Gogh: The Roulin Family Portraits opens at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts (30 March-7 September 2025), an appropriate venue since it owns the finest of the postman paintings, along with one of his wife rocking the cradle of their newly born child. The exhibition will then travel to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam (3 October 2025-11 January 2026). With just over half the 23 scattered portraits, the show (based on new research) will be slightly modest in terms of number of works, but it promises to be deep in impact.
Osaka, July and Tokyo, September
Van Gogh’s Self-portrait as a Painter (December 1887-February 1888)
Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam (Vincent van Gogh Foundation)
Japanese Van Gogh lovers can expect a bumper year of exhibitions. The first show touring to three venues will be packed with loans from the Amsterdam museum, under the title Van Gogh’s Home: the Van Gogh Museum, the Painter’s Legacy, the Family Collection, the Ongoing Story. It opens at the Osaka City Museum of Fine Arts (5 July-31 August 2025) and is then touring to the Tokyo Metropolitan Art Museum (12 September–21 December 2025) and the Aichi Prefectural Museum of Art in Nagoya (tentatively 3 January–23 March 2026).
The show will focus on the story of the collection assembled by Vincent’s brother Theo and then administered by his widow Jo Bonger and their son. In 1973 the family went on to create the Van Gogh Museum. The coming Japanese show will have over 30 Van Goghs (nearly all paintings, along with a few drawings), plus works by other artists collected by Vincent and Theo, including examples by Paul Gauguin and Camille Pissarro. Also on show will be four letters written by Vincent (these are very rarely lent for exhibitions, for conservation reasons).
Den Bosch, July
Van Gogh’s Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885)
Het Noordbrabants Museum, s’Hertogenbosch (photograph Peter Cox)
To celebrate its new acquisition of Head of a Woman (Gordina de Groot) (March-April 1885), the Noordbrabants Museum is to hold an exhibition centred around Van Gogh’s studies for his first masterpiece, The Potato Eaters (April-May 1885), in which Gordina is depicted.
The exhibition, in s’Hertogenbosch (Den Bosch) in the south of the Netherlands, is entitled simply The Potato (26 July-23 November 2025). There will also be a smaller show on this theme with contemporary artists at the Vincent van Gogh House in Zundert, the artist’s birthplace (11 October-9 November 2025).
Kobe, September
Van Gogh’s Terrace of a Café at Night (Place du Forum) (September 1888)
Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (photograph Rik Klein Gotink)
A second large show in Japan will present works from other great Dutch Van Gogh collection, the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, in the east of the Netherlands. It is ambitiously entitled the Grand Van Gogh Exhibition. There will be nearly 50 Van Goghs, both paintings and drawings.
The exhibition will open at Kobe City Museum (20 September 20-1 February 2026) and then tour to two other venues: Fukushima Prefectural Museum of Art (21 February-10 May 2026) and Tokyo’s Ueno Royal Museum (29 May-12 August 12 2026). A second part of the exhibition, with other works, is planned for 2027-28.
Running exhibitions
There is an enormous appetite for Van Gogh in Korea, and the largest exhibition on the artist in more than a decade is about to open in Seoul. Van Gogh: The Great Passion will start at the Hangaram Art Museum/Seoul Arts Center (29 November-16 March 2025) and then travel to the Daejeon Museum of Art (27 March-22 June 2025). The loans, numbering around 60, are from the Kröller-Müller Museum.
Another major exhibition which opened this autumn and will continue into early in the new year is Van Gogh: Poets & Lovers (until 19 January 2025) at London’s National Gallery.
Other current shows include Ultra-Violet: New Light on Van Gogh’s Irises at the J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles (until 19 January 2025) and How Van Gogh came to Groningen at the Groninger Museum (30 November-5 May 2025). An exhibition on Martin Wong-Vincent van Gogh is now on at the Kunsthaus Zurich (until 26 January 2025) and will then go to Vienna’s Albertina (14 February-22 June 2025).
And finally, there will be an important exhibition on the German artist Anselm Kiefer and his links with the Dutch painter at the Van Gogh Museum (7 March-9 June 2025) and London’s Royal Academy of Arts (28 June-26 October 2025).
Anselm Kiefer’s The Starry Night (2019)
© Anselm Kiefer (photograph Georges Poncet)
Other Van Gogh news:
Van Gogh’s A Pair of Lovers (March 1888)
Private collection, on loan to Cleveland Museum of Art
A Pair of Lovers (March 1888), which Van Gogh cut out of a larger composition that he discarded, is on long-term loan to the Cleveland Museum of Art. It was sold at Sotheby’s in 2022, going for £10m.
