This week: the Van Gogh blockbuster in London, a new book on the birth of Impressionism, and Juan Pablo Echeverri’s performative self-portraits. As the exhibition Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers opens at the National Gallery in London as part of its bicentenary celebrations, The Art Newspaper’s special correspondent and resident expert in the Dutch painter, Martin Bailey, takes a tour of the exhibition with our associate digital editor, Alexander Morrison. The National Gallery of Art in Washington, meanwhile, has just opened the exhibition Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, its iteration of the show marking 150 years since the first Impressionist exhibition, which began earlier this year at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. Coinciding with the show is the publication of the book Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism, by the Washington Post art critic, Sebastian Smee. Ben Luke speaks to Sebastian about the book. And this episode’s Work of the Week is MUTIlady (2003) by Juan Pablo Echeverri. The photographic piece features nine photographs in which the late Colombian artist pictures himself with an apparently flayed body and wildly different haircuts seemingly reflecting a multitude of identities. The work is part of the exhibition GROW IT, SHOW IT! A look at hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok, which opened this week at the Museum Folkwang in Essen, Germany. The show’s curator, Miriam Bettin, tells Ben more about the artist and the work.

Van Gogh: Poets and Lovers, The National Gallery, London, 14 September-19 January 2025; The Sunflowers are Mine: The Story of Van Gogh’s Masterpiece and Van Gogh’s Finale: Auvers and the Artist’s Rise to Fame by Martin Bailey, Frances Lincoln, each £10.99/$14.99 (pb), from 17 October, but available now at the National Gallery.

Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism is published by W. W. Norton & Company in US and out now, priced $35. In the UK it’s published by Oneworld, out on 17 October and priced £25; Paris 1874: The Impressionist Moment, National Gallery of Art, Washington, until 19 January 2025.

GROW IT, SHOW IT! A look at hair from Diane Arbus to TikTok, Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany, until 12 January 2025.

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