In 2019 an exhibition entitled Hockney-Van Gogh: The Joy of Nature was mounted at Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. Two years later the same exhibition opened in the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. For both events there was no literal, picture-by-picture gallery catalogue. Instead there was an intelligent, discursive book written by the Dutch art critic and curator, Hans den Hartog Jager, who had previously published on Van Gogh.
Beautifully packaged by Thames & Hudson, is a rare tome that transcends the idea of an exhibition catalogue as mere souvenir. Instead, it is a timeless statement about the parallels between David Hockney’s later
