A “historic record”, welcomes the Musée d’Orsay, which announced that the exhibition event “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise” had attracted 793,556 visitors, “i.e. a daily average of 7,181 visitors over 108 days opening”, between October 3, 2023 and February 4, 2024.
“This is the best exhibition attendance since the museum opened” in 1986, ahead of “Edvard Munch. A poem of life, love and death”, in 2022, which brought together 724,414 visitors and “Picasso. Blue and Pink”, which attracted 670,667 visitors in 2018, according to the Parisian museum.
Entitled “Van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, the last months”, this exhibition focused on the last moments of the sacred monster of painting in this small town near Paris, where he committed suicide in a field in 1890, at age 37, after having painted 74 paintings there in seventy days.
A first for immersive reality
Among them, iconic paintings, such as Doctor Paul Gachet, The Church of Auvers-sur-Oise, The Cornfield with Ravens or Les Racines. It was the first major exhibition devoted to the works produced by Van Gogh during the last two months of his life and “the culmination of years of research”, according to the museum.
The Musée d’Orsay took the opportunity of this exhibition-event to offer its public for the first time an immersive reality experience immersing visitors in the painter’s palette using a virtual reality headset. A dialogue, sometimes more random, with Van Gogh was also launched thanks to an interactive terminal animated by artificial intelligence.
The museum will repeat the experience from March 26 for its major spring exhibition, “Paris 1874. Inventing Impressionism”, dedicated to 150 years of Impressionism. A new virtual immersive dive will be offered to visitors as part of a Parisian evening shared with the Impressionists.
