Art in Transit: Van Gogh Goes Down Under as Picasso and Pals Head to Cuba

 
For a couple of dead fellows, they do get around. News from the art world has masterpieces by two of Museyon’s favorites headed to new climes. First, a selection of 112 works from Paris’ renowned Musée D’Orsay are currently on display at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra, including Paul Gauguin’s “Tahitian Women on the Beach” (1891) and the highly popular Vincent Van Gogh paintings “Starry Night Over the Rhone” (above) and one of his “Bedroom in Arles” studies, both from his famous residency in the Bouches-du-Rhône city in and around 1888. It’s a significant step as Canberra is only now coming into its own as a theater for great exhibitions and, slowly, proving its worth as a destination that may one day compete with the more popular tourist sites like Melbourne and Sydney. Meanwhile, Swiss collector Gilbert Brownstone is donating a group of 120 works to the National Museum of Fine Arts of Havana in Cuba. Naturally, some will be shaking their fists as valuable pieces by Andy Warhol, Camille Pissarro, Roy Lichtenstein, Pablo Picasso, and many others make their way to the Communist Autocracy (where, by the by, Americans are not allowed to visit by law). Whether you can skirt around U.S. trade laws or not, at least you can follow Van Gogh through Arles and four other painters in legally accessible cities with our forthcoming “Art + Travel Europe: Step into the Lives of Five Famous Painters”. We won’t tell the State Department a thing.