From Renaissance Masters to ’80s Enfants Terribles, Hamish Bowles Presents His European Art Agenda | Vogue

"I visited the Van Gogh Foundation, unveiled in its present iteration—a contemporary structure built around a 17th-century townhouse. The current exhibition, La Vie Simple: Songs of Alienation (through April 2), explores contemporary artists’ responses to a bucolic life—in many instances threatened by the onslaught of the modern world—that parallel the work of the 19th-century Barbizon school artists and Vincent van Gogh’s own passionate embrace of the lifestyle he discovered here; Juergen Teller pictures the fairly grim rural vistas of his German birthplace, while Yto Barrada’s 2007 photographic series “Iris Tingitana” documents the poignant loss of a landscape where this flower—so beloved by Van Gogh—has traditionally flourished beneath the developer’s cement." - Hamish Bowles