Van Gogh was reborn nearly a century after his death in the work of painters in Europe and the United States, whose expressive mark-making and focus on the artist as outsider reshaped his legacy for the late twentieth century. These revivals of expressionism, in the work of artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat in New York, Rainer Fetting in Berlin, and Enzo Cucchi in Rome, framed Van Gogh as a figurehead of a certain approach both to making art and to being an artist. This talk will look at a range of works of art that interpreted the legacy of Van Gogh for a postmodern audience.

Ben Street is an art historian and educator. He is the author of How to Enjoy Art: A Guide for Everyone (Yale, 2021) and a children's book, How to Be An Art Rebel (Thames and Hudson, 2021), among other books. He is a contributing writer to Art Review, Apollo and the Times Literary Supplement. He lectures for the University of Oxford and the University of East Anglia and has been an educator for all ages for the National Gallery, Tate, the Royal Academy, Dulwich Picture Gallery and the Museum of Modern Art and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York. More at benstreet.co.uk or @thebenstreet on instagram.