"Van Gogh & Japan" concerns a love affair of creative misperceptions between temporally and geographically distant admirers. Van Gogh (1853-1890) never went to Japan, though he idealized it briefly as a utopia in which artists worked communally in converse with nature.

Attempting to establish what became a short-lived artists' collective in Arles from early 1888, Van Gogh described a town surrounded by fields of spring flowers as a "Japanese dream." He wrote to his sister that he no longer needed Japanese paintings: "Here in Arles, I am in Japan." This fanciful outlook transposed a cheerier disposition upon what were famously troubled times for the artist.

The exhibition's focus is the bric-a-brac of Van Gogh's Japan fetishism from around 1886-1890. These include Japan references culled from his letters; Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints; illustrations he copied, such as the cover of the May 1886 Paris Illustre Le Japon; and Japanese imagery adapted to oil paintings, like the gaudy and incongruous collage of "Courtesan (after Eisen)" (1887). Further mention must be made of the ukiyo-e exhibition Van Gogh arranged in a favored cafe in 1887, and the inspiration he received from Pierre Loti's novel, "Madame Chrysanthemum," in 1888.