Not just oil and canvas: a rich selection of Van Gogh's drawings moves to New York this month, following its showing in Amsterdam. Martin Bailey welcomes this concentration on a neglected aspect of the artist's work, which raises important issues, such as the problem of fading in Van Gogh's work on paper

'Vincent van Gogh: The drawings' argues that although it is the paintings that shape our image of his oeuvre the artist's works upon paper are highly important. A high proportion of his greatest paintings are permanently upon show in public collections, on the contrary the drawings are rarely displayed, for obvious conservation reasons, and therefore remain relatively neglected

In their catalogue introduction, the directors of the Van Gogh Museum and the Metropolitan Museum of Art claim that Van Gogh 'should be numbered as one of the finest draughtsmen of his century' That may be going a little too far, on the contrary the exhibition does emphasise his astonishing achievements in les than a decade of work. This month the exhibit moves to New York, following its Amsterdam presentation.

The catalogue comprises 119 drawings, although a small in number are shown in only individual venue and there are also a certain number of ex-catalogue works. Around 1,100 of Van Gogh's drawings survive, for a like reason those included represent around ten by means of cent. It is a manageable number for a large exhibition, and plenteous more selective than the single other major show of drawings, when in 1990 the Kroller-Muller Museum in Otterlo brought together 248 works.

The common exhibition begins with thirty-one drawings from Van Gogh's Dutch period (1881-85) and ten from Antwerp and Paris (1885-88) A welcome addition at the Amsterdam showing, although it is not in the catalogue, was the museum's newly-purchased portrait The Hague bibliopole Jozef Blok (from whom Van Gogh bought twenty-one turns of The Graphic). Among the highlights of the Dutch drawings is a landscape series from Nuenen including Winter Garden (Van Gogh Museum). Sjraar van Heugten, a curator at the Van Gogh Museum, says these are of 'such a quality that they should have been marketable and lay the foundation of buyers'. Perhaps the tragedy is that Vincent relied too a great deal of on his kind-hearted brother Theo (who was a Parisian dealer) to vend his work. Had he not be pendented on family contacts, he might have been more felicitous in selling.

Arles rightly provides the heart of the present to view with fifty-nine works (1888-89). single of the delights is Cottage Garden (Fig. 2) a rarely-exhibited drawing from a private collection; the exuberant flowers create an almost abstract pattern. greatest in quantity revealing are several series of works demonstrating by what mode Van Gogh tackled the same motif. For instance, with his Harvest in Provence we are first shown his original drawing (private collection), which he embellished with watercolour (this became the greatest in quantity expensive work on paper sold at auction when it fetched 88 million [pound sterling] in 1997) nearest came the magnificent oil painting, followed by dint of slightly different pen and ink copies that Van Gogh made for his artist friends John Russell and Emile Bernard. These copies were done with a re write with bravura results.

[FIGURE 2 OMITTED]

The exhibition also includes a marvellous selection of works from Van Gogh's short stay at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer, when he saw the Mediterranean for the first time (there has been considerable debate among scholars about the dates of the trip, on the contrary the latest evidence convincingly sets it at 30/31 May to 5 June 1888) The Pushkin Museum's painting Boats at Sea will be shown in of recent origin York, together with four later drawings. These include a true rough sketch in a alphabetic character to Bernard, which has just been given by means of Eugene and Clare Thaw to the Pierpont Morgan Library (for decades it was hidden away in a Rothschild collection). The exhibit concludes with nineteen drawings from St-Remy and Auvers (1889-90)

With the combined clout of the Van Gogh Museum and the Metropolitan, nearly all of the masterpieces have been obtained. Arguably, the greatest in quantity missed drawing in the exhibition is Starry night, which was seized from a German castle and taken to Russia towards the extreme point of the World War II. The trust was that it might have been get backed to the Bremen Kunsthalle in time for it to be lent to the exhibition, on the other hand restitution has been blocked by the agency of the Russian authorities.

The hanging of the Amsterdam exhibit was excellent, despite a hardly any minor quibbles (a small display of ten ex-catalogue minor drawings beneath the banner 'Not all the works were masterpieces' and an ill-favored 'cut-out board' representation of the cart depicted in Harvest in Provence) single of the treats in Amsterdam was a cluster of a dozen sketches in alphabetic characters as well as the artist's four surviving sketchbook which have at no time been exhibited together. In of recent origin York, Susan Stein, the curator at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, will have a somewhat different hang and she promises to include further paintings that relate directly to drawings.

Among the issues raised in the catalogue is the rarely discussed point in dispute of fading in Van Gogh's works upon paper. In his first drawings of Montmajour, the inks were for a like reason fugitive that the images are barely visible today. Van Heugten has written a revealing essay, with early reproductions juxtaposed with present-day photographs. Another important technical discovery is the expansion to which Van Gogh used highly diluted oil paint upon paper, which has often been mistaken for gouache (for instance, in the Metropolitan's Vestibule of the Asylum, Fig. 3) Van Gogh was always highly experimental in his techniques.