BASEL, Switzerland -- Vincent van Gogh may have preferred painting portraits and figures, but his landscapes sparked a revolution in art.

Seventy landscapes, among them key works never seen by wide audiences, are presented in an ambitious show at Basel's distinguished Kunstmuseum that is being billed as ``Europe's art event of the year.''

Vincent van Gogh Between Earth and Heaven focuses for the first time exclusively on his landscapes, the most frequent motif in his work. Organizers expect more than half a million visitors before the exhibition ends Sept. 27.

Lenders include museums in the United States, Japan, Israel and seven European countries as well as several private collectors. Kunstmuseum director Bernhard Mendes Buergi, who is also one of the curators, says the fact that the art was permitted to travel to Basel is ``quite extraordinary.''

The combined insurance value of the works is given at more than $2 billion. Premiums and the cost of mounting the exhibition are certain to be correspondingly high.

Buergi says the project would not have been possible without sponsoring UBS, the largest Swiss bank, a top victim of the financial crisis that is getting substantial survival subsidies from the government.

The show's pieces mirror the continuous shifts in Van Gogh's mental state, alternating between hope, fits of self-doubt and the despair that eventually drove him to suicide at 37.

''Van Gogh was an artist who shaped himself by destroying himself,'' Gottfried Boehm, a prominent Swiss art historian, writes in the exhibition catalog, citing excessive drinking combined with equally excessive zeal to reach an ``artistic goal of maximizing the evocative power of color.''

Somber tones dominate the paintings of Van Gogh's early years. Even the first one on view, Flower Beds in Holland, dated April 1883, radiates a dusky atmosphere despite blue skies. Visitors get a similar impression from a painting Van Gogh did the next year of the tower church where his father, a Calvinist pastor, gave Sunday sermons.

Theo van Gogh, an art dealer in Paris who financially supported the artist throughout his life, talked his brother into dropping such a darkening approach if he wanted to become a respected modern artist.

In 1880, Van Gogh joined his brother in Paris, where Theo put him in touch with Claude Monet and other successful impressionists. The two years he stayed in the French capital brought a profound change in his work, a brightened palette and a different technique. Particularly striking is a multicolored picture of a Fourteenth of July Celebration that reflects radically bold brushwork.

In exchange for his regular financial support, Theo got the landscapes, which he presumably thought might sell better than his brother's other work.

Van Gogh got the message after he left Paris early in 1888 and moved to Arles in the south of France, where a bright spring sun soon intensified the colors in his paintings. On view are spectacular samples of that new outlook, among them a series of wheat-field and harvest pictures.

A sudden change in Van Gogh's mental state, never stable since his youth, precipitated the famous 1888 Christmas Eve crisis in which he cut off part of his earlobe. A self-portrait showing him with bandaged head is reproduced in the exhibition catalog.

Attesting to his relapse into depression is the last of 20 Arles pictures, Landscape Under Stormy Sky, with its ominously threatening clouds. Van Gogh painted it in May 1889 only a few days before committing himself into an asylum at Saint-Remy, where farmers called him a ``crazy redhead.''

The transfer marked what many consider the peak of his career. Outstanding among the works he did there are the swirling Cypresses, on loan from New York's Metropolitan Museum. He painted it from the window of the room to which he was confined for several months.

Eventually, Theo talked him into leaving Saint-Remy and seeking the treatment of a homeopath, Dr. Paul Gachet in the village of Auvers north of Paris. There Van Gogh's output reached an unprecedented feverish pace -- 75 paintings within 70 days. Ten of them, all landscapes, are on view at the Kunstmuseum, the last, depicting swirling wheat stacks, painted just days before Van Gogh shot himself in the chest. He died two days later on July 29, 1890.

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