Every art exhibit begins with a big idea. Yet every show boils down to a curatorial leap of faith: If we put such-and-such works in the same galleries with such-and-such works, relationships will develop and epiphanies will follow. But art exhibits are very much like perfectly planned dinner parties. Once the liquor begins to flow and the conversations and flirtations begin to commence — just as: once the artworks are on the walls and they begin to speak to one another — the party takes its own course.

Sometimes, as with the recent exhibits “Matisse Picasso” and “Cézanne and Pissarro,” the art, no matter how great, suffers precisely because of curatorial context. I was afraid then that the Neue Galerie’s exhibit “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” which, opening today, places van Gogh drawings and paintings alongside works by the German and Austrian Expressionists he inspired, would suffer from the “Cézanne/Pissarro” syndrome. Pissarro, a great painter, could not hold his own next to the monumental Cézanne. Likewise, almost all of the artists in “Van Gogh and Expressionism” — save Franz Marc, Vasily Kandinsky, and Paul Klee — cannot compete with Vincent van Gogh. Still, this show is a roaring success.

Walking into this glorious, high-key-colored exhibit is like entering a party in full swing: The atmosphere is heady; the conversations, a combination of shouts, murmurs, and belted-out song, are amicable and a joy to listen to. Such is the inexplicable magic of a show centered on the influence of a painter so gifted, his work so groundbreaking, that his art demanded an immediate and emotional response in the studios of other artists.

“Van Gogh and Expressionism,” curated by Jill Lloyd, brings together 80 works by artists including Erich Heckel, Alexej von Jawlensky, Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Gustave Klimt, Oscar Kokoschka, August Macke, Emile Nolde, Max Pechstein, Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and Egon Schiele. (Oddly, Max Beckmann is omitted.) The show, whose works were made between 1887 (when van Gogh was hitting his stride) and 1921, focuses on van Gogh as the father of German Expressionism. Certainly, he was this, but he was so much more.

True, van Gogh, as Matisse pointed out, was one of the first artists since Delacroix to rehabilitate the role of color, restoring color with emotive power. This fact is made plain enough in the exhibit’s paintings, which burn the senses with electric reds, greens, yellows, oranges, and pinks. But what “Van Gogh and Expressionism” also makes clear, despite its narrow focus on German and Austrian artists, is that the Dutchman was not merely an influence on the Expressionists through the forcefulness of his hand and the emotional impact of his color. Van Gogh brought more than “Expressionism” to the Expressionists.

Influenced by the lightness and free color of the Impressionists, the hard-edged bluntness of the North, and the bright colors of the South, van Gogh brought Monet, Bruegel, Rubens, Byzantine icons, Japanese prints, and the Romanticists into his studio. Van Gogh’s work inspired German Expressionism; but, as this show beautifully demonstrates, that influence was much broader and possibly less nationalist or regionalist than has often been stated in the history books. Van Gogh, like a firestorm, was a force to be reckoned with. And every artist dealt with that storm in his own way and through his own culture. Van Gogh had as much influence on the Fauvism of Matisse, the swirling forms of Art Nouveau, the frontality and shallow space of Cubism, and the simultaneity of the Delaunays as he did on the Expressionists. All of these influences and conversations can be heard, if only faintly, in the Neue exhibit.

Van Gogh, not surprisingly, is the sun around which all the other painters in “Van Gogh and Expressionism” revolve. At least two or three great late van Goghs anchor each room. In one gallery, van Gogh’s “Wheat Field Behind St. Paul’s Hospital,” completed in 1889, the year before the artist took his own life at 37, hangs alone on a wall. The painting’s turbulent yellow wheat field, tended by a single reaper, is the churning sea under a strip of baby-blue hills and a yellow-green sky.

This masterpiece was the first painting by van Gogh to enter a museum (in 1902 at the Folkwang Museum in Hagen, Germany, now in Essen, Germany). And this is the first time it has traveled to America. The painting’s energy and color speak to Kandinsky’s brightly hued “Murnau: Street With Horse-Drawn Carriage” (1909) and to the swaying branches and grasses of Marc’s willowy “Larch on a Forest Meadow” (1908).

The high heat, bright color, and swirling, thickened arabesques of “Wheat Field” — emulated over and over again in the other paintings on view — not only make many of the other artists come out looking good in the Neue exhibit; van Gogh’s extraordinary powers make a lot of the painters in the show look better, and their aspirations to appear higher, than they have in the past. The exhibit works because of the dialogues it has set up as much as it does through the strength of its individual paintings and drawings.

At times the other works in the show are left wanting; but even as pastiche and homage they come across as heartfelt, direct, and heroic leaps into the unknown. Works by Pechstein, Heckel, Schiele, and Klimt do not have the authority to contend with masterpieces such as van Gogh’s late “Self-Portraits” and landscapes, “The Zouave” (1888), “The Bedroom” (1889), “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Les-Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer” (1888), or “The Italian Woman With Carnations” (1887), a brilliantly, oddly-stippled work that resembles a weaving and a wood carving, and which, with its chair back sticking out of the sitter, transforms the woman into a windup toy.

However, there are moments in “Van Gogh and Expressionism,” amid the racing, free-flowing colored brushwork, the hot pink roads, yellow skies, fervent stares, and blazing landscapes, when the overall fantastical atmosphere of the show transcends its individual shortcomings. And isn’t this precisely what one wishes for when planning a party, especially one with such an esteemed guest of honor as van Gogh?

Until July 2 (1048 Fifth Ave. at 86th Street, 212-628-6200).