18

1901 Making a Name

In 1898, Emile Schuffenecker painted the Portrait of Julien Leclercq and his Wife, a pastel on paper. It was a tribute to the friendship between Schuff, the investor—middling artist and art collector—and Leclercq, the French poet and art critic.

The portrait, which hangs today at Cornell’s Herbert F. Johnson Museum of Art in Ithaca, New York,172 was also a token of appreciation to Leclercq for persuading Jo van Gogh-Bonger to provide a few van Gogh paintings to the contemporary art exhibition in Oslo that the art critic had arranged. Jo had grown accustomed to brushing off art dealers that irritated her through the years, but Schuffenecker knew when to approach her and when to recede into the shadows and not bother her. Although he owned several van Goghs by the end of the century, in addition to “owning one of the finest art collections in Paris,”173 he needed an intermediary to deal with Jo when he felt their business relationship was a bit tense and frayed, from the poor introductions he made and from sales of van Gogh paintings not going through. That intermediary was Julien Leclercq.

Leclercq was married to Fanny Flodin, a Finnish pianist. Sculptor Hilda Flodin was her sister.174 With a Scandinavian wife and a sculptor sister-in-law, who was connected to Finnish royalty and the art world, it was only natural for the art critic Leclercq to organize the Oslo exhibition. As more art dealers and collectors acquired or sought to acquire the artwork of van Gogh, who was finally becoming a household name at the end of the decade, Leclercq and Schuffenecker foresaw the increased momentum in the market at the turn of the century. Together, they plotted to get their hands on more of the Dutch painter’s masterpieces, while also seeking to broaden van Gogh’s name recognition and drive up the value of his art.

By then, Julien Leclercq was already the owner of Starry Night, the masterpiece that hangs today at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Van Gogh himself thought it was a subpar effort, telling Theo that his better works included the themes of olives, wheat fields, and sunflowers. Perhaps this was because of Starry Night’s connection to Christianity, the halos around the stars and Venus, and the embellished peaceful town beneath the night sky that gave a kind of Christmas feel to the painting. The other subjects were all connected to nature, tied to Vincent’s heart, his passion, and his life as a painter.

In spring 1900, Jo loaned eight van Gogh paintings to the persistent Julien Leclercq, who had written several letters to her, each time emphasizing the fact that Vincent van Gogh’s artwork was on the brink of fame. In the end, he got through to her by suggesting that the loan coincide with the Exposition Universelle—the World Expo—in Paris that would begin on April 15, 1900.175

Jo van Gogh-Bonger sifted through a box of the 1890s articles, reviews, and critiques of van Gogh’s artwork from critics, such as Aurier and Leclercq. She pulled out the 1890 review in the Mercure de France and reread what it had said about the artist:

Like Salvator Rosa, he is a tormented spirit. His power of expression is extraordinary, and everything in his oeuvre derives its life from his own technique. His was an impassioned temperament, through which nature appears as it does in dreams, or rather, in nightmares…. At the Salon of the Indépendants there are ten paintings by Van Gogh that bear witness to a rare genius.176

Jo knew Leclercq was an art critic and not an art dealer. He didn’t have his own gallery. But he did possess an understanding of Vincent’s artwork with a strong appreciation of his talent. By staying in Paris during Exposition Universelle, Leclercq would take advantage of the opportunity: his plan was to display the eight paintings in his apartment during the seven-month expo, which made a lot of business sense to her, as his place would be well trafficked by art enthusiasts; it made sense to Leclercq because he wouldn’t have to lease additional space for the exhibit.177

When Leclercq received the eight paintings, he saw that the decade-old works, which had been stored haphazardly in Theo’s apartment and at the Tanguy shop in Paris, were in bad shape. They had to be restored: “A neighbor and friend of Leclercq, the painter Judith Gerard, notes in her memoirs that he ‘called in Schuffenecker, who taught drawing in one of the city’s schools and came each day, in return for a small payment, armed with a large box of colors to cover up the holes and glue back flakes of paint.’ Gerard observes that Schuffenecker became so enthusiastic about his work that he decided to ‘improve’ on several other van Goghs that he felt were unfinished.”178

The paintings from the South of France needed to be restored in order to be presented at an exhibition, and, more importantly, sold to an art collector or dealer. As the restoration took place, there would be at least a six-month period for Emile Schuffenecker to copy them, one by one, out of everyone’s sight. It was especially convenient that the only person who was likely to detect a forged van Gogh, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, was living in Bussum, Holland, more than three hundred miles north.

Copying other artists’ works during the time of the Impressionists was often a way for artists to improve their technique, experimenting with paints, colors, and brushstroke styles. Van Gogh himself had done it plenty. But for him, it wasn’t about copying or reproducing the exact painting, the way a camera would. It was more about translating what he saw into his own unique style. Still, for him as for other artists, it was common practice. For example, during his stay at the asylum, van Gogh completed twenty-one copies of Millet’s works, both in an attempt to define his own style and as homage to the painter.179

At the start of the twentieth century, the art world was quite different than when van Gogh was at the asylum, however. The market for Impressionists and Post-Impressionists had taken off. Claude-Emile Schuffenecker was a man more concerned with making money than developing technique, more interested in squeezing people, even friends, in deals to pay the lowest amount possible while reaping the biggest profit.

Leclercq, too, was not immune from the impulse to profit from the sale of van Gogh’s work. To maximize this profit, he needed to have his own art exhibition, with van Gogh as the main artist, in Paris. But Jo van Gogh-Bonger wasn’t keen on the idea, knowing that the art critic, who was also a poet, couldn’t bankroll or sponsor it. So she ignored his October 12, 1900, letter. Then, on November 25, Leclercq followed up with another letter, this time using “now or never” psychology, writing: “I am asking you to set the date for the exhibition of Vincent’s work, and I would like you to choose February 15th. Everything has changed in the meantime and I am no longer master of my own time.”180

That last line had to give Jo a sense of lost opportunity if she didn’t relent, act, and exhibit van Gogh’s works in Paris in 1901. She agreed. Outside of transcribing and translating all of Vincent’s letters to his family, it would be the single best decision she had ever made. So Leclercq was going to organize the van Gogh exhibition, collecting a total of seventy-one artworks from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, his own collection, Schuffenecker’s collection, and other Parisian art dealers. The show would be held on March 17, 1901, at the renowned Galerie Bernheim-Jeune, a retrospective called Exposition d ’Oeuvres de Vincent van Gogh.181

Going hand in hand with the Paris exhibition would have been the A. B. List. But, as mentioned earlier, all three of the Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings were missing from Andries Bonger’s list.

Why is this important? When the former Met curator Charles S. Moffett, at the time the senior curator of paintings at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, wrote the essays for the Emil G. Bührle Collection catalogue The Passionate Eye, he said the following about Wheat Field with Cypresses, painting No. 62 in the collection:

The artist clearly regarded ‘Wheat Field with Cypresses’ as a work of special significance, for on 2 July (1889) he sent a drawing after the completed painting to his brother, and in September he made painted variants for his sister and mother.182

That is one drawing and two paintings. The van Gogh letters of July and September back up the art expert’s assertion of how many versions of the drawing and painting of that particular study existed: one and two, respectively.

So how does that stack up with the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s claim that there were three paintings? Based on the brothers’ correspondence, we know that in September, Vincent painted, shipped, and directed Theo to send the Small and Final versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses to their sister and mother in Netherlands. But what if, during Vincent’s June 1889 study of the landscape, he only completed the drawing, never painting the so-called “First” version that the Met claims to own?

If the late Charles Moffett were alive today, how would he weigh in, given his breadth of knowledge about the artist, his thorough understanding of van Gogh’s brushstrokes and impasto, and his insights on the painter’s symbolism?

Why couldn’t his twenty-first-century counterpart at the Met, Susan Alyson Stein, curator of European art and Impressionism, come to the same conclusion that Moffett did when it came to the number of paintings in this study and the fact that the Small and Final versions of the painting were sent on to the van Gogh family in Holland from Vincent in Saint-Rémy through Theo in Paris?

In the book she edited with Asher Ethan Miller in 2006 for the Metropolitan Museum, The Annenberg Collection: Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, which included texts by her, Colin B. Bailey, Joseph J. Rishel, and Mark Rosenthal, Stein wrote:

One week later, on July 2, he (van Gogh) reported that he had done another “canvas of cypresses with some ears of wheat, some poppies, a blue sky like a piece of Scotch plaid,” also painted in … “Thick impasto” but now set in a “wheat field in the sun, which represents the extreme heat.” The canvas in question is the present “Wheat Field with Cypresses.” Van Gogh came to regard it as one of his “best” summer landscapes and repeated the composition three times.

But, as I briefly discussed earlier, Vincent van Gogh Letter No. 784, dated July 2, 1889, which is the letter that Susan Stein cites above, didn’t mention the “Scotch plaid” multicolored sky in reference to Wheat Field with Cypresses. No, the letter referred to another painting, not a horizontal landscape, but that tall vertical one. It is a painting that the Met also owns, called Cypresses, that Stein also wrote about in her book. That tall painting was also donated by the Annenberg Foundation to the museum and hangs today on the wall not far from the Wheat Field with Cypresses.

When the two paintings are seen side by side, it is clear that only Cypresses has “a blue sky, which is like a multicolored Scotch plaid.” The sky of Wheat Field with Cypresses doesn’t have anything remotely like tartan-patterned hues or design at all. The two main colors, with varying shades of both, are light blue and cotton white clouds depicted in van Gogh’s famous swirling brushstrokes that he invented for the Starry Night painting.

When this author noticed the discrepancy in January 2016, he sent Stein an email pointing out the error, but Stein never replied to clarify or rebut the discovery.

There is another important misidentification in Stein’s description. The second line of “thick impasto” and “extreme heat” in Stein’s description are actually references to yet another painting, Reaper. This work depicts a reaper in the wheat field emblazoned in an explosion of yellow, from the color of the stalks to the heat of the sun burning on top of the field, like a furnace.

So how did Stein and company, the so-called experts on European art and Post-Impressionism, get the reference so wrong? In their book, they arrived at just one painting, Wheat Field with Cypresses, while the van Gogh Letter No. 784 clearly refers to two paintings—not one—that resemble the Met’s painting only in name, and not by what was depicted in the picture.

The question becomes: are there any references to a third Wheat Field with Cypresses, the so-called First version of the painting?

In doing a deep dive into the Van Gogh Letters database, which can be accessed online by anyone in the world, this author could not find a single mention or citation for a Wheatfield and Cypresses—as the study and its painting and the drawing versions are called in the English translation of the letters—painting, just the drawing that resides today in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

Further research showed that the study’s specific name only shows up in eight of the hundreds of letters, two at the start of summer 1889 and six that autumn, as Vincent informed his mother and sister that they would each receive one of the landscape paintings. The last letter that mentioned Wheatfield and Cypresses, Letter No. 824, was written on December 7, 1889.

Either those two versions of the Wheat Field with Cypresses study, which can be found today in London (the Final version) and in the private Greek collection (the Small version), were delivered to Holland per Vincent’s repeated instructions to the meticulous Theo to send them on to their beloved mother and sister in time for Christmas, or those two paintings remained in France. But if the latter had happened, those two paintings would have shown up in Theo’s possession when he took “control” of all of Vincent’s paintings and artwork in the wake of the artist’s death; and they would have shown up and been written into the Catalogue des Oeuvres de Vincent van Gogh by the equally meticulous Andries Bonger in 1890–91.

But, as previously discussed, the title Wheat Field with Cypresses doesn’t show up in the original November 1890 A.B. List of 308 paintings. Those paintings didn’t vanish and then one day magically reappear. They must have been sent to Vincent’s mother and sister in Holland. At some point over the next decade one of these two Wheat Field with Cypresses made its way into Jo’s possession, probably from her mother-in-law, Anna Carbentus van Gogh.

By 1900, mother van Gogh would have been eighty-one years old. She likely knew that her days were numbered, that all three of her sons had died before she passed on, and of the effort that Johanna and Andries Bonger had invested in marketing, selling, and protecting the name and paintings of Vincent. So it makes complete sense that she would give up one or perhaps even more paintings gifted to her long ago by Vincent.

So the journey of the two paintings to Holland explains their absence from the A. B. List. It is more problematic that the alleged third version of the Wheat Field with Cypresses, currently in the Met’s possession, does not show up in this inventory. Since it was not sent to an alternative location or recipient, it would have been kept by Theo, and would thus have been recorded in the list with the other works.

That never happened.

The decision by Jo van Gogh-Bonger to sell the eight paintings to Emile Schuffenecker and lend seventy more to Julien Leclercq precipitated an unfortunate course of events. Not everything would be rosy about that business deal on the side of Leclercq and Schuffenecker.

When the show opened on St. Patrick’s Day in 1901, a few of the van Goghs on display were L’Allée des Alyscamps,183 The Seine with the Pont de Clichy,184 Prisoners Exercise,185 and the Final version of Wheat Field with Cypresses,186 which was lent by Emile Schuffenecker, as was Fourteen Sunflowers, a work of unclear provenance.

The authenticity of this last painting has been recently questioned, for reasons that are quite similar to the circumstances of the Wheat Field, namely that it is missing from all records prior to appearing at Schuffenecker’s. Geraldine Norman, an art critic who in the late 1990s discussed the possibility that one of the Sunflowers was a forgery, suggested that neither auction house nor most art experts in 1987 had a good handle on who Emile Schuffenecker was at the time. She wrote about the famous auction:

Vincent’s original painting of fourteen sunflowers now hangs in London’s National Gallery, and his own copy is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. But nowhere in his correspondence to his brother, Theo, is there mention of a third version—the one now known as the Yasuda Sunflowers. The canvas first surfaced in a 1901 Van Gogh exhibition in Paris, listed as the property of one Monsieur Emile Schuffenecker. It’s known that Schuffenecker had access to the painting for six months for restoration; the question is whether he also seized the chance to copy it.

“If I am right,” Norman wrote in London’s Sunday Times, “the painting was Schuffenecker’s undisputed masterpiece.”187

Had we only had the art critic’s accusation on record, then all might have passed quietly in the night. Vincent did copy a number of still life paintings of sunflowers, some with twelve petals, others with fourteen petals, with some of those paintings landing at the Tokyo shipping company, the London National Gallery of Art, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

Controversy first arose on the very first day of the van Gogh exhibition, which was shared with a half dozen other artists from his era. Julien Leclercq made quite a scene:

The first documented forgeries or erroneous attribution are two Arles landscapes which Julien Leclercq removed from the van Gogh exhibition at Bernheim-Jeune in 1901. They belonged to Theodore Duret and were described in Meier-Graefe’s “Entwicklungsgeschicte der modern Kunst” as “two curious landscapes.” In the exhibition catalogue, which he dedicated to Johanna van Gogh, Julien Leclercq crossed out numbers 56 and 57 and added the explanation—“Withdrawn from the exhibition as not being by Vincent. Initially included by me sight unseen.”188

Was it Emile Schuffenecker who forged those two Arles landscapes? Was it Emile Schuffenecker who copied the Fourteen Sunflowers? Did Leclercq, who might have been in on the plan, make a scene to show Jo van Gogh-Bonger that he was going to weed out any suspect paintings, while allowing other Schuff copies to be embedded in the grand exhibition with real van Goghs? It’s hard to say. But in reality, it was the most direct way to pull bad Schuffenecker forgeries, “initially included by me sight unseen,” while keeping the better and potentially more profitable forgeries in place.

The connection between the exhibition and forgeries has already been noted: “A number of Schuffenecker’s false Van Goghs seem to have come on the market.” Geraldine Norman, a British cultural reporter, speculated that those extra paintings were used to “bulk out” the more than seventy paintings in the 1901 Van Gogh exhibition in Paris.

Julien Leclercq had cleaned out the two obvious forgeries from the show, so instead of seventy-one paintings by van Gogh, the retrospective exhibition had been whittled down to sixty-nine. It worked to perfection.

A very clever con. A great ruse.

A forgery can only take place after the artist dies. It has an even better chance when the main art dealer who knows or represents that artist passes away. But in the case of the two deceased van Gogh brothers, one the master artist, the other the art dealer, their untimely deaths eleven years prior handed over all of the paintings to Johanna, giving her ample time to become familiar with them, to learn their histories from the van Gogh letters, leading her to become a living expert on Vincent’s paintings—at least those in her possession. So the forger had to take special care not to provoke suspicion on her part.

Of course, we should also consider the question of whether Claude-Emile Schuffenecker had enough smarts, daring, talent, skill—and was unscrupulous enough—to make money off his dead acquaintance. Schuff was not only pals with Vincent and Theo, but also ran in the same circles as the likes of Gauguin, Pissarro, Bernard, Monet, and many other artists of their day, so he would be well familiar with their particular methods and characteristics.

Schuffenecker and Paul Gauguin had first met in 1872 at the Pont-Aven art school, and then went on to work together at a stockbroker’s office. The minor artist Schuff encouraged Gauguin to take up a career as an artist; Gauguin did just that, becoming a starving artist, while Emile Schuffenecker made it a point to always stash away money, like a squirrel, yet present himself as poor. Man was meant to exploit diamonds and gold mines, and Schuffenecker was the latest gold digger determined to leverage the timing and talent of van Gogh and exploit his art for all it was worth at the turn of the century.

The second wave of van Gogh forgery claims was made in the late twentieth century, sixty years after the Otto Wacker wholesale forgeries of van Gogh, which will be described later in this book. “One is an accident, two is a trend,” as the saying goes. But so far these claims have been largely ignored by established museums. For instance, in the 2001 edition of its annual journal, the Van Gogh Museum tried to simply wash away the claims of Geraldine Norman and many other investigative journalists and art experts with phrases like “to err is human”189 (referring to the absence of the Yasuda Sunflowers, which was the fourth version of the still life painting, in van Gogh’s letter to Theo), or “perceived errors of interpretation and the anomalous brushwork,”190 (blaming the messenger), or “there is a lack of documentary evidence, nor did the artist’s [Schuffenecker] contemporaries characterize him as fraudulent.”191 These attempts to ignore investigative concerns are troubling for several reasons.

First, if the Van Gogh Museum wants to use “a lack of documentary evidence” to support its contention that Schuffenecker didn’t forge Fourteen Sunflowers, then they must address the problem that there is also no documentary evidence that van Gogh ever painted that fourth version of the still life. Everyone with money to invest and art specialists to vet that painting knew, after its purchase in 1987, that it could never be sold in the open market because it is a fake.

Second, lack of documentary evidence is actually quite in line with Emile Schuffenecker’s shady practices. We know that he hid his wealth from his friends, for instance. There were also very few friends available to report this potential fraud. When the van Gogh brothers died in the early 1890s, and Paul Gauguin—who at one time briefly lived with Schuffenecker’s family—tried to slake his insatiable wanderlust, traveling aboard a slow ship to Martinique, Panama, and to the far South Pacific, there was no one left to shine the spotlight on Schuff, the minor artist, and his dealings, legitimate or illegal.

What about Schuff’s close friend Julien Leclercq? Well, as fate would have it, he was the rocket fuel that launched van Gogh’s fame in 1901 into orbit. He was also the one who organized a follow-up exhibition in Berlin in early October. But he would end up suddenly dying on Halloween night of that year at the young age of thirty-six.

Given that the few friends who knew the introverted investor had either died prematurely or left France, it doesn’t take a mathematician to figure out why Schuffenecker’s close friends didn’t step forward and out him as a con man at that time—by then, he had no “close” friends.

The Van Gogh Museum should also drop all lines of argument on Emile Schuffenecker that read like this: “By the 20th century he had almost ceased to paint, making it highly implausible that in 1901 he would have been tempted to copy a work by Van Gogh, whose style was so alien to him.”192 Because, for one, there was nothing “alien” to Emile in van Gogh’s person, artwork, or paintings. Au contraire. The two were part of the same milieu, the same group of artists. And the fact that Schuffenecker officially painted only one painting in the last thirty-four years of his life says it all. Claude-Emile Schuffenecker quit creating his own work. He chose the path of least resistance—copying masterpieces rather than creating original works—to maximize profit.

If Schuff had been an artist of great stature, he would have pushed on, just like van Gogh had pushed against his mental and physical ailments and lack of money, and produced a massive oeuvre. But Schuff never had the talent, inner beauty, or connection to the subjects of his paintings that can be seen in the works of van Gogh, Gauguin, and other great masters.

This disparity in skill does show in his forgeries, even the best of them. One of the problems with the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses is that it clearly has been painted by a different artistic hand. A side-by-side comparison of the Final National Gallery version and the Met’s version would reveal this, among other issues, even to a non-art expert.

Perhaps Swiss investigative journalist Hanspeter Born, along with his coauthor and Impressionist art expert Benoit Landais, who was involved in the 1990s second wave of van Gogh forgery concerns, the “Fakes Controversy,” stated it best in their thoroughly documented self-published book, Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers:

Schuffenecker, not content with doing “Arles” landscapes, also tried his hand at even more demanding “Saint-Rémy” paintings. Mont Gaussier with the Mas St. Paul, F 725—originally owned by Blot and later sold to the Mathiesen Gallery—is a fairly grotesque pastiche in which a peasant woman watches a man who seems to look for a four-leaf clover. This landscape, now rejected as false, is derived from A Meadow in the Mountains; Le Mas St. Paul F 721 that Emile bought from Johanna in 1901 and is in the Kröller-Müller Museum.193

Once he got close to copying—not translating—van Gogh’s artwork, with money on the nearby horizon, and a good deal of it, why would Schuffenecker ever stop?

Yet his weaker talent was no match for the master’s hand or the test of time, with “fairly grotesque pastiche” results.

The ease with which the Van Gogh Museum dismisses inquiries into the paintings’ authenticity is unjustified, especially since it is an institution that is supposed to be the last word on authenticity questions, ensuring that the works that bear the artist’s name have actually been created by that author. They are expected to do more to put a stamp of authenticity on the paintings that are proven to belong to van Gogh, rather than rubber-stamp new claims as baseless without doing a thorough investigation.

Quality assurance requires it. New generations of art lovers, enthusiasts, students, experts, critics, artists, teachers, and visitors demand that real, fully—not quasi—unquestionable, un-doctored, un-forged van Gogh paintings can be viewed, absorbed, and appreciated.

Now will the Van Gogh Museum look into the provenance and authenticity of the Met’s First version of Wheat Field with Cypresses?