19

The Art Restorer’s Dream

Art critic Julien Leclercq’s brilliant catalogue for the retrospective exhibition of seventy-one van Gogh works of art introduced the artist to the world, and perhaps more importantly, to Paul Cassirer, who attended the Bernheim-Jeune show in 1901.

At the exhibition, Cassirer, a German Jewish art promoter and gallery owner, was introduced to Johanna von Gogh-Bonger. He saw what many other gallery owners and art dealers from Paris and London failed to see in van Gogh’s paintings, especially from the late period in Arles and Saint-Rémy. These works were full of intense, dazzling colors and represented the next wave in the art of the avant-garde movement; Cassirer foresaw that they would sell in Berlin, and sell well, feeding the liberal tastes in that German city that was overtaking Munich in its attention to the arts.194

For art publisher Cassirer, who had introduced and exhibited Paul Cézanne in Germany with his cousin Bruno Cassirer, Vincent van Gogh was a natural fit.195 Cassirer and Jo had an easy time understanding one another because they shared a certain culture—they were both northern. She was Dutch; he, Germanic.

The year 1901 was transitional. It was a year that Paul and Bruno Cassirer dissolved their partnership.196 Paul took over the art gallery business; Bruno focused on publishing. In deference to one another and their families, they signed a non-compete exit contract that stipulated they couldn’t compete against one another for seven years in their respective businesses.197

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger married for the second time on August 21, 1901, to Johan Henri Gustaaf Cohen, a painter and writer, who would later add Gosschalk to his last name, becoming simply Johan Cohen Gosschalk. He was a “good deal younger than she. We then moved to a house built by Willem Bauer, a brother of Marius Bauer…. He [Johan] had a fine, sensitive mind, but his health was poor.”198 Together they raised her son, Vincent Willem, and would live in Paris only two more years before moving back to Holland in 1903.

In May 1902, Paul Cassirer inserted five van Gogh paintings in a show with the Berlin Secession199—a rejected group of artists, much like the maligned van Gogh and Gauguin, that formed to repudiate the academic view on art at the turn of the century—presenting the artist and French Post-Impressionism artwork to Berlin.200 Through the success of that exhibition, Paul Cassirer would pit French “civilization” against “German Kultur in the art galleries of Berlin.” He did so to bridge the historical differences resulting from the Napoleonic and Franco-Prussian Wars of the nineteenth century, though he also did it to “irritate” the rebel artists of the Berlin Secession movement. As he knew, “For the Germans, Zivilization was artificial and false, while Kultur [was] not ideological but natural and pure, practical and materialistic, a means of doing things efficiently rather than elegantly.”201

Cassirer’s exhibit of van Gogh established a name for the French-influenced Dutch master, with a pointed difference between van Gogh’s Post-Impressionism and the Berlin Secession group: “Cassirer hung his Vincents avant-garde style, namely, against the stylish walls of his gallery designed by Henry van de Velde, where the audience both screamed in horror and gasped in admiration.”202

In buying van Goghs and selling them in Berlin, Paul Cassirer solidified a long-term relationship with Johanna van Gogh-Bonger based on trust and appreciation for avant-garde art, which was reinforced by the business ethics and temperament of Cassirer, which inspired confidence. Jo trusted Paul to such a degree that she allowed his cousin Bruno to publish van Gogh’s letters in his journal Aus der korrespondenz Vincent van Gogh (The Correspondence of Vincent van Gogh) in 1904 and again in 1906.203

The success of Cassirer’s early exhibition of Vincent van Gogh’s works partly allowed Johanna and Johan Cohen Gosschalk to move into their big house in Bussum, Netherlands, in 1903, where she hung several of Vincent’s paintings. Over the mantel hung The Potato Eaters. Across the room, over a cupboard, was The Old Harvest; over the doorway, Boulevard de Clichy. “In the corridor downstairs were Vincent’s drawings of the courtyard of the hospital at Arles and the fountain at St. Rémy; in the bedroom the three Orchards in Bloom, the Old Almond Blossoms, the Pieta after Delacroix, and La Veillée after Millet.”204

The house of Johanna and Johan was a veritable mini-museum of Post-French Impressionism. As the Paul Cassirer-led success of promoting van Gogh to the German market continued to grow through the decade, Jo van Gogh-Bonger struck gold of her own. She had continued her tireless quest to make van Gogh and his work known to the wider public, working galleries and art museums:

In this regard the three exhibitions of works by Van Gogh organized by the Rotterdam Oldenzeel gallery in January, May and December of 1903 were important. There, as early as in February of that year, the Utrecht cigar manufacturer, Gerlach Ribbius Peletier, bought the present painting [“Head of a Peasant Woman”] for 500 guilder.205

In 1905, Johanna exhibited 474 works from the van Gogh estate—paintings, drawings, and sketches—at the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.206

1901 was also a threshold year for Schuffenecker, perhaps more so than for Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger. Yes, she remarried and set her sights on the art markets in the north. But Emile Schuffenecker was the owner of eight van Gogh originals, one of those being the Final version of Wheat Field with Cypresses. And he did it with no money down.

At this time, you may remember, Schuffenecker was no longer working on his own paintings. In fact, he would create just one more of his own paintings in the rest of his life. Why? Was it because he was a third-rate artist? Was it because not a single art dealer would give him a “one-man” exhibition on his unspectacular paintings? Or was it that Emile knew his limitations as an artist and was considering other opportunities as he saw the market for French Impressionism and Post-Impressionism take off that year, letting Paul Cassirer and Johanna van Gogh-Bonger do the legwork to drive up the value of van Gogh paintings and spread the artist’s fame through northern Europe and, a decade later, to America?

The answer to these questions is a blending of all three. Schuffenecker was an opportunist bent on making money. When the opportunity arrived in 1901 to exploit a hot rising artist, nothing would hold him back. The last painting Claude-Emile Schuffenecker created was in 1905; it was the pastel The Tower.207

That artwork was an island unto itself. It was painted a decade apart from his ninety earlier, nineteenth-century paintings, with nothing to follow until his death in 1934, or nearly three more decades. Given their less-than-impressive quality, Schuffenecker would have been truly forgotten had he not been called out as a forger after his death in 1934, and again at the end of the twentieth century during the Van Gogh “Fakes Controversy.”

Born and Landais, in their 2014 book Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers, contributed to the controversy by showing evidence that the Yasuda Sunflowers was one such forgery. Born and Landais also convincingly argued that Schuffenecker had forged at least a half dozen other van Gogh paintings, one of which is hanging in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The coauthors’ evidence boils down to some paper-trail breadcrumbs, detailed research on the history of the players involved, connection of dots, and ultimately side-by-side comparisons of real versus fake van Goghs across at least a half dozen paintings.

It seems, however, that they did not address all the evidence—none of their claims, or those from the 1990s Van Gogh Fakes Controversy, or any other source, have ever debunked the authenticity of any of the three Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings.

And there is plenty of evidence to be found, which for Wheat Field with Cypresses goes beyond normal areas of circumstantial evidence and relies on the accumulation of facts and inconsistencies. There are certain special conditions in the history of this particular work, as discussed in Part II. The Saint-Rémy paintings suffered a different kind of physical deprivation and deterioration over the years, languishing in poor storage. Being rolled up, not stretched and dried properly, and then stored haphazardly in Theo van Gogh’s apartment and then Père Tanguy’s house, before FedEx, US and climate control existed, accelerated the aging of the National Gallery’s version of the painting. The 1987 Leighton-Reeve Technical Report described the degrading process in a technical, scientific, unflinching manner.

And what about the Met’s First version? Unlike the National Gallery, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has never made its condition report—aka technical report—public, not even under a Freedom of Information Act request from Stephen Gregory, the publisher for the English edition of the Epoch Times, on behalf of this author.

In this age of transparency, the Met’s version appears to have more secrets in the closet than a dirty politician.

But let us return to the condition of the painting. In the case of the National Gallery’s Wheatfield canvas, the impacted impasto and structural cracking issues of the paint itself can, even today, more than 125 years after it was created, forensically demonstrate that the painting did indeed suffer those stresses, while the Met’s version shows no such markings, cracking, or distress. It’s as if the National Gallery painting had run the full twenty-six-mile New York City Marathon, crossing the finish line winded, tired, sweaty, thirsty, beaten, and exposed to the elements, while the Met version had trotted out of the Metropolitan Museum at Fifth Avenue on Central Park and jogged the last mile, crossing the finish line as fit and clean as if it had not run the race at all.

In 1901, the year when Emile Schuffenecker would have forged Vincent’s work, the forger no longer could have had access to Tanguy’s paints and the special, custom-made ground pigments he had created for van Gogh, since Tanguy died in 1894. Those would have been the lead whites, emerald greens, and hot yellows, special orders made only for Vincent and no other artists—not Monet, not Manet, not Cézanne, not Gauguin, not Pissarro. All three of those specific paint types and pigments were used in the authentic Wheat Field with Cypresses paintings.