20

Dark Provenances

In the summer of 2013, after contacting the curators at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the National Gallery in London inquiring about their versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses, I was emailed a section of a book, Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection, co-edited by Susan Alyson Stein.

Stein had spearheaded the publication as lead editor in 2009. She is an expert on nineteenth-century European and Post-Impressionist art. I wanted to point out that the attribution for the description of the Met’s First version of the painting was wrong, as noted in an earlier chapter; this took place two and a half years after I requested access to the condition report, which she refused to share or make public. (On the opposite end of the spectrum, the National Gallery couldn’t have been more open. Its website link to the 1987 Technical Report is a way for all people—not just experts or journalists—who are interested in the painting to review, share, dissect, discuss, learn, and disseminate the details of a thorough scientific examination of the masterpiece.)

Let us turn to the paintings’ provenance, however. When the descriptions of both paintings—the First and Final—were compared side by side, serious questions arose about the identity of their owners, the chain of custody of sales and purchases, and other historical details.

The Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses’s provenance, as described in Stein’s book and other Met materials, went from the creator Vincent van Gogh to his brother Theo; after Theo’s death, the painting was inherited by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and her son Vincent Willem. The Met claims its painting then sat idle for the rest of the 1890s. It wouldn’t be until a decade later that Jo van Gogh-Bonger sold it to Emile Schuffenecker, along with seven other paintings. Schuffenecker would hold onto the Met’s painting until 1906 (not exhibiting it at all after the 1901 Bernheim-Jeune exhibition), when he finally sold it to Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Wagram.208 The new owner’s name and title, Marshal Louis-Alexandre Berthier, matched that of the chief of staff for Napoleon at the outset of the Italian campaign.209 Decidedly, the name comes from good family stock.

As stated throughout this book, the Met’s version of the painting’s provenance has several issues. In the van Gogh letters from the summer of 1889, there is mention of a drawing of the Wheat Field with Cypresses, but there is no evidence that van Gogh ever painted the subject in those early summer months of 1889. Compounding the issue, the Met claims that Theo became the de facto owner of the painting when Vincent died in July 1890. That couldn’t have been the case either, since nowhere in the thirty handwritten pages and 300-plus entries of the A. B. List can one find either one of the interchangeable French names—Cyprès aux Blés d’or or Blés et Cyprès. These were the two names used to refer to the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses in the 1901 Bernheim-Jeune show and later in the 1909 Galerie E. Duret exhibition in Paris. Not a single entry attributed to either name, or any other similar third name Andries might have used to describe the painting.

Is this an omission? A landscape painting of such size and majesty simply would not have been tossed aside, given away, or forgotten. No. It would have been recorded, if the painting had been delivered to Theo and kept there as the Met claims. So was there ever a third Wheat Field with Cypresses? Probably not. The van Gogh letters interpreted by the online registry and Charles Moffett back in 1990 clearly only reference a drawing and two paintings, the Small and Final, sent to Vincent’s sister and mother in Holland.

Even more peculiar was the lack of exhibitions of this painting after the radiant success of the 1901 Bernheim-Jeune Gallery show. Why would such a masterpiece not be put into art galleries or exhibits afterward to garner more interest, spread van Gogh’s name, and drive up its value? Why would money-hungry Emile Schuffenecker not do anything with it until he sold it five years later? It’s inconceivable.

The history of the National Gallery’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses is stranger still as it is described. Yet its physical characteristics—the impacted impasto, cracking, the stress of the paints and canvas being rolled and stored in less than ideal conditions—show that it is a real and original van Gogh artwork from his days in the South of France. The National Gallery’s painting went from Vincent to Theo by way of the goods train to Paris in September 1890. Vincent’s letter directed Theo to send both the big and little versions of Wheat Field with Cypresses to their mother and sister in Holland. That was what was supposed to happen. But did it? One couldn’t make that connection from the National Gallery provenance.

That provenance goes from Vincent to Theo to Père Julien Tanguy Gallery, Paris, in 1890.210 How did that happen? Why did it happen, if it happened at all? Yes, Theo stored and paid for storage on Vincent’s growing oeuvre of paintings. And yes, Vincent directed Theo to give certain paintings to Tanguy, including one of the three portraits of him. But there is no record of Wheat Field with Cypresses being given to Tanguy in any of the letters. Moreover, if Tanguy had stored that painting, then it would have shown up in the list compiled by Jo and Dries after Theo’s death in 1891. And since Tanguy didn’t store it, he had to have bought the painting from Theo. That’s not what happened.

The big trouble with that possibility is that everyone has known, everyone has examined, and everyone has agreed that only one van Gogh painting was sold to a buyer during the life of Vincent. So a sale to Tanguy in the first seven months of 1890 could not have happened. Period. And it did not. After Vincent died, Theo took hold of his possessions in Auvers-sur-Oise and sent the belongings and the paintings, in particular, back to Paris under his watchful eye.

Therefore, that sale could not have taken place in August or September of 1890. When Theo’s health rapidly declined and he had his psychotic break, for which he was sent to an asylum in his native Holland, no sale could possibly be transacted and left unaccounted for, since Jo and Andries had started the process of inventorying and accounting for all of the van Gogh paintings they owned and stored in France.

So it seems implausible that Père Tanguy or his gallery were ever the owners of any version of a Wheat Field with Cypresses.

According to the National Gallery provenance, Tanguy would eventually sell their version in 1901 to art critic, ghostwriter, pamphleteer, novelist, and anarchist Octave Mirbeau,211 who seemingly sold it promptly after acquiring it. Mirbeau did, in fact, own a couple of van Goghs, including Irises, which was one of Vincent’s first subjects painted in the garden at the asylum in May 1889. Mirbeau bought it in 1892, as he was one of the early supporters of the artist.212

In 1922, Mirbeau’s critiques of the artist were compiled under the title Des Artistes, with a long remembrance of Vincent after his death. He concluded the piece on van Gogh with:

Oh, how he understood the exquisite soul of flowers: How delicate becomes the hand that had carried such fierce torches into the dark firmament when it comes to bind these fragrant and fragile bouquets! And what caresses has he not found to express their inexpressible freshness and infinite grace?213

If Mirbeau had bought Irises in 1892 and kept it for the next thirteen years before selling it to Auguste Pellerin in Paris, then why would this early and enthusiastic supporter of van Gogh buy the National Gallery’s Wheat Field with Cypresses in 1901 from Tanguy and immediately sell it to Alexandre Rosenberg, who in turn flipped the masterpiece to Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, Paris, all in the same year?214

It is quite strange that two Wheat Field with Cypresses, the Metropolitan’s and the National Gallery’s canvases—purportedly painted three months apart and sent their separate ways after reaching Theo van Gogh in Paris—are both lacking any trace of any paperwork, either in the van Gogh letters or the A. B. List catalogue book, that would reliably place them in Paris or even France during this time period. More interestingly, both of those paintings—if this detail is to be believed—randomly ended up at the same Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in 1901 via their two completely different historical routes. It was no coincidence, nor was it blind luck. What really happened was something different. Here’s the most likely scenario.

Johanna van Gogh-Bonger retrieved the Wheat Field with Cypresses that had been gifted to Vincent’s mother and sold that Final version to Emile Schuffenecker. The real painting was exhibited in the spring 1901 retrospective show and catalogued by Julien Leclercq at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery, which ultimately bought and kept the London version—the real painting—until 1920, when it sold the masterpiece to Dr. Gustav Jebsen in Oslo, Norway. That painting, in fact, would not be shown in an exhibition until 1990 in Amsterdam at the Van Gogh Museum. Dr. Jebsen sold it to the famous Paul Rosenberg Gallery in London in 1923; it then went to the Tate Museum and ultimately was purchased in 1961 by the National Gallery.215

During the time he was in possession of the painting, Schuffenecker had the opportunity to produce his own forged version, which would eventually end up at the Met. He then “sat” on this version until he felt enough time had passed since the 1901 exhibition and he felt comfortable selling it, in 1906. No exhibits of his own. No broadcasting or advertising that he was going to move his canvas. Just lying low, letting the van Gogh hype driven by Paul Cassirer in Berlin and Johanna Cohen-van Gogh-Bonger in Holland gain momentum.

Emile Schuffenecker had pulled off the perfect crime.

But then, Schuffenecker was only an investor, a minimal artist, and an opportunist. He wasn’t a seer who could look into the future and predict that technology would allow the two paintings to be scrutinized in granular detail, that they would be examined in high-definition imagery an ocean of time apart, 24/7, from any online access point in the world. Nor could he have envisioned the van Gogh letters being put into a large vat of digital information, an online database where today, in the twenty-first century, anyone can pore over the correspondence and discover the insights that even Schuff would know little about.

Then again, he had made his money; perhaps he would not care.