Breaking van Gogh

According to the Met’s provenance, as listed on its website, the timeline of ownership for the Wheat Field with Cypresses runs as follows:

1889: the painting is sent to Theo by the artist

1891–1900: the painting is sold by Theo’s widow through Julien Leclercq to Schuffenecker

1900–at least 1901: Emile Schuffenecker

ca. 1906–1910: Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Wagram, Paris

1910: Paul Cassirer (sold to him through Galerie Barbazanges, Paris)

1910–1935: von Mendelssohn family, Germany, later Switzerland

1935–1951: von Mendelssohn family

1951–1956: Emil Bührle (to whom it was sold through Fritz Nathan by the von Mendelssohns)

1956–93: Dieter Bührle, Zurich

The 100-year flood came to Paris on January 21, 1910, and the rain would continue to pour through January 28, with the River Seine cresting to a record twenty-eight feet above spring level.225 The widespread flooding submerged streets, cafes, apartments, and offices. It forced citizens to walk on elevated wooden planks just to cross the street or travel down a long alley, using the sides of the buildings for balance and support. A photo of a policeman being ferried in a gondola-like boat with a bicycle made the scene look more like Venice than the City of Lights.

The only apparent good news came from the art world. Most galleries and museums of the day didn’t have basements or at least didn’t store the artwork in the cellars. In fact, Musée d’Orsay, the large museum that today runs parallel to the Seine and receives three million visitors a year, the third most in France,226 didn’t exist in 1910. At the time, that location belonged to Gare d’Orsay, a railroad station built between 1898 and 1900.227 That January, the Gare station was flooded to street level, stranding commuters, yet not destroying works of art.

Emile Schuffenecker sold Wheat Field with Cypresses in 1906 to Louis-Alexandre Berthier, Prince de Wagram, who in turn would sell it to the Galerie Barbazanges, Paris. That took place in 1910, after the Great Flood of Paris, according to the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s detailed provenance of the painting. But this timeline doesn’t add up for several reasons.

The sale to the Galerie Barbazanges couldn’t have taken place in 1910. Why? The answer is simple. The Galerie Barbazanges didn’t open on 109, rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, until a year later, in 1911.228, 229 The painting clearly couldn’t have been sold to Galerie Barbazanges in Paris ahead of its 1911 opening, or to Paul Cassirer in Berlin in November 1910, or to Franz von Mendelssohn in December 1910—if these sales are supposed to have gone through the Galerie Barbazanges.

The bigger question is why the Metropolitan Museum didn’t do the necessary research on the actual chain of custody owners of their First version, the way this author did, that would have uncovered the myriad inconsistencies with dates and timelines of who owned the painting and when. It could have been either in 1993, when the painting was bought by Walter Annenberg for $57 million and gifted to the Met, or five years later, in 1998, when then Met Curator Gary Tinterow—who was the point man for the Met in the late 1980s when it ultimately pulled out of exhibiting The Passionate Eye tour—was on a mission to resolve the “suspect” provenance of the painting.

What about a decade after that, when Susan Alyson Stein’s team was doing the deep-dive research on who owned Wheat Field with Cypresses—and when, and where—for her co-edited book on the Annenberg Collection at the Met?

One must ask why so many art and van Gogh experts outside of the Metropolitan Museum didn’t pick up the forgery before. Why is one version within the same series light years better than the other? If one of the paintings was supposed to be superior, one would think it would have been the earlier one from June 1889, since the drawing of same landscape was dead on in terms of detail and penmanship, since a great masterpiece, Starry Night, was produced while Vincent was confined to his bedroom at the asylum two weeks earlier, and since Cypresses and other great landscape “Wheat Field” paintings were done in the lead-up to that scene.

The history of Galerie Barbazanges began in 1911, when “Paul Poiret leased part of his property located on the Faubourg Saint Honoré 109 to his friend Henri Barbazanges”; “the Barbazanges Gallery for contemporary modern art started with money from L.C. Hodebert … Poiret spoke well, that he could hold two exhibitions a year.”230 The two exhibitions they did hold were in 1911.

Since Galerie Barbazanges couldn’t possibly have purchased the painting in either 1909 or 1910, then who bought the painting during that time period? Did Henri Barbazanges buy Wheat Field with Cypresses and hold onto it for less than a year? It’s possible. But why would Henri do that when he was going to open his own modern art gallery in Paris the following year?

Wouldn’t Galerie Barbazanges need paintings, such as a few van Goghs, to fill the halls of the gallery with bold light and bright color that was avant-garde chic and had name recognition? Of course it would. Did someone tip off Henri that Schuffenecker was the quiet owner of the painting from 1901 to 1906, before selling it? It could have happened.

When it did open in 1911, Galerie Barbazanges, over the next fifteen years of its operational life, would cut a huge swath through the avant-garde art scene in Paris and in Europe as a whole. Henri’s gallery exhibited Bernard Naudin and the Russian-Jewish artist Marc Chagall in 1924 with a retrospective exhibition of Chagall’s magnificent works;231 the year before Henri bartered Manet’s masterpiece The Old Musician “in exchange for two other French paintings: a portrait by Camille Corot and a nude by Auguste Renoir.”232

The idea of Paul Cassirer being the owner of the painting at some point does make sense, since he saw some version of that painting among van Gogh’s dazzling, seventy-one-piece art exhibition in 1901 at the Bernheim-Jeune.

Naturally, it would be Cassirer, who had championed van Gogh’s form of Post-Impressionism for a decade, who purchased it in Paris and took that painting back to his art gallery in Berlin, since the avant-garde art scene in 1910 had just taken off like a luminous streak of fireworks. It also makes sense that some art dealer, such as a Henri Barbazanges or some other Parisian gallery owner, had bought and sold the van Gogh “masterpiece” to Paul Cassirer in Paris in or around late 1910.233

At the start of the decade, Berlin was the fastest growing city in Europe. From 1871, when Vincent van Gogh was eighteen years old and still several years away from embarking on his career as an artist, Berlin’s population exploded from 827,000 people to nearly 2.1 million people by 1910.234 “Berlin also became the most important railway node in Europe with no less than twenty-two railway stations.”235 Prior to the start of World War I, Berlin had more than 100 daily newspapers, which seems an astounding flow of information in a pre-computer, pre-Internet, and pre-smartphone era.236

Berlin was hot. Berlin was the place to be. And its avant-garde wave of modern paintings began in 1910 and lasted until 1932, just as the Aryanization of Hitler’s Germany descended on the populace like an icy mist of poison gas.

At the start of 1910, Der Sturm magazine was established, “devoted to promoting expressionist art; the term Sturm (“storm”) soon assumed the character of a trademark. This kicked off the new age, the advent of modern art. Two years later, the Sturm Gallery would open in Berlin.”237

The time, 1910. The place, Berlin. The nouveau city, coming of age amid its smoke-spewing factories, was the right place to be at the right time to sell a van Gogh or the work of any other major artist of the day. Paul Cassirer ended up selling the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses to German-Jewish industrialist and banking magnate Franz von Mendelssohn in Berlin in December 1910. The art dealer owned it for less than a month, while he owned other van Goghs for years. Why? Did he, too, like a Parisian art dealer before him, notice an oddity about the canvas, something that told Cassirer that it was likely a fake?

In late 1910, Franz, together with his cousin Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, ran the most prominent private and oldest bank in Germany, founded in the second half of the 1700s, when United States of America had broken off as a colony from England to become an independent country.

The cousins’ business skills were only one trait of a talented and passionate family. Before them came world-renowned classical music composer Felix Mendelssohn. As Franz played the violin, so too did his children gravitate toward art and music.

An even more famous ancestor, who perhaps left an even greater impact, was the German-Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn.

Born in 1729, a son of a Torah scribe, by his mid-twenties Moses befriended philosopher Immanuel Kant and journalist and playwright Gotthold Lessing.238 Moses would publish books defending Judaism in print, yet at the same time use rational thought and reason to reform his religion to assimilate in Germany by recognizing “multiple religions and respected each one,” as he wished to lift the Jewish people out of the ghetto.239

“Moses Mendelssohn not only set in motion the Hebrew Enlightenment of the 19th century, but his classic Letters on Sentiment—considered the foundation of German philosophic-aesthetic criticism—and Phaidon, about the immortality of the soul, proved that one could be both a practicing Jew and an enlightened German.”240

From a robust family tree, with a mixture of solid business underpinnings, intellectual prowess, and an affinity for the arts, Franz and Paul were in a golden era during the rise of Berlin in 1910, an ideal time and place to operate, to lend money to entire industries, to network with business leaders, and to be the financial caretakers of tens of thousands of people, particularly Jewish citizens like them. While becoming rich, they tapped into that family vein of art and culture to become major buyers in modern art.

As they bought dozens of paintings well into the 1920s, Franz would own four van Goghs with “suspect provenance,” as family heir and historian Dr. Julius Schoeps explained in a September 2013 telephone interview, while “Paul owned six van Gogh paintings with clear provenance.” Dr. Schoeps’s reference to “suspect provenance” has only one possible meaning. That one, two, three, or all four of Franz’s van Gogh paintings were either faked or copied before 1910. The First version of the Wheat Field with Cypresses was one of those four paintings with suspect provenance, as the Met’s former art expert Gary Tinterow admitted in his 1998 interview with the New York Times.

Today, Dr. Julius H. Schoeps is the director of the Moses Mendelssohn Center for European-Jewish Studies at the University of Potsdam and the managing director of the Moses Mendelssohn Foundation. Prior to that appointment, Dr. Schoeps was the first director and cofounder of the Solomon Steinheim Institute.241 As a political scientist and Jewish historian, and heir to the Mendelssohn bloodline, Schoeps brought about a decade-long case in the US courts against the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation in 2007: “The heir, Julius H. Schoeps, a grandson of one of Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy’s sisters, has claimed that two of the Picassos—Le Moulin de la Galette, done in 1900, and Boy Leading a Horse, from 1906—were sold under duress during the Nazi regime, and thus, belong to him.”242

The lawsuits were an attempt to spur the museums to do the right thing and return the two priceless Picasso paintings that the Nazis had confiscated during the run-up to World War II, forcing Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to sell those artworks at below market value. Unfortunately for Schoeps and his family’s esteemed legacy, on January 18, 2016, the US Supreme Court rejected the appeal to hear how the Nazis forced Mendelssohn-Bartholdy to sell the art amid the Aryanization of Germany in 1934.243

Those attempted “clawbacks” of artwork that belonged to the von Mendelssohn family took Julius Schoeps on a long, arduous journey through the US and German court systems to recover a total of five Picasso paintings, while fighting powerful art institutions like MoMA, Guggenheim, and the Munich Museum.244

As was the case with the German Jewish art dealer Paul Cassirer, who would become very successful as chairman of the Berlin Secession, from 1912–1915, the Mendelssohn cousins would grow in wealth and fame in German society, as would their art collection. Franz, Paul, and their families would hit the apex of their lives in Germany in the late 1920s, as their nation was battered by the cold defeat in World War I and the hard reparations of the Versailles Treaty; the emergence from the defeat of war must have reminded them of their ancestry and the postwar rebuilding they did in their day. “Moses’s eldest son, Joseph … [was] … responsible for managing France’s reparations after the Napoleonic Wars, financing railroad development across Eastern Europe and controlling the Tzar’s investments.”245

Whatever optimism had swept through Europe in the 1920s, and with Germany climbing out of its inflationary death spiral, avant-garde art was still a hot investment for collectors looking to expand their collections in the Roaring Twenties. Being on the front lines of banking, dealing with businesses and citizens alike, must have forewarned the Mendelssohn cousins that dark clouds were forming on the nearby horizon that would soon loom over the art world, the Jewish people, and the continent.