26

Van Gogh’s Missing DNA

In 1982, CBS investigative journalist Morley Safer of 60 Minutes thought he had a hot story to pursue with a painting by Georges de La Tour potentially being “branded a fake.” Safer had “produced four English art professionals who attacked the authenticity of The Fortune Teller, believed to be painted by the 17th-century French artist between 1632 and 1635, and purchased by the Met in 1960 at a cost of $675,000.”

The Met swatted aside Safer’s request for an independent art expert to examine the authenticity of the artwork and denied him copies of the X-rays and results of tests that the Met had done on the painting. The Met art representative used a flimsy excuse not to appear on 60 Minutes, claiming that because the story was more British-centric, he would only be interviewed by the BBC. As the New York Times’s Grace Glueck saw it, “the failure of anyone from the Met to appear on the program did the museum a real disservice.”290

This author faced a similar stonewalling by the Met in July 2013, when requesting a copy of the museum’s condition report for Wheat Field with Cypresses. When repeated requests to review the Met’s condition report on Wheat Field with Cypresses were denied, editor Stephen Gregory, publisher of the Epoch Times newspaper, wrote a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) letter requesting the condition report; that request was also denied.

Months later, this author learned through a former employee at the Metropolitan Museum, who will remain nameless, that the Met has an unwritten policy when it comes to paintings with questionable backgrounds and provenances:

• If the painting was purchased by the Met and later proven to be a fake, the Met would, in most cases, remove it from its walls and store it in a cellar vault alongside many other such fakes that the museum had bought over its nearly 150-year history.

• If the painting was given as a “gift” to the Met, however, the museum was under no obligation to examine the object’s history to find out whether it was genuine or a forgery.

Wheat Field with Cypresses fits the second case. The painting was gifted to the Met by Walter Annenberg after he bought it for $57 million (it would be “the most expensive purchase” acquired by the museum).291 Thus, following the Met’s own internal logic, it was under no obligation to verify whether the van Gogh was real or a fake. With that twisted logic, the Met also felt it wasn’t obligated to provide the condition report to a newspaper, even under a FOIA request. So the Met, in its own view, under its so-called unwritten policy, believes that it has no obligation to do what’s right for world-famous, iconic master artists like Vincent van Gogh and for the museum’s visitors.

The Met’s refusal to release the condition report—which would reveal the analysis of physical condition, aging, repairs, touch-ups, weave counts, pencil sketching or outlining of the subject under the paint, chemical analysis of the pigments and vanishes or sealers, and whether any dirt or pollen made it into the paint if it was painted outdoors—is in stark contrast with the approach taken by the National Gallery.

Of course, even if the Metropolitan Museum ever does release the condition report, could the document be trusted? This is not to accuse the Met of anything. But after a cascade of denials, rejected FOIA requests, and a raft of major errors of attribution in its 2009 Annenberg Collection art book on Wheat Field with Cypresses, a skeptic would be wary of anything the Met put forth concerning this painting.

But if the Met had released the real condition report, which would have shown the two previous major owners of the painting—the Bührle family and Franz von Mendelssohn’s family—the following items would prove it to be an outright forgery:

1. Canvas weave count. With a van Gogh self-portrait suspected of being a fake, two siblings who inherited the painting in 2000 wanted it authenticated. They brought it to Maria-Claude Corbeil, a chemist at the Canadian Conservation Institute of Ottawa. In mining the van Gogh letters, she was able to deduce that the canvas was supposed to be “asymmetrical.” In other words, it contained a “different number of horizontal and vertical threads.” Under X-ray imaging, Corbeil proved the “canvas contained the same number of threads in the horizontal and vertical directions.” Conclusion: the portrait was a fake.292

Note: Van Gogh’s The Langlois Bridge (May 1888, Arles) at the Wallraf das Museum, Cologne, Germany—the museum conducted a condition report on the painting, which uncovered a weave count of “vertical 12, horizontal 13 threads per cm, very fine, open, almost netlike weave, pale in color.”293 It other words, it is asymmetrical—a genuine van Gogh.

Question: Does Schuffenecker’s (the Met’s) Wheat Field with Cypresses canvas have the same asymmetrical weave properties? If it’s a square, it’s a fake.

2. Colors and pigments. As has been stated throughout this book, Vincent van Gogh was very particular in the paints he used. Van Gogh’s custom-made colors and pigments, mixed and ground by Père Tanguy, from the special greens to the lead whites, are one of a kind. In the National Gallery Technical Bulletin for A Wheatfield, with Cypresses, it is stated that van Gogh used “chrome yellow” (lead chromate).

Note: By 1901, when Schuffenecker forged the Wheat Field with Cypresses, Père Tanguy had been dead for seven years, with no understudy or apprentice in his shop to reproduce those special pigments.

Question: Does the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses contain the special paints for the wheat field (chrome yellow), cypresses (green), and the lead white to “prime” the canvas, and perhaps use for the white clouds? If the yellow was “cadmium,” or any of the other special paints that don’t match pigments used during the Saint-Rémy period, then it’s a fake.

3. X-rays and impacted impasto. X-rays have been used to detect or confirm certain colors and pigments, weave counts, chemical analysis, and final condition of paints under varnish used by van Gogh in his paintings from the French period.294 If those French-era paintings were from the South of France, then stresses would be detected from age, poor storage, and impacted impasto.

Note: The National Gallery Technical Bulletin didn’t show any varnish being used on the Final version of the painting. That likely suggests that the other twin, the Small version of Wheat Field with Cypresses, wasn’t treated with varnish either, which would have been out of character for the usually meticulous van Gogh. Yet in September 1889, Vincent was coming off his bender of depression, so perhaps he either forgot this step of preservation or didn’t have the materials at the time to seal the painting.

Question: What would the Met’s version reveal under X-rays, with respect to canvas condition, paint colors, and special pigments used? If the X-ray revealed a painting atypical from other pictures van Gogh painted during his thirteen-month stay at the asylum, then it’s a fake. If the Met’s version wasn’t sealed with varnish when other June 1889 landscape paintings were, then it’s likely a fake.

4. Brushstrokes. Van Gogh’s brushstrokes, athletic and fast, separated him from other painters of his era and following generations. They were “strongly rhythmic” and “tightly arranged, creating a repetitive and patterned impression”; they were “special to van Gogh.”295

Question: Are the painting’s brushstrokes characteristic of van Gogh’s style? If the “blue blob” on the Alpilles mountains and the spiraling cloud, which looks like the white paint had been sucked through a straw on the canvas in the upper left hand of the Met’s version, are not typical van Gogh brushstrokes and were painted by a different hand, then the painting is a fake.

5. Cracking. A study by Louis von Tilborgh of the Van Gogh Museum, which examined the weave patterns of van Gogh’s canvases, found: “It is known from Van Gogh’s letters that he preferred rolls of canvas to ready-made, pre-stretched canvases, and information about their weave structure might make it possible to reconstruct painting locations on those rolls.”296

Note: Van Gogh’s paintings in the South of France, whether done in Arles or Saint-Rémy, all have the same exact characteristic: being rolled for transport. National Gallery’s A Wheatfield, with Cypresses was “rolled” with the physical evidence being more than simple wear and tear or poor storage. That painting suffered from being rolled, showing “impacted” impasto, cracking in the blue sky in the upper right-hand corner of the picture, while the Met version is totally free from any such cracking or impacted thick applications of paint.

With no such physical blemish in the paint aging that resembled cracks in a clown’s makeup or that of a dry riverbed, the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses is a fake.

Deep analysis by scientific experts would prove the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses as an old Schuffenecker forgery (circa 1901). An X-ray would reveal that Schuffenecker didn’t draw the contours, as Vincent would have done. The “known van Gogh aid,” which the Dutch artist himself had described as a “perspective frame” in pencil, would be absent from the Met masterpiece. Would the experts find canvas pre-primed with lead white paint, another van Gogh trademark?297 And when X-rays would reveal the absence of asymmetrical weave counts—there would be nothing for the Met to hide or refute anymore.

Van Gogh Museum’s leading art expert, Louis von Tilborgh, in his 2012 study Weave Matching and Dating of Van Gogh’s Paintings, addressed the claims that van Gogh, who at times lost his faculties and could be idiosyncratic, wouldn’t have been so exact with his materials, such as the special paints and canvases. As Tilborgh et al. noted: “Thanks to the correspondence we simply know more about the way he worked with his painting materials than about almost any other artist of his period, although that mainly applies to the years 1888–90.”298 Van Gogh remained precise and kept track of what he used.

Finally, during a November 2013 interview, former FBI special agent and founder of the FBI’s Art Crime Unit Robert Wittman weighed in on what would be, for him, the unequivocal proof that the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses is a fake van Gogh. He pointed specifically to the material characteristics of the painting. Knowing that the picture was painted outdoors in June 1889 leads one to expect that there would have been pollen or dirt in the paint.

Wittman added, “Paint chip analysis, if it doesn’t detect pollen, then it’s a clear fake. That would be definitive,” since the landscape would be shown to have been painted indoors as opposed to being outside, in front of his subject, as van Gogh did with his sketch and then detail drawing of Wheat Field with Cypresses in June 1889.

Unfortunately, such an analysis is not an option, outside of attempting to steal a chip of paint off the painting inside the Met. (The thought has crossed this author’s mind.) Regardless, the overwhelming circumstantial evidence points to their picture being painted by another hand, that belonging to Schuffenecker.