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Van Gogh’s Fragmented Oeuvre

The forgers who fenced dozens of paintings through the once-venerable Knoedler Gallery, established in the nineteenth century, could only commit their crime knowing that artists such as Rothko, Pollock, and Motherwell had been dead a long time. When we see the profits one stands to reap—“Preet Bharara’s office indicted Ms. Rosales on being the front for the paintings that were sold to Knoedler Gallery for more than $30 million, and then flipped for $80 million to wealthy investors”299—we can understand why people of all stripes forge paintings. This particular series of crimes started in the mid-1990s and went well into the twenty-first century, before Getty, the owner of the gallery, pulled the plug on the historic gallery. Before that happened, however, “the profits were huge. In total, 63 fake paintings were listed as produced and laundered. They included iconic names of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell, but they had an ‘odious’ air about them.”300

The August 2013 article this author wrote on that art-crime conspiracy explains the mindset of the thief: “For art forgery to work, the artist must be dead so he can’t spot a fake. Take the abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock, who died in 1956. Last year, the Knoedler Gallery was shut down for having a ‘forged’ Pollock. There’s one problem with copying his work. Pollock used lead-based paints that were banned in the 1970s.

“Another problem with Pollock: ‘The whites are no longer whites, they are now yellow, due to aging,’ said a top art restorer and a watchdog to the New York City auction houses when I met him at his studio. ‘There are two ways to detect fakes. The good ones can spot the odious crap right away. If it’s a period piece, you flip over the painting and check the frame and canvas to see if it’s an original from that time period,’ he explained.”301

At the start of the twentieth century, doubts began arising about suspect van Goghs that had moved beyond a single fake, or even two or three. The question grew with time. In 1997, an article came out claiming that there could be as many as one hundred fake van Goghs, with at least “forty-five doubted in the canonical Hulsker catalogue, sixteen are in the Van Gogh Museum, Amsterdam; leading scholars Dorn and Feilchenfeldt consider another twenty-one dubious, and there is skepticism also about some drawings. But there is good news as well: over the last ten years, twelve new works have been accepted as being by Van Gogh.”302

Talk about a broken oeuvre from a major artist. One hundred fakes? Mon dieu! Even if the number were whittled down to forty-five fakes, the van Gogh controversy is clearly alive and well more than a century after his death.

But instead of going to bat and trying to hit a home run, why not try to hit a single, as in a single fake? More startling than the number of fake van Goghs in the market is that this particular one, the Met’s Wheat Field with Cypresses, has never shown up on any of those fake-forged-Schuffenecker lists. It’s an outlier. It is also a clear fake. A butchered copy. So if that painting has never been examined as one of the dozen or more suspect fakes by the art experts that came before this book, what does that say about Vincent’s true oeuvre?

Let’s start with what we do know about which van Goghs are true van Nogh paintings.

1901—Julien Leclercq removes two van Goghs from the seventy-one paintings that were exhibited at the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery on day one of the show, making a nice diversionary tactic to get Jo van Gogh-Bonger to look in another direction.

1932—Then there were the four confirmed fakes in the Otto Wacker Trial, which didn’t turn up the weave count issue then, but have been confirmed by modern X-rays for one of them. In his miraculously discovered trove from a “secret” Swiss collector, how many of the thirty-three paintings are actually van Noghs?

2000—Maria-Claude Corbeil, a chemist at the Canadian Conservation Institute of Ottawa, proves through deep X-rays that the weave counts were not asymmetrical for painting Cypresses (different than the Met’s original), which has a provenance that ran through convicted art forger Otto Wacker.

2014—Swiss investigative journalist Hanspeter Born and French art expert Benoit Landais dismantle the Yasuda Sunflowers in their thoroughly researched book Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers, proving beyond a doubt it was forged by the minor artist in 1901.

2014—Not to be outdone by their own work, Born and Landais make another strong case in their book by looking at another Met van Gogh; this time they examine L’Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux with Books; the authors show that Madame’s elbow is floating above the table, not resting on it as it does in the real painting with nearly the same name, L’Arlésienne: Madame Ginoux with Gloves and Umbrella, which hangs in Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

2016—James O. Grundvig, with plenty of help from the experts—particularly art expert Alex Boyle, who shined the light in the right direction—proves beyond question that the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s version of Wheat Field with Cypresses is a clear fake, a bad Schuffenecker forgery. By the way, no condition report is needed from the Met to solve this case.

Without breaking a sweat, the above list shows there are ten—ten—major van Goghs that are fakes. Since we are talking about ten, and not one or two, one begins to wonder how many more are actually out there. We may never know. But then, we should know. In the opinion of this author, and I do not stand alone, the Van Gogh Museum, which is the ultimate arbiter of all things related to the Dutch master artist, should do a lot more to confirm the fakes that are out there and investigate those with questionable provenance. It seems that museums are more interested in protecting their self-serving interests, revenue, and reputations than checking the authenticity of their paintings.

However, in the Digital Age, someone, some organization, or a group of art lovers, art historians, art researches, or an investigative journalist like myself can shame those museums that have been and continue to be unwilling to cooperate, unwilling to be transparent, and unwilling to serve the public as they claim to do. Perhaps interested parties could join together and apply some shame and more pressure en masse by singling out those museums that claim to seek the truth but in reality sweep it into a dark corner of their storage vault.

At the top of that list should be the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

A recent book, the 2001 Behind the van Gogh Forgeries: A Memoir, which reprints a fragment of a Schuffenecker obituary published by Dutch newspapers in 1934, sheds more light on the circumstances surrounding his life:

With reference to the death of the painter Emile Schuffenecker, deceased in Paris at the age of eighty-three, the ‘Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung’ reminds us that his name was repeatedly mentioned in relation to paintings erroneously ascribed to Van Gogh. He was a friend of Van Gogh and belonged to Gauguin’s circle in Pont-Aven. Van Gogh had a great influence on him. Copies of Van Gogh’s paintings which came on the market were probably by his brother Amedée, a wine dealer who was also an art dealer. There are most likely in various collections a number of works ascribed to Van Gogh that were painted by Amedée Schuffenecker.303

It appears the Dutch editors believed that the Schuffenecker brothers had gotten away with committing the ultimate fraud, copying sixty paintings, most of them van Goghs.

So the ultimate number of the van Gogh fakes remains a mystery, and one certainly worth a closer look.