Breaking van Gogh

The van Nogh Checklist is meant more for the art fan, the van Gogh enthusiast, and not necessarily for the art experts, art editors, art historians, and art scholars at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Van Gogh Museum, London’s National Gallery, or other museums. We know these institutions will do whatever it takes to protect their inventory and priceless artworks, but their maneuvering ultimately won’t help any attempted cover-ups as technology improves and the research goes from analog archival documents to, one day, a living database of letters, facts, images, metadata, and other available and multifaceted information.

Vincent van Gogh’s art career can be seen in stages of development over ten years. First, we find him perfecting his technique, initially as a doodler, sketcher, and drawing artist, and later with his breakout painting The Potato Eaters, created in Nuenen, Netherlands, in 1885. But if one takes that painting, or any of the paintings he did during that period, and compares it to his iconic artwork created in Paris—influenced by the French Impressionists—the works will almost look like they came from different artists. Once Vincent journeyed to the South of France, with his dream of starting an artist colony derailed by his mental breakdown in Arles around Christmas 1888, he developed his iconic brushstrokes and a dazzling array of colors. Most of Vincent’s top ten or top twenty masterpieces on anyone’s list are likely to come from among the paintings created in the last three years of his career as an artist—those spent in Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers-sur-Oise—and not his first seven.

Knowing this great creative development and the subsequent gap in the quality of his artwork, one can set out on their own and begin to look for things that might not add up for a typical van Gogh painting. Thus, the date of the artwork is the first critical juncture in determining and defining a van Gogh.

When separating the van Gogh oeuvre by time and region, set apart works from his earlier years. Thus the first part of his massive oeuvre covers his early years as an artist, when he created in Holland, England, The Hague, and Paris when he first arrived in France. The next batch of creativity dates to the period in Arles and Saint-Rémy. Most of van Gogh’s bright, colorful, vibrant, and iconic paintings came from the later period, 1888 to 1890. The last seventy or so canvases, created over the final two to three months of his life in Auvers-sur-Oise, in northern France, the farming community outside of Paris, fall partly into both groups. From a virtuosity point of view, the Auvers paintings are firmly placed in South of France group. But because those paintings never suffered the stresses of being rolled, stacked on one another, crammed into crates, and shipped by goods train to Paris, their physical condition falls into the first category of his earlier works.

This is important because the paintings that were created in the South of France hold physical “signatures” that van Gogh’s other paintings do not, including time and place.

Second, look to the extant correspondence, especially between the artist and his brother. Vincent and Theo’s letters have been parsed, reviewed, deciphered, dissected, sourced, and analyzed like few documents over the same period of time, when Jo van Gogh-Bonger, Paul Cassirer, and others began publishing limited and full editions, eventually in Dutch, French, German, and English. Today, with the Van Gogh Letters database available online, free to use, and easy to navigate, with keyword searches, one can easily dive deep and quickly into any single painting, event, person, period of time, or other specific queries. That wasn’t possible in 2000. So technology of this century has already had a huge impact on research, killing off the static and archaic typed or handwritten card catalogues in the libraries of the world.

Lastly, because the light and bright colors from the south influenced Vincent so dramatically, he meticulously relied on certain hues, paints, and pigments from the Tanguy shop. The letters from that period back up what the experts at museums around the world have learned and confirmed—that van Gogh had special, custom-made paints that were unique only to him.

Thus, the Arles and Saint-Rémy paintings give an investigator a lot more avenues to explore in searching for a fake van Gogh. That all starts with how the paintings were stored, dried (insufficiently in many cases), rolled, and transported from the Arles train station on the goods train up north to Theo’s apartment in Paris. And because van Gogh was so prodigious during his years in the south, Theo and Jo’s flat soon ran out of places to store his paintings. By the time Theo got married and Vincent was halfway into his Saint-Rémy stay at the asylum, Theo had leased space from Père Tanguy to store more of his brother’s paintings as they arrived each month.

When I interviewed Van Gogh Museum Senior Researcher Louis van Tilborgh in June 2013 for the “Hacking Van Gogh” article I was researching for the Huffington Post, he agreed that the van Gogh paintings from the Saint-Rémy year were “rolled” and shipped north, as the van Gogh letters state. The signature trait of stress, combined with thick impasto brushstrokes that led to the paints being “impacted” with signs of cracking and other stress microfractures, are wholly different than other van Goghs painted before and after the artist’s Arles–Saint-Rémy period.

In 2014, Dr. van Tilborgh was appointed professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam.304 Van Tilborgh’s 1986 doctoral thesis was on Vincent van Gogh. In the “Social Responsibility” section of the press release, we read: “This scientific mission is the reason why the Van Gogh Museum provides the University of Amsterdam with the professorship of Louis van Tilborgh. Van Tilborgh—senior researcher of the museum—has been appointed as professor of Art History, more particularly Van Gogh at the Faculty of Humanities.”305

Van Tilborgh’s passion and expertise for van Gogh extends beyond Amsterdam and the Netherlands, and beyond speaking to journalists like myself overseas. Months after the June 2013 interview, Louis van Tilborgh was busy authenticating a long-missing, but ultimately genuine van Gogh, Sunset at Montmajour (1888), a painting from Arles.306

An autumn 1986 Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibition of eighty van Gogh paintings from the Arles–Saint-Rémy period left quite an impression on New York Times art writer Michael Brenson on the eve of the March 1987 Sunflowers auction. After seeing the exhibit showing some of the best artwork from that period, Brenson wrote: “At Saint-Rémy, and then to a lesser degree in the north French village of Auvers, where he spent the last three months of his life, van Gogh’s powers of discernment and organization are unmistakable.”307

Six weeks earlier, Brenson elaborated on that special period in van Gogh’s life as an artist, writing:

Van Gogh changed art. He took the complementary colors of Impressionism and made them not so much expressions of light as symbols of a fiery, pantheistic imagination.

There is a lot in these paintings that defies rationalistic method and language. The cosmic imagery of “The Starry Night”—in which van Gogh seems at the same time to be charting and riding the chariots of the gods—is one of them. The maternal cloud shape in “Olive Trees With the Alpilles in the Background” is another. The “secondary imagery”—facial configurations in trees and clouds … mitting such ghostly authority that once recognized they do not stop exercising a haunting power—is as prominent in the St. Rémy paintings as it is in landscapes of Cézanne.

In Auvers, the palette changes and the pictorial audacity continues, but there is less identification with place, more interest in the kind of decorative possibilities suggested by Puvis de Chavannes, and most of the paintings now seem first of all like paintings. The double-square canvases—roughly 19 by 38 inches—gave van Gogh a way of exploring friezelike composition. It also enabled him to work within a peaceful format; horizontality has long been identified with the calm of the horizon. There are fascinating works here, hallucinatory dances of flowers and wheat, landscapes scurrying about under heavy skies. Van Gogh was heading someplace new.308

From the details of this book, one can produce what this author calls the Van Gogh/Van Nogh Checklist:

• Physical Condition: Impacted impasto, cracking, paint stress from being rolled and kept in rough storage at Theo’s flat and Tanguy’s shop.

• Canvas/Weave Count: Asymmetrical weave count, such as twelve horizontal, thirteen vertical threads per square centimeter. If the weave count is square from Arles onward, it’s a clear van Nogh.

• Colors: There were at least three unique colors that Père Tanguy created for van Gogh: lead whites to prime the canvas; chrome yellows, for the hot effects of the southern sun, golden wheat, and shining stars; and those special greens for the fields. There are a lot of studies and literature in this area. Twentieth-century forgers simply wouldn’t have had access to these special paints, since Tanguy died in 1894. Any one of those colors of paints that deviate from other van Goghs from the same era and place tell us it’s a true van Nogh.

• Brushstrokes: Again, this has been examined by art experts, as well as electrical engineers who mapped those strokes hidden beneath the surface. Using X-rays, electrical engineers from New Jersey ran the bits of data through machine-learning data analytics to confirm that Vincent van Gogh had a one-of-a-kind, unique brushstroke. To examine non–van Gogh brushwork, look at the ten fake van Goghs and compare them against genuine Vincent artwork to detect poor, varying brushwork of an inferior hand for a van Nogh. Vincent van Gogh was a very deliberate painter.

• Letters: The Van Gogh Letters database, found at http://vangoghletters.org/vg/. This great online resource empowers anyone to rapidly and efficiently scan hundreds of Vincent’s letters by region, time, person, object, or keyword (e.g. wheat, cypress, starry, river, rolled, train, etc.) in minutes, 24/7.

In the letters, there is a column on the right side for sources, attributions to correct paintings, and other interesting facts about the life and artistry of van Gogh. This allows the user to check and verify the sources used.

• Museums: Those museums that own or exhibit van Gogh paintings are good sources of information. Even the Met, which doesn’t share its condition reports, keeps valuable details online.

Each museum does it differently; that’s why it’s important to fact-check artwork in multiple sources.