In June a Van Gogh watercolour, “Harvest in Provence” (1888) sold at Sotheby’s London for £8,801,500, but all is not safely gathered in. Van Gogh, the most popular and best known artist, has recently had grave doubts cast on his work. No less than forty-five of his paintings have been declared as fakes, and they are some of the most famous: “The garden at Auvers,” “The Arlésienne,” “Dr Gachet,” even the “Sunflowers” and the self-portrait in the Met have been doubted as coming from the hand of Van Gogh.
While this may come as shock to the Van Gogh-loving public, the problem has turned on serious matters of scholarship which affect not just museum holdings and market prices, but touch the very nature of research into authenticity. Scholars themselves have not been univocal and their methods have not been uniform, but, those who have spoken on this matter are, for the most part, highly respected authorities in the field.
Our correspondent Martin Bailey has looked at what these scholars have been saying: Jan Hulsker, whose authoritative monograph, The new complete Van Gogh was published last year, has maintained that in addition to the forty-five he lists discretely as fake, he has very strong doubts about the authenticity of many more works.
German art historian Dr Roland Dorn and Zurich-based dealer and scholar Walter Feilchenfeldt together have undertaken the most serious work in the field of Van Gogh fakes and have also pointed out the extent of mistaken identifications and of deceptions.
The Art Newspaper has also had exclusive access to the work of Dutch scholar Liesbeth Heenk of the Courtauld Institute who has undertaken the most detailed examination so far of Van Gogh’s drawings. Dr Heenk has made a technical and stylistic analysis of the works on paper and has concluded that a number are inauthentic.
The crux of the matter is that Van Gogh sold virtually no works in his lifetime and consequently there is no commercial proof of provenance or authorship and his heirs had little control of the oeuvre. Within twenty years of his death he became immensely popular and his paintings commanded the highest prices. Greedy fakers were helped by the publication of Van Gogh’s diaries in which they could read the artist’s descriptions of works-in-progress which they could then counterfeit. The first fakes were detected in 1928. We review the situation up to the present.