The provocative Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan often hits the headlines. His banana duct-taped to a wall sold last month for $6.2m at Sotheby’s to Justin Sun, a Chinese collector and cryptocurrency entrepreneur. The work's new owner was later filmed eating the fruit (the actual banana needs frequent replacing), the key element of Cattelan’s conceptual work Comedian (2019).
Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian (2019)
Sotheby’s
But how does Van Gogh fit into the Cattelan story? In 2017, then-president Donald Trump’s office asked to borrow Van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow (February 1888) for the White House from New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum. The museum declined, suggesting that instead Trump could borrow a solid gold toilet by Cattelan, entitled America (2016). This provocative counter offer failed to amuse the White House—and was ignored.
Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), installed at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 2016-17
Edward Westmacott / Stockimo / Alamy Stock Photo
The Guggenheim explained that it was unable to lend the Van Gogh landscape because the painting was “prohibited from travel except for the rarest of occasions”. However, our inquiries show that the museum later lent it to four exhibitions in Europe: in Bilbao (2018), Aix-en-Provence (2019), Milan (2019) and Arles (2023). The museum’s excuse therefore now looks flimsy, since the 2018-19 loans must already have been under discussion when the White House request was made.
Nancy Spector, then the Guggenheim’s chief curator, had responded to the White House’s curator Donna Smith in an email on 15 September 2017, as reported in the Washington Post. Declining to lend Landscape with Snow, she instead offered the 18-karat toilet “should the President and the First Lady have any interest in installing it in the White House”.
America had been plumbed into a toilet cubicle for Guggenheim visitors from September 2016, where it was then enjoyed by 100,000 members of the public. The last day of the installation was 15 September 2017, the very date of Spector’s email to the White House, so the artwork must have been on her mind—and had just become available for loan.
Spector commented to the White House: “It is, of course, extremely valuable and somewhat fragile, but we would provide all the instructions for its installation and care.” Concluding, she said that “we are sorry not to be able to accommodate your original request [for the Van Gogh], but remain hopeful that this special offer may be of interest”.
Spector’s outspoken views on Trump’s presidency was made clear in an August 2017 article which is still posted on the Guggenheim’s website, entitled “Maurizio Cattelan’s Golden Toilet in the Time of Trump”. She commented that Trump’s presidency was “marked by scandal and defined by the deliberate rollback of countless civil liberties, in addition to climate-change denial that puts our planet in peril”.
Stating that “Trump is synonymous with golden toilets”, Spector added that “Cattelan’s anticipation of Trump’s America will, perhaps, be the lasting imprint of the sculpture’s time at the Guggenheim”. She left the Guggenheim in 2020, for reasons unrelated to the White House incident.
Art historians may one day regard Spector’s counter offer to the Van Gogh request as playing with the idea of conceptual art.
The stolen toilet
Although the White House studiously ignored the loan offer, there would soon be another request, from an almost equally unlikely source: a duke who lives in one of Britain’s grandest stately homes. Blenheim Palace, in Oxfordshire, is the mansion of the Duke of Marlborough - and the birthplace of Winston Churchill.
Blenheim's curator, who was organising a Cattelan exhibition, asked the Guggenheim in 2018 to borrow America. This was agreed and the golden toilet was plumbed in, in the very toilet cubicle once used by Churchill. The Blenheim show, Victory is Not an Option, opened on 12 September 2019.
Maurizio Cattelan’s America (2016), installed in the cubicle once used by Winston Churchill, Blenheim Palace (2019)
Tom Lindboe (photograph), courtesy of Blenheim Art Foundation
Disaster struck. Two days later, in the early hours, thieves broke in, stealing America - and creating a temporary flooding problem when the toilet was quickly unplumbed.
No sign of the artwork has appeared and the fear is that it has been melted down for its scrap value. Weighing 103 kilos, its present gold value would be nearly $9m. In April 2024 one man pleaded guilty and three men not-guilty to the theft. They are due to appear in court next February.
Snowy scene
As for Van Gogh’s Landscape with Snow, it is now back on display at the Guggenheim in New York. The atmospheric picture depicts a man and his dog trudging towards a distant farmhouse, with the white peak of Montmajour on the horizon.
Van Gogh painted the scene on 21 February 1888, two days after his arrival in Arles, in the south of France, where snow is most unusual. As Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, “the landscape under the snow with the white peaks against a sky as bright as the snow was just like the winter landscapes the Japanese did”. The peak of Montmajour must have reminded him of depictions of Mount Fuji.
While Van Gogh struggled to paint in the icy weather he can hardly have imagined that one day his picture would be requested by the president of the United States to hang in the White House.
And what of the Cattelan’s banana? Comedian was made as an edition of three, which were sold in 2019 for around $120,000 each. One of the trio has just been resold for $6.2m at Sotheby’s. Another resides in a private collection. The third was donated to the Guggenheim. The New York museum may have lost the golden toilet, but it still owns one of the now legendary duct-taped bananas.
