Connoisseurship and that new Van Gogh
October 3 2013
Picture: NYTimes
Art historian Gary Schwartz (whom regular readers will know for his expertise on that recently discovered Saenredam) has raised some interesting questions about the new Van Gogh 'discovery' - specifically, how did it ever get turned down in the first place?
It was submitted for judgment in 1991, at which time the museum notified the owner that “we think that the picture in question is not an authentic Van Gogh.” The quotation is from the scholarly publication on the re-attribution in the October issue of the Burlington Magazine, the art-historical equivalent of an article in Nature or Science. (Louis van Tilborgh, Teio Meedendorp and Oda van Maanen, all curators at the Van Gogh Museum, “’Sunset at Montmajour’: a newly discovered painting by Vincent van Gogh,” The Burlington Magazine 155 [2013], nr. 1327, pp. 696-705.) Given this embarrassing fact, the rhetoric surrounding the announcement should have been toned down considerably. The painting should not be called “newly discovered,” certainly not in a journal of record like the Burlington. A more accurate title for the article would have been “Sunset at Montmajour: the Van Gogh Museum changes its mind about an attribution and corrects an old error of its own."
Schwartz goes on to highlight all the strong evidence in favour of the picture, including a large '180' written on the back of Sunset at Montmajour, which matches up exactly with an inventory compiled just after Theo Van Gogh died, where the picture is listed as '180 soleil couchant a Arles', and with the same dimensions. Montmajour is in Arles. The more I read about it, the more I wonder how Van Gogh connoisseurship ever went so off beam?
