Two months after the inventory market crash of 1929, an American Gold Rush heiress named Eila Haggin McKee bought a Paul Gauguin nonetheless life referred to as “Flowers and Fruit” (c. 1889) from the Reinhardt Galleries in New York City for $5,000. A decade later, McKee gave the portray to the Haggin Museum, a fledgling new museum in Stockton, California that she helped discovered, and the place it has remained on show ever since. But for practically 90 years, the artwork world believed the portray to be misplaced. When it was “rediscovered” in 2018, the Gauguin committee of the Wildenstein Plattner Institute determined to take away the work from its newest model of the artist’s catalogue raisonné. “Flowers and Fruit” was not an genuine Gauguin, at the least within the opinion of the institute.
How did a portray that was as soon as coveted by museum administrators and collectors alike merely disappear? And how can a murals abruptly be deemed inauthentic, after greater than a century of authenticity? This is the topic of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market by Stephanie Brown.
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin is many issues without delay. It’s an artwork detective thriller, a behind-the-scenes have a look at provenance analysis, a psychological evaluation of Paul Gauguin, and a crucial commentary on the artwork market. It can also be a case research of what can go flawed from the minute a portray leaves an artist’s arms. Brown takes the reader from the rocky seaside coast of Brittany, France to the hallowed halls of Paris’s most esteemed artwork public sale homes, the galleries of New Bond Street in London and Fifth Avenue in New York City, and eventually, a little-known museum in northern California, uncovering, in her phrases, a “complex, layered story” with “unexpected connections and surprising gaps.”
In the ebook, Brown gives one definition of provenance: the “chain of transfer of ownership and possession” of a murals. By this definition, there are some crucial points to the provenance of “Flowers and Fruit” that originate from Gauguin himself, whom Brown describes as a wandering soul who lived a “peripatetic life” stuffed with “fractured relationships.” Gauguin himself typically didn’t know precisely the place his work had been. As the artist was not commercially profitable in his lifetime, there was no motive for anybody to maintain detailed accounts of his work. His agent, the famend supplier Ambroise Vollard, saved “famously vague and inconsistent” data, in accordance to Brown. And lastly, the relationships between artwork sellers within the early 20th century was complicated, opaque, and worldwide, permitting for artwork to be bought and moved below the radar. This mixture of unlucky elements sowed the seeds of doubt practically 130 years after “Flowers and Fruit” was created.
The portray options two vases, one blue and one darkish pink, with eight items of fruit and floral blue wallpaper within the background. According to the Wildenstein Institute’s 1964 catalogue raisonné, which deemed the portray genuine however famous it as “disparu,” or “missing,” it was seemingly painted in 1889 at an inn on the coast of Brittany. Scientific evaluation to this point has confirmed that the portray does certainly date from that point interval.
It is just not, nonetheless, a portray that screams “Gauguin.” Brown calls it “ordinary.” Still life work solely make up 15 p.c of the artist’s oeuvre, and “Flowers and Fruit” doesn’t resemble any of his others. Nor does it appear to replicate a specific location, which his work typically does.
But, as Brown notes, the portray does resemble Paul Cézanne’s “Still Life with Fruit Dish” (1879–80), which Gauguin owned. And he typically misplaced observe of paintings. He would stash work with associates and acquaintances between travels round France and lengthy stays in Tahiti. Often, he would fall out with them; typically, they’d refuse to return his paintings. And he had no household life to communicate of, having deserted his spouse and household shortly after the French inventory market crash of 1882.
“Flowers and Fruit” was devoted to “à l’ami Roy” — “the friend Roy” — per the phrases written above Gauguin’s signature on the portray. One of Brown’s first quests was to observe down who precisely “Roy” was. Through what she describes as a “meticulous culling of source materials,” Brown found that Louis Roy was a fledgling artist and highschool drawing instructor who had collaborated with Gauguin on a collection of woodcut prints. Gauguin as soon as made a portrait of him, and he owned quite a few Gauguin work earlier than he offered half a dozen of them to Vollard shortly after the artist’s dying. Two years after Roy died, his spouse offered two extra. None of those, nonetheless, had been “Flowers and Fruit.”
By the early 1920s, curiosity in Gauguin had elevated exponentially. Major museums, together with the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Art Institute of Chicago, added the artist’s work to their collections. In 1923, “Flowers and Fruit” got here up for public sale on the Hôtel Drouot, a revered public sale home in Paris, consigned as certainly one of a number of Gauguins stated to come from the Louis Roy assortment. At that time, the portray was thought-about a “signature” work of Gauguin; the famend French actor Sacha Guitry bought the portray for 14,000 francs — across the equal of round $10,000 at present, according to some conversions. Six years later, Guitry put the portray again up for public sale on the identical public sale home, the place an newbie collector named Max Kaganovitch, bidding on behalf of gallery proprietor Étienne Bignou, purchased it for 42,700 francs, or around $20,000 today. From there, it traveled to London, the place Bob McKee, Eila’s husband, noticed it in a gallery window. When it traveled to the Reinhardt Gallery in New York City later that yr, the McKees bought it.
In 1939, the McKees donated the portray to the Haggin Museum, positioned 80 miles east of San Francisco. It was a museum specialised in native historical past, fairly than artwork. There had been no artwork historians who may write a catalog. It had no connections to the larger artwork neighborhood, and there’s no file of them working with exterior artwork specialists. This is how the portray disappeared from the artwork world — till 2018, when Brown reached out to the Wildenstein Institute to allow them to know the place the portray was, and despatched them her analysis. The institute inspected the portray and determined not to embody it in its new version of Gauguin’s catalogue raisonné, however didn’t give any motive why.
“Flowers and Fruit” was as soon as the pleasure of the Haggin Museum. The portray was emblazoned on mugs, coasters, and postcards within the present store. Due to the uncertainty of the portray’s provenance, nonetheless, the museum eliminated the portray from public view in 2018 and hung it in a non-public workplace. Next month, nonetheless, it’ll return to the museum galleries as a part of a particular exhibition delving into the historical past and provenance of the portray. It might be hung side-by-side with one other Gauguin nonetheless life, “Still Life with Quimper Pitcher” (1889), on mortgage from the BAMPFA assortment on the University of California Berkeley.
Brown set out to decide if “Flowers and Fruit” was genuine. She doesn’t discover a definitive reply, however her analysis leads her to many different essential questions: Who will get to resolve what’s genuine or not? What is the definition of “authenticity”? Does the situation of the place a piece of artwork finally ends up — a wonderful artwork museum, a famend non-public collector, or a native historic museum — affect the portray’s legitimacy? What inherent biases exist inside provenance analysis? What teams of individuals or sorts of artists are privileged on this analysis? Does the follow account for human nature and the way historical past unfolds, which is commonly messy, unpredictable, and unclear?
According to Brown, the story of the portray’s fluctuating authenticity is extra a “story about cultural power and identity, and the way that the art world assigns value.” Being left off a catalogue raisonné, Brown writes, “does not necessarily confirm or deny the authenticity of a work of art.” She provides, “Gauguin specialists do not always agree on the authenticity of a particular work.” Two extra nonetheless life work by the artist, for example, had been faraway from the newest replace to the Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné in July 2024, together with one housed in the Glyptotek museum in Copenhagen bought from the identical 1923 public sale as “Flowers and Fruit,” and one from the Musée D’Orsay in Paris. Additional scientific testing, Brown provides, may yield extra solutions. Ultimately, the convoluted historical past of “Flowers and Fruit” remains to be being written.
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market (2024) by Stephanie Brown, printed by Rowman & Littlefield, is accessible for buy on-line and in bookstores.
