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 Metropolis 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. However 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, no less than 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 the way can a murals immediately be deemed inauthentic, after greater than a century of authenticity? That is the topic of The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Examine of Authenticity and the Artwork Market by Stephanie Brown.
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin is many issues directly. It’s an artwork detective thriller, a behind-the-scenes have a look at provenance analysis, a psychological evaluation of Paul Gauguin, and a vital commentary on the artwork market. It is usually a case examine of what can go improper from the minute a portray leaves an artist’s fingers. 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 Avenue in London and Fifth Avenue in New York Metropolis, and eventually, a little-known museum in northern California, uncovering, in her phrases, a “complicated, layered story” with “surprising connections and stunning gaps.”
Within the e book, Brown gives one definition of provenance: the “chain of switch of possession and possession” of a murals. By this definition, there are some vital 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. Because 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 seller Ambroise Vollard, saved “famously obscure and inconsistent” information, based on Brown. And eventually, the relationships between artwork sellers within the early twentieth century was complicated, opaque, and worldwide, permitting for artwork to be bought and moved beneath the radar. This mixture of unlucky components 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. In line with the Wildenstein Institute’s 1964 catalogue raisonné, which deemed the portray genuine however famous it as “disparu,” or “lacking,” it was probably 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 isn’t, nevertheless, a portray that screams “Gauguin.” Brown calls it “odd.” Nonetheless life work solely make up 15 % 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.
However, as Brown notes, the portray does resemble Paul Cézanne’s “Nonetheless Life with Fruit Dish” (1879–80), which Gauguin owned. And he typically misplaced monitor of paintings. He would stash work with mates and acquaintances between travels round France and lengthy stays in Tahiti. Typically, he would fall out with them; generally, they’d refuse to return his paintings. And he had no household life to talk 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 good friend Roy” — per the phrases written above Gauguin’s signature on the portray. Certainly one of Brown’s first quests was to trace down who precisely “Roy” was. By way of what she describes as a “meticulous culling of supply supplies,” Brown found that Louis Roy was a fledgling artist and highschool drawing instructor who had collaborated with Gauguin on a sequence 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 demise. Two years after Roy died, his spouse offered two extra. None of those, nevertheless, had been “Flowers and Fruit.”
By the early Nineteen Twenties, curiosity in Gauguin had elevated exponentially. Main museums, together with the Louvre, the Metropolitan Museum of Artwork, and the Artwork 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 one in all a number of Gauguins stated to come back 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 as we speak, based on some conversions. Six years later, Guitry put the portray again up for public sale on the identical public sale home, the place an novice collector named Max Kaganovitch, bidding on behalf of gallery proprietor Étienne Bignou, purchased it for 42,700 francs, or round $20,000 as we speak. 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 Metropolis 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, reasonably than artwork. There have been no artwork historians who might write a catalog. It had no connections to the higher artwork neighborhood, and there’s no report of them working with exterior artwork consultants. That 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 to not embrace 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 satisfaction of the Haggin Museum. The portray was emblazoned on mugs, coasters, and postcards within the present store. As a result of uncertainty of the portray’s provenance, nevertheless, the museum eliminated the portray from public view in 2018 and hung it in a non-public workplace. Subsequent month, nevertheless, it should return to the museum galleries as a part of a particular exhibition delving into the historical past and provenance of the portray. It is going to be hung side-by-side with one other Gauguin nonetheless life, “Nonetheless Life with Quimper Pitcher” (1889), on mortgage from the BAMPFA assortment on the College of California Berkeley.
Brown got down to decide if “Flowers and Fruit” was genuine. She doesn’t discover a definitive reply, however her analysis leads her to many different vital questions: Who will get to determine what’s genuine or not? What’s the definition of “authenticity”? Does the placement of the place a chunk of artwork finally ends up — a advantageous artwork museum, a famend personal collector, or a neighborhood historic museum — impression the portray’s legitimacy? What inherent biases exist inside provenance analysis? What teams of individuals or kinds of artists are privileged on this analysis? Does the apply account for human nature and the way historical past unfolds, which is commonly messy, unpredictable, and unclear?
In line with Brown, the story of the portray’s fluctuating authenticity is extra a “story about cultural energy and identification, and the best way that the artwork world assigns worth.” Being left off a list raisonné, Brown writes, “doesn’t essentially affirm or deny the authenticity of a murals.” She provides, “Gauguin specialists don’t all the time agree on the authenticity of a specific work.” Two extra nonetheless life work by the artist, as an example, had been faraway from the most recent replace to the Wildenstein’s catalogue raisonné in July 2024, together with one housed within 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. Further scientific testing, Brown provides, might yield extra solutions. Finally, the convoluted historical past of “Flowers and Fruit” continues to be being written.
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Examine of Authenticity and the Artwork Market (2024) by Stephanie Brown, revealed by Rowman & Littlefield, is out there for buy on-line and in bookstores.