The Fake Van Gogh's (Counterfeit Art Documentary) | Timeline

[Music] among the tragedies of the American bombing of Japan in 1945 was the loss of a painting of five sunflowers by Van Gogh Japan's favorite artist [Music] thirty two and a half million at twenty two and a half million pounds last time at twenty two and a half million pounds at twenty two million five hundred thousand pounds for the last time what forty-three this painting of fourteen sunflowers by Van Gogh made almost three times the previous record price for a picture the buyer was from Japan the Yasuda far and marine insurance company of Tokyo but had they bought a new national treasure or an expensive fake your--the anticipation may have seemed a joke at the time but doubts were already being expressed it's a very funny muddy picture and it did Ben Vincent van Gogh was not muddy okay you said well it needs to be cleaned and all that that's not the case there's something it's not put together and it doesn't have that snap the latest fake scandal hit the auction rooms when Van Gogh's gardener Dover was put up for sale in Paris press coverage of the sale sparked a media witch-hunt of suspicious van Gogh's it had been suggested that the garden was a fake before the sale but the auctioneers carried on regardless the bidding didn't go high enough and it wasn't actually sold [Applause] Richard Rodriguez a French lawyer and connoisseur thought it should never have been put up for auction in the first place he objected saying a recently published book doubted the picture's authenticity [Music] since I was told the sunflowers was a fake back in 1987 I've been longing to have a go at it as a journalist fix have always been my speciality the van Gogh fakes were made at the turn of the century shortly after his death they got muddled up with his real work and everyone's assumed ever since that they were genuine today this has produced a fantastic model estimates of the number of fakes have gone as high as a hundred leading scholars agree that the fakes exist but they fight among themselves over which they are and complain bitterly about each other's ignorance in private the van Gogh Museum has an embargo on certain family documents no one has been allowed access to some of the key evidence museums and sale rooms hide behind confidentiality clauses there's just too much money and too many reputations at stake the case of the Yasuda sunflowers highlights all these problems the painting was unwrapped in Tokyo with all the respect due to the greatest painter in the world and an enormous sum of money the evidence against this picture seems to me overwhelming there are three versions of this bars of 14 sunflowers Vincent often copied his own pictures so on the face of it there is nothing surprising about him repeating the subject but the Yasuda painting is the only one not mentioned in his letters the only one that is unsigned and is thought by connoisseurs to be visually inferior to the other two the renewed doubts about the version in the London National Gallery which was painted in August 1888 it was bought directly from the van Gogh family the Asuna picture is a copy of it whether by Vincent or not for a period in the 1980s the Yasuda painting hung on loan alongside the original everyone could see it was not as good the third painting of 14 sunflowers has never left the family collection and is now in the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam the almost daily letters that Vincent wrote to his art dealer brother Theo never mentioned the Yasuda picture only the London and Amsterdam versions there are essentially three ways to investigate whether a painting is a fake by visual comparison by studying documentary evidence and by scientific tests all of them will be needed if an answer is to be found to the Yasuda mystery the person who has spent more time than anyone else chasing documentary evidence on the fakes is Benoit lon day he was not trained as an art historian but has been working on Van Gogh for the past seven years he is convinced that the Yasuda sunflowers is not by Van Gogh on two versions there are three petals on the flower the version of London and the version now in Tokyo in the other one of him standing are two so this these two are now connected so if you look the announcement of the cover of the catalog when it was sold the yellow here is put over to brown which is on the background and that is true everywhere okay it's not the way Vincent was working because he was working by colors I wouldn't say it isn't a fake without having seen it and really have made very definite stories about it but I couldn't be sure I cannot tell really tell decide everything for sure but for me if you want to decide anything you should have to do a lot of technical research for the outcome to know exactly what's what so you don't actually exclude the possibility that this is by a different hand you just say that you haven't seen it yes and it's a whole puzzle that still needs to be studied and when I got this catalog I remember having said to miss no man look it's a funny thing I got a special catalogue my christy of a star panting oh they are going to sell and for me it's a copy done by a clumsy artist [Music] the man who first challenged the sunflowers in public is a Milanese quantity severe Antonio de Roberta's the study of van gock is for him a passionate hobby at his knowledge won him a hundred million lira about fifty thousand pounds from a TV quiz in 1990 he has put all his doubts about the sunflowers on the internet and is the bit noir of professional scholars unlike them he wants to make a big public issue of it yes oh no absolutamente con viento questo Poirot nausea demon God so no drop a probe a kml owe me a no convene toe NC to toe questo Quadro money my cheetah tonalá correspond Enza de vincent Asaf Rotello namaste aunty van gock GT per beam Ventus at the vaulting partly the Zira soul in LA later a fatty or fratello in a Sunnah request a venti set day later a request a venti Satechi tascioni SI parla my request Okada no I'm very interested in the new theories I think they're they're very they're filled with Sherlock Holmes and we all like a great mystery we all like a great sensationalist whodunit but sadly the stylistic grounds in this case I think could be accounted for several reasons one it could be that it was a painting that was possibly more mishandled the other probable issue is that the sunflowers is a work which we all expect to be brilliant but it has suffered [Music] to unravel the mystery we need to look at Vincent's life [Music] the sunflowers were painted in our a little town in the South of France where he moved in february 1888 by that time he was 35 and had been painting for eight years the son of a dutch pastor he had worked in an art gallery then became a preacher he was always emotionally unstable and neither career suited him he was a slow developer as a painter and it was only when he reached all that the great period of his work began [Music] he painted the surrounding landscape and the town itself particularly the cafe run by his friends the rulers [Music] you never had enough money but he managed to drink quite heavily and became a habitué of the local brothels the townspeople considered him a curiosity [Music] he sent his paintings in batches to his art dealer brother Theo in Paris to whom he wrote almost daily about his work the letters are crucial evidence when chasing fakes Vincent dreamed of bringing other painters to our and establishing a studio of the South he took over half a derelict house known as the yellow house only Goga actually came to join Vincent it was to decorate Gaga's room in the yellow house that Vincent painted his famous series of sunflower pictures I turned to Allan tareka the man who had first told me that Yasuda sunflowers was a fake for a visual explanation of what's wrong with the picture the one we are going to speak it out about he is a Paris art dealer who has a formidable reputation as a fake spotter colleagues in the trade and museum curators bring him their problems he told me that it would be easier to explain if he could show the three pictures together so he had replicas made first out of the wrapping came the Yasuda picture the one tareka calls a fake it was followed by the sunflowers from the London National Gallery the third is the picture from the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam these three pictures have never been seen side by side before tarika showed us how the faker had misunderstood what van Gogh was painting here we see for instance this sleeve you see this lid here is made of two kind of greens and it's attached normally to the stem here also we see the green leave here which is attached normally to the stem here it's made only with one kind of green but it's still alive but here it's like if the stem was going foo was going was crossing the leaf we have the feeling that the stem is going through the liver and this is abnormal in the natural in the real mature the leaf doesn't go on the stem this way that's an mystic VAT the painter did while he tried to repeat the image which is well for instance here we see the stem here which is broken you see and here the stem has continuity it's normal and here also the same this stem between those two flowers and respecting the life of each of the elements here the painter had problem of disposing the stem you know which means that this flower now is holding on a stem which is broken and the degree of life I would say the degree of life the evolution of life of the flower doesn't correspond to the evolution of the statement and there are other elements for instance in the center flower here when van got painted it of course the petals are tied to the center part of the flower if we look at the copy that I did which is in Amsterdam we find of course the same phenomenon which is the petals of the center flower are connected to the center part of the flower if we look now at the Yasuda panting we see the petals here are not connected with the center part because because we are painted with thickened pesto's the Pentel could not handle the thick brush stroke here to connect it correctly with the center part of the flower he couldn't have felt like that and make all of these mistakes which we'll have seen which are clumsy which correspond to the clumsiness of the handling of thickened pesto's and for him panting we're thinking pesto's was not away was not difficult because it's not that he had learned it some way that's how he was writing with bent for all of his reasons i think that this painting is a fake painting done by crucio artist [Music] you know the sunflower is a life-giving flower and it also produces oil but it also produces turpentine for painting it's an artist's of medium as well which I didn't really know about but in RL when van Gogh painted these works he painted them mainly because they were yellow and I think by this time he had a very careful symbolic association with certain colors and yellow for him definitely was represented as a life-giving color associated with the Sun in nature but also with love and gratitude the symbol of life but also anticipation of Gauguin's arrival because as you know he painted these sunflowers for the decoration of the yellow house it remained as he said in his one of his last letters to Albert or ei The Critic he says you know every artist has had his certain flower father coast had the hollyhock I have the sunflower so somehow he associated himself from I'm sure a lot of iconographic and spiritual reasons to naturalistic reasons and artistic reasons with the sunflower but they are definitely integrated with his preparation of the welcome to began to come to our Oh [Music] yeah really your seal told me you wouldn't tell me take these things come on you have trouble finding the place Oh your painting things are hearing some canvases they arrived a day before yesterday but I fixed this room up for you [Music] it's very nice [Music] I painted that with you that's very friendly Vincent it's very friendly but the stormy artistic temperaments clashed and famously Vincent cut off part of the lobe of one year in an attempt at emotional blackmail this nervous storm landed him in an asylum in nearby sorry me he often painted in the asylum garden and some of his best pictures date from this period a year later apparently recovered he moved north to Ostia was where he lived and painted for two months he loved the big open skies and the cornfields but it was a difficult time since Theo had just got married and Vincent felt that he was losing his brother's affection and support in a fit of depression he went out into the countryside and shot himself [Music] Vincent died after two days of agony he was carried to his grave with sunflowers on his coffin his brother Theo inherited all his paintings but shattered by what had happened also lost his reason and only survived Vincent by six months they are buried side by side in the hilltop cemetery at AU there with Theo's death or first-hand knowledge of why how and when the pictures were painted was lost by unanimous family consent ownership of all Vincent's pictures was passed to Theo's one-year-old son Vincent Willem van Gogh this meant that Theo's Widow Johanna who was 28 at the time found herself in charge of almost all her brother-in-law's paintings and it was this young Dutch woman who put Vincent on the map she built the van Gogh myth by laborious ly transcribing his letters Vincent and Theo had written to each other several times a week and Theo kept all the letters he received the letters give a vivid account in words and pictures of what Vincent was doing and feeling and of course whether he mentions a picture and how he describes it is crucial evidence for fake spotters all the sunflower pictures are mentioned in the letters except for the Yasuda version in contemporary documents all of them get referred to just as tournesol the French for sunflowers making it difficult to work out which picture is being talked about this happens with Joanna's inventory of paintings inherited from Vincent if you accept that the Yasuda painting is genuine then there are not enough sunflower entries on her list it was the Paris Exhibition of 1901 at the bound homes yearn gallery that finally established his reputation it also gives us a vital clue to the identity of the man who may have made a large number of the suspected fakes there were 65 pictures in the exhibition catalog all borrowed from Paris dealers and collectors and 11 of them are now suspected of being fakes it included three sunflower pictures Yasuda was number five and the catalog tells us that it was led by Claude Emil chiffon iike a minor artist who was a friend of Goga for the last few days of the show the London version was also exhibited it is the first photograph in the gallery's album it arrived late because chef Annika had been restoring it for Johanna chef Annika is our prime suspect he had the opportunity to make a copy while he was restoring the London painting the sunflowers for me I can only tell you that from having examined it closely I can talk about it from the point of view of shufen ëthis life and skills the opportunity to do it was there the skill to do it was certainly there I have no question about that the intention to do it as a copy might have been there the intention to do it as a forgery was quite another thing [Music] Jill gross vocal was the curator of an exhibition of schaffernakís own work at the priori in Sajha male in the autumn of 1996 he had a very good eye he really was the initiator of the collections of gogans work and and Vincent's work at the beginning he painted in a way that represented his training his earliest training was quite academic but he was very open he remained very open and so he moved from one pattern of painting into another with relative ease because he was trying to locate his own persona he was a highly intelligent and highly cultured and highly complicated individual I think he is someone who certainly investigated the contradictions that is to say how is it that it was possible to recognize the genius in a work by Cezanne or go gallivant go orchid door and yet not be able to assume his rightful place alongside these giants I think this was a major awareness he had all his life Joe Venegas daughter was to inherit several van Gogh fakes her father had the classic psychological profile of the faker an artist so bitter at his own lack of recognition that he makes fakes to prove connoisseurs can't tell the difference in his own mind that makes him just as good as the artists he imitates [Music] this picture was painted by googa who was a close friend and often lived with the family in Paris he is said to have had an affair with chauffeur Necas wife who later demanded a divorce possibly the financial motive for the fakes another suspected fake that has close links with the chauffeur NECA family is Vincent's self-portrait with a bandaged year now in the court held Gallery London I think it's absolute forgery it's made as a third of it and it's not only the quality of the paintings which i think is very inferior to the other one if you see how clear this image is the the head here the clear eyes it is righteous ruler you see from the self-portrait that my health is absolutely restored now because I'm absolutely clear and it's to be seen in this painting if you look here he looks Haggard and he never paints himself has many is working he's intent on what he is doing and he is very clear-headed also depends Mouse hasn't MIT doesn't make any sense but there's no pipe to a picture of a mountain she was idiotic so if you look at this painting this is marvelous painting you have to realize that fin sent was a true realists if he painted himself he painted himself as it was at the time here you see he has cut is here and he is there is a bandage here and the bandage is put in place my piece of linen or going all around if you look here at this painting there is no bandage there's only the Lynn going all out the father doesn't realize her situation was have you any idea who might have painted that if it's not by Van Gogh no no I because photos aren't used to announce them surface search Amy Osho Faneca earned the genuine picture at one time and made this copy of it now in the van Gogh Museum so he could easily have made a forgery as well Christi's commissioned a promotional film showing the successful marketing of the asou de painting and how they had checked its provenance they might not have been so pleased to find a chiffon echo inscription had they known more about his reputation one of the first steps with every work of art that comes for auction at Christie's is physical appraisal this rigorous examination of the painting will establish or in the case of a van gogh confirms its authenticity scholarly research is vital to sort out what happened nearly a hundred years ago this makes the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam and its extensive archives crucially important to all potential detectives Vincent's enormous popularity particularly with the Japanese means that this tiny museum gets 700,000 visitors a year [Music] it is a family Museum Vincent's nephew inherited all the pictures when he was one year old as an old man in 1962 he arranged that the Dutch government would build a museum where the family paintings could hang they now belong to a foundation controlled by the van Gogh family but funded by the state the family is very sensitive about evidence which reflects badly on their forebears and have consistently denied scholars access to certain key documents the museum is still a stumbling block to sorting out the fake problem 1901 nope to the 1900 world fair the museum recruited a new director in 1997 John Leighton from the London National Gallery who is struggling to be more open but he has to work within the traditional limitations John do you feel that you can discuss with us the debate about the authenticity of the pseudo sunflowers we have a very clear policy and discussing works of art and the attribution works about to belong to other people and without the express permission of the owner I wouldn't feel confident are happy about doing that so I'm afraid not the museum is currently building a new wing it is financed by the Yasuda Fire & Marine insurance company of Tokyo out of gratitude for the popularity and profits that the purchase of the sunflowers has brought them Yasuda has contributed thirty seven and a half million dollars under these circumstances it is difficult to believe that the van Gogh museum could give an unbiased opinion on the authenticity of the painting the first big fake scandal erupted in Berlin in 1928 there was a loan exhibition at the prestigious Paul casera gallery specialists in modern art which included several pictures from the dealer Otto vaca Mariana Franken felt remembers what happened when these pictures arrived it suddenly realized that they were painted by one person but not by phone book not by the same person is the other paintings and then of course the whole thing exploded very quickly Berlin was a very gossipy town everybody wanted to keep secret but it was quite impossible and came to the press very soon and people who had bought these pictures brought them to be taken back and as everybody knows they were a trial much later I remember that my husband his firm parkus IRA never had bought one of these paintings but not at all because he didn't believe in it but he didn't like them he always said they were done and without the real fungal coloring but people bought them after only one didn't doubt paintings at that time it was not used that they were fakes and did you meet taka himself no only at the trial I saw him first time at the trial when he told everybody that he was a dancer by the name of William de lluvias I don't know why I kept this name in my mind I must say it was very exciting because all the famous art historians were giving their opinion and every time in the opinion Vacca who never admitted his guilt was jailed for 19 months and fined some of his pictures had been bought by major collectors the cursory exhibition was to celebrate the publication of the first complete catalogue of Van Gogh work compiled by a Dutchman called buck de la vie his book is still the van Gogh Bible he started work on it because people were already getting muddled about fakes and he hoped to clear things up but the first edition actually contained 33 of the Vaca fakes seven years later laughs I had to publish another book titled live for Van GOG the fake Van Gogh's it contained the VUCA paintings and many others one of the major collectors of the pre-war years was mrs. Cruella moola and her museum in the Dutch countryside contains an even greater collection of Van Gogh's than the van Gogh Museum itself it also contains a lot of mistakes the curator has had the courage to remove them from the main gallery and tuck them away install this one dates back to the great scandal of the 1920s doesn't it yes what is it in the body in Charlene - yes yes many of the problematic paintings are flower paintings you have little documentary proof about any painting so this gives a lot of opportunity for people to be creative and then these two we're moving right on not well that's certainly supposedly sorry me isn't it yes can you explain why that says to you that it's not may not be by going off when you see it amongst the other works it would be easier to explain this difference so you see it when it's hanging upstairs more vividly than when it's done yeah yes that's the tragedy with many fakes that in order to show that they are fakes you better show them in the real gallery but after you have decided not to do then you've taken them out of that yes it would be nice if we would have something like the yayyyyy for painting but something like that doesn't exist the Musee d'Orsay in Paris has a group of paintings given to the nation in the 1950s by Paul Gautier son of the doctor who looked after Vincent in over there are eight paintings supposedly by Van Gogh some of which are now thought to be fakes they may even have been painted by the doctor himself this is as it were and Estelle who is also a chief curator is deeply concerned by the problems a painting of Gachet who is now it's question whether he may have painted some of them and got himself so there is no record of there being a second version the first version was auctioned at Christie's New York in May 1990 and made the highest price for any picture ever the gushy portrait was bought by Japanese billionaire who died in 1996 one of the world's greatest pictures it has been out of sight in a bank fort for more than seven years there are two paintings of dr. Gachet two portraits that are very similar one that was sold recently and is now in Japan and one in the Musee d'Orsay what do you think about them one is genuine and the other is not this one is the good one but we can find in the in the painting itself the proof of the hand of the master the landscape is mixed to the portrait by the fact the line is quite the same line and the same colors are changing a bit that they are the same colors coming on it and the same same shape and to make a wedding between the coat of cachet and the chalice you can see it's quite the same kind of shape three times the coat and the flower they are two in fact and also this corner is the same at that and this column is also the same okay that all is lost in the copy if you see this painting in a flea market you never think it can be Bangkok if you don't know the other why the colors are in conflict so its aggressive no melancholy the head of cachet is not anymore in the corner but it's not anymore the arm skinny at all they tried you can see they try to do it there is absolutely no reason to imagine that Vincent could have done this thing and more than that we know that on 15 of June there was only one portrait of Gachet because in later he says I have now one portrait of King and because it's so far from the work of instance I am sure it's a copy you know Vera Vincent stayed in a little over ouch run by the reviled family he lived there for just over two months and is credited with having painted eighty-three pictures which means more than a picture a day some of them must be fakes and were probably painted by the gosh a circle dr. Gachet was a painter and so was his son Paul known as cuckoo after he had shot himself Vincent struggled back to the herbage mortally wounded Adaline preferred the daughter frodan innkeeper have seen that he was blessed that why she came up to his room to just to check what happened [Music] and then they called the local doctor and the local doctor didn't want to take care of Vincent because everybody in the village knew it was dr. Gachet who takes care for the painters so dr. Gachet came over and then when he had seen there was nothing to do he asked the neighbor perchick to go to paris to pick up the deal so tell you arrived at about 12 o'clock and at one o'clock in the morning he died here in his room [Music] now dr. Gachet came over with his son and he said to his son roll kuku because the more he was rolling the paintings the more he could bring him back home and that's how he got a collection of paintings on Bangkok which are today endorsing museum dr. Gachet and his son seemed to have taken as many paintings as they could gushie specialized in mental illness and homeopathy but had been a keen amateur painter since his student days his home attracted many artists including Renoir Pissarro and Suzanne who came to him for medical advice and loved experimenting with his etching press dr. Gachet died in 1909 but his son lived on in the house becoming more and more eccentric and reclusive he never had a job and seems to have lived off selling the pictures and antiques that his father had crammed into the house one villager who has devoted her life to the study of local history his might include me on good the do they want awesome easel member-only come here so men person gives ll receive a como illa-allah paviva Kamsa pesky FOMO J for sitter mr. Lucas okay mr. dollar video said Turner don't people say kill is your to leaf is do something he kept very quiet about the van until he made a series of donations to French national collections in the 1950s his gifts now in the Musee d'Orsay include works by Van Gogh Renoir Pissarro and Suzanne he also gave the nation paintings by his father and himself he signed his pictures including copies of works by other artists with the pseudonym do even Russell his father called himself Paul van Russell the museum has reacted to the controversy by having the gassy van gock scientifically investigated and announcing that they will mount an exhibition of all gaseous donations to public institutions in the autumn of 1998 this is sure to spark another explosive argument you have seen when you walk up to the cemetery the countryside is exactly how it was hundred years ago Japanese they don't come only to visit but also to bring offers for Vincent and and certain days we just cleaned the cemetery and you have lot of little pots of sake brushes and also a lot of Japanese who died in in Japan their dream is to be buried with Vincent's so a lot of Japanese bring over the ashes here and then they put it on the graves from Vinson and Te'o the number of Japanese tourists who come to worship at the van Gogh shrine near over got a big boost when your suitor bought the sunflowers in 1987 it will be a terrible disappointment to the nation if they discover their famous sunflower picture is not really buy then go what do you think your pseudo guerre to say if they actually have to face the fact that they are landed with a fake oh I don't think they'll face it I think they hope it'll go away I do not think that the people in charge of the insurance company or gonna let regiments of experts in to take it off the exhibition and look at it and maybe even do some analysis and so on I just don't think they're gonna do that I think it would be a very great loss of face I think the picture was purchased because the only other Vincent van Gogh in Japan prior to the United States firebombing of Tokyo was a sunflowers which was destroyed it is said that the painting was relined after its arrival in Japan which may mean that important evidence has been lost we asked a suitor if we could talk to them about this and our views on the sunflowers problem Yasuo Gotoh the chairman of the company replied we have no intention of participating in any discussion of sunflowers authenticity as we hold no doubts whatsoever that it is genuine we also have no intention of answering the questions mentioned in your letter [Music] I personally find it impossible to believe that the Yasuda sunflowers is by Van Gogh there's too much evidence against it it's not mentioned in the letters or other early documents it first appears in the hands of a mule chauffeur NECA who his name has long been linked with faking and it is generally agreed that it is visually inferior to the other two it does disturb me however that so many experts still think it genuine they aren't talking to each other and don't know each other's arguments which is why the model persists if the experts the Van Gough Foundation and mr. Gotoh from Yasuda could be persuaded to divulge what they know the truth about the asada picture could be found using secrecy to protect their reputations and huge investments just won't do Christi's has both money and reputation at stake and has opted for silence they refused to be interviewed and issued a statement saying we see no reason on the evidence so far produced to alter our original opinion that the sunflowers is an authentic work by then go you don't ever get a concert of opinion you know worse sell them do you get it and so this what I think will just kind of go on forever and since it's not going to ever be for resale does it matter most of us who know Van Gogh and I think a lot of us do or profess to know a lot about Van Gogh know that this very simple man filled with great humility and compassion for mankind saw these works as different legacies than financial ones I think he would be horrified and distraught beyond anything you can imagine to see himself somersaulted such tremendous value and such crass commercialism I think it would have been something that he couldn't have ever tolerated you

Channel: Timeline - World History Documentaries

Views: 582,293

Rating: 4.7341976 out of 5

Keywords: painting, Documentaries, authenticity, auction, stories, 2017 documentary, History, history documentary, Vincent van Gogh, Full Documentary, Documentary Movies - Topic, Sunflowers painting, The Fake Van Goghs, documentary history, Channel 4 documentary, real, fake, TV Shows - Topic, Documentary, BBC documentary, fakes, Sunflowers, Full length Documentaries

Id: 1xPYxroE6P8

Length: 49min 13sec (2953 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 27 2018

Reddit Comments

[u/Bread112]

I'm not an expert on the subject, however, isn't it obvious to spot the fakes? The feel and style of Van Gogh is aggressive and very particular. Some of the fakes scream of being phonies. The two versions of the portrait of Gachet is night and day between real and fake. Awesome doc BTW.

[u/mountedspartan]

real hard work done