Was Van Goghs’ Most Expensive Painting Ever Sold A Fake? | Perspective

[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 22.5 million at 22 and a half million pounds last time at 22.5 million pounds at 22 million five hundred thousand pounds for the last time about 43 this painting of 14 sunflowers by van gaal made almost three times the previous record price for a picture an export license in all probability will be applied for the buyer was from japan the yasuda fire and marine insurance company of tokyo but had they bought a new national treasure or an expensive fake doubt about its authenticity what a time to ask no i don't think there is the authenticity question may have seemed a joke at the time but doubts were already being expressed it's a very funny muddy picture and it 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 it doesn't have that snap the latest fake scandal hit the auction rooms when van gogh's gardener over was put up for sale in paris press coverage of the sale sparked a media witch hunt of suspicious van goghs 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 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 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 fakes 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 yesuda 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 virus 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 yesuda 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 there are no 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 yasuda 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 londe 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 the version of london and the version now in tokyo in the other one of amsterdam there are two so this these two are now connected now if you look on on the enlargement of the cover of the catalog when it was sold the yellow here is put over the 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 russian have made very definite strategy about it but i couldn't be sure i cannot tell really to 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 um it's a whole puzzle that still needs to be studied yes and when i got this catalogue i remember having said to miss norman look it's a funny thing i got a special catalogue by christy of a star painting that they are going to sell and for me it's a copy done by a clumsy [Music] artist the man who first challenged the sunflowers in public is a milanese quantity surveyor antonio de robertis the study of van gogh is for him a passionate hobby his knowledge won him 100 million lira about 50 000 pounds from a tv quiz in 1990 [Music] 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 i'm very interested in the new theories i think they're they're very um they're filled with sherlock holmes and we all like a great mystery we all like a great sensationalist who done it but sadly um the stylistic grounds in this case uh 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 to unravel the mystery we need to look at vincent's life [Music] the sunflowers were painted in all 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] he never had enough money but he managed to drink quite heavily and became a habituate of the local brothels the townspeople considered him a curiosity 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 of crucial evidence when chasing fakes vincent dreamed of bringing other painters to owl 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 gogar's room in the yellow house that vincent painted his famous series of sunflower pictures i turned to alan tariqa the man who had first told me the yasuda sunflowers was a fake for a visual explanation of what's wrong with the picture the one we are going to speak a lot 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 we had replicas made first out of the wrapping came the yasuda picture the one tarika 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 showed us how the faker had misunderstood what van gogh was painting here we see for instance this sleeve you see this sleeve 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 was going was crossing the leaf we have the feeling that the stem is going through the leaf and this is abnormal in the nature in the real nature the leaf doesn't grows on the stem this way that's another mistake that the painter did while he tried to repeat the image which is there for instance here we see the stem here which is broken you see and here the stem it 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 the 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 semen and there are other elements for instance in the center flower here when van gaal planted it of course the petals are tight to the center part of the flower if we look at the copy that he 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 yazuda painting we see the petals here are not connected with the center part because they are painted with thick impastos the painter could not handle the thick brush stroke here to connect it correctly with the center part of the flower he could not pump like that and make all of these mistakes which we have seen which are clumsy which correspond to the clumsiness of the handling of thick and pastels and for him painting with thinking pastels was not a way it was not difficult because it's not that he had learned in some way that's how he was writing with paint for all of his reasons i think that this painting is a fake painting done by a clumsy artist so [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 medium as well which i didn't really know about but in arl 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 and nature but also with love and gratitude a 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 aurier the critic he says you know every artist has had his certain flower father quoth had the hollyhock i have the sunflower so somehow he associated himself for i'm sure a lot of iconographic and spiritual reasons and naturalistic reasons and artistic reasons with the sunflower but they are definitely integrated with his preparation of the welcome to gauguin to come to ireland [Music] you have trouble finding the place oh you're painting things are hearing some canvases they arrived the day before yesterday all right i fixed this room up for you [Music] it's very nice [Music] i painted him for you well 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 saremi 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 overseers 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 over [Music] with theo's death all 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 laboriously 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 tornasol 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 bernheim jeon 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 catalogue 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 catalogue tells us that it was lent by claude emil schufeneker 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 schofinecker had been restoring it for johanna chofaneka 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 schufenecker's life and and skills the opportunity to do it was there the skill to do it was certainly there i have no question about that uh the intention to do it as a copy might have been there the intention to do it as a forgery was quite another thing jill grace vogel was the curator of an exhibition of schofinecka's own work at the prior museum in sargera in the autumn of 1996. he had a very good eye he really was the initiator of the collections of gauguin's 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 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 gogan or van gogh 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 schofeneker's daughter was to inherit several vanguard 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 this picture was painted by girga who was a close friend and often lived with the family in paris he is said to have had an affair with schofeneker's wife who later demanded a divorce possibly the financial motive for the fakes [Music] another suspected fake that has close links with the schopeneker family is vincent's self-portrait with a bandaged year now in the courthold gallery london i think it's absolute forgery it's made as a verduri and it's not only the quality of the painting 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 he writes his brother you see from the self-portrait that my 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 haggard when he is working he's intent on what he is doing and he is very clear-headed also the pen's mouse hasn't doesn't make any sense but there's no pipe to the pinch of the mouth so if you look at this painting with his marvelous painting you have to realize that vincent was a true realist if he painted himself he painted himself as it was at the time here you see he has cut his ear and he is there is a bandage here and the bandage is put in place by a piece of linen or going all around if you look here at this painting there is no bandage there is only the lin going all around the father doesn't realize how situated your situation was have you any idea who might have painted that if it's not by van gogh no no i i because searchers aren't used to to announce themselves research emil schofinecker owned 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 christie's commissioned a promotional film showing the successful marketing of the yasuda painting and how they had checked its provenance they might not have been so pleased to find a shuffernecker 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 that is incredible i think it is look i think it is flowers here where the patriots turns out this rigorous examination of the painting will establish or in the case of the van gogh confirm its authenticity and here's the owner's name bruce for mr [Music] necker 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 seven hundred thousand 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 vangog family but funded by the state the family is very sensitive about evidence which reflects badly on our forebears and have consistently denied scholars access to certain key documents the museum is still a stumbling block to sorting out the fake problem now one of the things that i've been trying to work out is whether it was the sunflower or the london one that was sent to the 1901 no to the 1900 world fair and that the clap had and put into the 1901 exhibition the museum recruited a new director in 1997 john layton 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 of works of art to belong to other people and without the express permission of the owner i wouldn't feel confident or happy about doing that so i'm afraid not the museum is currently building a new wing it is financed by the yasuda fire and 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 37.5 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 lone exhibition at the prestigious paul casira gallery specialists in modern art which included several pictures from the dealer otto wacker mariana feikenfeld remembers what happened when these pictures arrived and suddenly realized that they were painted by one person but not by fangok not by the same person as 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 at trial much later i remember that my husband his firm paul casira never had bought one of these paintings but not at all because he didn't believe in it but he didn't like them they he always said they were dull and without the real fungal coloring but people bought them after all one didn't doubt paintings at that time it was not used that they were fakes and did you meet waka 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 olindo lovell i said 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 change their opinion vacker who never admitted his guilt was jailed for 19 months and fined some of his pictures had been bought by major collectors the casira exhibition was to celebrate the publication of the first complete catalogue of van gogh's work compiled by a dutchman called bart de la fai 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 wacker fakes seven years later lafaye had to publish another book titled live for van gogh the fake van goghs it contained the wacker paintings and many others [Applause] requires a bit of strength [Music] one of the major collectors of the pre-war years was mrs cruella muller and her museum in the dutch countryside contains an even greater collection of vangos 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 in store good lord so this is a whole rack of um vodka i mean fake fangs yes these works that are no longer attributed to fengo yes indeed absolutely um now this one dates back to the great scandal of the 1920s doesn't it yes was it in the berlin show in 28 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 uh people to be creative and then these two were moving right on not where that certainly supposedly sounded me isn't it yes can you explain why that says to you that it's not may not be by van gogh when you see it amongst the other works it would be easier to explain this difference you see it when it's hanging upstairs more vividly than when it's down here 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 their context it would be nice if we would have something like dna for a painting but something like that doesn't exist the museo dorse in paris has a group of paintings given to the nation in the 1950s by paul garcia 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 um as it were the key picture of course one of them and estelle who is chief curator is deeply concerned by the problem both a painting of garcia who is now it's questioned whether he may have painted some of the vanguards himself also 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 gasher portrait was bought by a japanese billionaire who died in 1996 one of the world's greatest pictures it has been out of sight in a bank vault for more than seven years there are two paintings of dr garche 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 the proof of the hand of the messer 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 but they are the same colors coming on it and this is same shape and to make a wedding between the coat of cache and the digitalis you can see it's quite the same kind of shape three times the clutter and the flower and the the coat and the flower there are two in fact and also this color is the same at that and this color 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 a vanguard if you don't know the other why the colors are in conflict so it's aggressive no melancholy the head of cache is not anymore in the corner but it's not anymore or the arm skinny at all they tried you can see they tried 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 15th of june there was only one portrait of geshe because in the letter he says i have now one portrait of kishay and because it's so far from the work of vincent i'm sure it's a copy in over vincent stayed in a little obage run by the ravel family he lived there for just over two months and is credited with having painted 83 pictures which means more than a picture a day [Music] some of them must be fakes and were probably painted by the garcia circle dr gashe was a painter and so was his son paul known as coco after he had shot himself vincent struggled back to the oberge mortally wounded adeline bradford the daughter of the innkeeper have seen that he was blessed that's 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 gache who takes care for the painters so dr garcia came over and then when he has seen there was nothing to do he asked the neighbor hershey to go to paris to pick up teo so teo arrived at about 12 o'clock and at one o'clock in the morning he died here in his room [Music] now dr gashay came over with his son and he said to his son rocco because the more he was rolling the paintings the more he could bring back home and that's how he got a collection of paintings of van gogh which are today in the ursa museum dr gashe and his son seemed to have taken as many paintings as they could garcia specialized in mental illness and homeopathy but had been a keen amateur painter since his student days his home attracted many artists including renoir pizarro and cezanne who came to him for medical advice and loved experimenting with his etching press dr gashe 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 is madame claude unique repair [Music] he kept very quiet about the vanguards 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 pizarro and cezanne he also gave the nation paintings by his father and himself [Music] he signed his pictures including copies of works by other artists with the pseudonym louis van russell his father called himself paul van russell the museum has reacted to the controversy by having the gashe van gogh scientifically investigated and announcing that they will mount an exhibition of all gashes 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 they bring office for vincent and and certain days we just cleaned the cemetery and you have a lot of little bots of sake brushes and also a lot of japanese who die 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 vincent and tayo the number of japanese tourists who come to worship at the vanguard shrine in over got a big boost when yasuda bought the sunflowers in 1987. it will be a terrible disappointment to the nation if they discover their famous sunflower picture is not really by van gogh what do you think yesuda are going 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 are going to 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 going to 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 yasuda if we could talk to them about this and their views on the sunflowers problem yasuogoto 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 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 emil chuffeneker whose 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 [Music] if the experts the van gogh foundation and mr goto from yasuda could be persuaded to divulge what they know the truth about the asuda picture could be found using secrecy to protect their reputations and huge investments just won't do [Music] 22 million 22.5 million christie's has both money and reputation at stake and has opted for silence they refuse 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 van gogh five hundred thousand pounds for the last time you don't ever get a concert of opinion in or we're seldom you get it and so this one 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: Perspective

Views: 38,111

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, van gogh, history documentary, vincent van gogh, the fake van goghs, sunflowers painting, documentary history, van gogh paintings, van gogh documentary, van gogh watercolor, fake van gogh, art fraud, stolen paintings, stolen paintings found, true crime, crime documentary

Id: rJD_mAFUJPA

Length: 49min 22sec (2962 seconds)

Published: Sat Jun 27 2020