A Real Van Gogh, How the Art World Struggles with Truth

‘This is research of a kind that is seldom performed by art historians, who are more interested in whether a given work is genuine or not than in the process by which opinions are formed. Time after time, Tromp discovers that key agents allow their judgment to be guided by their own financial interest. In day-to-day practice, the ethics of this behavior is not questioned either in the courts, the art trade or the art-historical literature.’ Gary Schwartz ‘Based on prodigious research, Henk Tromp’s work provides a fascinating case study of the problem of authenticity. This question of what is real and what is true extends far beyond the realm of art history and may be the most difficult cultural and moral issue all of us face today.’ Modris Eksteins, Professor of Modern History at the University of Toronto and author of Rites of Spring

www.aup.nl Amsterdam University Press

TROMP_Van Gogh WT.indd 1

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789089 641762

A REAL VAN GOGH

Henk Tromp is a cultural anthropologist and works at Leiden University.

HENK TROMP

Vincent van Gogh’s paintings and drawings are fabulously expensive. Millions of people admire his work, but are those masterpieces all genuine? To this day, the international art world struggles to separate the real Van Goghs from the fake ones. The key question in this book is what may happen to art experts when they publicly voice their opinions on a particular Van Gogh (or not). The story starts with art expert J.B. de la Faille who discovered to his own bewilderment that he had included dozens of fake Van Goghs in his 1928 catalogue raisonné. He wanted to set the record straight, but met with strong resistance from art dealers, collectors, critics, politicians and others, marking the beginning of a fierce clash of interests that had seized the art world for many decades of the twentieth century. In his fascinating account of the struggle for the genuine Vincent van Gogh, Tromp shows the less attractive side of the art world. His reconstruction of many such confrontations yields a host of intriguing and sometimes bewildering insights into the fates of art experts when they bring unwelcome news.

A REAL VAN GOGH HENK TROMP

HOW THE ART WORLD STRUGGLES WITH TRUTH

Amsterdam University Press

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a real van gogh

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Henk Tromp

A Real Van Gogh How the Art World Struggles with Truth


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Cover illustration:UCLA Charles E. Young Research Library Department of Special Collections, Los Angeles Times Photographic Archives. Copyright © Regents of the University of California, UCLA Library. Cover design: Studio Jan de Boer, Amsterdam Layout: V3-Services, Baarn isbn e-isbn

978 90 8964 176 2 978 90 4851 141 9

nur

646

The English translation has been subsidized by the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research © Henk Tromp / Amsterdam University Press, 2010 All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise) without the written permission of both the copyright owner and the author of the book. Every effort had been made to obtain permission to use all copyrighted illustrations reproduced in this book. Nonetheless, whosoever believes to have rights to this material is advised to contact the Publisher.


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‘Tis with our Judgments as our Watches, none Go just alike, yet each believes his own.’ Alexander Pope, An Essay on Criticism


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Table of Contents

Dramatis personae Introduction 13 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

9

An eye for an eye 25 True colors 57 Hushing up 85 For art’s sake 107 The expert tamed 129 Retaliation 171 An uneasy legacy 191 Between a rock and a hard place Among art experts 231 The gift 255 The unfinished Vincent 273

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Acknowledgments 301 Notes 305 Archives 329 Illustrations 331 Bibliography 333 Index of names 345

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Dramatis personae in order of appearance Leading roles J. B. de la Faille (1884-1959): Lawyer, critic, journalist, art dealer, curator, and auctioneer. Francophile, campaigned against German expansionism during the First World War in the Netherlands. Compiler of the catalogue raisonné of Vincent van Gogh (first edition, 1928; second edition, painting catalogue, 1939; posthumous edition, 1970). H.P. Bremmer (1871-1956): Critic, painter, art educator, patron, dealer, curator, art collector, and advisor to Mr. and Mrs. Kröller. Great admirer of Vincent van Gogh. Gave courses in “practical aesthetics.” Acquired a following among the wealthy middle class. The “art pope” of the Netherlands until the mid-twentieth century. Awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Groningen in 1951. V.W. van Gogh (1890-1978): Civil engineer, nephew and heir of Vincent van Gogh. Known in the art world as “the Engineer.” Owner of the largest number of Van Goghs in the world, which he gave on loan to the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1930. Chairman of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. Co-founder of the Expertise Institute in 1952. Awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Amsterdam in 1954. Entered into an agreement with the Dutch state in 1962 for the establishment and construction of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh. A.M. Hammacher (1897-2002): Critic; director of the Aesthetics Department of the Dutch post office; after 1945 director of the Art Division of the Ministry of Education, Art and Science; in 1948 appointed director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. In 1952 extraordinary professor of art history


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at the Delft Institute of Technology. Awarded an honorary doctorate by the University of Utrecht in 1958. Writer on Vincent van Gogh’s life and work. Editorial chairman of the posthumous edition of De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue between 1961 and 1970. Supporting roles C. Veth (1880-1962): Journalist, critic, writer whose works included De advocaat in de karikatuur. H. Kröller-Müller (1869-1939): Art collector, wife of millionaire A.G. Kröller. Vincent van Gogh was the focus of her art collection, which she passed on to the Dutch state between 1928 and 1935. O. Wacker (1898-1970): Dancer and Berlin art dealer. Sold 30 paintings between 1926 and 1928 that were allegedly by Van Gogh. Convicted of falsification of documents in 1932. W. Scherjon (1878-1938): Printer and publisher of art books, critic, collector, and art dealer. Compiler of Van Gogh catalogues published in 1932 and 1937. L. Justi (1876-1957): Art historian, director of the Nationalgalerie in Berlin from 1909 to 1933. Assistant librarian at the Nationalgalerie until 1946, then director of the State Museums in Berlin (German Democratic Republic). J. Meier-Graefe (1867-1935): Art historian, writer, critic. Champion of modern art in Germany. First in Germany to own a painting by Van Gogh. A.M. de Wild (1899-1969): Restorer, dealer, and chemist. Pioneer of the scientific analysis of paintings. Chester Dale (1883-1962): American banker, millionaire, and art collector. Sat on the boards of several American museums. Appointed President of the Board of Trustees of the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1956.

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W. Jos. de Gruyter (1899-1979): Graphic artist, critic, director of the Groningen Museum (1955-1963), then chief curator at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. Published a Van Gogh catalogue with W. Scherjon in 1937. J. Walker (1906-1995): Art historian, chief curator, director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. W. Sandberg (1897-1984): Graphic designer, joined the staff of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam in 1938 and later became its director (1945-1962). W. Goetz (1903-1969): Director of Universal Studios, millionaire, and art collector. Margrit de Sablonière (pseudonym of M.A. Bicker Caarten-Stigter, 1905-1979): Writer and translator. Secretary of the Expertise Institute from 1952 to 1959. M.M. van Dantzig (1903-1960): Restorer, art expert. Developed pictology, a method for establishing the authenticity of paintings. H.L.C. Jaffé (1915-1984): Art historian, curator, and deputy director of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam. Writer on aspects of Van Gogh’s life and work. Wrote his doctoral dissertation in 1956 on De Stijl. Became professor of modern art at the University of Amsterdam in 1962. Paul Gachet (1873-1962): Son of doctor and art collector Paul Ferdinand Gachet (1828-1909), from whom he inherited works by Vincent van Gogh. Donated a large portion of them to the French state between 1949 and 1954. M. E. Tralbaut (1902-1976): Journalist, art critic, and art historian. Writer on aspects of Van Gogh’s life and work. Awarded his doctorate for a dissertation on Van Gogh’s stay in Antwerp. A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn (1912): Art historian. Head of the Department of Modern Dutch and Belgian Art of the Netherlands Institute for Art

supporting roles


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History. Between 1961 and 1970 she worked on the posthumous catalogue raisonné of Vincent van Gogh. Plus: politicians, government officials, public sector employees, journalists, detectives, public prosecutors, judges, lawyers, artists, cartoonists, critics, forgers, and many others.

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Introduction

In 1897, the French painter Judith Gérard copied a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh owned by Paul Gauguin. She signed the painting with d’après (after) Vincent Judith, fully in accordance with the rules governing the copying of works of art, and sold it for a small amount of money to the art dealer Amédée Schuffenecker. Many years later, in 1911, she attended a Van Gogh exhibition at the Eugène Druet gallery in Paris. Included among the paintings by the master she saw her own copy, but much to her surprise it had been altered. The green background, which she had faithfully copied years before, had been covered with flowers, and her signature had disappeared. The following exchange took place between herself and Druet: Druet: “Beautiful, isn’t it? And quite genuine, you know...” Gérard: “I don’t believe a word of it!” Druet: “I assure you it is!” Gérard: “And I am sure that it is not by Van Gogh because I painted it myself. Someone has tampered with it, but I recognized it immediately. A forgery has been made of my copy.”

That evening she related the incident to her husband. She thought the forgery should be exposed, but he strongly disagreed: “Don’t do it. You’ll just provoke the art dealers and cause distress to the buyer, who thinks he’s got a proper, genuine Van Gogh. If he thinks it’s beautiful, he’s happy, and you’ll only spoil his happiness. If he bought it because he thinks it’s genuine, then he’ll be punished by a higher form of justice. Just leave it alone.”1 She took his advice and kept quiet. Druet managed to sell the painting shortly thereafter to the Berlin banker and art collector Paul von Mendelssohn-

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Bartholdy. The Van Gogh expert Jacob Baart de la Faille included Gérard’s copy in his 1928 Van Gogh catalogue raisonné under the title Self-Portrait with Flowers, number F 530. Although Gérard told her story to a magazine a few years later, and De la Faille knew about it, he continued to insist that the work was a genuine Van Gogh.2 Judith Gérard and her husband were artists. They were not art experts, the individuals who are the focus of this book. However, this anecdote sheds light on an intriguing aspect of the controversies over genuine and fake Van Goghs that have been raging for more than a century and that Judith’s husband so clearly expressed: why would you deliberately want to incur the displeasure of others, in this case of dealers and collectors? Standing up for the truth is something you may live to regret sorely. This admonition has greatly interested me in recent years, and as a result I began a search for everything by and about Van Gogh experts that I could lay my hands on. This is derived from a book by André J.F. Köbben and myself, De onwelkome boodschap, of hoe de vrijheid van wetenschap bedreigd wordt (Unwelcome tidings, or how the freedom of science is being threatened), in which we discuss what can happen to a researcher if commissioning authorities or superiors find his/her research displeasing. “Unwelcome tidings are those that threaten to harm the interests (material or otherwise) of a person or organization, or that are politically inopportune; that tarnish the position or prestige of the highly placed; or that offend national or religious feelings or any other kind of idealistic sentiments.” 3 In that book we dealt with many affairs that involved such tidings, paying particular attention to the means – objectionable and less objectionable – by which interested persons attempt to limit or avert any harmful consequences. The publication of the book caused quite an uproar in the Netherlands in 1999. Later on we thought it was unfortunate that we hadn’t paid any attention to historians. They, too, sometimes serve as the bearers of unwelcome tidings and similarly come under fire. This book is intended to rectify that deficiency, so it is based on the same questions we posed in De onwelkome boodschap. What I initially had in mind was a broad approach, but for practical reasons I decided to limit myself to a single example, although it is an example that covers a good many years: the battle over the authenticity of works by Vincent van Gogh. The questions are: 1) What were the factors behind the attitudes of the Van Gogh experts and others involved in the conflicts over




introduction

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. Vincent van Gogh: Selfportrait dedicated to Paul Gauguin, (F ), , , x , cm. Fogg Art Museum.

. Judith Gérard: Selfportrait of Vincent van Gogh, (F ), ,  x . Fondation Collection E.G. Bührle.

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authenticity; and 2) what could happen to a Van Gogh expert if he/she was the bearer of unwelcome tidings concerning the authenticity of works by Vincent van Gogh? Background Art experts make it their business to acquire, increase, and maintain their authority. They use their knowledge as specialists in an attempt to gain intellectual ascendancy over a public of colleagues and laymen. The development of the profession of art expert has never been the subject of systematic study, however. Art sociologists have skirted the issue for the most part, as we see in Sociology of the Arts by Victoria D. Alexander.4 Although she made the division of labor in the art world an important theme (as Howard S. Becker did before her in Art Worlds), art experts are conspicuously absent from sociological discussions of the world of art.5 The historian Joseph Alsop, however, in his The Rare Art Traditions, demonstrates that they are among the most important actors involved in shaping the modern art world because their job is to provide works of art with their true history.6 He contends that the specific character of the art world lies in the practice of collecting art as it began in Italy during the Renaissance. From that moment on, collectors began accumulating objects that have a special beauty and a specific history but are not meant for practical use. In this way, collectors created an art market. Dealers appeared who specialized in buying and selling art objects, and art collectors began competing with each other for unique items to add to their collections. Collectors have specific preferences, and this stimulated the supply in certain segments of the art market. Dealers began to specialize. Competition and business went hand-in-hand with assessment and reassessment. Art critics got involved, resulting in the establishment of standards of taste. As tastes change, diversification arises in the art business and among collectors. Competition leads to higher prices and ultimately to super prices for works of art. As Alsop shows, fake works of art are bound to be put into circulation as a result. Art experts play a key role here, since they provide the true history of art objects. This highly simplified summary of Alsop’s historical analysis is consistent with notions and theories on the division of labor and specialization from the social sciences. In Painting,




introduction

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Power and Patronage, Bram Kempers discusses the rise of the professional artist in Renaissance Italy.7 The formation of this profession was marked by the development of a particular pattern of values in which individuality and autonomy came to occupy a prominent place, along with specific organizations, types of behavior, feelings, notions, and taboos. No comparable sociological study has been done on the development of the profession of art expert. The research conducted by Carol Gibson-Wood on connoisseurs from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries is mainly historiographic, but her work, along with other historical studies of art experts like Jonathan Richardson, Giovanni Morelli, and Berend Berenson, provides points of access for my own sociological approach to the struggle over genuine and fake Van Goghs.8 The same applies to the studies of Dutch art historians, such as Hildelies Balk’s work on art expert H.P. Bremmer and Peter de Ruiter’s book on A.M. Hammacher.9 I have made grateful use of their research in order to shed light on a few crucial aspects of the formation of the professional art expert. Art experts derive their authority from the idea that their sole interest is that of pursuing the truth. The authority of Van Gogh experts was based on their knowledge of the life and work of the artist. In a few cases they combined this with collecting a considerable number of his works or caring for them for extended periods of time. De la Faille owed his position to the catalogue raisonné that he compiled himself, the first edition of which appeared in 1928. During his lifetime – he died in 1959 – no one else put a comparable catalogue on the market and, curiously enough, since the publication of his posthumous catalogue in 1970 (see Chapter 11), no other catalogue raisonné of the works of Vincent van Gogh has been published. Bremmer and Hammacher derived their authority from their publications on Van Gogh and from the management of the second largest collection of the works of Vincent van Gogh: the Kröller-Müller collection. Finally there was Engineer V.W. van Gogh, who was the owner and caretaker of the largest number of Van Goghs in the world. As we shall see, each of these men aspired to establish, maintain, and increase their authority and power. The struggle over the authenticity of works by Van Gogh really has to do with who could claim the title of authoritative expert on his work, and it was manifested in attempts to support, limit, or undermine that authority

background


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in others. The stories in this book usually start with a reasonable question about whether a painting or drawing could be attributed to Van Gogh, but they escalate into disputes because the authority of the expert proved insufficient to convince those who had a stake in the matter. These stakeholders also included fellow experts who felt their authority was under attack and could turn to any number of powerful people to prove they were right. In the twentieth century these were mainly collectors, museums, governments, and the law. Unlike medical specialists, lawyers, and accountants, art experts have no organization of their own to admit persons to their profession by legal means and the power of the government. They do not undergo any kind of process to attain professional status in this limited sense of the word. But the idea of joining together in order to uphold certain professional norms was discussed several times within the Van Gogh world during the twentieth century. It played a role in the twenties, but no concrete results were forthcoming in the thirties and forties. The idea persisted, however, and in 1952 it led to the founding of the Expertise Institute (see Chapter 9). The goal of the Institute’s initiators was to use the power of the Dutch government to put an end to the activities of independent experts who, in their eyes, were not passing impartial judgments on the authenticity of works of art. The main focus of this book is on the art expert as investigator and truthteller. The experts on Vincent van Gogh supposedly established the authenticity of his work by using methods taken from historiography and the natural sciences. But in many cases they passed contradictory judgments about what was and what was not from the hand of Vincent van Gogh. Part of this can be explained by differences in knowledge and methodology, but another part has to do with social factors. Both lend themselves to a sociological approach. The insights of the sociologist Robert K. Merton provide a suitable basis for understanding the attitude and actions of Van Gogh experts. He has described science as an organized, social activity that derives its specific character from a distinctive system of norms. In this system, the norms impartiality and skepticism play a prominent role. Impartiality means that when conducting their research, scientists are guided by no other value than the truth. Skepticism means that they base their conclusions on empirical observation and logic. Science is also subject to two other norms: that researchers make their findings and methodology accessible to others and




introduction

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that they evaluate them without respect to persons.10 Merton shows that practitioners of science regularly mention and comply with these norms in their writings. He also shows that they sometimes violate these norms. Professions in the art world have undergone a process of differentiation and specialization. They differ from each other on the basis of specific ideals and material interests. The crucial point is that many of the individuals in this book combined those professions in a single person. Take the book’s central figures: besides being an art expert, J.B. de la Faille was also an auctioneer, dealer, curator, and critic; H.P. Bremmer was also a painter, collector, patron, art educator, critic, dealer, curator, and advisor; Engineer V.W. van Gogh was also an owner of art and a curator; A.M. Hammacher was also a critic, museum director, and curator. The Van Gogh experts were aware of the inconsistency of the norms in the art world. As we shall see, when determining the authenticity of paintings and drawings they were frequently confronted with the dilemmas that telling the truth can entail. In such cases this was the truth − I say this just to be perfectly clear − as each of them saw it. Thus during the twenties De la Faille wrote that there was a clash of interests between the art expert as someone who knows the truth about works of art, the art critic or museum director as promoter of taste in art, and the art dealer as businessman who is interested in making a profit. Bremmer did not write about this topic, but his behavior clearly suggests that his various hats caused him quite some concern because he always felt compelled to conceal the fact that he had any financial interests in the works of art he had recommended. The Engineer – as an owner, caretaker, and curator – did not consider himself free to pass judgment on forged Van Goghs that were the property of others. As director of the Expertise Institute, he drew up and enforced certain norms and rules governing authenticity. Hammacher, as a museum director, was reticent when it came to statements about authenticity but like the Engineer he wanted to regulate the assessment of works of art, and he did that as editorial chairman of De la Faille’s posthumous Van Gogh catalogue raisonné. He also made a successful appeal to the Dutch state to keep rival experts from publishing their own catalogue raisonné. Other experts who appear in this book also served differing, sometimes conflicting interests. Disputes that arose over authenticity were partly due to an inadequate division of roles played by experts in the art world.

background


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In a number of these conflicts, experts allowed their own financial interests to prevail, or they chose to serve as spokespersons for the interests of others. It goes without saying that the most important explanation behind the development of conflicts over authenticity was probably the prospect of gain or loss. After all, ever since the beginning of the twentieth century the paintings and drawings by Van Gogh that were sold by art dealers or at auctions had been increasing in value year after year. In the last decades of the previous century, the prices of his paintings topped all others and became the “market leader” for the prices of modern art in general. Vincent’s works were a good investment. The decision by wealthy collectors like Helene Kröller-Müller and Chester Dale to refuse to accept the unwelcome tidings that they were the owners of forgeries (see especially Chapters 2, 3, 4, and 7) had little to do with money, however. The possible loss of tens of thousands of guilders or dollars didn’t really affect them because they had not purchased the paintings as commodities. They were among the collectors who strove to enhance their image and to immortalize themselves by means of their collections, and they saw the commotion over the Wacker Van Goghs as a potential slur on their honor more than anything else. In the first decades of the last century, Vincent van Gogh was one of the modern painters. By the twenties, the controversy over their aesthetic and historical significance was in full swing, which meant that collectors who bought Van Goghs at that time had taken a risk. It therefore makes more sense to see the art world as a body of exchange relationships in which financial values are converted into power and social prestige. Anyone with a large, beautiful collection can count on garnering the interest of museums, auction houses, and the media. Such a collector is assured a place in the hierarchy of the art world and may receive accolades for his efforts. He creates a power position if he owns a large number of works of art with the prospect of making future donations: he acquires followers. By making those donations he obligates the recipient and forces him to behave in a certain way. The donation binds the recipient and the donor. This idea is further elaborated in Chapters 4, 7, and 10. The work of Vincent van Gogh was part of a complex process of ideological formation in the Netherlands and Germany. One of the things that had defined the genius of the Netherlands in the nineteenth century was the life and work of the Old Masters of the Golden Age. The unification

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introduction

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of Germany during that century also went hand in hand with attempts to determine that country’s genius based on the work of artists, and for some people this also meant “Northern” artists like Rembrandt. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the “moderns” – of which Van Gogh was one – had not yet acquired a permanent place in the national pantheon. A controversy was raging in the Netherlands and Germany as to whether any of the modern artists expressed the national genius and if so, which ones. Van Gogh’s work had a symbolic value for the activities of political organizations, who wanted to use it to underscore their unity and legitimacy and therefore felt threatened by denials of authenticity. Van Gogh’s person and work were also important for those searching for an individual notion of God. The vocabulary with which they praised his works of art was taken from that of the Christian religion. This blending of aesthetics and ideology gave the struggle over authenticity a whole new dimension. Denying authenticity could be experienced as the defilement of a personal or collective sense of meaning and purpose. Reactions In De onwelkome boodschap, we identified the possible reactions to unwelcome tidings, based on the cases presented, as follows: 1) acceptance, 2) rejection, 3) hushing up, 4) challenging the tidings by rhetorical means, and 5) (attempts at) silencing the bearer. 11 If the findings of a researcher are accepted (Point 1), that would be the end of the matter, at least as far as this book is concerned. His findings might also be rejected (Point 2), without any negative consequences for the researcher. Such rejection may take the form of a published text presented according to the rules of empirical argumentation, but it may also come in the form of an insinuation, ridiculing or that other universal weapon, the ad hominem argument. Another possibility is hushing up (Point 3), that is, pretending that the unwelcome tidings were never announced. In this instance, the recipient may keep the results to himself if they are not to his advantage. He may impose a kind of gag order on the researcher, or he may ignore any negative results and explicitly praise those research results that support his own interests. Challenging the tidings by rhetorical means (Point 4) refers to “purple prose and bombastic and disingenuous linguistic usage meant to prove oneself

reactions


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right and to decimate one’s opponent.” 12 Point 5 – (attempts at) silencing the bearer – refers to when an authority or person who has power over the bearer of unwelcome tidings threatens him with sanctions if he dares to make the information public, and in this way tries to discourage him from doing so. The researcher can avert this by complying with certain demands. As I shall demonstrate, these reactions are fully applicable to my research on Van Gogh experts. Although the world of science differs in many ways from the art world, this earlier analytical scheme still holds water. In De onwelkome boodschap, we also discussed how various researchers with unwelcome tidings might react when put under pressure. There are those who fight tooth and nail against any suggestion that they keep their message to themselves or temper it in any way. Others try to work out a compromise. Still others resign themselves to what they see as the inevitable. Finally, there are those who, of their own free will, drop the unwelcome results or gloss them over, and who therefore prefer to act as some kind of advocate than as an independent researcher. As will soon become apparent, this characterization is also quite useful for helping to understand the reactions of Van Gogh experts involved in conflicts over authenticity.13 Methodology The research questions are rooted in twentieth-century Western art. Art historian Erwin Panofsky is once said to have commented that sociologists, who are mainly interested in theorizing, and historians, who just want to report events, made him think of two neighbors fighting over the same plot of land who never get anywhere because one has the gun and the other has the bullets. It has been my intention, as an anthropologist, to put an end to this standoff by wielding the one weapon that is perfectly suited to the art historian: archival research. To answer the questions I pose in this book, I have also carried out extensive and repeated discussions with persons from the art world, far more than is customary among art historians. And in describing and interpreting the events covered here I have been guided by the prevailing theoretical principles of the social sciences. In this way I have attempted to make a contribution to the broadening of social research with




introduction

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regard to scientific integrity and to a deepening of historical research on art experts.14 The Dutch Van Gogh experts H.P. Bremmer, J. Baart de la Faille, Engineer V.W. van Gogh, and A.M. Hammacher played a prominent role in the twentieth century in the conflicts over genuine and fake works by Vincent van Gogh, and my aim was to provide insight into their attitudes and experiences. This led me to a study of documents, books, catalogues, newspapers, and magazines. I also examined letters, annotations, minutes of meetings, scrapbooks, and clippings in the archives of both organizations and private individuals. With just a few exceptions, my requests to consult confidential documents were all honored. In pursuing my research, I conducted formal and informal discussions, some of them repeatedly, with persons from the art world. Following the example of sociologist J.M.G. Leune, I have broken down these discussions into ones that serve an orienting, verifying, and supplementary function.15 The art world has its own norms and rules. The orienting discussions familiarized me with the lay of the land and helped me understand the attitude of experts and others when problems of authenticity arise. Some of the discussions I conducted were aimed at verifying the intent of information that was contained in written form. As I said, my research is based to a great extent on catalogues, annual reports, minutes of meetings, newspapers, magazines, personal annotations, and letters. Not everything concerning authenticity has been committed to paper, however. Sometimes this was because the matter in question was simply taken for granted – by those involved, that is, but not by the reader today. Sometimes it was because the matter in question was of a sensitive nature, which people at the time did not want to write about out of discretion or shame. As a result of the discussions, I obtained a better understanding of what was intended in the written information. Many documents from before 1970 are, however, no longer available. Either they were cleared away because it is simply impossible to save everything, or they were destroyed because the contents were deemed too sensitive, or they were lost due to negligence or calamity. In some cases, discussions with those who were directly involved helped me to fill in these gaps.

methodology


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What does “fake” mean? In this book, a fake Van Gogh refers to a work of art that is wrongfully attributed to the artist Vincent van Gogh. Such an attribution may have been made for three different reasons. First, it was a malicious forgery: someone made a painting or drawing in the style of Van Gogh with the intention of misleading others. Second, someone tampered with an existing object. Van Gogh’s signature could have intentionally been applied to an existing work, usually because his work commanded more money on the art market than that of the actual maker. Another possibility is that the name of the actual maker was removed in an attempt to sneak it into the Van Gogh oeuvre as an unsigned work, as in the case of Judith Gérard. Third, an error was made: a work was wrongfully attributed to Van Gogh, but no dishonorable motives were involved. The Van Gogh experts are the focus of my research, and the question is whether they knew that deliberate deception or erroneous attribution was involved, and if so, when did they learn about it? And what did they do with this information? What you will NOT find in this book From the outset, I would like to spell out what readers should NOT expect from this book. First, I will not try to establish which works of art were actually from Vincent’s hand. Was the second version of the painting The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy painted by him or not? When was it made? Who was the owner in 1889, 1898 or 1901? Do the carefully applied brushstrokes indicate a forgery? I offer no answers to these kinds of art historical questions that so occupy art lovers and connoisseurs. Second, I present no black book – or anything remotely like it – about the art world or the Van Gogh world in particular. While I may show the less savory side of the art world in this book, this by no means signifies that it is all trouble and affliction. I say this with a certain emphasis, since misunderstandings are quick to take root.

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1

An eye for an eye

Vincent van Gogh died on 29 July 1890, leaving behind an oeuvre of uncharted proportions. His brother Theo may have been aware of its size, since the two men had been so close and Theo had supported Vincent in a number of ways. But within just a few months Theo followed Vincent to the grave, and he took his knowledge of Vincent’s work with him. A few decades later, Jacob Baart de la Faille assumed the task of documenting the work of Vincent van Gogh in text and picture. In 1928 he published his Van Gogh catalogue raisonné comprising 1,716 works, but it quickly became apparent that some of the paintings in his magnum opus were not from Vincent’s hand. De la Faille was shocked, and he made up his mind to correct his mistakes. In late 1928 he rejected a few dozen paintings as fake Van Goghs, but in 1932 he changed his mind and readmitted some of them as genuine, only to condemn them again as fakes about 20 years later. Genuine, fake, genuine, fake: was this an indication of instability, haste, excessive carelessness, or – even more painful (if that is possible) – of an inflated ego and sheer incompetence, as a few contemporaries believed? Was this swing of the pendulum a sign of excessive skepticism, perhaps, or of what is called “scope creep” in managerial circles? Was it an expression of lively scholarly inquiry, or were there other, quite different factors at work? The search for an answer to these questions reveals a fascinating history that centers on De la Faille’s effort to purify Vincent’s work and to preserve his own integrity as a Van Gogh expert. De la Faille Jacob Baart de la Faille (1884-1959) did not seem predestined to leave his mark on the work of Vincent van Gogh. He studied law in Utrecht and led an active student life: he was a board member of the student associa-

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tion, a writer of reviews and poems (“To a child: [...] O dream on in the land of joy, / where everything glitters like gold / how gently life steals in on us / and all of the wonders grow cold.”).1 He received his doctorate in jurisprudence on 2 June 1913, became a Dutch newspaper correspondent stationed in Vienna, and established contact with artists of the Secession, the Hagenbund, and the Klimt Group with an eye to promoting and selling their work in the Netherlands. In June 1914, he was back in the Netherlands as acting director of Larensche Kunsthandel, a company of Amsterdam art dealers. Was this the beginning of a career in the art world? Perhaps, but there was also another option. De la Faille was politically active, which attracted the attention of the Movement Against the Pending Constitutional Revision (ATAG) and of the General National Party, who wanted him as their candidate in the 1918 elections for the Lower House of Parliament.2 He never served in parliament, but his position during the Great War provides insight into his personality – insight that is essential for understanding his attitude as a Van Gogh expert.

. “Mr. J. Baart de la Faille and his wartime art. Let the little painters come unto me...”

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During the First World War, the Dutch government assiduously guarded the country’s neutrality, but the attitude of the elite was anything but neutral. Some were intensely pro-German, others intensely pro-French (or anti-German, if you will). De la Faille belonged to the latter group. He organized benefit exhibitions for Belgian artists at the beginning of the war. This cost him his job at Larensche Kunsthandel, which did not think the exhibitions were neutral enough.3 His zeal remained undampened, however, and he began collecting money and goods for the Serbian Red Cross, protested against the policy of free passage for zeppelins, condemned the presence of Dutch students at the Flemish University of Applied Sciences in Ghent (which was under German control), engaged in polemics with a lawyer who tried to gloss over the violation of Belgian neutrality, and was the founder of the Dutch section of the League of Neutral Countries. 4 The neutrality principle as an aspect of international law is a great good, the League wrote. Neutral countries like the Netherlands could only maintain such a principle by adopting “a universal humanitarian and absolute legal position,” but with the understanding that the Entente would win the war.5 So the League interpreted neutrality in a very special way: as one of its leaders said, “Each person has two homelands, his own and France.” There were limits, not only to the notion of neutrality but also to the “universal humanitarian” position professed by the League. When a newspaper asked the League’s leaders whether the Netherlands should offer as much help to German children as to French and Belgian, the answer was negative. De la Faille wrote communiqués, distributed stickers, sent out anti-German postcards, besieged meetings, denounced Dutch indulgence – in short, made sure that the League’s voice was heard. The war of attrition at Verdun in 1916 made a deep impression on De la Faille. In scarcely five months, more than 200,000 French soldiers were killed there (and almost as many Germans, but they could not count on his sympathy). According to him, the war would have been lost without French perseverance, and the Netherlands would also have fallen prey to Prussian expansionism. De la Faille believed that the Netherlands was indebted to the French defenders at Verdun, so he began raising money in the Netherlands to have a cast made of the sculpture La défense by Auguste Rodin. In 1920, the monument was unveiled on the Esplanade de la Roche near Verdun.6

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. August Rodin, La défense.

During the Great War, De la Faille devoted himself to things that did not benefit him financially and that involved taking risks as well.7 But he was also proud to mention the many decorations he received for his endeavors: the French Cross of the Legion of Honor, the Czech Cross of the Order of the White Lion, the Belgian Cross of the Order of Leopold II, the Serbian Commander’s Cross of the Order of Saint Sava, etc. During the twenties, he was a prominent figure at various festivities: the Relief of Leiden, tributes to artists, and celebrations honoring the Dutch royal family. He was cultural ambassador for the French principality of Orange, for the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, and for Czechoslovakia, and he liked making it known that he was rubbing shoulders with the highly placed. De la Faille was clearly someone who enjoyed the limelight: he was no stranger to vanity. Yet this attitude was quite in keeping with the aggressive nationalism, hero worship, and the almost inviolable sense of social position that permeated Dutch society at

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the time, far more than it does today. He was characterized as “emotional,” a rather broad concept. “Impulsive” might be a better way to describe him. If one of his ideals was at stake, he would immediately raise his voice even though it might cause him harm. He was less concerned with the consistency of his ideals than with the need to act; he was assertive and did not give up easily. These characteristics also guided his career as an art expert and an authority on the life and work of Vincent van Gogh, and made him an exceptional figure in the Dutch art world. Needless to say, De la Faille was no saint. He struck disingenuous compromises at decisive moments and betrayed his ideals, as we shall see. He was like the militant preacher of monogamy who gets caught in the act of adultery. De la Faille eventually chose the world of art over the world of politics. In 1916 he took a job as auctioneer with Frederik Muller & Co. of Amsterdam, and in 1923 he became a partner and co-director of the A. Mak auction house. He also earned money working as a journalist, giving lectures, writing art criticism, and issuing certificates of authenticity. One of De la Faille’s lifelong interests was the theater: he directed, acted in, and wrote plays, including Een inbraak (A Burglary), a comedy in one act, and De oplichtsters (The Lady Racketeers), a tragedy in one act. Unfortunately, his scripts are nowhere to be found and probably have not withstood the test of time. The few available reviews of his dramatic work do not suggest that the world lost a great playwright in the person of De la Faille. His career as an art expert, however, can easily be described as a theatrical performance. Whether we see it as a tragedy, a comedy, or a farce is really a matter of taste. One thing is certain, however: the script was not from his hand alone. There were others – art experts, dealers, collectors, politicians, government officials, and journalists – who also put pen to paper, and each of them would try to bend the action to his own advantage. None of them, however, was able to determine the entire course of events regarding the authenticity of the work of Vincent van Gogh, let alone predict the outcome. Certificates of authenticity The end of the Great War brought economic recovery to the Netherlands, but it was short-lived. The political and economic climate in Germany was even more volatile and precarious, if such a thing was possible. With the

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deposition of Kaiser Wilhelm II, the authority of the state was completely undermined. In the first six years after the war the Reichsmark suffered devaluation after devaluation, with hyperinflation striking in 1923. Bank balances lost all their value from one day to the next. In early 1923, one dollar could buy 20,000 Reichsmarks; by the end of the same year, it brought in 4.2 trillion.8 In this period of social unrest and economic decline, the wealthy began investing in objects of value: precious metals, jewelry, art. Experience taught that such commodities could be sold for their original price or higher once the economic climate picked up. The wealthy saw the paintings of Vincent van Gogh as a good investment. The growing appreciation for Van Gogh’s life and work went hand in hand with rising prices. By 1925 the value of his works had multiplied many times over since the end of the nineteenth century. Cynthia Saltzman shows that Vincent’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet, which was painted in 1890 and sold for 300 francs in 1897, brought in six times that amount seven years later and 60 times that amount 14 years later. (By 1938, the 1897 price had increased by a factor of 500, and in 1990, the canvas was sold for the tidy sum of 82.5 million dollars.)9 That particular painting is regarded as a masterpiece, but other paintings by Vincent were heading in the same direction. The demand was there, and so were the price increases. Because the demand could not be met, it became tempting to put works on the market that were not by Vincent himself but closely resembled his style and to sell them as original Van Goghs. Price increases also paved the way for forgers, who either adapted existing canvases and added Vincent’s signature or fashioned their own “Van Goghs.” Koldehoff writes that in 1899, a fake Van Gogh was sold at the Ambroise Vollard gallery in Paris. Dorn and Feilchenfeldt report that in 1901, Bernheim-Jeune had two paintings removed from the Van Gogh exhibition in his gallery because they had been erroneously attributed to the master.10 These were early attempts to sell fake Van Goghs – possibly not the very first and by no means the last. The art trade tried to eliminate the uncertainty about makers of art by calling on art experts. In the mid-nineteenth century German universities began setting up degree programs in art history, with other Western European countries following suit. This gave rise to an influx in the number of experts who could help buyers and sellers determine the provenance of a work of art and the identity of the artist. The art expert, trusting in “the

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eye” and the images he had stored away in his memory, believed himself capable of determining who the maker of a painting or drawing was. The standard practice was that an expert would issue a certificate of authenticity for a particular work of art – at a fee. In the certificate he would name the creator of the work and sometimes a few pertinent details, note the place and date of the certificate, and close with the expert’s signature. The widespread use of photography made it possible to combine the certificate with an illustration of the work, in which case the expert usually wrote his findings on the back of the photo. Some of the patriarchs of Dutch art history such as A. Bredius (1855-1946), Hofstede de Groot (1863-1930), and W. Vogelsang (1875-1954) wrote many certificates of authenticity.

. J.B. de la Faille as auctioneer.

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Conflict of interest In 1920 De la Faille published an article in the Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant (NRC) on conflicts of interest in the art world. Museum directors were seeking extra earnings while being shielded by the status of their position, he said, but they did not want to be known as dealers. He thought the government should not allow them to issue certificates of authenticity at a fee: “The certificates of authenticity and originality that they grant, which all too often are no more than letters of indulgence for the sins of copyists and forgers, would also disappear.”11 The article was published anonymously and caused quite a furor. It led to a debate in the newspaper with a certain X, who appeared to be quite familiar with the museum world. X thought De la Faille’s article lacked careful reflection, since directors of state museums were already prohibited from engaging in commercial activities. De la Faille regarded the dealers’ practice of giving works of art to museums on loan as “outright abuse.” Dealers who displayed their wares there could be sure of a rise in value, increased visibility, and hastened sales: “We recall the dealer Delarof who sold his paintings in the Netherlands via the Mauritshuis by sale to the highest bidder, as it were. [...] Museum directorates should not be allowed to serve such mercantile aims. It is an abuse of the museum and makes it look like a commercial establishment.”12 X did not feel so strongly about this matter, as long as other owners had the chance to show their pieces as well. He also approved of museum directors charging fees for certificates of authenticity. This was exchanging knowledge for money, and there was nothing wrong with that. In fact they ought to insist on being paid; either that or run the risk of being overwhelmed by requests from private owners. De la Faille profoundly disagreed: the certificates should be free, and if not, the money should go to the museum and not to the director. X would have none of it. He also thought that De la Faille’s criticism of museum directors who issued certificates of authenticity for possibly forged works was irrelevant: “Every museum director (and art scholar) has had the experience of taking a forged work for the real thing and confirming it in writing. The point is whether the practice is intentional and whether it happens ‘all too often.’ If it is, then that is inadmissible. If it is not, then it is human and forgivable, as long as the director is willing to admit his mistake.”13 Was X’s admonition a reflection of reality? Had museum directors actually retracted their certificates of authenticity? Had they admitted their mistakes to buyers and sellers? X did not say.

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In 1922 De la Faille criticized the German art expert Valentiner (18801958), who had allegedly discovered dozens of paintings by Rembrandt. De la Faille was scandalized by the ease with which Valentiner and others increased the oeuvre of the Dutch Old Masters. The following table on the various Rembrandt catalogues raisonnés, which was not part of De la Faille’s article, shows the extent of the problem.

Table 1

Number of paintings attributed to Rembrandt between 1836 and 1921

Publication

Compiler

Number

1836

Smith

620

1868

Vosmaer

342

1885

Dutuit

456

1897

Bode

595

1915

Hofstede de Groot

988

1921

Valentiner

706

Source: Bruin 1995, 184.

Over a period of roughly 90 years, the number of Rembrandts fluctuated dramatically without any of the compilers bothering to account for the attributions and rejections, according to De la Faille. “There is no other painter with so many discovered works as Rembrandt,” he said. “Why is that? Is Rembrandt the most important master in the history of painting, or is he one of the most highly regarded in the art market and should every discovery be seen as a sack of gold?”14 Connoisseur Hofstede de Groot responded by coming to Valentiner’s defense, but he did not attempt to answer De la Faille’s rhetorical question of whether commerce had obscured the perception of the master’s work. The director of the Rijksmuseum, Dr. F. Schmidt Degener (1881-1941), sent De la Faille his voice of approval: “Your depiction of the motives of those engaged in systematic discovery is all too correct.” He said Valentiner’s book “makes a mockery of the master.”15 The negative influence of the art market continued to concern De la Faille the auctioneer. How could the practice be reined in, and how could authenticity be established in an objective manner? In December 1924 he called for the creation of an “official authentication bureau” in each country

conflict of interest


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that would research, certify, and register works of art. For each certificate of authenticity, a fixed, low fee would be charged regardless of the outcome of the assessment. The money would go to benefit the bureau, the experts would be reimbursed for their expenses and would work free of charge.16 De la Faille’s proposal almost turned the prevailing practice of issuing certificates of authenticity on its head. Experts now worked independently for the most part, but De la Faille wanted them all to work within one organization. Experts set their rates on the basis of market value (a “Johannes Vermeer” certificate was more expensive than an “Abraham Teniers” because it was based on the price that the authenticated work would command), but the bureau would charge a fixed fee. Experts served the interests of their clients, but with the intervention of the bureau they would have to be totally impartial. The article was controversial, attracted attention, and was printed in Dutch, German, and French.17 Art critic Cornelis Veth published a rejoinder. He acknowledged the abuse mentioned by De la Faille: “ [...] any novice German art historian can be found to issue a certificate of authenticity for an old Dutch work of art.”18 The affairs being fought out in public concerning the authenticity of works by Rembrandt, Hals, or Vermeer were damaging to the prestige of art history as an independent field of scholarship. The expert, like the judge, should be objective in formulating his verdict. But what made Veth rise up in protest was the notion of “official” in De la Faille’s proposal. That meant the Dutch state would set up authentication bureaus, appoint officials, and assume financial responsibility. Veth rejected this in no uncertain terms: “If a dealer overcharges another dealer or a private collector for a particular painting or some other art object, it is of no concern whatsoever to the public interest.”19 The question that actually dominated their discussion was how to end the insecurity of the art-buying public, not how to make people more knowledgeable about art objects or what the art expert’s obligations were regarding the cultural heritage. Veth and De la Faille both wanted to restore buyers’ faith in the art market, and their answers were identical. Fixed, low rates should be charged for certificates of authenticity, experts should consult technicians in special cases, and well-documented reports should be issued. Shared responsibility among the experts would make certificates of authenticity more authoritative and give the public confidence. Veth wanted technicians to play a major role in the authentication process be-

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cause basing a certificate on stylistic features could lead to “foolishness.” The analysis of paint, canvas, and binding agents could “provide conclusive proof of a painting’s age [...].”20 Hard, technical research is objective, and chemical and physical analyses transcend commercial interests. Veth’s assumptions would come back to haunt him in 1932 (see Chapter 5). Both Veth and De la Faille argued for the establishment of a council, not one that would judge the value of the attribution but one that would judge the way the certificate of authenticity was handled. De la Faille said that by “official authentication bureau” he was not thinking of a national bureau: “By official bureaus I merely meant this: generally recognized, consisting of members, chosen at a meeting of museum directors, art dealers, auctioneers, recognized experts, etc. [...] Who among us is going to take the initiative?”21 Such an initiative would be taken, not in 1925 but some 25 years later – I will come back to this in Chapter 9 – and with consequences for De la Faille himself; consequences he had not at all anticipated. Vincent’s fame Van Gogh’s work made an overpowering impression on De la Faille right from the beginning. He wrote about it for the first time in 1913: “[The paintings], in all their brutality and ferocity, bear witness to a talent so fullbloodedly anarchistic yet so great and so destructive of everything humdrum and traditional.”22 In 1917 he decided to put together a catalogue raisonné.23 As auctioneer at Muller & Co. from 1916 to 1923, he was frequently involved in the sale of Van Goghs. The collection of the German playwright Carl Sternheim, including ten Van Goghs, came under the hammer in 1919.24 In 1920 the Rotterdam businessman Kröller bought 20 paintings by Vincent from the Enthoven collection at Muller. Research on the catalogue reinforced De la Faille’s contact with Johanna van Gogh-Bonger (1862-1925), widow of Vincent’s brother Theo (1857-1891), and with her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh (1890-1978), who would be known in the art world as “the Engineer” to distinguish him from his famous uncle and namesake, an epithet that will be used throughout this book. He inherited more than 250 paintings and over 500 drawings from Vincent van Gogh.25 He and his mother also owned a wealth of letters and other documents. After the death of Vincent van Gogh, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger devoted

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herself to making his work better known through exhibitions and sales. The correspondence between Theo and Vincent that she edited in 1914-1915 was published in several languages. The Van Gogh family never ventured to compile a catalogue raisonné, so De la Faille’s project was especially welcome. He relieved them of a great deal of work and would increase public awareness of Vincent’s art. Working on the catalogue made De la Faille part of the machinery that spread Van Gogh’s fame. He traveled throughout the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Switzerland, and Germany to visit owners of Van Gogh’s work, capture it in photographs, and track down its history. He arranged for works from the Engineer’s collection to be shown in Rotterdam, Amsterdam, Paris, Munich, Hannover, and Berlin. He mounted exhibitions, gave lectures, wrote text for catalogues, and took care of insurance and customs formalities.26 He mediated occasionally between Engineer Van Gogh and potential

. De la Faille saw himself as a specialist in Vincent van Gogh’s French period. This photograph, taken in around , shows him in the park of the hospital Saint-Paulde-Mausole in Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, where Vincent van Gogh lived between May  and May .

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buyers of works by Vincent van Gogh, for which he probably received a commission.27 De la Faille’s interest in Van Gogh went even further: he took the initiative to establish “documentary Van Gogh museums” in Arles and Saint Rémy to keep the master’s memory alive there; he devoted himself to having a statue of Van Gogh erected in Nuenen; and he worked on setting up the organization Friends of Vincent van Gogh and His Time. These activities, and the rumor that he was compiling a Van Gogh catalogue, made him a Van Gogh expert par excellence in the eyes of many. That is the way he saw himself, too. In 1927 he put together an exhibition on Van Gogh’s French period for the Bernheim-Jeune gallery in Paris, which published a catalogue for the event written by De la Faille. De la Faille knew that newspapers often did not bother to edit compact press releases, so he praised himself as “the well-read Dutch critic, who has done more than any other art historian to bring to light conclusive details about the turbulent life of Van Gogh in France, and whose study and reconstruction of that period is also unsurpassed by anyone in the field.”28 Sure enough, French newspapers reproduced the press release without changes. De la Faille had publicly claimed a lofty place in the Van Gogh firmament, but it was a claim that would not go unchallenged. Catalogue raisonné In early December 1927, De la Faille’s publisher distributed the two volumes of the Vincent van Gogh catalogue raisonné containing entries for 862 paintings that De la Faille confidently attributed to the master. This was followed in July 1928 by two more volumes containing 724 drawings, 119 watercolors, nine lithographs, one gouache, and one etching. He had invested about 5,000 guilders in the catalogue’s production. The voluminous work was published in French – the language of the cultural elite – with a dedication that expressed an ardent union of national pride and high culture: “To my beloved France, the precious land of my forefathers, which fostered the awakening of Van Gogh’s genius.”29 It was groundbreaking work, not only because it was the first Van Gogh catalogue raisonné but also because it was the first such catalogue to treat a modern master. No equivalent catalogues yet existed for moderns such as Cézanne (1839-1906), Gauguin (1848-1903), or Manet (1832-1883).

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The design of the catalogue built on C. Hofstede de Groot’s magnum opus, which dealt with Dutch painting from the Golden Age. For each Van Gogh, De la Faille listed the most frequently used colors (the reproductions were in black and white), the title, date and place of origin, dimensions and technical details, owners, exhibitions, literature, and references to the letters between Vincent and Theo in which the work is mentioned – in short, characteristics that could shed light on the work’s history. The function of the catalogue was obvious: it would be consulted by anyone involved in the sale of his works as buyer, seller, or agent. It simplified the task of making an initial comparison, should an unknown work crop up that looked like a Van Gogh. The catalogue raisonné drew a border, which was of great importance for the commercial value of a work. It established the size of the oeuvre, and with it the sense of scarcity. A national bank that casually prints money weakens the country’s currency. The same would be true of an art world that did not concern itself with the number and identity of works attributed to a particular artist. The function of the catalogue raisonné for the enrichment of knowledge about the artist is also obvious: anyone wanting to know how he had developed, what his influences had been, and what influence he had exerted had to study the catalogue. If an unknown work were to suddenly appear, it would have to be compatible with the works contained there. It was a first point of reference and a universally accessible touchstone for any study of authenticity. De la Faille had assigned numbers to all the works, which publications on the work of Van Gogh gradually came to refer to as F(-aille) numbers: with this tome, he had clearly left his mark on Van Gogh. Critics in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and England were full of praise. De la Faille had performed a feat of the utmost tediousness, or as art critic Jo Zwartendijk (1889-1938) of the NRC graphically put it, “Imagine the correspondence involved in producing such a catalogue, the endless writing back and forth, how many mistakes must have slipped in, how many disappointments the photographic material must have given rise to, not to mention the reluctance of collectors greedily guarding their treasures, careless information that must have exhausted his patience at times, incorrect data, offers of forgeries that were ‘already far too numerous,’ and on and on!”30 The catalogue increased interest in Van Gogh. Critics emphasized the unique qualities of his personality and his work, and employed

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metaphors suited to his deification: “[He] suffered, he endured, he was crucified,” “a genius [...] a comet,” etc.31 Those who entered the world of Vincent van Gogh were treading on holy ground. Despite all the praise, the reception of De la Faille’s magnum opus was curious in many respects. First, the total number of write-ups was striking: the harvest was lean when it came to reviews in the trade press, which was odd given the fact that international appreciation for Van Gogh was on the rise. Second was the length of the reviews. The influential Burlington Magazine praised De la Faille’s catalogue in two short articles that were conspicuous for their brevity. 32 The pieces in International Studio, Cicerone, La Renaissance de l’Art, and La revue de l’art were more descriptions than fully developed, critical reviews. 33 Also striking was the absence of reviews by Dutch writers who had helped establish Van Gogh’s reputation, veterans like Just Havelaar (1880-1930), Richard Roland Holst (1868-1938), A.C.A. Plasschaert (1874-1941), or beginners like W. Scherjon (1878-1938), A.M. Hammacher (1897-2002), and W. Jos. de Gruyter (1899-1979). The most glaring absentee was one of Van Gogh’s supporters from the very beginning, H.P. Bremmer. One explanation is that Bremmer had been thanked in the catalogue for his assistance. On the other hand, Bremmer could have encouraged others to write a review, but no one from his circle took up the pen. Bremmer In 1928, at age 57, Petrus Bremmer (1871-1956) could look back on a successful career in the art world. He had done quite well for himself, catering to the demand for art among the upper middle class of the late nineteenth century. Growing prosperity, the desire to travel, and a passion for accumulating things turned many people into potential collectors of modern art. Yet as Bremmer’s biographer Hildelies Balk writes, many of them felt insecure about their taste in contemporary art, which seemed to reject the prevailing artistic criteria based on naturalistic rendering.34 What is modern art anyway? How can one tell the difference between a real work of art and the product of an uninspired hack? Bremmer, who had first aspired to a career as an artist, took a tip from his brother-in-law, the cultural anthropologist Dr. S.R. Steinmetz (1862-1940), and began giving courses in “practical

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. H.P. Bremmer, about .

aesthetics” in his home or in the homes of course participants. He taught his pupils what to be aware of, how to look at the work of art, and how to acquire the artist’s “artistic emotion.” He was opposed to the prevalent approach to art history that emphasized facts, themes, schools, and styles. Art history is to art as theology is to religion, he taught. Bremmer traveled all over the Netherlands to show off his enthusiasm for art, and he made his name as an “art educator.” There were those who were deeply impressed by him and would continue to sign up for his courses for years to come. About 35 years after his death, Balk spoke with some of Bremmer’s former pupils who referred to him with emotion as a “monument for the Netherlands.”35 His circle of associates, Balk writes, reads like an excerpt from a Dutch book of peerage. In 1904 Bremmer began his own monthly magazine, Moderne kunstwerken (Modern Works of Art), which he stopped publishing in 1910, then launched Beeldende kunst (Visual Arts) in 1913 of which he would be the sole author until 1937. He published books, including the successful Van Gogh: inleidende beschouwingen (Van Gogh: Introductory Discussion, 1911), was a curator of exhibitions, and an advisor to collectors. His most important and profitable connection was with the wealthy businessman

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Anton Kröller and his wife, Helene Kröller-Müller. In the early twentieth century the Kröllers hired him as their advisor in building up an art collection. There was nothing timid about their approach. At Bremmer’s advice they would regularly purchase dozens of pieces at a time during visits to dealers or auction houses. By 1928 their collection comprised about 5,000 works of art. Bremmer also served as a patron, and provided artists with allowances from his own pocket – sometimes for a good many years – or persuaded others, including the Kröllers, to support them financially. He bought their work, organized exhibitions, wrote about it, and recommended it to course participants and collectors. His efforts benefited scores of artists, among them Charley Toorop, Piet Mondriaan, and Bart van der Leck, as well as less highly rated painters such as Truus van Hettinga Tromp, Henri van Daalhoff, and Jan Zandleven. His assistance meant they could hold their own in the art market, and some owed their success to his help. Such financial support was dependent on Bremmer’s taste, of course. As Piet Mondriaan’s work gradually became more abstract, he ran up against Bremmer’s definition of acceptable painting. Mondriaan went his own way and lost Bremmer’s financial support. The same was true of Bart van der Leck, but he was unable to pull it off. After a few years he was forced to return to the figurative work that Bremmer so admired, after which the support was resumed.36 Something of a patron-client relationship formed, which for Bremmer was inspired by a love of art as well as by the expectation of being able to sell the work. As so often happens with patronage, the relationship was ambivalent and not merely friendly. After Bremmer’s death in 1956, Van der Leck would describe him in Museumjournaal as generous and a man of stature but also stubborn, domineering, and determined to have his own way.37 For Bremmer, Vincent van Gogh was the quintessential artist. He collected his work, and in 1925 he owned 25 paintings and 47 drawings.38 He published something about him almost every year from 1894 on, and conferred on him a significance that was consistent with the cultural changes of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the age of “the world’s disenchantment.” As the meaning of life dictated by Christian churches gradually lost its value, an all-out search began for new forms of spirituality – a direct, individual experience of the divine couched in a different but recognizable

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visual language. Here art played a key role. The ideal symbol of this search was Vincent van Gogh, the son of a Protestant minister who left a brief career in the art trade to try his hand at preaching, only to be disappointed by failure, and finally decided to become an artist at age 27. He renounced physical comfort and social prestige and was intent on developing a new style of art that expressed a religiously charged sense of life: a lost Christian who had found a new church in art. Bremmer identified with Van Gogh. As Elly Stegeman has observed, he underwent a similar development: “ [...] from naturalism via neo-impressionism to a personal idealism – Van Gogh in his painting, Bremmer first in painting but later in speaking and writing about art.”39 She points out that both of them believed they had a calling. Bremmer’s aim was to be witness to a new aesthetic based on the idea that an artist expressed his feelings in a work of art, and that the true art expert could recognize those feelings.

. Cornelis Veth (), “We need to hear Bremmer’s opinion.”

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Bremmer wrote about European art from practically every period and immersed himself in Chinese and Japanese art. Paintings, drawings, sculpture, ceramics: he saw them every day in magazines, books, studios, museums, at auctions, and in the homes of artists and private individuals. They were all given a place in Bremmer’s extensive archive, which contained photographs and magazine reproductions: if he saw a work unknown to him, he would compare it on the spot with the visual archive in his head and pronounce a judgment on the artist who made it. His opinion was highly sought by dealers and private investors, and he issued certificates of authenticity throughout his entire career. These would have numbered high in the hundreds, but only a portion of them have been preserved. In retrospect, Balk notes, Bremmer had made some remarkable discoveries, but in just as many cases he got it all wrong. Art dealer N. Eisenloeffel, with whom Bremmer had done business, took notes on the subject. When a participant in one of Bremmer’s courses bought a drawing by Odilon Redon on his own initiative, Bremmer announced it was a fake: “Bremmer says that even if Mr. Redon himself were to come and say, this drawing is among the best I’ve ever made, Bremmer would answer that judging was his job, not Redon’s.” Eisenloeffel noted the same confident attitude with regard to a Van Gogh: “Roland Holst had been given permission to select a drawing from Mrs. van Gogh-Bonger’s Van Gogh collection, which he sold to De Bois, and Bremmer said it wasn’t a Van Gogh.”40 Balk suspected that Bremmer’s adamant pronouncement was prompted by rivalry: Roland Holst had recognized the importance of Van Gogh before Bremmer did, and he announced it in writing. It is not known when these judgments were made or when Eisenloeffel made note of them. Eisenloeffel was not the only one to comment on Bremmer’s authoritarian and inflexible attitude with regard to authenticity. In 1910, when the Kröllers bought their first Van Gogh canvas – Reaper with Scythe (F 688) – at the Cassirer gallery in Berlin, Bremmer’s judgment was inexorable: definitely not a Van Gogh. He dissolved the sale and had the painting returned. Cassirer followed this series of events with astonishment: “Has the gentleman gone mad?” He himself had bought the painting from Van Gogh-Bonger, an unimpeachable source.41 Balk suspects that Bremmer could not tolerate the fact that course participants like the Kröllers, whom he had initiated into the world of Van Gogh only a few years before, had the audacity to

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buy something on their own.42 He brooked no contradiction when it came to questions of authenticity. He was the sort of teacher who could not bear to see a pupil equal or surpass him. Bremmer’s mixture of art and religion, his identification with Van Gogh, his glorification of the intuitive faculties in attributing and rejecting works of art, and his inner certainty about the qualities of the true artist were an intoxicating cocktail that impeded every attempt to discuss authenticity. In all the years preceding his 57th birthday on 17 May 1928, Bremmer had seldom met with any open criticism of his work style. He was an artist, curator, writer, critic, patron, advisor, collector, and dealer, and he performed these roles with verve, making him something of a one-man band in the art world. According to Balk, Bremmer gave little thought to these roles because he was far too sure of himself. His behavior also lends itself to another interpretation, however, according to which Bremmer was more than conscious of the conflicting interests combined in his person and at times acted in a way that suggests tactical altruism: giving a high-value performance in order to conceal a personal and material interest. Bremmer was motivated not only by a selfless readiness to help and an absolute love of art, not only by an unassailable sense of his own importance, but also by shrewdness and calculation. He had acquired power and prestige in the art world and was determined to maintain his unique position. His reputation for being able to make and break careers was distinctly exaggerated, but it was not far from the truth. Friends of Vincent In March 1928 De la Faille formed the organization Friends of Vincent van Gogh and His Time, the purpose of which was to acquire works by Vincent van Gogh and related artists for the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam.43 He invited Kröller-Müller and Bremmer to become members, but both of them turned him down. Bremmer thought there was more than enough of Vincent’s works in the Netherlands and that it was better to support living Dutch artists.44 Kröller-Müller wrote that with her 97 paintings, 38 drawings, and eight watercolors by Van Gogh, the Netherlands already had plenty of the artist’s work in its care.45 These words contain a hint of the rivalry that existed between Bremmer and Kröller-Müller on the one hand and De la Faille and the Van Gogh family on the other.

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The discord probably began with the split between Bremmer and Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, writes Balk in her biography of Bremmer. Both had helped establish Vincent’s reputation in their own way, and Bremmer had been as successful as she. Bremmer had had a hand in putting early works by Vincent on the market in 1903, works that Johanna felt actually belonged to the Van Gogh family. It all had to do with three crates containing paintings, drawings, and watercolors that Vincent van Gogh had entrusted to his mother in 1885 when he left the southern Dutch province of Brabant. Some of these works had gone missing, and some had ended up in other hands.46 Bremmer also clashed with her over reproduction rights, to which he had to appeal on numerous occasions in his work on the magazines Moderne kunstwerken and Beeldende kunst. Year after year, Bremmer had published articles and given lectures on Van Gogh, while Jo van Gogh-Bonger had no one of comparable energy to advertise her brother-in-law’s work until 1925. Only after her death would De la Faille take up the task of writing articles, giving lectures, and mounting exhibitions. The Van Goghs owned by the Kröllers were kept in The Hague on the Lange Voorhout and could be seen by anyone who was interested, but the Van Gogh family did not have the facilities to put their extensive collection of works by Vincent on permanent display. In addition, Bremmer, as the Kröller’s advisor, had carefully built up an important collection. Johanna van Gogh-Bonger and her son had not collected their Van Goghs but instead had inherited it. Johanna had sold some Van Goghs to keep her head above water and to make Vincent’s work better known. De la Faille was a newcomer to the Van Gogh firmament, even though his achievement of being the first to compile a catalogue raisonné was not to be underestimated. But apparently his goal was to use the Friends organization – a collection-forming organ for the Stedelijk – to acquire a position comparable to that of Bremmer. Interestingly enough, the Friends did not invite Engineer Van Gogh to become a board member. His name was also missing from the imposing list drawn up by the Recommendations Committee. So it is not entirely inconceivable that one of the Friends’ unspoken goals was to purchase the Engineer’s inheritance using private and government money and to give it to the Stedelijk Museum. But they never got that far.

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Fake Van Goghs De la Faille’s magnum opus, the Van Gogh catalogue, was published in December 1927, but his joy was short-lived. In January 1928, during the mounting of an exhibition at the Cassirer gallery on the chic Victoriastraße in Berlin, director Walter Feilchenfeldt (1894-1953) and his associate Grete Ring (1887-1952) were surprised by four Van Goghs that had been submitted by the Berlin art dealer Otto Wacker (1898-1970).47 The canvases were entirely at odds with the other paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Wacker was a newcomer to the art market. In December 1927 he had attracted attention with an exhibition organized by De la Faille of 120 drawings and watercolors by Vincent taken from prestigious collections, including that of Engineer Van Gogh. This exhibition was the crown of Wacker’s successful sale of Van Goghs over the previous two years. De la Faille was also involved in the organization of the Cassirer exhibition and was asked for his opinion. After all, he had issued certificates of authenticity for these canvases as well as many other Wacker Van Goghs in 1926-27 and had included them in his recently published catalogue raisonné. Feilchenfeldt, Ring, and De la Faille quickly agreed, however, that these were not by Vincent van Gogh. Wacker took the four paintings back.48 De la Faille asked him about the provenance and was told they were from the collection of a refugee who had settled in Switzerland, a Russian nobleman who feared reprisals would be taken against his family and therefore wished to remain anonymous. De la Faille had already heard the story from Wacker himself, but Wacker refused to provide him with any further details. It sounded plausible: thousands of Russian refugees had fled to the capitals of Europe after the Bolshevik revolution. Moreover, art dealers were not unaccustomed to maintaining owner anonymity, since competitors could easily draw from the same source. Owners in turn could require discretion because of inheritance questions, taxes, or security. But there was one aspect of Wacker’s story that could be checked. He had told De la Faille that according to the Russian the paintings, about 30 in all, had been part of the collection of Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. De la Faille made inquiries with Engineer Van Gogh. The Engineer wrote him in March 1928 to say that he had checked his mother’s papers, and apparently there had never been a sale of that number of paintings to any one dealer or collector, let alone a Russian nobleman.49

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De la Faille was shocked. He did not doubt Wacker’s good faith and thought Wacker had been the victim of fraud. How could he himself, the Van Gogh expert, have been so wrong? The press would later contend that he and Wacker were in collusion, since he had written certificates of authenticity for the canvases. De la Faille thought the criticism was undeserved. He argued that every expert received a fee for writing certificates of authenticity, and that colleagues resented him for charging so little, namely 25 guilders.50 He was also accused of having had a financial interest in the sale of the Wacker Van Goghs: it was said that he was paid for putting the paintings on sale. He had issued certificates of authenticity for 22 Wacker paintings, but the sources do not tell us which transactions he had had a role in or what his profit or commission had been. According to his own statement made in 1932, he had sold three Wacker paintings in the Netherlands in early 1928 for 94,000 guilders but had bought them back after having been convinced that they were spurious.51 Had De la Faille been blinded by the temptation of money or the prospect of profit or commission? He himself said that initially he had felt some hesitancy about the Wacker paintings when he was working on the catalogue: “As soon as I saw the paintings I felt doubt enter my heart. But as so often happens, one examines the canvases more closely and analyzes them, and if they are not blatant forgeries one reasons the doubt away. On top of that, I did not see the paintings side by side but in succession, and with rather long intervals in between, so I could not compare them with each other.”52 The idea that his Van Gogh catalogue contained forged works was “terrible,” he said, “because I had devoted years of my life to that effort. But it was my duty to make my mistake known. After all, art dealers and purchasers use books like this as advisors ... and I don’t want to be a poor advisor!”53 Was his judgment influenced by commercial considerations? I am inclined to answer that question with a “yes,” albeit a weak one, since there are no good sources to back me up. Needless to say, De la Faille did not know he had been dealing with forged work. His behavior after January 1928, however, is unambiguous proof of his desire to rectify the errors he had made concerning the Wacker Van Goghs and his willingness to retract his judgment. After the incident at the Cassirer gallery in January 1928, De la Faille wanted to study all the paintings again and to compare them with undisputed Van Goghs from the same period and with similar motifs. His exami-

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nation was of a stylistic nature. Exactly what did he focus on, and did he really study all the works a second time? We don’t know. But we do know something about how he dealt with one Wacker Van Gogh: Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523). Otto Wacker offered the canvas through a front man to director J. Siedenberg of the Frans Buffa & Zonen gallery of Amsterdam in February 1928. Siedenberg had misgivings. De la Faille accompanied Siedenberg on a visit to the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam in February to compare the painting with Self-Portrait (F 522), an undisputed Van Gogh from the collection of Engineer V.W. van Gogh that was in the museum on loan.54 The canvases were almost identical in terms of composition, yet they differed greatly in color and execution. The execution of the Wacker painting was weaker. Siedenberg and De la Faille agreed that the Van Gogh from the Wacker gallery was not by the master. De la Faille informed Wacker, but he had already found another buyer for the canvas. So De la Faille contacted the new owner – the conductor and art dealer Joseph Stransky of New York – and told him of his findings. Stransky in turn sold the painting within a few weeks to the American collector Chester Dale. Whether Dale was also informed is highly unlikely. Dale would learn of the report in the newspapers at the end of November.55 De la Faille spent the following months studying the Van Goghs of Otto Wacker, some of which had found other owners. After May he gradually became convinced that not just a few but all of Wacker’s paintings were fakes, and he turned down an invitation to discuss the matter in November 1928 during the Van Gogh exhibition at the Kastner Gesellschaft in Hannover. The management was going to show seven Wacker paintings among a group of undisputed paintings by Vincent. De la Faille was now sure of what he was doing, and he regarded any discussion as superfluous: the paintings were fakes.56 After a few days, the director of the Gesellschaft seconded his opinion: the Wacker Van Goghs had not been able to withstand comparison with the genuine Van Goghs. All seven were unmistakable forgeries.57 Supplément De la Faille was determined to keep the matter under wraps. He decided to follow the unwritten law of the art trade: when a work of art is being sold whose spuriousness is incontestable, seller and buyer will observe all neces-

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. Self-Portrait at the Easel (F ),  x  cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington.

. Certificate of authenticity by De la Faille on the back of a photograph of Self-Portrait at the Easel: “The undersigned declares that he has examined the painting reproduced on the opposite side,  centimeters high and . centimeters wide. He regards it as a genuine and characteristic work by Vincent van Gogh, painted in  during his stay in Arles. It will be described and included in his catalogue raisonné on the master’s work. Berlin, July , , J.B. de la Faille” But in February  De la Faille judged it a forgery.

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sary discretion. The seller will take the work back and compensate the buyer for any loss. The purpose of this confidentiality is to safeguard the reputations of both seller and buyer. While the rule is exemplary in its simplicity, there are factors that can sap the rule of all its power, and the Wacker Van Gogh case had them in spades. The number of persons and official bodies that had anything to do with the canvases only increased as 1928 drew to a close. By November, more than half of the 30 paintings had passed through the hands of dozens of art dealers and private collectors. A few dealers had been warned by De la Faille and had sold the paintings back, but not all of them succeeded in recovering the damage wrought by Otto Wacker. The resulting discontent was difficult to hide. In addition, a wide range of people had been consulted: art experts, museum directors, restorers, painters, art historians, and critics, not to mention the exhibition in the Kestner Gesellschaft and subsequent discussion. De la Faille made an arrangement with his publisher whereby owners of the catalogue – which would have numbered in the dozens by the end of November – would be sent a Supplément containing a list of the fake Wacker paintings. He also informed his business relations in the German and Dutch art world of his plan. So De la Faille’s effort to keep the matter quiet was doomed to failure.

. “Another new Van Gogh.” Cartoon by Piet van der Hem in De Haagsche Post, December , . An expert touts the authenticity of a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh with headphones and radio.

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The German press had the scoop on the Wacker paintings. On 28 November 1928, it was front-page news: “Famous Van Gogh paintings are fakes,” “Huge discovery of forged paintings,” “Spurious Van Goghs,” etc.58 The Dutch newspapers followed a day later. They announced that De la Faille’s Supplément listing all 30 fake Van Goghs from the Otto Wacker gallery would appear within a week. Wacker threatened to take legal steps to prevent publication and said he would prosecute De la Faille for libel if necessary. It never went beyond a threat, but it was enough to alert the journalists. And there was plenty to write about. The amount of money involved was considerable; prices circulating in the press ranged from 25,000 to 75,000 Reichsmark per painting. The Berlin police became involved and began holding interrogations in Germany and the Netherlands, and this was before any party had filed a single complaint against Wacker. It all had to do with dissension in the art world. One person insisted that all the paintings were fakes while another said they were all genuine, and yet another that some were genuine and some were fake, which meant there was no agreement over the number and identity of the contested works. There were experts who revised an opinion that they had previously announced with staunch conviction: the German Van Gogh expert Julius Meier-Gräfe (1867-1935) who, like De la Faille, had been issuing certificates of authenticity for Wacker Van Goghs since 1926, now began to waver. The German art dealers were split. A few bought back the paintings they had sold. One of them was the art dealer Mathiessen, who lost a total of 150,000 marks. The dealer Hugo Perls, on the other hand, had also sold Wacker Van Goghs and would not hear of buying them back. Then there was the legal action: shortly before Christmas, Mathiessen instigated civil proceedings against Wacker. A female buyer sued the Hugo Perls gallery because Perls did not think he was obliged to take back any of the paintings. There was the secrecy about the former Russian owner. Some thought it was a credible story, others a dubious alibi. Commenting on one particular painting, Engineer Van Gogh told a journalist from De Telegraaf he had never seen it at his mother’s and there was no indication in any of her files that she had ever sold anything to Russians.59 In short, the Dutch and German morning and evening editions had much to report on in December 1928.

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 and . “ Bilder, angeblich von Van Gogh”. Owners and dealers found themselves in difficult straits. The press − here Kunst und Künstler − published reproductions of the contested paintings.

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The art pope The Supplément was published on 10 December 1928. De la Faille’s rejection was impressive in its brevity; he listed 30 paintings, and only by number. But De Telegraaf and the NRC looked up the titles and owners, published the entire list and added dozens of photos of the canvases.60 Other newspapers and magazines followed suit, with photos and commentary.61 De la Faille let himself in for a flood of condemnation. The Netherlands Art Buyers’ Association, founded in 1919 to settle disputes among dealers and between dealers and the public, convened an emergency meeting without delay and denounced both the publication and its author. It let the press know that “the work on Vincent van Gogh by J.B. de la Faille is regarded only as an enumeration of the works attributed to him, and the maker’s personal findings are no guarantee of its competence.”62 There were some who expressed the opposite opinion, however, such as the art dealer Cassirer: “He [De la Faille] is the most authoritative expert in the field of Van Gogh canvases, so his certificates of authenticity are decisive.”63 Others had similar positive things to say. But Bremmer’s reaction was prompt and resolute: some of the Wacker Van Goghs were forgeries and others were definitely from Vincent’s hand. Which was which, he didn’t say. “[De la Faille] is not capable of judging the authenticity of a painting by Vincent van Gogh,” Bremmer wrote. “If he were, he would not have revised his opinion of 30 paintings all at the same time, nor would he have had to ask for my insight again and again on the question of authenticity while working on his catalogue.” Bremmer did not deny the value of his contribution as author of the Van Gogh catalogue, but “[...] putting together a catalogue like this does not make one an art expert. Trying to prove the authenticity of a work of art by tracing its provenance is a job for a detective. An art expert ought to know whether a work is genuine or not by looking at the work itself, without knowing anything about its provenance.”64 Bremmer left no doubt as to who had the eye and who did not. De la Faille, he said, was “completely unqualified.”65 He repeated his point of view in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung of 10 December, which the NRC reprinted in translation on 11 December.66 In response, De la Faille, while expressing his respect, played down the contribution Bremmer had made in the creation of the catalogue and distanced himself: “I have always regarded Mr. Bremmer as an authority on Van Gogh, but he does not have a monopoly on the subject.”67 This reply

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was not enough to soften his opponent’s heart: Bremmer “an” authority – one among others? Bremmer was the art pope, and he would not allow anyone to topple the tiara from his head. In a revealing turn of events, Bremmer’s position was confirmed in December 1928 by several people who began purchasing Wacker Van Goghs. De la Faille’s Supplément came out on 10 December, but in what can only be seen as an acknowledgement of authority, Willem Scherjon, publisher of Bremmer’s magazine Beeldende Kunst, bought a Wacker Van Gogh on 12 December at Bremmer’s advice for 11,500 guilders: F 639, La route dans les Alpilles (henceforth to be referred to as Two Poplars).68 On 17 December, the Kröllers bought La mer à Saintes-Maries (henceforth Seascape) on Bremmer’s recommendation via the d’Audretsch gallery in The Hague for 18,000 guilders.69 Kröller-Müller wanted to buy two more – F 614, Des Cyprès (henceforth Cypresses), and F 385, Portrait de lui-même (henceforth Self-Portrait) – but she thought the prices were too high.70 She told an associate in Berlin that buying these canvases was intended as an act of support for Bremmer’s opinion that some of the works regarded as false by De la Faille were quite genuine: anyone who believed in Bremmer put his money where his mouth was. She also saw this affair as an opportunity to buy Van Goghs at a low price and thought Bremmer should wait with his opinion on the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs. At the moment these were scarcely marketable, she wrote, so she could acquire them for very little. If Bremmer were to pronounce judgment, she believed the price would undoubtedly go up.71 Eight months earlier, both Kröller-Müller and Bremmer had turned down membership in the organization Friends of Vincent Van Gogh, founded by De la Faille: she with the argument that there were enough works by Vincent in Dutch collections, and he that it would be better to buy works by living Dutch artists. Now Bremmer, like Kröller-Müller, overruled his own admonition. To be consistent, he himself bought a contested Van Gogh for 8,000 guilders: F 625bis, Les meules au lever de la lune (henceforth Haystacks). The purchases made by Scherjon, Kröller-Müller, and Bremmer show how much they were intended as an action to discredit De la Faille as a Van Gogh expert. A copy that has been preserved of the Haystacks purchase agreement between Wacker and Bremmer, dated January 1929, offers an intriguing glimpse into Bremmer’s interests. It was always very important for him to

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conceal his own financial interest in the works of art he recommended, but according to the agreement, both Wacker and Bremmer were free to sell the painting to any third party within a two-year period ending 31 December 1930.72 Later Bremmer would explain that the money was intended as a loan to Wacker.73 There was another dimension to this purchase, however, which will be revealed in the next chapter. The fact remains that Bremmer bought a Wacker Van Gogh for much less than Scherjon and Kröller-Müller had paid for Two Poplars and Seascape. From Bremmer’s point of view (he believed Haystacks was definitely a genuine Van Gogh) he actually had not taken any risks. Indeed, if Wacker were unable to pay back the loan, the canvas could be resold at a profit. Here Bremmer was revealing himself not only as a collector but also as a dealer. It was an aspect of his professional conduct that would not be discussed openly in the newspapers until many years later, in 1937. After 10 December 1928, Bremmer would no longer condescend to refute De la Faille in writing. In his magazine Beeldende Kunst he wrote positive pieces about Seascape (“The splendor of this work lies in its serenity”74) and Two Poplars without any mention of his opponent’s arguments, and he left it at that.75 He was conspicuously absent from the polemics and discussions on the Van Goghs of the Wacker gallery, but he did not stand aloof: the commercial and idealistic interests were too big for that, and interference was necessary. He acted behind the scenes, not so much as an organizer but as the instigator of the rising struggle in the Netherlands against De la Faille. Others took center stage, defending Bremmer’s views and attempting to preserve and expand his authority. It happened with his own encouragement but, probably more often, it also happened without his having to urge anyone to defend the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs. They acted almost the way a zealot serves the pope or a courtier his prince: not at his order but in his spirit.

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2

True colors

At the time of writing − the beginning of the twenty-first century − there isn’t a single expert who is willing to speak out in defense of art dealer Otto Wacker’s Van Gogh paintings. The generally accepted opinion is that they are all fakes and that most of them were made by the same person, most probably Otto’s brother, the painter and restorer Leonhard Heinrich Wacker (born 1895). For a good part of the twentieth century, however, some of these paintings managed to pass for works by Vincent van Gogh, much to the astonishment of chroniclers of the Wacker affair. They point out the questionable aspects of Otto Wacker’s career: earlier charges of dealing in forged paintings, the “art collection” of a Russian nobleman who was never identified, an unfinished “Van Gogh” found by the police in Leonhard’s studio, and other incriminating evidence. Why did dealers and experts fail to heed these warnings? What made them take a chance on a man like this? The only possible answer, the chroniclers claim, is that they were corrupt, incompetent, or gullible. Seen from this perspective, the account of the affair is a history of wisdom by hindsight. The chronicler knows how the battle is going to end, sees the role that people and objects have played, and writes about how they were swept along by the current of the times. If only they had been more attentive, they never would have become such willing prey to Wacker’s deception! This kind of chronicler is a prophet of the past. Contradicting this theory that they all acted exclusively out of either corrupt or noble motives – and that the Wacker brothers would have been easy to unmask – are scores of other intriguing aspects to the Wacker affair. Until January 1928, no one openly expressed any misgivings about Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs. It is important to note that nothing about the dark side of his wheelings and dealings ever appeared in the newspapers. The discovery of four of his fake Van Goghs at the Cassirer gallery was kept from

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the public eye. A few weeks later – in February and March 1928 – a sales exhibition was held at art dealer M. Goldschmidt’s Berlin branch at which at least seven of the nine Van Goghs were from Otto Wacker.1 In July of that year, Wacker sold a drawing by Van Gogh to the Nationalgalerie in Berlin for 9,000 reichsmarks. In Wacker’s correspondence with this museum, not a word about forgeries is mentioned.2 If malicious stories about Wacker had been making the rounds in the German art world, his colleagues would have dismissed them as gossip and slander. After all, every dealer has had the experience of making a bad buy and knows how easily a presumed golden purchase can turn into a white elephant. If a dealer like Wacker had found himself entangled in an unfortunate transaction, none of his colleagues would have cried foul. So the unsympathetic reports that were heard about Otto Wacker starting on 28 November 1928 smack strongly of ex post facto assessments: once the affair surrounding the fake Van Goghs hit the newspapers, many people actually appeared to have known all along that Wacker was a crook and that his merchandise was of dubious content. It is not very likely, however, that they entertained such views in earlier years, since until the summer of 1928 Wacker was still known as someone who had a way with people. The fact that so many prominent dealers and collectors, plus the Nationalgalerie, agreed to do business with him suggests as much. When the falsity of a few of his Van Goghs was pointed out to him in early 1928, he showed no indignation toward his critics. During all those years, and even until long after 1928, De la Faille, Meier-Graefe, and others insisted that he had always treated them properly. Clearly, Wacker played his role as a bona fide dealer with flair. And topping it all off is the fact that dealers and collectors were hungry for works by Vincent van Gogh. This made them less critical toward the Van Goghs that Wacker was offering: stylistic peculiarities, material deficiencies, and ambiguities regarding their provenance were all shrugged off. In the world of art sales, the certificates of authenticity issued by experts such as Bremmer, De la Faille, Meier-Graefe, and others were the deciding factor. This chapter deals with the dispute over the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs in Germany in 1928 and 1929. We have seen how the controversy played out in the Netherlands and Germany in 1928, so some overlapping of dates and events is to be expected. The dispute in Germany does feature

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the same elements: great financial loss and damaged reputations. And here, too, the focus is on acquiring authority, maintaining it, expanding it, and undermining it. But the persons and institutions are different. The main difference is that Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs ended up in a drama where art – that of Van Gogh in particular – played a role that is difficult to imagine or understand today. The question of the fake Van Goghs was pushed along by a complex conflict of interests in the German art world, following a course quite different from that in the Netherlands. In this drama, the art dealer Otto Wacker, art critic Julius Meier-Graefe, and museum director Ludwig Justi all occupied places of prominence. The German spirit From the late nineteenth century onward, a host of artists, dealers, collectors, and critics in Germany were involved in bringing Vincent’s work to the attention of the art-loving public, but they met with a great deal of resistance. Germany was strictly divided about the significance of art. There were those who felt that art’s function was purely aesthetic. Others insisted that the purpose of art was at least closely allied with – if not identical to – pedagogical, moral, philosophical, religious, racial, or political goals. 3 For many in Germany, the love of art was the test of a person’s convictions and a barometer of the culture’s superiority, ascendance, or downfall – or, in the idiom of the age: of the Geist, the spirit. One person might argue that Van Gogh had destroyed French art, while another would contend that he had brought it to untold heights. Van Gogh was variously regarded as a northerner, a Frenchman, a Fleming, and a Teuton. There were those who did not know where his roots lay, but based on an assumption of his ethnic origins they did not hesitate to ascribe to Vincent characteristics that were seen as either praiseworthy or reprehensible, as part of Germany’s Geist or a challenge against it. This debate stems from the centuries-old misconception that the beautiful and the good are essentially interchangeable. It is beyond the scope of this book to report on the diversity of views that were held in Germany concerning the non-autonomous aesthetic of the works of Van Gogh, 4 but his life and work became part of the disputes that had arisen over the use of art to strengthen the German national consciousness.

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Kaiser Wilhelm II believed that the purpose of art was to cultivate citizenship: it should express loyalty to the state, pride, power, and self-confidence. At the unveiling of a series of statues of all the Brandenburg princes in 1901, he uttered the memorable words: “An art that disregards the laws and limits that I have defined is no longer art.”5 The work of the Impressionists and Post-Impressionists, which included Van Gogh, violated this commandment. It was too free, cursory, weak, superficial – in short, it was too French. In the eyes of an influential conservative elite, modern French art was an expression of republicanism and therefore an undermining of the German social structure, with the monarchy at the top. In the same year, Wilhelm II derisively referred to a Cézanne exhibition at the Cassirer gallery in Berlin as “sewer art from Paris.” He watched with dismay as the Königliche Nationalgalerie in Berlin showed and collected works by Degas, Renoir, and Manet. The director of the museum, Hugo von Tschudi (18511911), had chosen to be led not by political but by aesthetic criteria. For the conservatives, the presence of the French Impressionists in the Nationalgalerie, completed in 1876 in imperial, classical style, was an outrage. Was

. The Nationalgalerie in Berlin, opened in . For the conservative elite, the motto Der Deutschen Kunst meant that modern French art, which they insisted also included Van Gogh, need not be shown. The year  refers to the German victory over France.

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the inscription over the entrance to the museum – “Der Deutschen Kunst” (German Art) – totally meaningless? When von Tschudi commissioned six French paintings in 1909 for 25,000 marks, Wilhelm II blocked the purchase before the financial arrangements were completed. The sale was called off and von Tschudi was forced to step down.6 There were other German museums and collectors who attached little importance to the views of the Kaiser, however, and von Tschudi quickly found employment as the director of the Neue Pinakothek in Munich, where he was able to show off his enthusiasm for modern French art once again. It was not only museums beyond the immediate reach of the Kaiser that chose to go their own way; collectors and critics did, too. Van Gogh’s art gained ground all over Germany. In the first twenty-five years of the twentieth century alone, thirty-seven exhibitions of his work were organized and about fifteen percent of his paintings ended up with German owners. This is an extraordinary outcome in view of the fact that at the end of the nineteenth century almost all of Van Gogh’s works were in Dutch or French hands. But until the outbreak of World War II, Van Gogh’s life and work would continue to be the subject of controversy. There were artists, critics, dealers, museums, and collectors who rejected Van Gogh during those years as well as those who embraced him. One of the latter was the art critic Julius Meier-Graefe. Meier-Graefe In October 1927, when De la Faille’s exhibition of Van Gogh drawings from the gallery of Otto Wacker held its opening, Meier-Graefe commented with a sigh, “Every week Berlin is one art dealer richer.” 7 It all had to do with the astounding economic growth that had taken place in Germany over the preceding years: the Golden Twenties. Unemployment had practically disappeared, industry had been modernized, the business community was in full swing, and wages had skyrocketed. All this could be felt in the art world. Art lovers had money in abundance and there was a demand for works by modern masters. Wacker was one of the many to profit from this turbulent artistic and economic climate. Over the previous two years he had had no trouble putting drawings and paintings by Vincent van Gogh on the market, and with the profits he had been able

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. Julius Meier-Graefe in around . The first in Germany to own a painting by Van Gogh, he published a great deal about his life and work and provided the Van Goghs being sold at Kunsthandel Otto Wacker with certificates of authenticity.

to move from his shop on the unassuming Zimmerstraße to a well-placed establishment on the Viktoriastraße, right near the Potsdamer Platz and amidst the city’s well-known art dealers: Cassirer, Thannhauser, Matthiesen, and others. Wacker was able to benefit from the reputation of the sixty-year-old Meier-Graefe, who granted certificates of authenticity to twenty-five of his Van Goghs.8 Meier-Graefe’s assessment was as sought-after by dealers and collectors in Germany as that of De la Faille, and he, too, was held to be a Van Gogh authority of stature. Meier-Graefe had immediately recognized the importance of Van Gogh for modern art. He was the first in Germany to purchase his work, starting in 1893, and he wrote about him many times. In his three-volume Die Entwicklungsgeschichte der modernen Kunst (1904) and Impressionisten (1907), Van Gogh occupies a key position. His Vincent van Gogh of 1910 was the first successful biography of the artist, and his Vincent: Der Roman eines Gottsuchers of 1921 underwent many reprints and was translated into English and French. By 1928, Meier-Graefe was the Van Gogh authority in the German art world.9 When Meier-Graefe returned to Berlin in July 1928 after a long stay in the United States, Cassirer informed him of De la Faille’s plan to issue a Supplément of the fake Van Goghs. Meier-Graefe became alarmed and wrote

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to De la Faille on 15 August asking him not to act too hastily. He wanted to examine the questionable canvases one more time himself. Meier-Graefe felt sorry for Wacker. He believed the art dealer had been duped: it was almost certain that Wacker would never be able to get rid of his dearly acquired merchandise, making him – sadly – just one more victim of art world swindlers. Meier-Graefe managed to convince Wacker that the anonymity of the Russian owner would have to be abandoned, and that a joint visit to the Russian would provide more clarity about the provenance of the canvases. Wacker agreed to arrange a meeting. In September 1928 he claimed to have traveled to Switzerland, but he returned a few days later with a disappointing announcement: a meeting was out of the question until further notice. The Russian appeared to have left unexpectedly for a long stay in faraway Egypt.10 Meier-Graefe accepted Wacker’s story. In November, Meier-Graefe asked the Engineer whether his mother had ever sold the questionable paintings to a Russian family as Otto Wacker alleged, and he received the same answer that De la Faille had been given to the same question in March: the canvases did not originate from the Van Gogh family.11 This failed to convince Meier-Graefe, and in December he once again urged Wacker to arrange for a joint visit to the Russian in Switzerland, this time in the company of a police investigator. Wacker said he would comply, but ultimately no journey to Switzerland would ever be undertaken. Resistance How did Otto Wacker take the criticism of his merchandise in 1928? He seemed to make light of the incident of the four fake Van Goghs at the Cassirer gallery in January 1928. He did not dispute the judgment of De la Faille, Ring, and Feilchenfeldt, and he gave the paintings back. In the first half of that year he was still able to sell his Van Goghs for high prices to dealers and collectors in Germany, the Netherlands, and the United States, but that summer, cracks began to appear on the surface of his operation. De la Faille informed art dealers of his revised judgment, and most of them took back the canvases from the duped collectors, offered them to Wacker, and demanded a refund. When the art world learned of De la Faille’s plan to dismiss all the Wacker Van Goghs as fakes in a Supplément to be published at the end of 1928,

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Meier-Graefe swung into action. He leaked the news to the German press, and in a halfhearted attempt to save his own reputation as a Van Gogh expert he wrote that he and De la Faille were planning on conducting a joint investigation. He regarded De la Faille’s revision as ill-founded and thought his actions were rash and harmful to many of those involved. He accused him of being headstrong: “De la Faille’s views are so beyond the pale that I would sooner turn my soul over to the devil.”12 Meier-Graefe had not been able to re-examine all the canvases, the newspapers wrote, but unlike De la Faille he regarded most of them – one newspaper said eighty percent – as authentic. In November 1928, however, it became clear that others in Germany were challenging Meier-Graefe’s assessment. One of them was the director of the Kestner Gesellschaft in Hannover, who issued a statement on the spuriousness of seven Wacker Van Goghs that had been shown to him. Wacker’s defense of his business had begun to meet with more and more resistance in Germany. He saw that almost all the German art dealers had put their trust in De la Faille’s judgment, and he must have realized that experts like Meier-Graefe and Hans Rosenhagen (1858-1943) carried too little weight. By the end of November the attempt to defend the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs seemed all but lost, until Otto Wacker delivered a masterstroke to turn the tide. Teacher On 30 November 1928, Otto Wacker, accompanied by his brother Leonhard, paid a hasty visit to Bremmer in The Hague, bringing three paintings with him. It was not Otto’s first meeting with Bremmer. Seven months earlier, Bremmer had provided Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523) with a certificate of authenticity – after De la Faille had informed art dealer Joseph Stransky of his decision to revoke his judgment of the canvas, and before Stransky had sold it (with Bremmer’s certificate) in May 1928. Wacker knew the way Bremmer worked: the unquestioning emotion he displayed when he beheld a work of art and his disparaging attitude towards academic art study. Otto Wacker would not have to expect any troublesome questions from him about the provenance of the Van Goghs. Moreover, he was convinced that Bremmer wielded enormous authority among Dutch dealers and collectors. Wacker presented himself as a passionate dealer, but unin-

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formed with regard to Van Gogh. Would Bremmer, as a leading expert, be so kind as to tell him whether these canvases were from Vincent’s hand or not? Wacker had pushed the right button. This was just the attitude that Bremmer appreciated: the questioner had undertaken a long train journey from Berlin to seek his advice, acknowledged his authority without hesitation, appealed to his immense knowledge of art, and was a pupil in search of enlightenment. In a later statement about Otto Wacker, Bremmer would say, “Wacker possesses a natural artistic sense, to a much stronger degree than in most people.”13 A journalist from De Telegraaf was invited to attend the Wacker brothers’ visit to Bremmer and wrote, “So far Mr. Bremmer has seen nine of the paintings in question and has declared seven of them to be absolutely authentic. He arranged to see three paintings in his home, and one of them, with cypresses, he declared to be not only authentic but an uncommonly beautiful example of Van Gogh’s art, and he used it in a lesson by way of demonstration.”14 The theory that the Wacker Van Goghs consisted of a group of forged works accumulated around a core of genuine Van Goghs would become the new truth in the Dutch art world, thanks to Bremmer’s intellectual clout. Afterward, Wacker would sing the praises of Bremmer’s authority as a Van Gogh expert to anyone who would listen. The judgment of the recalcitrant De la Faille was hardly worth considering, or as Wacker would write to Scherjon, “Mr. Bremmer has never yet been mistaken in his assessment of the paintings of Van Gogh, which raises Bremmer far above the other Van Gogh experts.”15 Bremmer was convinced that Wacker was the victim of a smear campaign carried out by jealous art dealers, and he set out to protect him. As we saw, in December he began throwing his weight around as an art expert in his dealings with Scherjon and Kröller-Müller in order to sell Wacker Van Goghs, and he himself drew up a contract with Otto Wacker for the sale of Haystacks (F 625bis). Alibi Bremmer’s protective hand could not shield Wacker from the formidable blow to his reputation brought on by the newspaper reports of De la Faille’s Supplément. Everything Wacker said and did was held up to the light. Po-

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lice investigator Eulzen questioned Wacker on Saturday, 1 December 1928, upon his return to Berlin after visiting Bremmer in The Hague. How did the paintings come into his possession, who was the Russian collector, and where was this person staying so the police could speak with him? Wacker’s answer: to preserve the Russian’s safety I have destroyed all correspondence; I refuse to take part in an interview with him in the company of a Berlin investigator; I deem all police interference unnecessary, since reputable experts have acknowledged the authenticity of the Van Goghs; I am considering taking legal action against De la Faille. Het Volk wrote, “At the end of the interrogation, the inspector from the criminal investigation division told the art dealer that he did not believe a word of his statement and that he was only letting him go because he had no right to arrest him due to lack of evidence.”16 In a newspaper statement a few weeks later, Wacker’s lawyer Ivan Goldschmidt (no relation to the art dealer of the same name) made him out to be a hero: we should be praising him for wanting to protect the unknown Russian collector and his family from a regime that threatens its subjects with death for the least little infraction. Wacker was a victim of duty: he had promised the Russian on his word of honor that he would not divulge his identity, and despite all the pressure he was remaining loyal to his promise.17 “Honor” and “loyal” were salutary words in those days. Little by little, Wacker’s alibi was steadily undermined by facts published in the newspapers during the first weeks of 1929. On 18 January 1929, the Vossische Zeitung wrote that six or seven years earlier he had attracted attention by dealing in forged paintings that had supposedly been made by Heinrich Wilhelm Trübner († 1917); during the same period he had been accused of selling forged paintings by Arnold Böcklin († 1901) and Franz von Stuck († 1928).18 Then came the Frankfurter Zeitung article of 30 January 1929. The Moscow correspondent had spoken with the director of the Museum of Modern Art in Moscow and the head of the Visual Arts Division of the People’s Commission for Art Affairs, and they had assured him that none of the Wacker Van Goghs had ever been in Russia: “Russia had only a small number of art centers, and no private collections escaped the knowledge of art historians.”19 Voices in the German art world insisted that Wacker had been the victim of a Russian con man who owned a small core of genuine Van Goghs, around which he had commissioned a larger col-

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lection of forgeries. When the Nationalgalerie in Berlin subjected a few Wacker Van Goghs to a stylistic and technical examination, it became clear beyond a shadow of a doubt that some of the paintings were fakes. Ludwig Justi In 1928, Ludwig Justi, who had a doctorate in art history, was unquestionably the most influential museum director in Germany. In 1909 he succeeded Hugo von Tschudi as the director of the Königliche Nationalgalerie, the museum that was renamed the Staatliche Nationalgalerie a few months after the abdication of Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1918. Justi was not only one of the most important figures in the German art world but also one of the most controversial. He believed that a museum’s task was to preserve the old and recognize the new. It should exhibit and collect the art that has withstood the selection process of the ages, but it should do the same for contemporary art. He also felt that it was the museum’s job to familiarize the greater public with this art by means of lectures, tours, and publications. Justi’s ideas were by no means commonplace in the 1910s and ’20s, and they made him many enemies in conservative circles. While these enemies agreed with Justi that the museum should show German art, they despised his prefer-

. Ludwig Justi in around .

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ence for the Expressionistic works of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Max Beckmann, August Macke, and others. So his attitude earned him both friends and enemies among lovers of contemporary art. Justi’s enemies reproached him for failing to devote any attention in the Nationalgalerie to Georg Grosz and the Dadaists and for being far too late with his decision to hold an exhibition of the Constructivists. Among the advocates of modern art there were critics, such as Meier-Graefe, who found him modish and accused him of refusing to acknowledge the value of the Impressionists. It is true that Justi had little affinity for painters like Édouard Manet († 1883), Edgar Degas († 1917), and Auguste Renoir († 1919), though he did recognize their artistic value. Impressionism for him was a typical French form of artistic expression in which the mere surface of things was depicted. It was not in keeping with the German Geist, which he believed penetrated their essence. This judgment earned him the enmity of Max Liebermann (1847-1935), whose paintings clearly showed the influence of the French Impressionists and who, with Meier-Graefe and von Tschudi, worked hard to make their work better known in Germany. Liebermann had owned a Van Gogh, but he did not think very highly of the man as an artist: Van Gogh had suffered a great deal, but his suffering

17. Max Liebermann in 1904.

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had made him incapable of completing a single painting or drawing as a work of art.20 Justi’s entanglements were not limited to conflicts of ideals. He also disagreed with Liebermann over matters of a commercial and political nature. The painter was dissatisfied with the acquisitions of the Nationalgalerie. Liebermann saw too few of his own preferences among them and thought that the German artists he patronized were not getting the place of honor in the Nationalgalerie that they deserved. Liebermann was a critic of stature. He was one of the most successful painters in Germany, he was rich, and he lived in a stately villa right next to the Brandenburger Tor (his directions to visitors: “When you enter Berlin, turn left.”). His works were in great demand; dealers and collectors more or less tore the paintings from his hands. He held countless positions in the art world. In 1903 he became the chairman of the Deutscher Künstlerbund, which had been founded to withstand the pernicious effect of Wilhelm II on the arts. He was one of the luminaries of the Berliner Secession, a group of artists who had risen up in reaction to the dominance of academic art in the Prussian state, but he turned against them in 1911 because they agreed to allow Expressionism, a painting style he abhorred, to be shown in the exhibitions. He can rightfully be called a Painter Prince. But it was not until 1920 that he became president of the prestigious Preußische Akademie der Künste, a function that many thought he should have been given much earlier in view of his achievements and capacities. He could not hold such a position under the Kaiser, however, for Liebermann was a Jew.21 The dissension between Justi and Liebermann was probably not based on anti-Semitism but on competing artistic views. Justi wanted to limit the domination of Liebermann and his cohorts in the Nationalgalerie’s acquisition and collection policy. For his part, Liebermann would have seen in Justi a representative of the ancien régime.22 Indeed, Justi had been appointed by Kaiser Wilhelm II in 1909, and as successor to von Tschudi he was expected to keep the influences of Impressionism (i.e. modern French influences) in the Nationalgalerie in check. Reading the criticisms and polemical writings that were making the rounds in the German art world during those years is a strange experience. Discussing differences in taste and opinion on a professional level seems to have been utterly foreign to them. One example: Karl Scheffler, an influential critic of Justi’s museum policy, published a much talked-about

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brochure in 1921 called Der Berliner Museumskrieg (The Berlin Museum War).23 The title alone was bad enough, scarcely three years after the most gruesome war that had ever been fought in Europe! The writer condemned Wilhelm II’s improper use of art (among other things), protested against the overcrowded museum walls so fashionable at the time, expressed his great appreciation for the Impressionists, and deplored the prominence given to the Expressionists. So far so good. But all this went hand in hand with jeers and ad hominem arguments, and ended with a demand for Justi’s dismissal. What also makes reading these pieces so unsettling is our current knowledge that many in the German art world who opposed each other so vigorously in 1933 later became victims of the Nazis. Personal factors probably played a role as well. A close co-worker described Justi as someone who was friendly, convivial, and witty, but who could also be arrogant and hurtful.24 It is tempting to see a correlation between personal characteristics and the thoroughly hostile attitudes in the German art world. Whatever the case may have been, by 1928 Justi had a career behind him that was marked by highly volatile conflicts. He had successfully managed to serve the interests of the museum under a blinkered and domineering Kaiser, and he had also been successful in charting an independent course for contemporary art after 1918. He paid a high price for these efforts, but perhaps we should try to see it as someone from that period might have seen it, when inflated, authoritarian verbal exchanges were regarded as normal. For Justi, the words of the Dutch sociologist S.R. Steinmetz seem especially apt: “A good enemy is one of the best gifts of the gods” – keeping in mind that Justi had not one but a great many enemies. Invitation In 1928 an agreement was reached between Justi and Mrs. Kröller-Müller: her Van Gogh collection would be shown in the former Kronprinzenpalais, which Justi had put to use in 1921 as an annex of the Nationalgalerie. Now that Justi was no longer serving a Kaiser who insisted on seeing the nation glorified in academic, romantic paintings but was working under a minister who granted him more freedom, he could implement his museological ideas. What he had in mind was to reserve the entire palace for contemporary art. It was a revolutionary plan. Until then, modern art had been some-

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thing for private collectors, art salons, and art dealers. There were museums that showed the occasional example of contemporary art beside works by respected old masters, but a state institution totally devoted to modern art was unique. In December, news of De la Faille’s Supplément on the forged Van Goghs was in all the papers, and Justi saw the Van Gogh exhibition as a perfect opportunity to shed more light on the subject. His plan was to display the dubious paintings of art dealer Otto Wacker beside the 143 Van Goghs of Kröller-Müller, a collection whose authenticity was openly questioned by no one. He asked a few owners of Wacker Van Goghs if they would be willing to give their paintings to the Nationalgalerie on loan for the duration of the exhibition so that “experts and laymen might be able to form their own opinions about the objects themselves.”25 Justi must have realized that all the commotion had frightened the owners off. Since early December, the

. The Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. Here the Van Goghs from the collection of Helene Kröller-Müller were shown in early . The Berlin police would not allow her forged Van Gogh Seascape (F ) to be shown in the museum proper, but she managed to have this restriction reversed.

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uproar in the press and statements by De la Faille and the director of the Kestner Gesellschaft had damaged their reputations and inflicted financial loss. The owners had nothing to gain from complying with Justi’s request. On the contrary, there was a real possibility that he, the director of a leading museum, might side with the critics, too. Then the damage would be irreversible. Justi tried to reassure the owners – he wrote that as far as he was concerned, it was by no means certain that De la Faille was correct – but to no avail. On 21 December 1928, when the Prussian Minister of Education and Culture, Carl Heinrich Becker, opened the Kröller-Müller exhibition (which occupied the upper floor of the Kronprinzenpalais), only one collector, Mrs. E. Wolff of Hamburg, had sent in her Wacker Van Gogh: Cypresses (F 616). But when the art dealer Matthiesen officially filed charges against Kunsthandel Otto Wacker on behalf of the Society of German Art and Antique Dealers on 22 December, the question of authentic or fake began to gain momentum.26 Now the police had the authority to carry out extensive house searches of any suspected persons in order to seize the paintings and accounting books of the art dealer Otto Wacker and to question any involved persons in Germany and the Netherlands. It also meant that duped German dealers who had supported the charge through their professional society would now be handing over dubious Van Goghs for examination. If Wacker were convicted, it would increase the chance that those who had not been able to recover their money would finally get satisfaction. Crass forgeries By 3 January 1929, Justi had eight Wacker Van Goghs hanging in the Kronprinzenpalais, but not among the Van Goghs of Helene Kröller-Müller, as he had hoped. The police had prohibited him from hanging the controversial paintings in the museum proper because they were to be used as evidence if Otto Wacker were ever taken to court on charges of fraud. Displaying them could stir up public sentiment, thereby undermining the impartiality of the legal proceedings. So Justi hung them in his study, where a select number of persons could see them on request. He also hung the Wacker Van Gogh Seascape (F 418) there, which Kröller-Müller had sent to Berlin over a week after the exhibition had opened. He confided his doubts

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about the suspicion that all eight canvases were fakes to a Swiss colleague. Some of them were unquestionably “crass, inadequate forgeries,” he said, but there were also canvases among them that may well have been painted by Vincent van Gogh. Commenting on Houses at Saintes-Maries (F 421), he wrote: “Nor is it clear to me that this is not one of the first attempts in Marseille to reconstruct the landscape from a drawing while working at home.”27 A few days later the police raided the studio of Leonhard Wacker and seized a few paintings, which were taken to the Kronprinzenpalais. Two of the works attracted particular attention: a sketch on canvas – an Untermalung – of a composition in the style of Van Gogh, and a canvas signed “Vincent” depicting a small figure in a field of grain (henceforth The Mower). The Wacker brothers claimed this was a genuine Van Gogh from the col-

. After conducting a search of Leonhard Wacker’s studio in January , the police confiscated the painting The Mower ( x  cm), Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Justi and De la Faille thought it was a fake, but Bremmer and Scherjon regarded it as a work from Vincent van Gogh’s own hand.

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lection of the Russian, but that it was in bad condition and supposedly was going to be restored by Leonhard. The police and the Nationalgalerie suspected that it was a recent forgery made by Leonhard himself. This find was probably one reason why Justi abandoned all doubts regarding the disputed paintings. In the Vossische Zeitung of 26 January 1929, he wrote that all ten paintings from Kunsthandel Otto Wacker in the Nationalgalerie were fakes.28 The recently seized The Mower, which does not appear in De la Faille’s catalogue raisonné, was not included in this assessment. Justi wrote that you can recognize a genuine Van Gogh by the brushstrokes, each of which has “a clear meaning all its own based on its proportions and direction, relief and color, and also based on its relation to the surrounding brushstrokes.”29 Anyone who compares the Van Goghs of Kröller-Müller with those of Otto Wacker and fails to see the difference between genuine and fake is simply incapable of seeing, according to Justi. Attributing them to Van Gogh is an insult to the master. Apparently the spuriousness was so flagrant that Justi refused to trouble himself with discussing the paintings separately. According to De Telegraaf, “The authority of this scholar, who is the head of one of the greatest museums in Germany, will settle the matter for the time being as far as German public opinion is concerned.”30 Justi’s assessment was a direct criticism of Meier-Graefe, who had also based his certificates of authenticity on stylistic arguments. In the eyes of Justi, Meier-Graefe had “disgraced himself forever.” Meier-Graefe responded to Justi’s harsh criticism in the Berliner Tageblatt under the heading “The painter of weak moments.” Unlike Justi, he discussed the paintings one by one (except for The Mower) and classified them with words such as “suspect,” “indifferent,” “weak,” “very poor,” and “very feeble.” The label “forged,” however, was not one that he chose to use. He once against expressed his confidence in Otto Wacker but thought he should be more forthright as to the provenance of the canvases.31 Meier-Graefe’s uncertainty contrasted sharply with Justi’s decisiveness and scorn. The Justi speaking in the newspaper was quite different from the person who, three weeks earlier, had written to a Swiss colleague that he was not sure that all the works were forgeries and even held out the possibility that a few of the canvases could have been the work of Van Gogh. He had discussed the canvases with scores of people, he wrote; in other words, Justi

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had tested his observations against those of others and had adjusted them accordingly. Actually, what had happened to Justi was what had cost De la Faille so many weeks of work and what Grete Ring, on staff at Cassirer, expressed so aptly: “[...] once something is exposed as a forgery it immediately sinks into nothingness.”32 Justi had stripped his article in the Vossische Zeitung of all previous doubt, however, and he failed to mention that his certainty was the result of much deliberation. Such an attitude was not only in keeping with his person but was also consistent with the spirit of the time. His critics undoubtedly would have construed his skepticism about his own judgment and his attempt to qualify his visual impressions as signs of weakness and incompetence. Intervention When Helene Kröller-Müller attended the exhibition at the end of January 1929 and discovered that her new acquisition Seascape was missing, she was very put out. She demanded that it be placed in the museum proper. Bremmer, too, spoke with Justi about it. He threatened to send the entire Kröller-Müller collection back to The Hague if the painting were not hung in the exhibition with all the other Van Goghs. Justi gave in and hung it among Vincent’s other works from the Arles period.33 In February the police placed six more paintings in the care of the Nationalgalerie. They allowed a few to be returned to their German owners, but kept other canvases from being sent back, such as a group of three from the Matthiesen gallery: Self-Portrait (F 385), Cypresses (F 614), and Basket with Rolls (henceforth Rolls, F 387).34 All this to the distress of the art dealer, who had found in Kröller-Müller a potential buyer for Self-Portrait and Cypresses.35 Bremmer would have told her that these two were genuine. Rolls, on the other hand, was a fake in his estimation.36 The seizure of these canvases is the price Matthiesen had to pay for pressing charges against Wacker on behalf of the Society of Art and Antique Dealers.37 For the courts, the paintings would serve as evidence in a case against Wacker and therefore had to remain available. Did the judicial authorities then raise their eyebrows when they learned that the art dealer Matthiesen of all people – the claimant – wanted the paintings back? Did they suspect that he might still be able to dispose of a few questionable canvases? Were they at all aware that

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Matthiesen wanted to sell two of them for the price of genuine paintings by Van Gogh? Matthiesen had asked Kröller-Müller for 30,000 reichsmarks for Cypresses. The sale did not go through, however: she thought the figure was too high.38 Resin and lead De la Faille’s rejection of all of Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs, Ludwig Justi’s implacable judgment of ten of them, Meier-Graefe’s hesitation, the discoveries in Leonhard Wacker’s studio, and the statements by Russian museum authorities sound like the opening strains to a quick court case. The Nationalgalerie also began a technical and chemical examination of the paint and linen, and on 10 February 1929, Die Kunstauktion reported that investigators from the Nationalgalerie had found resin and lead compounds in the paint of the contested Van Goghs. These siccatives were probably added to the paint to cause the canvases to dry faster. The maker of the paintings must have known that pure oil paint would take years to dry. Experts knew that adding drying agents was alien to Van Gogh’s working method: he never added siccatives to his paint. Despite this addition, the results yielded by the siccatives must not have been fast enough for the forger, who then placed the canvases on a hot stove floor plate to speed up the hardening process. Oil paint that dries under normal conditions becomes so hard that it is difficult to scratch off with a fingernail. In the fake paintings, however, the paint layer was so brittle that poking it with a fingernail would cause the paint to crack. According to Die Kunstauktion, all forged paintings exhibit these characteristics.39 De Telegraaf published a summary of this article, which meant that in the Netherlands, too, it became known that the Nationalgalerie regarded the ten canvases as fakes on chemical and technical as well as stylistic grounds.40 Although these facts were less than favorable for Otto Wacker, the argument had not yet been decided against him. The article in Die Kunstauktion had to do with “all forged paintings,” which supposedly meant the ten paintings that were present in the museum in early February. Not a single research report on these paintings can be found in the archives of the Nationalgalerie from January or February 1929. Were all ten canvases actually examined at that time, and if so, by whom, and how? Did the museum

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subject Kröller-Müller’s Seascape (F 418) to a chemical and technical examination, for example? According to the letter of the report it did, but there are good reasons to believe that such an examination did not take place. The Nationalgalerie, in the person of Justi, found all ten stylistically weak and declared them as forgeries on that basis, but a much smaller number were probably given a chemical examination at the same time. About three years later, in 1932, E. Täubner, chemist for the German State Museums, would draw up a report of his examination of the Wacker Van Goghs in the Nationalgalerie. He wrote that he had examined five or six paintings at that time, half of them fake, the other half genuine. Which these were he does not say. (I will return to this in Chapter 5.) The words “five or six” clearly suggest that he was writing from memory. The following question is whether the Nationalgalerie examined the next six paintings that were brought to the Kronprinzenpalais starting in early February. If they were examined, how was it done and what were the results? These questions do not arise from a fastidious desire to be exhaustive. As it turned out, a lack of precision played a decisive role in the history of the Wacker Van Goghs. None of the technical or chemical experts who would become involved in this case examined all the works in their entirety. All in all, no more than ten canvases would be subjected to such treatment. Even more important is the fact that the knowledge thus gathered would largely be kept secret. The reason for the Nationalgalerie’s lack of precision has to do with the speed of the revelations. In January, the weakness of Wacker’s alibi was exposed. Justi must have thought it would be a matter of weeks before the whole truth came out in the open. After all, for him the spuriousness of the canvases was so obvious that doubt was out of the question. By February, the Nationalgalerie was confident that half the canvases were fakes, including Kröller-Müller’s Seascape. Justi and his associates probably slackened the reins at that point, mindful of the saying that you don’t need to eat a whole ox to find out whether the meat is tough. For others, however, the battle was far from over. The revelation regarding the composition of the paint may have put a definite end to the idea that the Van Goghs from the unknown Russian collector were all authentic, but it failed to refute Bremmer’s theory about a core of genuine works. Examining the other Wacker Van Goghs might have provided a definite

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answer, but they had not yet been offered to the Nationalgalerie. A few were in other countries, and attempts by the police to have them brought to Berlin had so far been unsuccessful. The judicial authorities had made an attachment order against the paintings that were still at Otto Wacker’s gallery in Berlin, however. These works could have been examined as well, but the police soon discovered they had missed the boat. Memory loss On 26 January 1929, Otto and Leonhard Wacker arrived at Bremmer’s home in The Hague. They had brought with them a few paintings from the gallery on the Viktoriastraße, including Haystacks (F 625bis), which now belonged to Bremmer. In doing so, the Wacker brothers had in fact withdrawn evidence from the attachment order imposed by the judicial authorities. In December, Bremmer himself had attempted to bring Wacker paintings to the Netherlands, but the police had managed to foil his efforts.41 After this successful transport, it was up to Bremmer to decide whether to have his property examined or not, and if so by whom. Otto Wacker had promised his Berlin friends that after his return he would lay his cards on the table with regard to the Russian collector. They expected him back on 4 February, but they waited in vain. Wacker had had an accident; that morning he had been found unconscious at the bottom of a flight of stairs in Hotel Rijnland (owned by Bremmer’s sister) in Leiden. He was rushed to the Sint-Elisabeth Hospital. When he regained consciousness, he said he had felt ill that morning and had fallen down the stairs. According to the attending physician his illness had been the result of a heart attack; according to Wacker it had been an attempt to poison him. Who was behind it – the Russian nobleman, jealous art dealers – he did not know. The doctor maintained that Wacker had had a heart attack, but Wacker in turn pointed an accusatory finger at the doctor, claiming that he was part of a conspiracy to take his life. Some sixty years later, Nicole Roepers looked up the official report of the incident filed with the Leiden municipal police in 1929. According to this report, an examination of Wacker’s blood and excrement revealed no traces of toxic materials.42 Nevertheless, the case of the forged Van Goghs had now acquired all the trappings of a detective novel: fake paintings, lots of

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money, a mysterious Russian nobleman, quarrelling experts, duped owners, and a police investigation. And let’s face it, what’s a detective story without a murder, or at least an attempted murder? The incident prevented Otto Wacker from returning to Berlin, where the police had wanted to question him. In an ironic news item, De Haagsche Post wished Mr. Wacker a speedy recovery and expressed its hope that the brain concussion would not have erased his memory of the provenance of the controversial Van Goghs.43 At the end of March, Wacker left the SintElisabeth Hospital. According to De Maasbode he was fully recovered when he set out for Berlin, but upon his arrival he immediately had himself readmitted to a hospital.44 After three months it looked as though the police would not be able to question him for the time being: Wacker’s health had deteriorated. But without his testimony, the case could not proceed.45 Daubigny’s Garden By the time the exhibition of the Kröller-Müller Van Gogh collection at the Kronprinzenpalais reached its end on 28 February, there had been more than 23,000 visitors, a large number for those days.46 All told, sixteen Wacker Van Goghs had hung in the museum and the publicity about the forged paintings had contributed to the event’s great success. The exhibition was highly praised. Even Justi’s most formidable critic, Karl Scheffler, was impressed, but he couldn’t resist writing that after viewing the Van Goghs he immediately made his way to the rooms where the real masters were: Manet, Renoir, and Cézanne.47 Ludwig Justi must have seen the success of the exhibition in the Kronprinzenpalais as a confirmation of the course the Nationalgalerie was taking. The museum was supposed to demonstrate the continuity of German art since the nineteenth century. Starting with the Romantic school, a line ran through Impressionism, Post-Impressionism, Fauvism, and Expressionism in which the German spirit was unmistakably present. But the museum was unable to show any paintings by one key figure in that development: Vincent van Gogh. So after the exhibition closed, Justi got in touch with various art dealers in order to purchase some Van Goghs for the Nationalgalerie. There were Van Goghs on the market, but he was not interested in acquiring just a few random paintings. There had to be a masterpiece

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among them. Other German museums such as those in Cologne, Essen, Magdeburg, and Munich owned at least one work by the master. By making some sensational purchases, the Nationalgalerie would be able to distinguish itself and to bid farewell once and for all to the restrictions that the Kaiser had placed on the collection. Justi had let his eye fall on a canvas he regarded as more beautiful than any painting from the Kröller-Müller collection. It had been painted a few weeks before Vincent’s death, and because of its size – 53 x 104 cm (20¾ x 41 inches), unusual dimensions for a work by Vincent – it was certain to attract attention. The work was Daubigny’s Garden (F 776), owned by the Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg. There were other Van Gogh paintings on his wish list, but he was burning to buy this particular canvas for the museum. He knew it would cost a great deal of money, much more than the museum’s annual acquisitions budget would allow, but he had a solution for this problem. He just might be able to exchange the canvas with Rosenberg for a Degas from the collection of the Nationalgalerie, although the exchange would require the permission of the minister. There was a “but,” however, and it was a big one. Justi knew about the rumor, which so far had not been published, that Daubigny’s Garden was a forgery.

. Daubigny’s Garden (F ),  x  cm, Hiroshima Museum of Art. For museum director Justi, the purchase in  was the beginning of a Van Gogh collection for the Nationalgalerie. In  Justi’s opponents would accuse him of having paid far too much for it. On top of all this the rumor that it was forged began to make the rounds.

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He would have to work with great caution. A point-blank question about authenticity would cause Rosenberg to break off negotiations and sell the canvas to an American. Justi needed time to make inquiries in the French art world. He played for time by having the canvas brought to Berlin on approval. In the meantime he approached two experts from the French art world and presented his problem to them. There is a second version of the painting, wrote Justi, which belongs to a Swiss collector, the authenticity of which is beyond doubt. An almost identical painting does not necessarily indicate a forgery, since Van Gogh often repeated certain motifs. But the painting had been the property of the French painter and collector Émile Schuffenecker (1851-1934). It is known, wrote Justi, that Schuffenecker made copies of paintings by Van Gogh. Justi asked whether the Rosenberg Daubigny’s Garden was a copy made by Schuffenecker that had been put on the market as a genuine Van Gogh around the turn of the century. The provenance in De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue went back no further than 1900. Would it be possible to find out who had owned it before that date? Justi urged his correspondents to be cautious. What if the inquiries about the canvas were to become known? It might create doubts about its authenticity, which would have to be investigated and refuted. One of his requests was to obtain information from Paul Gachet, the doctor who had stood at Vincent’s side during the last months of his life in Auvers-surOise, and from Schuffenecker. Rosenberg was not to hear a word about these conversations.48 Daubigny’s Garden arrived at the Kronprinzenpalais on 26 March, and the Nationalgalerie’s acquisitions commission was immediately captivated by its beauty.49 Whether Justi told them of the doubts about the painting’s authenticity is unknown, but in the meantime he received a detailed and reassuring answer from one of his correspondents in France. Justi’s appeal for discretion seemed to have worked. The doubts about the painting never reached the newspapers. But Justi was not the only one to have heard the rumor. A few of his opponents knew about it, too, and three years later they would use it against him. Rosenberg decided against exchanging Daubigny’s Garden for the Degas. Justi was in some ways relieved at the decision. Exchanging a piece from the intellectual legacy of Hugo van Tschudi would have infuriated his opponents all over again. Buying the painting with museum funds would have

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used up the entire acquisitions budget for 1929 in one fell swoop, probably would have been turned down by the influential Liebermann, and might have been blocked by the minister. For a long time he had been searching for a way to get around this resistance when in March 1929 the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie was set up, an organization that would purchase modern art on the museum’s behalf. Now, with a small group on the board who shared his preferences, he could purchase art and give it to the Nationalgalerie on long-term loan. About seventy of the society’s members were from the business community, with Baron Eduard von der Heydt as chairman. Von der Heydt was a banker, collector, and owner of works by Van Gogh. Daubigny’s Garden was one of the first paintings to be purchased with money from the society and a few private funds. The canvas cost 240,000 reichsmarks in June 1929, setting a new record in Germany for paintings by Van Gogh. In that same month the Nationalgalerie bought two more Van Gogh paintings: La Moisson (F 628, henceforth The Harvest) and Les amoureux (F 485, henceforth Lovers).50 The Nationalgalerie showed not the slightest doubt about the authenticity of these two canvases. Yet their authenticity, too, was to become the focus of a battle. And even though Justi had not bought them with state funds, the acquisitions would be heavily counted against him. This purchase was the beginning of a beautiful Van Gogh collection for the Nationalgalerie. It is not known what Justi’s plans were for the nature and size of the collection. He probably had only a rough idea himself. The acquisitions were supposed to be contingent on whatever Van Goghs were on the art market, although a fine Van Gogh collection in the most important modern art museum in Germany might tempt collectors to favor the museum with gifts of Vincent’s work. But extreme economic and political changes would soon spoil everything. Justi was forced to put the plan on hold because of the New York stock market crash, which took place a few months later on 27 October 1929. And in 1933 the Nazis would seize power, bringing the plan to create a Van Gogh collection in the Nationalgalerie to a screeching halt.

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Imitations In early May 1929, the police seized nine paintings from the home of Otto Wacker’s father, the painter Hans Wacker (1868-1958), in Berlin. This was followed one week later by the confiscation of twelve paintings by Leonhard Wacker. The police sent the paintings to the Nationalgalerie and asked whether any similarities in painting technique could be found between these works and the Van Goghs of Otto Wacker.51 Justi turned this task over to his curator, the sculptor and art historian Ludwig Thormaehlen (1889-1956). As Thormaehlen looked the paintings over, he was overcome by one surprise after another. Were all nine made by one and the same person? What could possibly account for the amazing variety of styles and techniques? If Thormaehlen had not known better, he would have thought that three or four different artists had produced the works. In two of the paintings he recognized an attempt to imitate the painter Heinrich Nauen, who had been born in Krefeld and was influenced by Macke and Van Gogh. Five of the nine canvases were clearly attempts to work in Van Gogh’s style. For instance, there was a remarkable similarity in painting technique between the Wacker Van Gogh Rolls (F 387) and a flower still life confiscated from Hans Wacker. In his assessment of two of the paintings from Leonhard Wacker’s studio, Thormaehlen concluded that it was impossible to see these works as anything but preliminary studies for a Van Gogh. Another painting could easily have passed for a Frans Hals at first glance. In his report to the police, Thormaehlen wrote that every aspiring artist imitates the work of others during his period of study in order to learn from them, but the 61-year-old Hans Wacker and his 34-year-old son had passed that phase long ago. For Thormaehlen it was an open-and-shut case. Hans Wacker’s still lifes were clear evidence that, one way or another, he had had a hand in the Van Gogh forgeries. The paintings seized from his son Leonhard were also unmistakable efforts to mimic the style of Van Gogh. All the canvases were conscious imitations and were not attempts to develop a personal style.52 In the Netherlands, the newspapers announced in July that paintings had been seized from Hans and Leonhard Wacker, but two months later word trickled out that the police investigation had not uncovered much fresh material. It was Otto’s brother, Leonhard, who then spoke up: “Prof. [sic] Wacker of Dusseldorf declared that he has restored a few Van Goghs for his brother, and the police investigation did indeed reveal that Van Goghs

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were found in his studio.”53 After another month, the newspapers wrote that canvases by Wacker Senior had been confiscated but said nothing about the Nationalgalerie’s devastating conclusions. Despite all the damning facts, a significant number of which had been made public during the first half of 1929, the newspapers reported that the preliminary investigation had reached a dead end. The police could not question Otto Wacker on account of the delicate state of his health. Evidence that he knew the paintings were forgeries when he sold them would have to be produced. Even if experts were to agree on the spuriousness of the works, Wacker could still have been the victim of fraud and would probably get off scot-free. In Germany it was feared that the case would run aground and that the fake works would go back into circulation. When the year 1929 came to an end, Wacker had not been indicted and press attention for the case was waning. For Otto Wacker, however, there was little to celebrate. The actions taken by his colleagues, the police, the museum authorities, and the journalists had not done him any good. But there was hope. In the Dutch art world, Bremmer had received considerable support for his assessment that some of Wacker’s Van Goghs were quite genuine.

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3

Hushing up

In the first decades of the twentieth century, Martin de Wild (1899-1969) belonged to a select circle of restorers with a lively interest in scientific investigation. He was trained by his father, Derix de Wild († 1932), but eventually came to regard his more practical approach as inadequate. In De Wild Junior’s opinion, the métier needed to be professionalized. He believed restorers needed to have knowledge of chemistry, the science most suited to understanding the material properties of paintings: which chemical and physical processes occur in pigments and mediums, in panels and canvas? De Wild thus decided to take a degree in chemistry at the Technische Hogeschool (Technical University) in Delft. It was precisely during this period – the early 1920s – that controversy began to arise surrounding the authenticity of a number of works of the Dutch Golden Age. Stories of forgeries were reported in the press year in and year out. The art world was divided as to the role scientists could play in determining whether a work was genuine or fake. A scandal regarding a painting discovered by Hofstede de Groot and attributed to Frans Hals led in 1924-25 to a notorious lawsuit that was eventually settled on the basis of both stylistic and scientific arguments. The picture was not by Frans Hals, but was in fact a twentiethcentury forgery – a conclusion Hofstede de Groot refused to accept.1 The title of the pamphlet he wrote on the case is telling: Echt of onecht? Oog of chemie? (True or False? The Eye or Chemistry?). For Hofstede de Groot, the answer was simple: “In painting the eye must always be the final judge, just as in music the ear – not the tuning fork or the test tube.”2 Hofstede de Groot’s sentiments were shared by other connoisseurs, but it failed to convince De Wild and his teacher, Professor Dr. P.E.C. Scheffer, who had conducted the chemical analysis of the so-called Frans Hals. In 1928 De Wild successfully completed his chemistry degree with a dissertation entitled

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Het natuurwetenschappelijk onderzoek van schilderijen (The Scientific Examination of Pictures), which also appeared in English and German. De Wild quickly came to be seen as an authority in the field, receiving commissions from museums, dealers, and private collectors. In 1938 he was hired by the Rijksuniversiteit Utrecht to teach a class in the painting techniques of the Old Masters. In 1946 the examining judge at the court in Amsterdam appointed him and four other experts – among them the chemist Dr. W. Froentjes (1909-2006) – to examine several works attributed to the seventeenth-century painters Johannes Vermeer and Pieter de Hoogh, all of which turned out to be from the hand of the master forger Han van Meegeren (1889-1947).3 By the end of his career, De Wild had garnered the respect of collectors and museums all over Europe and in the United States. The director of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, for example, wrote to him: “I have a problem, and when I have a problem I often turn to you.”4 In 1965 he was referred to as “the Netherlands’ grand old man of the scientific analysis of works of art.”5

. Chemist and art restorer Dr. A.M. de Wild in around .

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Paint From 1928 onwards, De Wild was responsible for the restoration of a number of paintings from the Kröller-Müller collection. He was commissioned and paid by Bremmer. The exact duration and scope of his work are unknown, but it appears that between 1929 and 1931 he restored more than fifty pictures for some 2,500 guilders.6 At the end of 1928 De Wild became embroiled in the controversy surrounding the works of Van Gogh sold by Otto Wacker. Probably at the request of Bremmer’s friend, Willem Scherjon, he examined a number of works from Wacker’s gallery considered by De la Faille to be forgeries. On 2 December 1928, the day after the publication in De Telegraaf of the list from De la Faille’s Supplément, which named the thirty Wacker forgeries together with their owners, the newspaper published De Wild’s opinion on the case. According to De Telegraaf, the restorer had examined “paint from several pictures and come to the conclusion that they were thirty to thirty-five years old, therefore originating in a period before anyone would have thought of forging a Van Gogh!” 7 The newspaper failed to mention exactly which works had been examined. In later articles, this “thirty to thirty-five years” was changed to “at least thirty-five to fortyfive,” thereby strengthening the argument for their authenticity: after all, Van Gogh had died in 1890.8 De la Faille remained undaunted and quickly parried his critics. He was in possession of testimony from a “well-known Amsterdam restorer” that put paid to De Wild’s assertions. The age of a work of art could never be determined solely on the basis of chemical analysis, according to De la Faille, because “anyone wishing to forge a picture would use special paint.” There was, he wrote, “a kind of paint available that dries quickly and is as hard as stone, similar to what we find in Van Gogh’s paintings.” 9 De la Faille did not reveal the restorer’s identity, but published his paint recipe with the aim of casting doubt on De Wild’s investigation. The proponents of Wacker’s Van Goghs, however, remained unconvinced and their confidence in De Wild was unshaken. The newspaper reports on De Wild’s activities in the years that followed are rather imprecise, failing to mention the exact number and identity of the Wacker pictures he examined. Invariably mentioned is his investigation into the paint of Seascape (F 418) and Two Poplars (F 639), which was supposed to confirm their age at around forty years and thus their authentic-

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ity. Among other things, in February 1929 De Wild gave a slide lecture on his work in which – according to the Utrechtsch Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad – he showed x-radiographs of one genuine and one doubtful Van Gogh. It is not certain which pictures these were. Nor did De Wild himself ever publish anything that could provide a decisive answer as to which Wacker paintings he examined and with what result. Why is it important to trouble oneself about the precise scope and nature of De Wild’s examinations so many years after the fact? His reputation, after all, has outlived him. As late as 2003, in an overview of the Wacker affair, he is referred to as one of the few truly independent experts.10 There is, however, reason to be skeptical on exactly this point. In 2002 I uncovered facts that shed a very different light on De Wild’s role in the scandal: rather than being independent, he appears to have been a partisan. The point of departure for this claim is a Wacker Van Gogh in the collection of an American millionaire. Chester Dale In many ways, Chester Dale (1883-1962) lived the American dream. From a modest background, he quickly worked his way up from messenger boy to banker, becoming one of the country’s wealthiest men by the eve of the First World War. He had been a professional boxer, played golf, was an esteemed member of New York’s high society, and had joined the New York Stock Exchange – a testimony to his wealth and influence – at the age of only thirty-five. His marriage to artist-critic Maud Murray (1875-1953), who had experienced the Paris art world at first hand and was determined to make it better known in the United States, stimulated his interest in art collecting.11 She chose the works, he negotiated the price. Here, too, Chester Dale was immensely successful; although the stock market crash of October 1929 led to the loss of a large part of his fortune, by the end of the 1950s his collection of modern art comprised more than 250 paintings and sculptures and was worth more than twenty-two million dollars. 12 This sum is even more impressive when we learn that he had actually spent “only” two million. The collection also contained many works from other periods, including masterpieces by Tintoretto, El Greco, Rubens, and David, among others.

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. The American millionaire Chester Dale bought modern French paintings on a grand scale during the twenties, attracting a great deal of press attention. In May  he thought he had added a real Van Gogh to his collection with the purchase of Self-Portrait at the Easel (F. ).

Chester Dale was one of those American entrepreneurs for whom art was also an investment. In this regard he went somewhat further than his cocollectors, who tended to keep fairly aloof from the business side of things. In 1925 he became a stockholder in the gallery Georges Petit in Paris, and soon had spies in both the French capital and in New York who helped him acquire works by living artists such as Modigliani, Picasso, and Matisse at a favorable price. The Dales were extraordinarily open about their purchases, issuing press releases with details about the artists, works, and values. This produced the desired effect, with the press devoting column after column to their collection. Such behavior is part and parcel of the game America’s wealthy like to play with one another: demonstrative spending on art was – and still is – an indication of social success. On 31 March 1930, for example, The New York Times reported that in 1929, collectors in the United States had spent 250,000,000 dollars on art. The oil-baron John D. Rockefeller had paid 375,000 for Piero della Francesca’s Crucifixion, while the cigarette manufacturer Schinasi had spent 250,000 on a Madonna and Child by Fra Filippo Lippi. As for Chester Dale, he had made some “significant acquisi-

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tions,” among them La Mousmé (F 431) by Vincent van Gogh. The reporter was tactfully silent on the price: a mere 40,000 dollars – not exactly a sum to rival the Rockefellers. Considering the numbers, it may seem that Chester Dale was a bit player in the collecting world, but appearances can be deceiving. His collection of 250 modern French paintings attracted the attention of American museums and led to his appointment to a variety of administrative functions in the art world. Dale was no easy customer: he was quick-tempered, dogmatic, roughspoken, and always entirely convinced of being in the right. Looking back on his career in 1956, he wrote: “All my life has been a challenge, just as my collecting pictures is a challenge. It’s that terrible desire to win!”13 He was fond of a drop: having a drink with him always meant downing two; after all “a bird can’t fly on one wing.”14 Many in the art world considered him vulgar, although other epithets were used as well: shrewd, brilliant, generous with his friends. One way or another, Dale was a figure to be reckoned with. In May 1928 Dale bought Van Gogh’s Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523) from Otto Wacker for 31,500 dollars.15 Five months later it went on display in New York.16 The American press was enthusiastic about the picture, which the New York Times declared was “[...] considered by many the best thing he ever did.”17 The New Yorker described it as ‘‘[...] a burning, thrilling thing and, as in all Van Gogh, [...] a perfect treatise in color,”18 while art critic Henry McBride called it “an indisputable masterpiece.”19 Back in the Netherlands, however, De la Faille had begun to think differently, and in early December he published his inventory of the Van Gogh works he considered to be forgeries – all of them from Wacker – in De Telegraaf and Algemeen Handelsblad. Among them was Self-Portrait at the Easel, a much-loved and much-admired work in the collection of Maud and Chester Dale.20 Scherjon The uproar over Wacker’s Van Goghs in the Netherlands and Germany was not lost on the Dales. The American and English press paid little attention to the affair, but it was enough to set their alarm bells ringing.21 Maud Dale hired a clipping agency and translators to help her keep abreast of developments. The couple was convinced that their work was not only genuine, but also one of the artist’s best. They found support among critics, collectors,

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and connoisseurs in the United States and Europe, among them the Utrecht publisher Willem Scherjon (1878-1938). In 1928 Scherjon was the owner of a publishing and printing house specializing in art books, with Bremmer’s popular magazine Beeldende Kunst

. In December  the art dealer Willem Scherjon bought the painting Two Poplars (F ),  x  cm., now at the Ohara Museum of Art, Karushiki, Japan. It proved unmarketable because De la Faille called it a fake Van Gogh.

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(1913-1938) in his list.22 He was a pupil and long-time friend of Bremmer, sharing the latter’s passion for modern art. Scherjon was a collector of the work of artists like Charley Toorop, Bart van der Leck, and Floris Verster; he was acquainted with many in the art world and was the driving force behind the Vereniging “Voor de Kunst” (Association for Art) in Utrecht.23 One of his contacts was the Utrecht art dealer C.W. Huinck, who specialized in modern French and Dutch works: Daubigny, Rousseau, FantinLatour, Van Gogh, Van der Leck, and others. Through Bremmer, Huinck had also had business dealings with the Kröllers, selling them works by Redon and Verster, among others.24 Huinck was involved commercially in Beeldende Kunst as well. Reproductions of paintings sold in his gallery were regularly found on its pages, and he was also a loyal advertiser. Scherjon was also a member of the board of the Utrechtse Museumvereniging voor Hedendaagse Kunst (Utrecht Museum Association for Contemporary Art), which worked closely with the city’s Centraal Museum. The museum was dependent for its displays of modern art on collectors like Bremmer and Scherjon, as it had no such collection of its own. The association’s board was somewhat ambivalent about Scherjon’s efforts, however. During a meeting in 1928 the chairman suggested that “one of the members seemed to be pushing excessively for the Huinck gallery,” and that in discussions regarding documents, there seemed to be “a tendency towards partisanship.” Scherjon replied that if these complaints were directed at him personally he was ready to lay down his mandate.25 The association was not prepared to let things go so far, though: Scherjon knew the Dutch art world better than almost anyone, and his relationships with artists, collectors, and dealers were regarded as invaluable. In December 1929 Scherjon left the museum association and sold his publishing house. In April 1930 he and Huinck opened a gallery in Amsterdam. They continued their professional dealings with Bremmer: they placed ads in Beeldende Kunst, and he reviewed their stock. Little is known about Scherjon as a person, but he must have been an assiduous man. Art critic W. Jos. de Gruyter, who accompanied him several times on business trips to Paris, called him a real entrepreneur: “Later I would come to the conclusion that all art dealers are, even the so-called idealists. When it comes to the nitty-gritty and they see a chance to make a good deal, they are all as hard as nails. Business is business.”26 Scherjon’s starting capital in the

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gallery probably came in the form of works from his own collection, among them Two Poplars, for which he had paid some 11,500 guilders. The picture – number F 639 in De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue – was also listed among the forgeries in the latter’s Supplément of November 1928. Scherjon was unperturbed by De la Faille’s assessment and – like Bremmer – continued to proclaim the authenticity of Wacker’s Van Goghs. “Voor de Kunst” In early February 1929 Ludwig Justi went to the press with the information that the Wacker Van Goghs in his museum were forgeries. This gave De la Faille’s allies new ammunition for their contention that all the works originating with Wacker’s mysterious Russian collector were fake. His opponents, however, following Bremmer’s line, continued to maintain that at least some of the works from the controversial collection were in fact authentic. Scherjon sought to confirm Bremmer’s standpoint, coming up with a move to counter the research undertaken at the Nationalgalerie. A Van Gogh exhibition in Utrecht was to undermine Justi’s position and convince the world that a number of the paintings sold by Wacker were in fact genuine. In 1928 he obtained permission from Vincent Willem van Gogh to put fifty-two paintings and six drawings on display at the gallery of “Voor de Kunst” in Nobelstraat in Utrecht; the show was to run from mid-April for a duration of six weeks. De la Faille was informed and warned the Engineer that Scherjon would undoubtedly use the exhibition to proclaim the authenticity of his own Two Poplars. We do not know whether Vincent Willem was influenced by De la Faille’s admonitions, nor whether Scherjon had actually planned to put his own Wacker Van Gogh on view. He certainly had something like it in mind, if not with his own work than with Chester Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel, which was to be exhibited in Paris in 1929. The Dales agreed to have their work shown in Utrecht and shipped it to France at the end of April.27 On Saturday, 25 May, as the Van Gogh exhibition at “Voor de Kunst” was about to enter its last week, Scherjon added two pictures to the display: Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel and another, undisputed self-portrait (F 626) from the collection of Tutein Nolthenius, a work from Van Gogh’s period

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at the asylum in Saint-Rémy.28 The exhibition was then extended by a week, the aim being to give any and everyone the chance to see with their own eyes that the two paintings were by the same hand. Scherjon wrote a small leaflet on the show, which appeared in both English and French, dated April 1929. In it he claimed to have found evidence for the authenticity of Chester Dale’s work in Vincent’s letters from Saint-Rémy, and quoted liberally from them. Art critics praised both the leaflet and the paintings. The NRC wrote that in Self-Portrait at the Easel, Van Gogh had “shown himself to be in touch with the deeper, essential basis of things.”29 De Maasbode examined in detail the coloration, brushwork, and composition of Self-Portrait at the Easel, calling it the artist’s “most beautiful” work. The reporter’s praise was couched in rather cryptic language: “If this portrait is not genuine, what at all can one then believe to be a real Van Gogh?”30 Het Vaderland art critic Just Havelaar failed to understand why De la Faille continued to insist it was a forgery: “Only a great artist could have painted this picture, and only Van Gogh could have been that artist. There can be no doubt about it, it seems to me.”31 The critic for the Utrechtsche Courant called it a work of “touching beauty.”32 De Gruyter, critic for the Utrechtsch Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad, however, pulled out all the lyrical stops: “In our opinion, there is not one work in the exhibition that is superior in terms of color. [...] There is something in it of a farewell, an unsettling calm as if before a storm. So much wisdom in the face of so many challenges can only be obtained by one living on the edge between life and death. In this sense it is a tragic portrait, but also one that is more free than any other we know by Vincent’s hand. It is a tragic portrait, but not at all melancholy; all that is heavy, melancholy or earthly has been purified by love and universal understanding and left far behind. The body is now nothing more than a brittle husk, it is no longer really present, it has lost its weight, almost its right to exist.”33 The critics were also full of praise for Scherjon’s canvas, Two Poplars, although it was not on view at the exhibition at “Voor de Kunst” but rather a few blocks away at the Centraal Museum. De la Faille’s claim that this painting, too, was a forgery, met with total disbelief. De Maasbode: “It is a very pretty landscape, outstandingly painted in a single tone.”34 Scherjon’s aim of quelling the rumors surrounding Chester Dale’s picture seems to have been achieved. De la Faille published a riposte, but found no public support for his continuing claim that Self-Portrait at the Easel was a forgery.35

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Samples On 6 June 1929, the day after the closure of the exhibition, Scherjon brought Self-Portrait at the Easel to De Wild’s laboratory in The Hague. Scherjon was on a very particular mission: “The owner of the portrait, Mr. Chester Dale of New York, has given permission to have the work examined in order to obtain scientific proof of its age, and to demonstrate its technical similarities with paintings by Vincent van Gogh.”36 This statement illustrates the collector’s unswerving faith in his picture. According to Maud Dale, chemical analysis was the only true touchstone, and would prove once and for all that the painting was genuine.37 Scherjon, too, was convinced the result would be positive. A few months earlier, in February 1929, he had written to Dale that he and Bremmer had studied a photograph of Self-Portrait at the Easel and that there could be no doubt that it was a genuine Van Gogh. There were certainly forgeries among the pictures sold by Otto Wacker, but some of them were unquestionably authentic. According to De Wild, the paint in Two Poplars was forty years old. De Wild, Scherjon assured Chester Dale, would similarly deliver scientific proof regarding the self-portrait’s age.38 What conclusions did De Wild reach in June 1929? No written record of his examination has survived, assuming there ever was one. In any case, nothing was found among his papers at the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie (RKD) in The Hague, nor in any of the other archives I visited. A dead end had apparently been reached. Was it possible, I asked myself, that others who had known him could shed light on this crucial aspect of my search for the role of the art experts in the Wacker affair, in this case a chemist with a doctoral degree? We now make a great leap forward, from June 1929 to 30 May 2002, the day I had a chat with the ninety-three-year-old chemist W. Froentjes, former director of the forensic laboratory of the Ministry of Justice and professor emeritus of criminalistics at the University of Leiden. He had met De Wild after the Second World War and together they had examined a large number of works of art, among them paintings attributed to Van Gogh. Froentjes had pleasant memories of their collaboration, and had become quite close to De Wild. Asked about his qualities as a scientist he said: “De Wild was a good analyst, he was particularly good at verifying pigments.”

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Above: . Sample vial F , turned a quarter of the way around. The F for “fake” is circled in red. Upper left: . Sample vials of paint taken from art dealer Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs. The third vial from the left is F , Self-Portrait at the Easel. Lower left: . De Wild’s box with paint samples from paintings by Vincent van Gogh.

In the course of our conversation, Froentjes produced a small box, which De Wild had given him in the 1960s. It contained glass vials with paint samples from works attributed – correctly or not – to Vincent van Gogh. De Wild had collected them in the years 1929-30. Each vial has a tiny label with the corresponding F-number: nineteen vials from the same number of works in the collection of Vincent Willem van Gogh; two from private collectors; and seven from the gallery of Otto Wacker. The notes at

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the lower right indicate which of the seven Wacker Van Goghs De Wild’s analyses had shown to be forgeries. Two of the vials are marked with the letter “G” for genuine. One vial bears an “F” for false that has been crossed out and replaced with a “G” and two question marks. All the other vials are clearly labeled “F”. One of these is also numbered “523” – – Chester Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel. What is more, De Wild circled the “F” in red. Who Knew? Back to 1929. Did De Wild deliver his unwelcome message directly to Dale, or did he also confide in Scherjon? The available evidence proves nothing either way. There is no correspondence with De Wild among Dale’s papers in Washington, only with Scherjon. And the surviving letters make no mention of the outcome. It seems highly unlikely, however, that Scherjon – who had mediated between Dale and De Wild – could have been ignorant of the research results. In fact, there are a number of clues that indicate quite the opposite. One month after handing over the painting to De Wild, Scherjon attacked De la Faille in the Utrechts Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad for his stance on SelfPortrait at the Easel. He reiterated De Gruyter’s aesthetic arguments, once again made an appeal to Vincent’s letters, and advanced the positive results of De Wild’s analysis of his own painting, Two Poplars. This exchange would have been the perfect opportunity to make the scientific evidence in favor of the self-portrait known to the wider world. But Scherjon failed to make use of it, and this gives reason for pause.39 Moreover, in early 1929 Scherjon had formulated the ambitious plan to write a book on the works of Van Gogh’s last years in France, in which letters, documents, and scientific arguments would serve to support his contentions regarding authenticity. The book was finally published in 1932, but without any mention at all of the technical research recently conducted into Van Gogh’s paintings. Elsewhere that same year, Scherjon did mention some of the results of these examinations – in this case x-radiographs of three versions of The Sower40 – but only in order to discredit forensic analysis as such.41 Scherjon had turned science in nothing more than the handmaiden of the art trade.

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There is yet another indication that Scherjon was aware of De Wild’s conclusions in the matter of the self-portrait. Kröller-Müller had seen the picture in June 1929 on an unannounced visit to the restorer, whereby he is said to have told her that the work was in poor condition. She makes no mention of his investigations into its authenticity, and De Wild himself had probably kept quiet on the subject. He did, however, show her the x-rays he had made. This technique, which reveals the underlying layers of paint, was still rather new at the time, and De Wild was one of the first in the Netherlands to own his own equipment. In a letter of July 1929 to J.A. Thomas, commissioner of police in Berlin, Kröller-Müller describes her visit to the “very stringent and entirely trustworthy” De Wild and states that no one in Holland now had any doubt as to the painting’s authenticity; simultaneously, however, promising Thomas total cooperation in his investigation.42 She also wrote to Scherjon to express her disagreement with Bremmer on this issue: he thought that “one should ignore all the [Berlin commissioner’s] letters and questions; on the contrary, I think that we should do all we can to help the truth come out.”43 When the collector then asked Scherjon to give her Chester Dale’s address – the Berlin police wanted to have the self-portrait examined in Germany and had asked for her help – he went to great lengths to avoid providing her with the information she had requested. What a pity, he wrote, that her inquiry had come so late; he would have been “more than happy to take the portrait to Berlin,” but now it was far away, back in America. It was unfortunate, but it would simply be too much trouble to have it shipped to Europe again. Having it looked at in Berlin was not such a good idea anyway; the German investigators were really quite superficial. And, by the way, the painting had been on show in Utrecht, as the German press and the Nationalgalerie had been aware: they should simply have come to see it! More importantly, a photograph was enough to tell anyone the work was genuine; there was certainly no need to bring it back to Europe. In the end, Scherjon offered to send both a color reproduction and a black and white photograph to Berlin.44 Neither Kröller-Müller nor the Berlin police were given access to Chester Dale.

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Anonymous The collector, meanwhile, wanted a second opinion, and on the way back to New York had Self-Portrait at the Easel examined in June 1929 in Paris. The restorer, whose identity I have been unable to discover, sent Dale a report later that same month. Most of the eleven-page document is devoted to the events leading up to the controversy surrounding the Wacker Van Goghs. He casts doubt on De la Faille’s competence and criticizes his behavior, while the views of other critics are treated with reserve, in particular those of “Monsieur Bremmer, who rightly or wrongly passes in Holland as an authority on Van Gogh.” His tone is that of an objective observer, uninfluenced by either prejudice or hostile opinions; his conclusions are based purely on stylistic and technical examination which, through “cold and syllogistic reasoning” led him to one inexorable conclusion: Dale was the owner of a forgery. In terms of style: the colors lacked the contrast so typical of the “master of Arles,” the lines were weak, and parts of the head were entirely unrelated to one another. Technically speaking: the canvas was no more than five years old; the backing, designed to suggest age, was bogus; the composition of the paint was atypical for Van Gogh; and the picture had been dried artificially – perhaps even in an oven – in order to conceal its recent production. The author seems to have had some difficulty in conveying these unwanted tidings, sensing that the owner might not immediately accept his conclusions. He writes that he would have liked nothing better than to prove the picture’s authenticity, particularly given his high regard for its owners. But he can do nothing but tell the truth. The final lines of the report are worth quoting in full: “This report has been drawn up by me for your personal satisfaction; you can make any use of it you wish. If in spite of it, you still wish to keep your picture, you have only to pigeon-hole this document among your archives. Whatever you may decide to do, be assured that what I have done has been done because of the kindness I feel for you, and in the service of the truth.”45 Chester Dale took this advice, and hid the report away among his documents. It remained there for more than seventy years before finally being rescued from oblivion. Dale also chose not to take advantage of the offer made by the dealers who had sold him the picture, Joseph Stransky and the Wildenstein gallery,

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in May 1928, which would have allowed him to return the self-portrait. At the time, they were also entirely convinced of its authenticity, and would undoubtedly have been much troubled by the declarations of De la Faille, De Wild, and the anonymous Paris restorer. They probably would have taken the painting back, as had all the German dealers before them for the Wacker Van Goghs they had sold.46 Why did Dale fail to make use of this opportunity? It is possible he was afraid of the negative publicity. In this same period – February and March 1929 – the dealer Joseph Duveen was on trial in New York for his refusal to accept the authenticity of La belle ferronière, claimed by its owner Andrée Hahn and her coterie of experts to have been the work of Leonardo da Vinci. Duveen was in a difficult position, although he too had a number of eminent supporters. The attention was bad for business and Duveen eventually decided to settle out of court, paying Hahn a total of 60,000 dollars. He remained convinced that the picture was a fake, but the settlement seemed in the eyes of the world like an admission of error.47 The most likely explanation for Dale’s choices, then, appears to have been the fear of losing face. They certainly bear witness to an unswerving faith in his own judgment. As he said himself, no dealer would ever have thought to try and palm off a painting on him: he made all his decisions himself.48 Moreover, for a whole year he and his wife had heard nothing but praise for Self-Portrait at the Easel from both American and Dutch critics. Dale, who remained childless, once said that he loved his paintings, that they were his family. Admitting that one of these children was actually a bastard – particularly after months of approbation – would undoubtedly have been very painful. Revealing the truth about the painting would have been made even more difficult by the fact that in the 1920s the dust stirred up in the American art world by modern European painting had yet to settle. There were numerous critics who made no secret of their distaste for the works of the Post-Impressionists – among them Van Gogh. In 1926, for example, the year in which the Dales bought a large number of modern French works, the Boston Herald wrote: “Cezanne was a poor painter, one with bad eyesight... Van Gogh was a crazy galoot, who cut off his ear to spite a woman and who painted for years in an insane asylum at Arles... At their worst [his paintings] resemble the crude, elemental expressions which nit-wits affix to sidewalks, fences, barn doors, and elsewhere – especially elsewhere.”49

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In 1932 both Maud and Chester Dale abruptly ended their collaboration with the French Institute in New York – she had worked as a curator, he as a member of the board – because of the organization’s lack of enthusiasm for Impressionism and Post-Impressionism, who had judged them to be nothing more than passing fashions. In the eyes of these critics, the Dales had bad taste. Were it now to appear they were the owners of a Van Gogh forgery, they would have become a laughing stock. It was thus a stroke of eminent luck that Self-Portrait at the Easel returned to New York in 1929 without a public scandal. After all, the Van Gogh exhibition in “Voor de Kunst” had been a success, and the work had been widely praised in the Dutch press by both critics and connoisseurs; De la Faille’s critique was the only one to be reported in the American press, in December 1928. In 1929 Dale and the American critical community could still argue that his opinion had turned out to be negligible. For the Americans, the uproar over the picture’s authenticity must have seemed little more than a tempest in a teapot. Who Else Knew? Did anyone else besides Dale, De Wild, and Scherjon know the outcome of the analyses that had been carried out on the Self-Portrait in The Hague? Perhaps someone from Scherjon’s circle, such as De Gruyter, Bremmer, Van Deventer, or Kröller-Müller?50 Nothing in De Gruyter’s publications at the time or in his estate papers indicate he knew anything about the affair. The information was probably kept from him. Bremmer, on the other hand, must have known something. The seven vials containing paint samples from the Wacker Van Goghs certainly point in this direction. The first two columns in Table 2 reproduce De Wild’s notes; the second two identify the titles of the paintings and their owners. Bremmer, owner of Haystacks by Moonlight, is the link between the chemist De Wild and the collectors Kröller-Müller, Dale, Wacker, and Scherjon. As Table 2 indicates, De Wild had also analyzed Haystacks, again with a negative result. We do not know exactly when he was asked to examine the work. In November 1928 De Wild looked into Seascape at Saintes-Mariesde-la-Mer and Two Poplars. In December he read De la Faille’s recipe for quick-drying paint, and in February 1929 he could have become aware of

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Table 2

Notes on the vials containing paint samples from the Wacker Van Goghs, as well as the identification of the paintings and their owners.

G= F genuine number F= fake

Title

Owner in 1929-1930

G

F 418

Seascape at SaintesMaries-de-la-Mer

H. Kröller-Müller

G

F ? (possibly F 639)

Two Poplars

W. Scherjon

G F ??

F 385

Self-Portrait

Matthiesen Gallery

F

F 521

Self-Portrait

Hugo Perls Gallery → Sir Robert Abdy (Paris)

F

F 523

Self-Portrait at the Easel

Chester Dale

F

F 625bis

Haystacks by Moonlight

O. Wacker → H.P. Bremmer

F

F 691

The Sower

Matthiesen Gallery → Gertrud Wolowsky → G. Schweitzer

Sources for the owners: De la Faille 1928, 1930, 1939, 1970; De Wild n.d. (1932); Feilchenfeldt 1989; Koldehoff 2002b; Zentralarchiv der Deutsche Museen zu Berlin.51

the analyses carried out at the Nationalgalerie in Berlin, which had revealed the addition of hardeners to the paintings in question. My contention is that in the course of 1929-30, De Wild focused his attention on precisely this issue, even discovering resin in the remaining five Wacker pictures. Taking samples from nineteen works belonging to Vincent Willem Van Gogh – all of them in April and May 1929 during the exhibition at “Voor de Kunst” – provided him with a clear basis for comparison. Resin, added to make paintings dry faster, is present in large quantities in the Wacker Van Goghs. Van Gogh, on the other hand, as mentioned above, never added anything to the paint to help it dry. Did Bremmer, with his disdain for scientific analysis in matters of art, pay any serious attention to De Wild’s conclusions regarding his Haystacks? It seems unlikely that they made much of an impression on him. At the beginning of the public scandal surrounding the Wacker paintings he ascribed only a modest, subordinate role to chemical analysis. Empathy with

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the artist and the experience of what he called “artistic emotion” were for him what determined if something was genuine or not. Nonetheless, the results of De Wild’s examination must have made things difficult for him, as he soon undertook several attempts to dispose of the picture in question. On 6 December, namely, Wacker offered the work first to Maud Dale, and then – five days later – to Helene Kröller-Müller. Bremmer, as Wacker’s secretary Max Renkewitz wrote to Dale, could not really afford the painting; Wacker therefore wanted to make use of his contractual right to sell it to someone else. He wrote that both MeierGraefe and Bremmer would guarantee its authenticity. Could there be any better recommendation for a work than that it came from the collection of Bremmer, the greatest connoisseur of Van Gogh? Moreover, Renkewitz wrote, Dr. A.M. de Wild had provided written technical evidence that it was genuine. Kröller-Müller received an identical letter, but with two references that had not been included in the letter to Maud Dale. Renkewitz hoped very much that Kröller-Müller would acquire the canvas so that it would remain in Europe rather than fall into the hands of American speculators. Even the Wacker gallery was able to recognize a moral dilemma. In addition, the letter to Kröller-Müller – unlike the one addressed to Dale – gives the picture’s price: 7,500 dollars.52 Here one should remember that only two years earlier Bremmer had paid 8,000 guilders (around 3,500 dollars) for it. Neither Dale nor Kröller-Müller were interested in Wacker’s offer. In the case of Kröller-Müller, this may well have arisen from the fact that she already had a work – purchased some twenty years earlier – that might be considered the Haystacks’ twin, namely Rising Moon: Haycocks (F 735). The mention of De Wild in the letter raises the question as to whether Wacker was simply unaware of his analyses, or that it had been suggested to him that the results had been positive. There is another possibility: De Wild had hoped to spare Bremmer and had never told him the unwelcome news regarding his Haystacks. This seems quite unlikely, however, as De Wild’s positive judgment on both the Seascape and Two Poplars had been widely reported in the press. An affirmative outcome in the case of Haystacks would have been a great help to Bremmer and his supporters in their polemic against De la Faille, Justi, and others. The letters provide no certainty about who knew the truth regarding Haystacks. What is certain

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is that Bremmer wanted to get rid of it, and that the offers made to Dale and Kröller-Müller were not his only efforts in this direction. In June 1931 the Hague Gallery d’Audretsch, a regular partner of Bremmer’s, put a canvas by Van Gogh up for sale entitled Moonlit Landscape, which was the Haystacks by Moonlight under another name.53 In 1932 Huinck & Scherjon held a sale exhibition of works by Van Gogh. 54 The catalogue comprised six drawings, three watercolors, and thirteen paintings, all listed as being from a “private collection.” Half of these certainly belonged to Bremmer: four drawings, one watercolor, and six paintings – among them Haystacks, which once again failed to find a buyer. In 1941 Bremmer again tried to sell it through d’Audretsch, offering it for 30,000 guilders to the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller.55 Did Kröller-Müller and her secretary and confidante Sam van Deventer know about the negative results of De Wild’s analyses of the Wacker Van Goghs? As far as Van Deventer is concerned, there are no documents to indicate he had any knowledge of the affair. It is possible that his personal archive, which is not yet open to the public, might provide more information. Four years after Kröller-Müller was offered Haystacks, namely in 1933, he became the owner of a Van Gogh self-portrait (F 385), and some insight into his knowledge about that picture could tell us more about the role the various experts played in his decisions. It seems to me, however, very unlikely that he knew anything about De Wild and his examinations. Helene Kröller-Müller certainly received no direct information in the matter. She trusted Bremmer implicitly and relied entirely on his judgment: “I have never known him to make a mistake.”56 His struggle for the recognition of some of the Wacker pictures was also hers, and she lent her support by actually acquiring one of the controversial canvases and by showing interest in purchasing two others. At the same time, she believed the Berlin police merited her full cooperation, thereby ignoring Bremmer’s advice. She was thus not the exactly the right person to entrust with the sensitive information garnered through De Wild’s examinations. She could not, however, have been entirely unaware of the schemes cooked up by her advisor, restorer, and art dealer. At a certain point she must have had a creeping feeling of being shut out, of being hoodwinked, as is indicated by her statements in Van Deventer’s book Kröller-Müller, de geschiedenis van

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een cultureel levenswerk: “Forgeries are a topic of discussion, and for the time being there is nothing but confusion among both laymen and connoisseurs. What is genuine according to one, is fake according to another; contradictory opinions are defended with the utmost tenacity and, what is worse, one always suspects an ulterior motive...”57

who else knew?


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4

For art’s sake

By November 1929, De la Faille had a year of turmoil behind him, all of it having to do with Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs. The distribution of the Supplément had not been greatly appreciated, although his published works and letters do not suggest that this caused him undue suffering. On the contrary, they reveal a certain intransigence quite in keeping with a man who is sure of what he is doing and is seeking to redress the fraud of which he has been such an unwilling instrument. His behavior was consistent with the basic attitude he had shown earlier in articles about conflicts of interest, forged Rembrandts, and expertise bureaus – articles that had made him a controversial figure in the art world. His newest démarche, the open struggle against fake Van Goghs, reinforced his reputation for being headstrong. There were experts and dealers who condemned his behavior and others who praised it. One art dealer, who wished to remain anonymous, said the following to a journalist upon the publication of the Supplément in November 1928: “I find Mr. De la Faille’s attitude to be forthright and in full accordance with the high reputation he enjoys in the field.”1 De la Faille’s detractors seized on the Supplément as proof of his incompetence: first he includes the Wacker Van Goghs in a prestigious catalogue raisonné, then he writes them all off within scarcely a year. This did not indicate serious study or a firm grasp of the facts. The same people used his about-face to cast doubts on his trustworthiness, pointing out that he had made financial gains by providing the Wacker Van Goghs with certificates of authenticity. In his own defense, he said he asked the same modest sum of 25 guilders for each certificate, regardless of whether his assessment was positive or negative. There was no evidence of a conflict of interest, he claimed.

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Les faux Van Gogh De la Faille’s aim in publishing the Supplément in December 1928 had been to do a service to the buyers and sellers of Otto Wacker’s paintings while securing his reputation as a trustworthy advisor. The unintended effect of all the publicity was that sellers and buyers became timid. In 1929 he grew increasingly convinced that as a Van Gogh expert his role was not limited to the art trade. So he made up his mind to devote a book to the fake Van Goghs, prompted by a desire to protect Van Gogh’s oeuvre. This blunt decision to call a spade a spade is a clear indication that idealism had entered the fray. De la Faille had assigned himself the task of guarding this corner of the cultural heritage from contamination. With the publication of his Les faux Van Gogh (The False Van Goghs) in January 1930, which included 174 works that he regarded as definite forgeries, De la Faille was violating an unwritten law of the art trade: that where questions of authenticity were concerned, one should remain discreetly noncommittal. De la Faille saw the book as inseparable from the rest of his Van Gogh research. Its proportions, typography, layout, and illustrations were identical to those of the catalogue raisonné. Like the catalogue, it was published in French, which assured him of an international readership. De la Faille wrote that Les faux Van Gogh did not meet the goal of purifying Van Gogh’s work. He had looked at so many false works that it was impossible to list them all. He also mentioned a certain opposition to his efforts: the owners were not eager to have their property publicly labeled as fake. But De la Faille felt it was his duty to guard the work of the great master.2 In the copy presented to the Engineer, he called the book a “written challenge to purify the oeuvre of the great master Vincent van Gogh,” which meant that it bore all the marks of the polemics from the year before. Neither the content nor the tone seemed aimed at calming the Van Gogh experts, for although De la Faille tactfully omitted the names of the owners of the forged works, he made an exception for those belonging to Scherjon and Kröller-Müller. They must have been less than pleased to see how often they were mentioned in the book. By publishing this work, De la Faille set out to defend an ideal with the hope of restoring his reputation as a trustworthy advisor. But he was also trying to make himself look good by comparison. Those who were familiar with the history of Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs knew that Ring and Feilchen-

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feldt of the Cassirer gallery in Berlin were the first to discover the forgeries. In Les faux Van Gogh, De la Faille went overboard, making it seem as if he had discovered the forgeries all by himself, although in his reports in Het Volk and De Telegraaf of November 1928 (see Chapter 1) and Das Kunstblatt in March 1929, he had noted that Feilchenfeldt was the first to doubt the works’ authenticity.3 Les faux Van Gogh is not limited to the Otto Wacker gallery, about which De la Faille had been publishing for a year. He also writes about forged paintings that he had come across during his search for works by Van Gogh in Western Europe but are not included in the catalogue raisonné, such as those owned by Théodore Duret, author of the prestigious Histoire des peintres impressionnistes (1878) – which went through many printings and translations – and a monograph about Van Gogh.4 Duret was a collector and friend of the French Impressionists, and he wrote certificates of authenticity that many regarded as infallible. But among the paintings in his estate were many forgeries, including still lifes that were signed “Vincent.” De la Faille believed that Duret was clean. He reveals the provenance of the contested canvases – a certain Proux in Asnières – and writes that he had seen dozens of fake Van Goghs by the same forger, all of them still lifes. In 1930, Duret’s “Van Goghs” graced the walls of dealers and collectors alike. In Les faux Van Gogh, the 30 forgeries that went into circulation via the Otto Wacker gallery are prominently featured. De la Faille’s discussion of the Wacker Van Goghs is historical and stylistic. His main arguments for rejecting the paintings are based on Vincent’s letters and on comparisons with the paintings and drawings that the forgers used as models, which is why these examples are pictured in Les faux Van Gogh. He relates Wacker’s story about the provenance of the canvases: the anonymous Russian who feared that his family might run into trouble with the Soviet authorities and who claimed that the paintings had come from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. De la Faille does not mention that there was no indication of a sale of 30 paintings to a Russian collector among the papers of Jo Van Gogh-Bonger. This information had already been given to him in March 1928 by the Engineer, and it would prove very helpful. De la Faille steers clear of the scientific arguments, such as those provided by De Wild in December 1928, in support of the authenticity of Seascape and Two Poplars, which had been repeated in the press again and again ever

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since. De la Faille probably thought that the formula he had published for paint-hardening agents, which could not be detected by means of chemical analysis, negated the value of such arguments. Nor did he discuss the findings of the Nationalgalerie’s technical examination. De la Faille rejected Chester Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel on pure stylistic grounds. Bremmer may have thought it was one of the master’s most beautiful portraits, and Scherjon claimed to have found proof of authenticity in Vincent’s letters, but De la Faille remained unconvinced by either argument. De la Faille does not identify the owner, just as he refrains from citing the names of Bremmer and Matthiesen as owners of Haystacks and Self-Portrait, respectively. The same was not true of Two Poplars and Seascape. In his discussion of Two Poplars, De la Faille supplies the name of the owner: Scherjon. He regards Scherjon’s efforts to prove authenticity by means of Vincent’s letters as too flimsy, and he rejects the canvas with a reference to the controversy in the NRC. Turning to Seascape, he writes, “This painting is based on drawing F 1431. Let us give credit where credit is due. It is a very beautiful painting, but it is not by Van Gogh.” According to De la Faille, the forger falls short because of his inadequate knowledge of the palette and brushstrokes Vincent used in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer. He concludes with the remark, “This fake Van Gogh is now part of the collection of Mrs. H. Kröller-Müller, The Hague. The Dutch expert H.P. Bremmer regards it as a genuine painting by Van Gogh.”5 It is as though De la Faille were trying to excuse not only the buyer but also her advisor for the purchase. It may be a fake, but it is still a “beautiful painting.” By adding the comment about “credit where credit is due,” he includes himself in the unknown forger’s successful deception. And for good reason, for although he does not say so, this work was one of the three paintings that he had sold in early 1928 in the Netherlands; after its spuriousness was established, he took it back and returned it to Wacker. It was an amiable mea culpa, but if De la Faille thought these words would sweeten the bitter pill for the buyer and her associates, he was quite mistaken. They clung to their conviction that Kröller-Müller had added an original Van Gogh to her collection. De la Faille also challenges the authenticity of other paintings that had been declared genuine by her advisor Bremmer, and he speaks of his “faithful and stiff-necked disciplines.”6 This was no way to make friends.

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The publication of a book about the forgeries of the work by a master is unique. It was true in 1930, and to a certain extent it has always been true. Search any bibliography of Dutch art experts from that period for compilers of catalogues raisonnés of Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals, or other artists who also published overviews of forged works, and you search in vain. Granted, there have been art connoisseurs who devoted themselves to problems of attribution, such as Frits Lugt with his Rembrandt: Ses élèves, ses imitateurs, ses copistes (1935) and Maurits van Dantzig with his provocative Frans Hals: echt of onecht (1937), but they did not compile catalogues of these masters. One undisputed exception is the famous Rembrandt Research Project started in 1968, which concerned itself with works mistakenly attributed to Rembrandt. The focus of this book, however, is not on technical questions of an art historical nature (about which the current writer pleads ignorance), but on finding an explanation for why so many people avoid reporting what they see and examine as soon as they realize that the conclusions might be painful for others in the art world. Part of the answer lies in the trials and tribulations encountered by De la Faille with Les faux Van Gogh. Reception The reactions to Les faux Van Gogh run from the loftiest praise to the deepest contempt. De la Faille received compliments from Schmidt Degener, director of the Rijksmuseum, who wrote to him, “It is so easy to remain silent under such circumstances. If you had not taken action, this falsification would have gone on endlessly, and what the following generations would have thought about Van Gogh is a mystery to me.”7 Numerous critics reacted similarly. Art critic Jo Zwartendijk reminded the readers of the NRC that De la Faille had openly admitted his mistakes in 1928, “a gesture for which he was reviled in every possible way. The fact is that we do not live in a world that shows much respect for people with courage, people who acknowledge their faults.”8 The Burlington Magazine called it a remarkable book, the Sunday Times said it was of inestimable value, the Illustrated London News praised De la Faille for his courage “in stirring up such a hornets’ nest, and upon his skill in waging war with such deadly effect” and the Haarlem art dealer J.H. de Bois called it “a chronique scandaleuse of a misguided Van Gogh cult” but also noted that without all the fuss sur-

reception


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rounding Otto Wacker, Seascape would have been taken for a genuine work by Vincent. De Telegraaf said, “If the art trade wants to continue as a genuine business, it will have to start fighting an energetic battle all across the board. At the present moment, catalogues of forgeries are just as necessary as catalogues of genuine paintings.”9 Other critics were more reserved in their comments about De la Faille’s list of fake Van Goghs. International Studio praised the book but was not convinced that all the Wacker Van Goghs were forgeries.10 In Journal des débats, the reviewer applauded De la Faille for heeding his conscience, but with misgivings: “All well and good! But is Mr. de la Faille infallible?” He then reasoned: if the catalogue raisonné presented fake works as authentic, could there not be authentic works in Les faux Van Gogh that are regarded as fake?11 It was a point that would be repeated again and again by Dutch critics. De Gruyter wrote to Zwartendijk and told her how astonished he was by her praise of De la Faille in the NRC. She has been fooled, he said. Les faux Van Gogh is “one of the most deceitful documents ever written.”12 De Gruyter went on to modify his views in the NRC, and later in Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, but always with a petulant tone.13 How, he wrote, could De la Faille’s inaccuracies continue to be published? Why do newspapers repeat his groundless charge of stubbornness against his detractors? How could De la Faille continue to defy the authority of Bremmer, Havelaar, Meier-Graefe, and others? Critics without exception have declared Self-Portrait authentic, wrote De Gruyter; in fact, a number of them regard it as “among Van Gogh’s most beautiful works.” Views on the authenticity of Two Poplars were equally unanimous. How could De la Faille dare to insist that it was forged, despite Scherjon’s close reading of Van Gogh’s letters, “even despite the scientific paint analysis by none other than Dr. A.M. de Wild, among others.”14 It is not Bremmer who is stubborn but De la Faille, who refuses to see that a portion of the Wacker Van Goghs are authentic. It was courageous of De la Faille to acknowledge his own mistakes, but according to De Gruyter, Les faux Van Gogh was no cause for jubilation.15 Art historian Elie Faure, who owned a drawing by Van Gogh, was also bitter in his accusations of De la Faille. Faure’s drawing was listed as authentic in the catalogue raisonné and now it was among the fakes in Les faux. De la Faille, he said, was capricious.16

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After reading this criticism, De la Faille no doubt felt that his prophecy was being fulfilled: that the struggle for the real Van Gogh was continuing. He must have realized that it would not be limited to polemics, and that it would not be conducted by means of substantive arguments alone; the interests were far too great for that. By publishing Les faux Van Gogh he was ratcheting up the intensity of the dispute that he had conducted so confidently in the newspapers and magazines in 1928 and 1929. But Bremmer and Scherjon, who felt that he had attacked their own interests, had political and material support at their disposal that was not available to De la Faille. At the heart of this support were Mr. and Mrs. Kröller. The Kröllers At the beginning of the twentieth century, Anton G. Kröller was one of the most successful businessmen in the Netherlands. As director of the firm of Wm. H. Müller & Co., he had managed to extend the commercial activities of his German father-in-law to Africa and South America. The firm had interests in transport to England (the Batavia Line) and in the mining

. Anton Kröller in around .

the kröllers


. Helene Kröller-Müller in around .

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industry in Spain, Sweden, and Algeria. Kröller had offices at one of the most chic locations in The Hague – the Lange Voorhout – and lived with his wife, Helene Kröller-Müller, and their children in the mansion known as Huize ten Vijver. With stables, a garage (they were among the first to own an automobile), and accommodations for the personnel, Huize ten Vijver offered a suitable environment for hosting the business and political elite from the Netherlands as well as those from abroad. The Kröllers were involved in the Boer War and became friends with the South African statesman M.T. Steyn and General Christiaan de Wet. Their wealth enabled them to lend considerable sums to others, including H.A. van Karnebeek, the Dutch Minister of Foreign Affairs.17 During the Great War, the couple’s sympathies were with the Germans. Kröller was an esteemed guest of the German government; he enjoyed conversing with Erich Ludendorff and Paul von Hindenburg, the de facto rulers of the empire. In August 1914, Mrs. Kröller-Müller rushed to the Belgian front to nurse German soldiers, but she found the work too demanding and within two weeks she was back in The Hague. Kröller was one of the founders of the Nederlandse Overzee Trustmaatschappij (the Netherlands Overseas Trust Company, or NOT), which worked to maintain foreign trade. The British naval blockade and Germany’s control of the Rhine threatened to strangle the Netherlands. Kröller traded in foodstuffs, coal, and iron ore, which gave his business a political dimension that was vital for the Netherlands as well as risky. The NOT succeeded in its purpose, but Kröller also managed to serve generous portions to himself and to the German government. As a grain purchaser for the Dutch and German governments, he earned millions, secretly acting as a grain agent, credit broker, and spy.18 The British distrusted him. Kröller’s commercial success enabled him to buy country estates in Wassenaar and the forested Veluwe region in the eastern Netherlands, which he used for horseback riding and hunting. The small farmers living on De Hoge Veluwe were forced off the land and their houses demolished. The property was fenced in so the Kröllers and their associates could stroll about undisturbed. At the hands of Kröller and Hendrik van MecklenburgSchwerin, Queen Wilhelmina’s spouse, many of the local wildlife ended their lives in the service of the hunt. When the prince consort’s amorous excursions got him into financial difficulties, the Dutch government and

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the court called on Kröller to clean things up. During the twenties Kröller was able to keep the prince out of bankruptcy.19 Back to 1905. That was when the Kröllers became acquainted with Bremmer. Listening to his lectures, Mrs. Kröller-Müller developed a passion for collecting art. Her husband financed the purchases. “In a hundred years’ time,” she said, she wanted their art collection to be “an interesting monument to culture, proof of the extent to which a merchant family at the turn of the century could achieve intrinsic refinement. It will be a museum more natural and lively than had ever been shown before.”20 During a visit to Florence, she wrote to her husband about the Palazzo Vecchio of the illustrious Medici family, with its crown and tower rising far above the city, and “how it can be seen from far and wide, and yet was not built by kings but by ordinary people.”21 The example of Renaissance power brokers proved infectious. Her husband hired a series of architects – L.J. Falkenberg, Peter Behrens, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, H.P. Berlage, A.J. Kropholler, and Henry van de Velde – and their staffs to build offices, houses, and a museum. Mrs. Kröller-Müller in turn spent the next 15 years building up an impressive art collection. A list of works, far from comprehensive, includes paintings from the sixteenth

. One of the display rooms at Wm. H. Müller & Zn. on the Lange Voorhout in the Hague.

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and seventeenth centuries by Hendrik Avercamp, Jan van Goyen, Tintoretto, Hans Baldung Grien, and Lucas Cranach; paintings and drawings from the second half of the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century by Anton Derkinderen, Theo van Doesburg, Paul Gabriël, Matthijs Maris, Joseph Mendes da Costa, Floris Verster, Piet Mondriaan, Pablo Picasso, Claude Monet, Charley Toorop, and Bart van der Leck. In short, this was a private collection comprising hundreds of pieces of ancient and modern art, the likes of which were unknown in the Netherlands of the 1910s and ’20s. Bremmer’s preferences can be seen in the collection as a whole, and his influence on the choices made was such that the collection really should have been called the Kröller-Müller-Bremmer collection.22 The dazzling heart of this collector’s passion was Vincent van Gogh. The couple owned more of his paintings and drawings – almost 150 works – than of any other artist. Helene Kröller-Müller saw his work as the hub of modern art: many roads led to it and many emanated from it, something she was finally able to express in the floor plan of the museum on De Hoge Veluwe, where the rooms with the Van Goghs form the core of the building. By the mid-twenties, the estimated value of the entire art collection was about

. The Kröller’s Van Gogh collection on the Lange Voorhout.

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five million guilders. Designs for a museum to house the art collection were submitted by Berlage and Behrens, but these were rejected. Finally Henry van de Velde came up with a design for a museum that met with their approval. Helene Kröller-Müller was passionate when it came to art. Victorine Hefting, who was given the job of documenting the collection in 1934, wrote about her: “She exhibited a remarkable combination of arrogant severity, detachment, and authoritarianism with a certain idealism that was focused only on beauty, human tolerance, and noble motives, which she thought you must possess when looking at works of art.”23 She shared with Bremmer an inability to brook contradiction. The economic recession of the thirties did not leave the firm of Wm. H. Müller & Co. unaffected. Funding for the collection had to be cut back drastically, Bremmer’s position as a paid advisor was terminated in 1932 and the building of the museum was postponed. But the picture of the economic decline of Kröller the businessman provided by Kröller-Müller’s secretary Van Deventer in his book of 1956, from which some of the information is derived, is incomplete.24 In 1988, Wennekes wrote that it was not the recession that caused the firm to totter but embezzlement. He quotes an accountant from the Müller firm: “Eighty percent of the losses had nothing to do with the depression. Eighty percent of the losses were caused by incompetence, flagrant dishonesty, and deception.”25 It never came to a legal investigation of the firm or of Kröller himself, but Kröller’s behavior threatened the survival of De Rotterdamsche Bank, his most important creditor. The Dutch state, and Minister of Finance Hendrik Colijn in particular, shielded the bank – and thereby Kröller – by providing credit to the tune of tens of millions of guilders.26 In 1928 the Kröller-Müller Foundation was established, with Mrs. KröllerMüller, Van Deventer, and a government representative as the board of directors. The decline of Wm. Müller & Co. and the establishment of the foundation, which would administer the Kröller’s art collection, are closely connected. According to the official history, the goal was to house gradually the collection of some 800 paintings, 5,000 drawings, and 275 sculptures in a national museum on De Hoge Veluwe and thereby to preserve it for the people of the Netherlands. It sounds like an act of altruism. The establishment of the foundation can also be seen as a deal, however, between Kröller and the Dutch government. If Kröller’s company were to go bankrupt, this structure would

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keep his art objects from automatically being put on the market. The form – a foundation with a government representative on the board – obviates such a sale without the approval or prior knowledge of the government. The approximately five million guilders that the collection represented in 1928 was entirely out of proportion with the tens of millions that the government spent to keep Wm. Müller & Co. afloat, but it represents enormous value all the same.27 During the twenties, the Dutch government appealed to the KröllerMüllers on several occasions to contribute to foreign exhibitions. Accommodation In January 1930, the Friends of Vincent van Gogh and His Time submitted to the city of Amsterdam a plan by De la Faille to organize an exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum on the 40th anniversary of Vincent van Gogh’s death. De la Faille’s proposal was to show 125 works by modern French painters, grouped around 75 works by Van Gogh, mainly from his French period.28 The first list of paintings by Van Gogh that De la Faille wanted to request for the exhibition is quite interesting: a total of 75 works, 22 of which had Dutch owners. Not a single painting on his list was from the Kröllers’ collection. The Van Goghs owned by her advisor Bremmer – more than 70 works – were absent as well. De la Faille told alderman Eduard Polak of Art Affairs he thought it was unlikely that all the paintings on the list would be obtained. In that case, a “secondary selection” might be made from the Kröller-Müller collection. In February 1930 the city of Amsterdam and the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences made funding available for the organization, transport, and insurance of the exhibition. The commissioning authorities wanted a large, representative exhibition that was worthy of this “great Dutchman.” But Polak insisted on equal representation for both Van Gogh and his contemporaries, not the preponderance of contemporaries that De la Faille had proposed. The alderman wanted at least a hundred works by Van Gogh to be shown.29 In the months that followed, De la Faille visited countless collectors, art dealers, and museums in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, and Germany, asking for paintings to be placed on loan. He had little luck. Not all the works he wanted to exhibit were made available to him. Then the alderman

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changed his mind: instead of an exhibition with an equal proportion of Van Goghs and works by his contemporaries, he wanted an exhibition focused entirely on Van Gogh. Of the 200 exhibited paintings, 150 would have to be by Van Gogh – a reversal of the proportion originally proposed. De la Faille did the math and realized that somehow he would have to borrow about 75 more Van Gogh paintings, but the alderman’s demand came at a time when many of the owners were bowing out. Their excuses were plausible enough: the requested work had been promised to another exhibition, or it had done a great deal of traveling and was in need of restoration, or it had been away too long and the owner missed seeing it every day. Some refused for vague reasons, but a few hinted at an aversion to supporting the exhibition in this way. The collector A. Hahnloser was quite frank in his letter to the Stedelijk Museum: “Because of Mr. de la Faille’s incomprehensible behavior toward me and other collectors in publishing Les faux Van Gogh we must regretfully decline your request.”30 By late May, some two months before the opening, De la Faille had been promised about 50 works. Searching for solutions, he thought of his relationship with the Engineer. After all, the Engineer had inherited more than 200 Van Gogh paintings from his father, Theo van Gogh. He could be asked to make a much larger contribution to the exhibition. But there was yet another possibility: the 75-painting shortfall was almost equal to the size of the Kröller-Müller Van Gogh collection. “The most we could hope for would be for her to allow her entire collection of Van Goghs to be shown in the Stedelijk Museum en bloc,” De la Faille told his fellow committee members. It was a rhetorical comment that he himself was quick to dismiss. The collection had already been shown so often, he said, both in the Netherlands and abroad. Furthermore, the nature of her Van Gogh collection, with its large number of works from the Dutch period, was not in keeping with the plan for the exhibition in the Stedelijk as formulated by the state and the city, which was supposed to concentrate on Van Gogh’s French period. To show her entire collection would throw the plan off balance. “Surely Mrs. Kröller would never allow our organization to pick and choose works from her collection,” he concluded. De la Faille failed to point out that the Engineer’s property had also been seen regularly in the Netherlands and abroad. It was obvious: De la Faille did not want to have to travel to the Kröller-Müller’s collection on the Lange Voorhout in The Hague.

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De la Faille had good reasons for his pessimism. Displaying Seascape in the Stedelijk Museum without reservations would be seen as tacit recognition of the painting’s authenticity. By excluding Kröller-Müller from his exhibition plan at the very beginning, he must have wanted to avoid a confrontation over authenticity similar to the one that had taken place the year before between Ludwig Justi and Kröller-Müller at the Van Gogh exhibition in the Kronprinzenpalais in Berlin. De la Faille tried asking the Engineer for more paintings and was given 47 in addition to the 22 canvases already promised. But alderman Polak had his mind set on the Kröller-Müller collection. He visited her in The Hague but came away empty-handed. Rather than appeal to Engineer Van Gogh for paintings, as De la Faille had done, he decided to notify the exhibition’s other commissioning authority, the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences. In early June, Mrs. Kröller-Müller received a delegation of heavyweights consisting of Polak, alderman for Education and the Arts; Mrs. H. van Dam van Isselt, head of the Department of Art Affairs for the city of Amsterdam; P. Visser, head of the Department of Arts and Sciences for the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences; and D.C. Röell, curator of the Rijksmuseum. Their purpose was to induce her to cooperate. A compromise was reached. As Röell wrote to De la Faille, “The result is gratifying. The tamed shrew agreed to exhibit her collection of Van Goghs in separate rooms, but not cut off from the other submissions.”31 All De la Faille had to do was accept this result: not a selection from her collection by the Friends of Vincent van Gogh and His Time, or by him as curator, but a decision to show her entire collection, including Seascape, forced by the city and the ministry, the exhibition’s commissioning authority. Why did the government act this way? Why couldn’t they be satisfied with a smaller exhibition? If they really wanted a large exhibition, why not turn to the Engineer? Were they reluctant to fuel the rivalry that existed between Kröller-Müller and the Van Gogh family, probably based on their separate collections? Or did it have something to do with the deal the government had struck with Kröller? The sources provide no clear answer to these questions, but they do suggest that the authorities did not want to get involved in any conflicts that would be fought out in the newspapers, as the Otto Wacker controversy had been the year before. This thesis – that the government acted the way it did in order not to disturb the status quo – is

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. Seascape at Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer (F ),  x . cm, Kröller-Müller Museum. Helene Kröller-Müller was always convinced that she had added a genuine Van Gogh to her collection in .

in keeping with the attitude of political authorities toward demonstrations of a symbolic or nationalistic character. A show of unity is essential. Differences must be eschewed. The actions of the government representatives (curator Röell acting as the minister’s official representative on the board of the exhibition) suggest, probably unintentionally, that all the paintings were thought to be genuine. Apparently the size, commercial value, and quality of the Kröller-Müller collection was so influential that they did not think it was necessary to agonize over the possible presence of a single forgery. The city was not at all confident that the dispute with De la Faille would remain concealed. De la Faille still hoped to prove himself right by offering his catalogue and Les faux Van Gogh for sale at the exhibition, but history does not tell us if he succeeded. The authorities must have feared he would undertake some kind of action, because Polak advised the deputy mayor, F.M. Wibaut, to keep De

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la Faille in the background during the press conference: “It would be best if he didn’t come at all and sent the information in writing.”32 The motto was: no controversy in the press about the exhibition. It was a vote against De la Faille and in favor of Kröller-Müller. Power The gallery Huinck & Scherjon had much less power over the exhibition organizers than Kröller-Müller, as is clear from the disagreement that emerged regarding the gallery’s Two Poplars. In early June, the gallery issued a press release containing a few laudatory remarks from the newspapers about Two Poplars as well as the results of research carried out by J.C.M. Garnier of the Utrecht police department’s dactyloscopic services, which was said to confirm the work’s authenticity. Garnier had discovered that fingerprints found on the canvas were the same as those allegedly found on uncontested Van Goghs from the Kröller-Müller collection.33 An anonymous writer in the NRC challenged the validity of the proof: no registered fingerprints of Van Gogh exist, and the prints could just as easily have come from someone else. But the NRC editorial staff supported Scherjon’s reasoning that the fingerprints were proof of legitimacy.34 For Scherjon, the fingerprints and the NRC’s acceptance were new weapons in the struggle, which was taken up by others in order to prove De la Faille’s error. “In my estimation,” wrote De Gruyter, “it would be difficult to find evidence more concrete than an authentic-looking thumbprint.” 35 By contrast, a critic from De Haagsche Post was unimpressed by the fingerprint investigation, although he did find De Wild’s research on the 40-year age of the paint compelling. That proved “beyond a shadow of a doubt” that the canvas must be Vincent van Gogh’s: “Anyone who has studied Van Gogh in depth will find peculiarities in Two Poplars that no one but Van Gogh could have set down with such passion. There exists another sense, moreover – a nameless one – of which the expert avails himself, and though it may not be scientific it is still of value.” 36 A few weeks later Bremmer wrote an article in his magazine Beeldende Kunst praising the painting: “The way the trees are rendered in that quavering gyration of lines almost suggests something orchestral. And despite all this wildness and turbulence there is still a subdued quality; after all, it was

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made by someone who still had control over himself in the midst of all his passion.” 37 Two board members of the Friends of Vincent van Gogh – Röell and Baard, director of the Stedelijk Museum – paid a visit to Huinck & Scherjon in early August and asked the gallery to collaborate in the exhibition. They made a selection of works by Van Gogh and by his contemporaries Jongkind, Gauguin, and Signac. The selection included Two Poplars. De la Faille was willing to borrow the paintings by the contemporaries, but not this Wacker Van Gogh. He threatened to withdraw as organizer and to cause a scandal if this forgery were admitted to the exhibition. Baard and Röell relented and justified the rejection to the alderman with the argument that accepting it “might give rise to renewed controversy in newspapers and magazines.”38 Upon hearing this, Huinck & Scherjon, who also wanted to see their disputed Van Gogh hang in the Stedelijk Museum, refused to place any of their paintings on loan.39 The difference between the treatment of the Kröllers and the art dealers Huinck and Scherjon is undeniable. The art world expected a great deal from the size and quality of the exhibition, but there were dissonant voices as well. De Gids awaited the exhibition with horror. It had nothing to do with the artist Van Gogh and everything to do with people trying to enhance their own fame: “Onanists of the spirit [...]. They have made an idol for their ‘Vincent cult’ that looks as much like Van Gogh as the pastry busts of Beethoven resembled Beethoven.”40 The publicity around Les faux Van Gogh, the damage to the interests of Huinck & Scherjon, newspaper coverage of Garnier’s fingerprint investigation, and the skepticism of De Gids were omens that the exhibition was not going to result in the universal agreement desired by the authorities. Polemics On 6 September 1930, the Stedelijk Museum opened its doors for the exhibition Vincent van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoten (Vincent van Gogh and His Contemporaries). It was a major event. The newspapers reported the presence of authorities of every stripe: members of the upper and lower houses of parliament, representatives of the Amsterdam city council, officers of the army and navy, the French ambassador, artists, and prominent persons from the business community and the cultural world. Alderman Polak, Minister

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J. Terpstra, and deputy mayor Wibaut gave introductory speeches; there was glowing praise for the dead master, and expressions of gratitude for Kröller-Müller and the Engineer. De la Faille was also present, contrary to Polak’s wishes, and he was drawn into the limelight as well – by Polak. The public was able to view 374 works by Van Gogh and almost 180 by his contemporaries. Three catalogues were on offer: one from the KröllerMüller Foundation and two from the Stedelijk Museum. The two from the Stedelijk were a catalogue of the remaining part of the exhibition and a catalogue containing a brief summary of the works shown, without illustrations. The Kröller-Müller catalogue described the 253 works in the collection and included reproductions of sixteen paintings, one of which was Seascape. De la Faille’s catalogue raisonné, with F numbers, had already found acceptance as a work of reference at art sales and exhibitions, but not in this KröllerMüller catalogue. Every reference to De la Faille’s work was omitted, and all 253 works were numbered according to a system used by the Kröller-Müller

. September , . J. Terpstra, Minister of Education, Art and Science, and the alderman for Art Affairs in Amsterdam, Eduard Polak, at the opening of the Vincent van Gogh exhibition in the Stedelijk Museum, Amsterdam

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Foundation. The catalogue of the remaining part of the exhibition was written by De la Faille, with the other 121 Van Goghs listed along with their F numbers. Museum director Baard wrote the foreword. Every reference to Les faux Van Gogh was omitted from the catalogue. In the eyes of the world, the Kröller-Müller Van Gogh collection was an unstained entity. September and October were harvest months for the organizers and the government. The press was full of praise. The Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant ran an enthusiastic and thorough article on the exhibition. Irony of ironies, the newspaper commended the compiler, De la Faille, for the “rare unity” that had been achieved, and made special mention of Seascape, “with those curling, foaming waves and the enchantment of the fine, ever-changing colors in the water.”41 The NRC was equally enthusiastic and devoted four detailed articles to the unique exhibition. This newspaper could see the end of Van Gogh’s mental balance in the contested painting: “with its stylized, distorted waves it is an early revelation of the fatal turmoil that began to consume him.”42 Het Volk wrote that the “democratic Amsterdam of today has found a socio-ethnic symbol in Vincent.”43 When the exhibition closed on 2 November 1930, the organizers and commissioning authorities had every reason to be pleased. Not only did they receive a very favorable reception in both the domestic and foreign press, but in seven weeks’ time more than five thousand visitors had gone to the Stedelijk Museum, an unprecedented number for that time. The satisfaction was short-lived, however, for after a few days a discussion began to develop in the Dutch press about the compiler of the exhibition and Les faux Van Gogh. When the NRC published articles about the rejection of Two Poplars, the controversy so feared by the government became a fact. The press turned against De la Faille, who had been so steadfast in his vacillation, and took sides with Scherjon, Kröller-Müller, and the critics who defended the authenticity of both paintings. De la Faille stuck to his negative assessment. In a letter to the editor written in late October, he wrote that Seascape was a fake and then concluded, “[...] I have not retreated from this opinion in the least.”44 He tried to place this and other pieces, without much success. Almost two months after the closing of the exhibition, De la Faille was applauded in De Groene Amsterdammer for the stance he had taken on the painting. This approbation was not low placed. Albert Plasschaert, one of

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the first to bring Vincent’s work to the attention of the Dutch public at the end of the nineteenth century, devoted a “late observation” to Seascape. His first impression, he wrote, was a premonition: “[...] this was not a color palette for Vincent, nor did it have his tension of form. (There were more dubious Vincents in Amsterdam!).” And he continued: “Against my better judgment [...] I later accepted the little painting. [...] Now I see the seascape as I first saw it: as missing the upheaval that Vincent always brings about in me – that is, as alien when placed beside the others.”45 Damaged reputation The discussion in the press did not limit itself to the question of authenticity. G. Knuttel Wzn, curator at the Gemeentemuseum Den Haag, criticized the exhibition in De kunst der Nederlanden. His criticism was of a professional nature: most of the contemporaries – Manet, Renoir, Guillaumin, Cézanne, and others – actually had nothing to do with Van Gogh. But Knuttel’s criticism was also of another sort. He castigated the Amsterdam city council and the Dutch government for asking De la Faille, of all people, to organize the exhibition. He denounced the “extremely outspoken Francophilia of the Dutchman [...] Mr. J. Baart de la Faille, who does not hesitate to write the good Dutch part of his name in [the catalogue raisonné] as J.-B. de la Faille, which a Frenchman can only read as Jean-Baptiste! We are glad to grant France this denier of his own nationality – as long as he does not commit the groundless indiscretion of turning the Dutch artist Van Gogh into a Frenchman as well.”46 De la Faille refused to keep step with those who would drape Vincent van Gogh in the Dutch flag, which was a real issue during the twenties and thirties. In the pieces written by his detractors, criticism of De la Faille’s competence with regard to Van Gogh and the weighing of De la Faille’s national convictions were blended together with other dubious aspects of his personality. At the end of the twenties, De la Faille was involved in a full-blown conflict with S.J. Mak van Waay, Jr., his partner in the auctioneering firm of A. Mak, who accused him of selling paintings off the company books. Mak van Waay instituted interlocutory proceedings to prove himself right and asked Engineer Van Gogh for information about the paintings that De

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la Faille had sold for the Van Gogh family. The Engineer refused to cooperate. Mak van Waay obtained no satisfaction from the proceedings – or so it seemed. The only public source of information regarding the case is Het Vaderland of 1932, written about two years after the fact: “De la Faille is acting under the name ‘Firma A. Mak.’ That name was granted to him following a long drawn-out lawsuit, after he had been a member of the firm of the same name and the Messrs. Mak had retired.”47 The documents from the lawsuit are untraceable, and we do not know whether Mak van Waay was vindicated or not. Had De la Faille indeed been doing business on the sly and was Mak van Waay unable to furnish evidence? Or did the partnership have certain terms which allowed employees to operate independently? Het Vaderland does not say. The answer to these questions is less important, however, than the fact that Mak van Waay Senior and Junior harbored a deep resentment against De la Faille, and that they expressed it behind the scenes. Mak van Waay, Sr. seized upon the commotion caused by the Van Gogh exhibition to write to critic Jo Zwartendijk of the NRC about De la Faille’s “brazenness” in his rendering of the facts.48 De la Faille’s interest in Van Gogh was purely financial, he said. De la Faille had cheated both himself and his son in a disgraceful manner, he was non compos mentis, and he had allegedly earned a great deal of money from Les faux Van Gogh.49 It is not known who else Mak van Waay approached with his grievances, but as we shall see in the next chapter, the letters had an impact. Art dealer Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs became a real issue between 1928 and 1931, with De la Faille as the central figure. It was no longer just about De la Faille the art expert who had mistakenly attributed 30 paintings to Vincent van Gogh. His detractors brought up scores of personal qualities that strictly speaking had nothing to do with the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs. Bremmer thought he was unqualified, Meier-Graefe found him headstrong, Scherjon criticized his competence, and Knuttel said he was a denier of his own Dutch nationality. Then there were those who simply refused to mince words: De Gruyter called him a liar, his former business associates labelled him a mala fide partner, and collectors censured his lack of discretion. De la Faille just shrugged his shoulders. He took each new allegation as a puff of hot air. But puffs like this, repeated regularly and with force in the press and in social circles, can turn into a fierce gale, and that

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is exactly what began happening to him in 1928. Of course there were those who stood up for De la Faille, but their voices in the press grew weaker and weaker. The attempts undertaken by De la Faille beginning in 1928 to salvage his reputation as a trustworthy advisor with regard to genuine and fake Van Goghs were unconvincing, and they failed to defuse the counterforces unleashed by Bremmer and Scherjon. After two years, the damage done to De la Faille’s reputation was a fact. His effort to expose paintings by Vincent van Gogh as fakes had backfired. In many eyes it was now De la Faille who was the fake. But De la Faille was convinced that the tide would turn. In Berlin the case against the Otto Wacker gallery was imminent. It was there, he expected, that the truth about the forged Van Goghs would finally come out in the open, and he would be vindicated.

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5

The expert tamed

Despite all the setbacks, De la Faille’s faith in his own convictions remained unshaken, at least in the eyes of the world. At the end of 1930 he smugly stated that no one, except for Bremmer and his circle, still believed in the authenticity of art dealer Otto Wacker’s Van Goghs – neither in the Netherlands nor in Germany. “J. Meier-Graefe and the other German experts have also come over to my side,” he wrote in the NRC.1 Meier-Graefe had told him in a letter that he had retracted his certificates of authenticity – at least that is what De la Faille claimed. This letter has not been found, but whether Meier-Graefe would so readily admit his error is highly debatable. In any case, the Berlin art expert Hans Rosenhagen (1858-1943) is not known to have retracted any of his fourteen certificates of authenticity, and in 1932 it would emerge that he still regarded eight of the works as thoroughly genuine. De la Faille’s self-assured pronouncement was probably based on the judgment of duped German art dealers and the Nationalgalerie (not the least important parties in the conflict, it must be said), and in the Netherlands he may have received support behind the scenes from Engineer Van Gogh and a few friendly dealers and critics. The Dutch press, however, continued to stick with the story of a core of genuine works around which a larger group of forgeries had been collected. In fact, that was Bremmer’s view. Actually, De la Faille’s take on the situation – consensus in Germany and the Netherlands, disrupted by a few Bremmerians – was wishful thinking more than anything else, as the case against art dealer Otto Wacker would soon reveal. The charge In October 1930, the office of the public prosecutor in Berlin announced its intention to take action against Otto Wacker. It regarded the pieces signed

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with Vincent’s name as documents in the legal sense and planned to gain access to enough incriminating material to support a case of falsified documents and fraud.2 Almost two years had passed, however, since the Matthiesen gallery had filed a complaint against Wacker on behalf of the Society of German Art and Antique Dealers. The public prosecutor’s dawdling was a source of irritation to many in the art world. Dealers complained that buyers were wary of making major purchases, and the Akademie der Künste declared that the lengthy preparations for the court case were doing serious damage to the German art world. A scandal involving the Bank für Deutsche Beambten that became public in 1930 added to the unrest. In order to increase the bank’s capital, the bank’s management had engaged in large-scale speculation in paintings – including some forged works, it discovered to its dismay. But it had vastly overestimated the value of the works, thereby threatening the bank’s existence. For many, the legal settlement of this case also took far too long. The unrest in the German art world had a more general, economic cause besides. When the Wall Street stock market crashed at the end of October 1929 on “Black Friday,” entire fortunes were swept away from one day to the next and capitalist countries were plunged into a worldwide economic crisis. In Germany there were more than 3.5 million registered unemployed by March 1930. American investments – which formed the basis of the “Golden Twenties” – declined drastically, tax revenues dropped, exports shrank and banks failed one after another. Because of the depression, many art lovers could simply no longer afford to make new purchases, which meant that dealers and artists saw their incomes plummet. Despite the pressure to put Wacker on trial, it would be almost another year before the public prosecutor’s office brought charges. That occurred on 4 September 1931, almost three years after the case of the forged Van Goghs had started.3 The charge focused on two questions: were the paintings fake, and was Wacker aware of it? The trial would take place in April 1932 in Berlin. Liar, liar In late February 1932, art critic Cornelis Veth launched a full attack on De la Faille in the brochure Schoon schip! Expertise naar echtheid en onechtheid inzake Vincent van Gogh (Come clean! Assessing authenticity in the work of

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Vincent van Gogh). According to Veth, De la Faille continued to do business with Wacker after declaring the Wacker Van Goghs to be forgeries, and even asked him for permission to run the committee on the returning of forged paintings. Veth was very firm about De la Faille’s Les faux Van Gogh: “Anyone who serves as an expert and art dealer and vouches for the authenticity of works of art cannot also claim the honor of uncovering fraud.”4 His guns were aimed not only at De la Faille’s judgments but also at the man himself. Veth criticized his vanity, his love of France, and his untrustworthiness, and called him a liar. Veth was outspokenly biased and painted De la Faille in the most somber colors, while his opponents were in many respects shining examples of refinement: “More than any collector, any museum, or perhaps any writer, Mrs. Kröller-Müller and her advisor H.P. Bremmer have secured the proper appreciation and the continued fame of Vincent van Gogh.”5 De la Faille’s material interest in the sale of the Wacker Van Goghs made his arguments dubious in Veth’s eyes, while he turned a blind eye to the material interest of Kröller-Müller, Bremmer, Scherjon, and others. Veth failed to mention which canvases he regarded as genuine in Schoon schip!, but he included a facsimile of a handwritten statement by Bremmer. Thus Bremmer ascended the podium and, for the first time since December 1928 – after more than three years of silence – openly passed judgment on sixteen paintings from the Otto Wacker gallery: half were forgeries, the other half were definitely from the hand of Vincent van Gogh. Bremmer listed the canvases by name but omitted the names of the owners. Five of the eight genuine paintings were Self-Portrait (F 385), Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523), Seascape (F 418), Two Poplars (F 639) and Haystacks (F 625bis). Bremmer’s brief comment on Haystacks is interesting: “Truly a work by Vincent himself. Saw it in my own home.”6 This last sentence was Bremmer’s clever way of concealing the fact that the work was part of his own collection, enabling him to continue to pose as a disinterested party. At the end of March, De Wild received a copy of Schoon schip! The brochure featured full-page reproductions of Self-Portrait at the Easel, SelfPortrait, Seascape, and Two Poplars, which were presented as genuine Van Goghs. De Wild’s handwritten declaration that the paint used in Two Poplars was 40 years old was printed in facsimile. The negative outcome of his analyses of Chester Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523) and the Matthiesen gallery’s Self-Portrait (F 385) was not mentioned, nor that of Bremmer’s

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Haystacks, which was also featured as a full-page reproduction. Self-Portrait (F 385) is shown opposite F 521, another canvas that Wacker had put on the market as a self-portrait of the master. What went through De Wild’s mind when he opened this booklet? Satisfaction, because the secret he had shared for so many years with Dale, Bremmer, and Scherjon concerning Self-Portrait at the Easel, Haystacks, and Self-Portrait had been kept so well? Remorse, because the favorable results were so strongly highlighted and the unfavorable ones concealed? We don’t know. All we know is that he did not speak out against this selective use of his findings. Veth’s brochure had an impact. The press concurred with his thorough aversion to De la Faille and echoed his disputable statements. De la Faille received a comforting letter from Engineer Van Gogh, who advised him not to take it to heart. He also spoke up for De la Faille one month later in an interview.7 Otherwise, all support for De la Faille in the Netherlands seemed to have disappeared. According to Weekblad van Rotterdam, Veth was “absolutely right.”8 De Maasbode said it was one more indication that De la Faille was really incapable of judging paintings.9 Art critic Zwartendijk of the NRC, who had praised De la Faille in 1928 for his catalogue raisonné and had called him courageous in 1930 for Les faux Van Gogh, made a full turnaround. She called him a “pseudo Van Gogh expert” and said that Veth’s “love of truth for a good cause” was commendable. Schoon schip! was an “apt and excellent book.”10 The brochure was also published in German under the name Falschen Experten? − Falschen Expertisen! According to the Vossische Zeitung, it was an undisguised attempt to frustrate the legal proceedings against Wacker by attacking De la Faille.11 The writer of the article, Max Osborn, was not far from the truth. Earlier, Kröller-Müller had shown how pleased she was with Veth’s criticism by having one of his anti-De la Faille articles, Van Gogh en zijn nieuwste vrienden (Van Gogh and His Latest Friends), translated and sent to Berlin police commissioner Thomas.12 Her secretary, Van Deventer, was actively involved in the production of the German edition. He edited the text – toning down the vicious remarks about German art dealers, tightening up other passages, turning Bremmer into Professor Bremmer – and maintained contact with the German publisher. Osborn, however, went to bat for De la Faille, museum director Ludwig Justi, and the German art dealers. He called the brochure a savage polemic. There was one passage from Veth about the museum direction – “Justi’s authority

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was derived from his official position and not his expertise” – that was particularly hard to digest. The newspaper gave Osborn’s article the headline “Dutch attack on Berlin,” which was not just a copy editor’s joke. Gradually the conflict over authenticity would take on nationalistic overtones. The Deutsche Algemeine Zeitung wrote that the brochure did not have very friendly things to say “about us,” i.e. “German experts, the German press, and German museum directors.” The newspaper could understand the problem, however. Why have we in Germany not shown more respect for Kröller-Müller’s advisor, Bremmer, and why didn’t we do anything to stop the court case against Holland’s pride, Van Gogh? We Germans should be grateful to Veth for challenging De la Faille’s “ancient Francophile foolishness” and for using an elaborate fingerprint analysis by Garnier and chemical analysis by De Wild to show that Two Poplars was the real thing.13 De la Faille did express his indignation in the NRC of 2 April. The only voices heard in the brochure were those of his opponents, he said. Veth never asked him for his view of the situation. De la Faille was embittered by this gross incivility: The booklet is nothing but an entirely personal attack on me, delivered under the guise of serving ideal interests [...], with the strongest terms highlighted by single and double underlines in red ink, and sent free of charge, unsolicited and anonymously to my closest family members, my friends, my office personnel, and my business associates. [...] Veth obtained the material he used against me from persons who have found me unacceptable because of my work in the matter of the forged Van Goghs. (Indeed, it is still apparently true that despite all their certificates, the Van Goghs I have rejected as false cannot be sold abroad.) Ultimately, Veth’s commercial goal is to bend the truth in order to make the paintings genuine.14

This is the person who spoke out on political issues during the Great War, on conflicts of interest in the art world, and on Van Gogh forgeries – a man of principle and pugnacity in the face of conflict, someone not inclined to tell people what they want to hear. Such an attitude would be sorely tested within the next few days. Ludwig Justi came under fire as well, not because of his views on the Wacker Van Goghs but because of his purchase of Van Gogh’s Daubigny’s

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Garden (F 776). When the court asked Justi to serve as an art expert on questions of authenticity, his enemies saw it as their chance to cast doubt on his competence. The painting had been purchased in June 1929, and the press had at that time focused no attention on the 240,000 marks it had cost. But in early 1932, that interest was revived and was used as ammunition against Justi. Max Liebermann elected himself spokesman for those in the German art world who thought the German government should refrain from buying any foreign works of art that cost more than 10,000 marks. The purchase of Daubigny’s Garden gave Liebermann reason to denounce Justi’s museum policy. The fact that the canvas had been purchased with private funds via the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie on behalf of the Nationalgalerie was irrelevant, he said. Justi, Liebermann argued, knew nothing about modern art. He simply went out and bought a Van Gogh, even though foreign modern art did not really interest him. He used the case of the forged Van Goghs to establish his authority. Van Gogh was a genius, to be sure, but because of his illness he had not been capable of turning a painting into a masterpiece. The gist of Liebermann’s argument was that Justi could not grasp that fact, and consequently he was not the right person to be the director of the Nationalgalerie.15 The Wacker trial Wednesday, 6 April 1932: The accused as victim The huge crowd of spectators who poured into the small room of the courthouse on the Alt Moabit that morning must have thought they were in a museum or an art gallery. Along one wall, leaning against the back of a long bench approximately at eye level, were about fifteen Van Goghs from the Otto Wacker gallery, all of them contrasting sharply with the dark wallpaper and brown furniture.16 When the accused, the lawyer, the prosecuting attorney, and the judges entered the room, however, the reality of the situation suddenly hit home: this was not the opening of an art exhibition but the beginning of a court case. The Central Berlin court of justice along with two laypersons and an appeals judge as president were responsible for delivering a judgment on the charge that between 1925 and 1928, the accused had sold 30 paintings bearing the signature of Vincent van Gogh, even though the works were forgeries.17 Otto Wacker was charged with fraud, falsification of

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. Paintings from the Otto Wacker gallery on display during the trial.

documents, and breach of property rights. Twenty-eight persons were summoned to appear in court as witnesses and/or experts to establish the truth. From the Netherlands: V.W. van Gogh, J.B. de la Faille, H.P. Bremmer, W. Scherjon, A.M. de Wild, and C.M. Garnier. From Germany: Gradkowsky, Jankowsky, Kreuzfeld, May, Uelzen, Thomas, Reichan, G. Ring, Feilchenfeldt; and the experts: J. Meier-Graefe, H. Rosenhagen, L. Justi, Donath, Müller, E. Spiro, L. Von König, K. Wehlte, L. Thormaehlen, Ruhemann, T. Stoperan, E. Täuber, and K. Brittner. The president opened the morning session with an explanation of the oath. Witnesses and experts were told to tell the truth and nothing but the

. April . The Wacker trial. Standing in the center is Otto Wacker, with his lawyer on the left and the three judges on the right.

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truth. Presenting false testimony while under oath could result in a maximum of ten years’ imprisonment. Then began the sparring match between the defence and the public prosecutor over the partiality of the witnesses and experts. Wacker’s lawyer read aloud from newspaper articles that supposedly showed that Justi and De la Faille were biased and therefore could not be heard as experts. The public prosecutor did not want Bremmer as an expert because he claimed Bremmer was not impartial. The defense also refused to accept two staff members from the Cassirer gallery because, as Wacker’s competitors, they could not provide independent testimony. The court postponed a decision on experts and witnesses until it came time to assess the paintings. After the reading out of the summons, the examination of Otto Wacker began. Wacker said that since the 1910s he had been selling work by German Impressionists on a commission basis for various German art dealers, and that he had also given performances of so-called old Spanish dances under the stage name Olindo Lovaël. After a performance in 1923 or 1924, he had been visited in his dressing room by the Russian owner of the paintings by Van Gogh, who had inherited them from his father. The president wanted to know more about the Russian, and said that by revealing his name Wacker would immediately be absolved of all charges. Wacker chose to remain silent. De Amstelbode wrote that Wacker’s speech was subdued and unsteady: “He pronounces his words with a painful disregard, blurred and toneless. [...] Great pains were taken to understand him, he was admonished to speak loudly, told to sit here, then there.” All attempts were useless, and the president ended up repeating almost every answer for the benefit of those present. President: “Do you not believe that people in Russia know about this Van Gogh affair? Do you think there are many people in Russia who own thirty Van Goghs? Don’t you think that people in Russia have long known who this person is?” Accused: “If people know, it’s not because of anything I have done. I can’t do anything about the scandal.” President: “Of course you can. In any case, it’s all the same to the Russians whether you name the Russian or not. But for you it is an extremely serious matter.”

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Accused: “If I thought that the former owner had not acted in good faith, I would tell you his name.”18

Questions from the court about the Russian’s whereabouts, Wacker’s trips to Switzerland, his correspondence, the conveyance of the canvases, the prices paid, and other matters all foundered on such answers as “I am not at liberty to say” or “I don’t know.” The questioning provided little new information, and the uncertainty about the provenance of the Wacker Van Goghs was not dispelled. De Wild noted at 3 p.m., at the end of the session, “It is conceivable that this is really a cover-up for a succession of homosexual entanglements with someone, yet it is also possible that the Russian is totally imaginary. It’s hard to tell.”19 Thursday, 7 April: Provenance On the second day of the trial, Wacker made a statement. He now regarded three of the paintings as fakes: Basket with Rolls (F 387), The Zouave (F 705), and Self-Portrait (F 521). He also revealed the prices of a few of the works he had sold, including Two Poplars, Seascape, and Haystacks. He said he had received a 9,000-mark advance from Bremmer for Haystacks. It was the first time that Bremmer’s financial interest in a canvas had been openly mentioned. The accountant from the office of the public prosecutor found that immediately after Otto Wacker had sold Self-Portrait at the Easel for 65,000 marks, he sent 51,000 marks to his brother Leonhard in Düsseldorf. Wages for the forger? Wacker said the money was meant to pay for restoration work and to buy a Van Gogh. When such a purchase proved impossible, Wacker’s brother had returned most of the money to him in hard cash. Wacker credited the entire affair to jealous dealers. He said the art dealer Cassirer had offered him one-fifth of the price for a landscape worth 40,000 marks, and when the sale did not go through he sided with Wacker’s opponents. Wacker was convinced that his accident of February 1929 in Leiden was an attempt on his life. Who was behind it? The Russian, jealous dealers, or disappointed collectors? He didn’t know. Engineer Van Gogh was the first witness to be questioned. He explained that after the death of his uncle, all the works had become his property via

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. April , . Engineer V.W. van Gogh giving evidence.

his father. His mother began selling paintings and drawings in 1892 and had kept careful notes of the transactions: the Wacker Van Goghs did not appear in her account book. He had never heard her talk about a Russian collection comprising some 30 Van Goghs. Most of the Wacker Van Goghs had never been part of his mother’s collection.20 In addition, only one seascape was left behind from Vincent’s stay in Les Saintes-Maries de la Mer, but there were two seascapes among the Wacker Van Goghs. Wacker’s lawyer stated that the family had been careless with Vincent’s work: “Is it true that paintings by Van Gogh had once been sold from a cart on the street?” The Engineer said that these were exclusively paintings from Van Gogh’s Brabant period. After his stay in Saint Rémy, a few paintings had also allegedly been left behind there. In its report, De Telegraaf wrote, “The witness said that of the paintings in the Wacker collection, only one or two at the most were identical to the canvases he had come to know as family property.”21 As a witness, Engineer Van Gogh avoided judging on matters of authenticity, but he did sow doubt with his remarks about Kröller-Müller’s Seascape. As a result, Wacker’s statement that the 30 paintings were from Johanna van Gogh-Bonger began to sound extremely dubious. The Engineer’s testimony did leave open the possibility that some of the Wacker Van Goghs were genuine, however. Indeed, he had said that “most” had never been in his family’s possession and that paintings had been left behind in Saint Rémy. The next witnesses were the art dealers, who talked about their business relations with Wacker. Liebermann of the Thannhauser firm had bought Two Poplars directly from Wacker, but the Wacker Van Goghs Self-Portrait (F 521) and Basket with Rolls (F 387) had come from other dealers. Eventu-

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ally, the obscure provenance had made him suspicious and he had sold the painting back to Wacker. Greta Ring and Feilchenfeldt of the Cassirer gallery testified that they had been surprised by four Van Goghs that Otto Wacker had submitted to the firm’s Van Gogh painting exhibition. In their opinion every single one was fake. After conferring with De la Faille they decided to exclude them. Feilchenfeldt was in Moscow in 1929 and had made some inquiries regarding Van Gogh collections. No one knew of any other collection besides that of Ivan Morozov, but all his Van Goghs were still in Russia. Friday, 8 April: Bookkeeping The third day of the trial began with the testimony of Detective Uelzen. In the spring of 1928, the Berlin police had been warned about forgers from the Rhineland and Hamburg who were trying to sell their products in Berlin. The reports of De la Faille’s Supplément had put Uelzen on Wacker’s trail, and on 1 December 1928 he had interrogated him in Berlin in the company of his lawyer. The proposal he made to Wacker – to go to Switzerland with Meier-Graefe and visit the Russian – was accepted by the accused but never carried out. Uelzen’s colleague, Commissioner Thomas, said the Düsseldorf police had been given a tip about forgeries of Old Masters that Wacker’s father, the artist Hans Wacker, was said to have made. Hans Wacker had told him he was not capable of painting Van Goghs.22 Thomas had issued an attachment order on Haystacks (F 625bis), but Wacker had sold the painting to Bremmer and had taken it to The Hague without police permission. Franz Zatzenstein of the Matthiesen gallery had purchased the Wacker Van Gogh Basket with Rolls (F 387) and did not doubt its authenticity. He had then exchanged a genuine Van Gogh from his own collection, The Olive Trees (F 710), for the Wacker Van Goghs Self-Portrait (F 385) and Cypresses (F 614). Imagine his surprise when, while spending some time with Wacker, he suddenly spotted a variant of The Olive Trees: F 710bis. It was at this point that he began to become suspicious. The provenance of the variant was “Swiss collection,” but despite inquiries made among his Swiss connections and despite questions asked of Wacker, Zatzenstein could obtain no clear answer as to the provenance of the canvas. He then tried to sell the Wacker Van Goghs back to Wacker, to no avail.

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The testimonies of Wacker’s chauffeur, Reichan; his secretary, Max Renkewitz; his accountant, Theodoor Jankowsky; and his brother-in-law, Gradkowsky – none of whom were sworn witnesses – cast no new light on Wacker’s business dealings with the Russian. Dr. Kreuzfeld, head of the psychiatric department of the Charité hospital in Berlin, had treated Otto Wacker and found him fully accountable for his actions: “Even earlier on, his whispering and slow manner of speaking indicated that he was consciously trying to obstruct the investigation being carried out against him. [...] Wacker was attempting to throw a kind of veil over his own basic nature. [...] Wacker only exhibits that sort of attitude if his interests demand it. Otherwise he is extremely capable.”23 Monday, 11 April: Conversion Now it was De la Faille’s turn to testify. The defense attorney had come down hard on him in recent days. The court had not yet decided whether to hear him as an expert or not. Before he was given a chance to speak, testimony would be heard from Gutmann of the Goldschmidt gallery (no

. April . Witnesses and experts at the Wacker trial. From left to right in the second row: J.C. Garnier, H.P. Bremmer and W. Scherjon.

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family of Wacker’s lawyer Ivan Goldschmidt) on the sale of six Wacker Van Goghs that he had sold back to Wacker for the purchase price in 1928 after doubting their authenticity. Wacker had treated him properly, Gutmann said. There was tension in the courtroom when De la Faille took the witness stand. De la Faille testified that he had met Wacker in 1926 in connection with a certificate of authenticity for one of his Van Goghs. He explained how their relations had developed and how in 1928 he had become convinced that all the Wacker Van Goghs in his catalogue were forgeries. The judge grilled him on this point. De la Faille’s argument was weak. He seemed unsure of himself and kept fumbling for words. Then he read aloud from a written statement. In 1928, “probably driven by excessive skepticism,” he had “lost the absolute objectivity that his work requires.” And then – entirely out of the blue – he declared that he had been wrong once more and retracted his decision about the spuriousness of five Wacker Van Goghs, which he said were actually genuine: F 418 Seascape, F 523 Self-Portrait at the Easel, F 639 Two Poplars, F 625bis Haystacks, and F 736 Haystacks.

With this statement he wished to remove all misunderstanding about his judgment and “to serve the unvarnished truth.”24 Those present in the courtroom were thunderstruck: the principled warrior De la Faille, compiler of the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, public confessor of his own faults, had backtracked for the second time in less than three years. At long last he had endorsed Bremmer’s position: that fake works had been collected around a core of genuine paintings. The enumeration of numbers and titles was not only a confirmation of Bremmer’s authority but it also protected the property of Kröller-Müller, Chester Dale, Scherjon, Bremmer, and an unknown owner, respectively.25 De Wild made the following annotation for himself describing this dramatic intermezzo:

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. “Making assessments at the trial of the Van Goghs,” cartoon by Piet van der Hem in De Haagsche Post, April , . De la Faille is on the left, Bremmer on the right. Van der Hem suggests that De la Faille’s reversed judgment was an arbitrary act. [below the cartoon: “Genuine − Not Genuine − Genuine − Not Genuine − ...”]

The president asked why De la Faille chose today to come forward with this information. De la Faille floundered, yet said he thought this moment was the best time. [...] However, De la Faille did not explain how he arrived at his decision within the last two days under pressure from Scherjon!!26

What did De la Faille and Scherjon discuss in the preceding days, and what was the pressure that Scherjon exerted? We would so much like to learn what vulnerable spot Scherjon touched to make De la Faille waver, and how Scherjon managed to impose his will. De Wild does not say. The day before the trial, De la Faille was fully convinced that he was right about the spuriousness of all the Wacker Van Goghs. Why did he so unexpectedly convert to this new version of the truth? A final answer will probably never be found, but it is clear he had made a deal with Scherjon. De la Faille later put Two Poplars on the market and after a few years found a buyer for it in Japan. In handling the transaction, De la Faille found himself the momentary owner of the canvas. He bought it on 25 September 1935 for 14,550 guilders from Scherjon and sold it the same day, with Scherjon’s knowledge, for 18,000 guilders to the collector Magosaburo Ohara via a Japanese middleman. Ohara knew about the Wacker case but thought he was buying a genuine Van Gogh nonetheless.27 The deal be-

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. On September , , De la Faille bought Two Poplars from the firm of Huinck & Scherjon for , guilders and sold it the same day to a Japanese collector for , guilders.

tween De la Faille and Scherjon probably had to do with more dubious Van Goghs. I will come back to this in the next chapter. De la Faille was not the only one being put under pressure behind the scenes during the trial. Scherjon also wanted to strike a bargain with museum director Justi. According to his posthumously published memoires, Scherjon warned him during a tête-à-tête outside the courtroom not to make a negative assessment of Scherjon’s painting Two Poplars while the court was in session. If he did, Scherjon would declare that two Van Goghs belonging to the Nationalgalerie were fakes: The Harvest (F 628) and the costly Daubigny’s Garden (F 776). 28 Scherjon was playing on the rumor making the rounds in the art world that Daubigny’s Garden had been painted by Émile Schuffenecker. Justi knew about this rumor. He had had it investigated in 1929 and feared the damage it could do. Scherjon must have known that this was one of Justi’s weak spots. Did Justi take the threat seriously or did he defy Scherjon’s attempt at blackmail? I will return to this later. After De la Faille’s sensational conversion, Meier-Graefe gave evidence regarding his relationship with Wacker, his certificates of authenticity, his growing doubts in 1928, and his proposal that he and Wacker visit the Russian together. He talked about Wacker’s journey to Switzerland and his

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announcement of the Russian’s unexpected departure to Egypt. But then Wacker had shown Meier-Graefe a letter claiming that the Russian was the rightful owner. It was the first concrete indication of the provenance of the canvases, and the judges wanted details. Het Vaderland wrote: At first the witness did not want to discuss this letter, and only after the president had reminded him of his oath did he say that Wacker had folded the letterhead over and asked him only to read the first page. The letter was written in the Russian’s awkward German and spoke of the paintings by Van Gogh. According to the witness, the letter was proof of Wacker’s honesty. Wacker then got tears in his eyes and said that he had not obtained the canvas by legal means. The Russian had entrusted the paintings to him without the knowledge of his own family.

Did Meier-Graefe realize that the story revealed more about his own naïveté than about the provenance of the canvases? He hastened to say something about the authenticity, about which he would be questioned as an expert the following day: It is the witnesses’ opinion that all the canvases put on the market by Wacker could easily be forgeries, without a single exception.29

Meier-Graefe was playing it close to the chest. Bremmer, who was the next to take the witness stand, was not bothered by such uncertainties. He promptly told the judges that nine of the canvases were genuine and eleven were fakes.30 The newspapers reported that Bremmer said eight were genuine and eight were fakes, the numbers from Veth’s brochure, which indicates how influential that document had become.31 The ninth Wacker Van Gogh, The Reaper, had no Faille number because it had surfaced one year after the publication of the Van Gogh catalogue. It was found in the studio of Leonhard Wacker – for restoration, according to the Wacker brothers; but according to Justi, a recent forgery by Leonhard – and was seized by the police, yet Bremmer declared it genuine.32 Bremmer said he had become acquainted with Otto and Leonhard Wacker in 1926, when they brought Self-Portrait at the Easel to him for a certificate of authenticity. He did not inquire about the work’s provenance, he

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said; he never did. He respected Wacker but thought he was as inscrutable as a sphinx. Wacker then came to him with another canvas, The Olive Trees (F 715bis), which he immediately rejected as a fake, and another whose authenticity he confirmed straightaway: Seascape (F 418). Bremmer also said he paid Wacker an advance of 8,000 guilders for Haystacks (F 625bis). It was the first time that Bremmer openly spoke of his financial interest in this work. It would have been pointless for him to be silent about it after the statements made by Wacker and police commissioner Thomas. Indeed, the “breach of property rights” part of the charge had to do with violating the attachment order and illegally transporting Haystacks from Berlin to The Hague. De Avondpost of 13 April 1932 published this segment, but all the other Dutch newspaper reports of this session known to me omitted it. None of the German newspapers mentioned it either. They paid little or no attention to what Bremmer had to say anyway, although they did have an ear for Justi – much to the irritation of Het Vaderland, which never failed to sing Bremmer’s praises and thought Bremmer’s presentation (“compelling argument”) towered above that of German experts like Justi (“weak reasoning”).33 Other newspapers were also full of admiration. A sample from De Maasbode: Bremmer was now about to give us a more detailed account of Vincent van Gogh as an artist and a human being, and as his speech progressed the courtroom fell silent, so that the dropping of the proverbial pin would have had the effect of a thunderclap. As this angular, robust figure drew a picture of the revered master he let himself be swept into a peroration in which lumps formed in his throat, and if he had gone any further the entire courtroom would have broken out in loud applause as he brought his speech to a close.34

The next witness, the Berlin art expert Hans Rosenhagen, had known Wacker since 1924 and had issued certificates of authenticity for him for paintings by Uhde, Schuch, Täubner, and others. Rosenhagen had also written certificates for a few Wacker Van Goghs, and while he did not find them beautiful, he did regard them as genuine. In a preview of the statement he planned to present the following day as an expert, he said that Seascape (F 418), Haystacks (F 625bis), Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523), Cypresses (F 614), and Two Poplars (F 639) were from Vincent’s own hand.

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The president invited De la Faille to be sworn in as a witness. The defense objected: if Wacker was guilty, then De la Faille was no less guilty since he endorsed the paintings with certificates of authenticity. The court retired to deliberate and decided to swear the witness in despite the objection. Scherjon was sworn in as a witness and came with two bullets in his barrel. First, he said, it was not so strange that the Wacker Van Goghs were not mentioned in the papers of the Van Gogh family. Thirty years ago, any Van Gogh lover could go to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger’s attic and look at the canvases being stored there. Scherjon himself saw the paintings stacked on top of one another like old newspapers. For a long time, the Van Gogh family treated them quite carelessly. Works were stolen from the attic as well at that time. (This last claim had been denied a few days before by Engineer Van Gogh, who was now back in Amsterdam.) In addition, many canvases that Van Gogh had written about in his letters had simply gone missing. So the Wacker Van Goghs could very well have “Johanna Van Gogh-Bonger”

. April . Experts during the Wacker trial. From left to right: E. Täubner, A.M. de Wild, L. Justi, H. Ruhemann, H. Rosenhagen, J.B. De la Faille.

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as their unimpeachable source even though they ended up in the hands of collectors and dealers via an unknown route. Second, he said it must be realized that confidentiality in the art trade was not an unknown phenomenon, at least not in the Netherlands. Art dealers may have clients who do not want their purchases or property to be made known.35 Here Bremmer broke in with the account of Vincent van Gogh’s departure from the Netherlands in 1885, when he left chests full of drawings and paintings with his mother in Breda. Over the years, some of these works had been sold and some had disappeared. Scherjon also gave his assessment of the Wacker Van Goghs. His list of genuine works coincided exactly with Bremmer’s nine, which was hardly surprising.36 Scherjon’s testimony reinforced Bremmer’s in its own way. While Bremmer thought investigating a work’s provenance to determine authenticity was irrelevant, Scherjon believed it was doomed to failure. The public prosecutor did not want to appoint Bremmer as an expert because of his close connections with the accused. At this, the lawyer jumped up and said it was “grotesque” that a trial on the authenticity of paintings by Van Gogh should be conducted without hearing Bremmer, “this expert with a worldwide reputation.”37 Tuesday, 12 April: Immunization The public prosecutor was no longer willing to hear De la Faille as an expert because he had revised his judgment once again, determining that he was unsuited to provide expert testimony in establishing the truth. The judges decided to hear him as a witness but not as an expert. The court swore in Meier-Graefe as an expert. The lawyer asked him to tell the court what the basis was for his assessment of the works as forgeries, since he had first declared that 25 Wacker Van Goghs were genuine. Meier-Graefe was self-confident when he began his response. Each and every canvas was merely a repetition of other works, he said. There wasn’t a single new motif among them, and that gave one pause. His argument on the authenticity of the works soon started to drift between the footpath of renewed certainty and the refuge of vague wording. He believed all the Wacker Van Goghs to be suspect, then called them very weak, admitted he was uncertain about the spuriousness of many of the canvases nevertheless (Self-Portrait at the Easel

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had always made a deep impression on him, despite everything) but made an exception for Two Poplars, Haystacks, and Self-Portrait, which were definitely fakes. Writing about Meier-Graefe, De Wild noted, “Have the impression that he’s expressing himself a bit tentatively in order to form another opinion, if it is needed.”38 Meier-Graefe said his doubts had cost him many sleepless nights: the paintings followed him to bed. Judging the authenticity was difficult because Van Gogh had also made many bad paintings.39 Lawyer: “Of what value, then, are certificates of authenticity?” Meier-Graefe (very agitated): “Of extremely little value! People who buy their paintings on the basis of certificates of authenticity deserve nothing more than to be duped.” Lawyer: “If there is doubt concerning the authenticity of a painting and it becomes necessary to check on the provenance, what’s left for the art experts? Why not just leave the certificate of authenticity to the civil-law notary?” Meier-Graefe: “There will always be people dumber than art experts.” (Hilarity in the courtroom. He continues:) “The work that has been discredited here will always have a certain value. Each year I certify at least 100 paintings to be forgeries which otherwise would be put on the market as genuine.”40

Artists themselves often do not know what they have painted, Meier-Graefe said. He told the story of a man who had bought a painting bearing the signature of Max Liebermann, but he wanted to have the authenticity confirmed in black and white just to be on the safe side. Liebermann denied that he had made the painting, but did not want to come down too hard on the owner. “I recommend that you to go to a handwriting specialist,” Liebermann said. “If he recognizes the authenticity of the signature, then the canvas is of my making.” The handwriting specialist declared that the signature was genuine, after which Liebermann decided it was his. If MeierGraefe thought this would justify the existence of the art expert, he was wasting his time. Journalists reported the story to ridicule the assessments of experts like Meier-Graefe.41 Rosenhagen then said he wanted to add three works to his list of authentic Wacker Van Goghs from the day before, making a total of eight: exactly

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the same paintings that Bremmer had attributed to the master in Veth’s brochure. He now regarded seven canvases as fakes. “I think he’s mixed up,” De Wild wrote about Rosenhagen, “and he’s confusing some paintings with others!”42 Bremmer took the stand as an expert. In his responses he stuck to the view of art that he had been preaching for many, many years. Genuine or fake was a question of feeling. When he stood in front of a painting, he tried to understand what the artist must have felt while painting it. “This means that the deep conviction of Van Gogh the artist and the man are always revealed in his own work,” the NRC wrote, “which is why Mr. Bremmer is so moved when he stands before a genuine Van Gogh.”43 His comparison of two Wacker Van Goghs that were present in the courtroom, both entitled Cypresses (F 614 and F 616), would demonstrate beyond the shadow of a doubt that one was made by a creative hand and the other was a mere forgery. The NRC wrote that Bremmer discussed colors, lines, composition, and brushstrokes, but provided no details. The judges probably did not hear any useful arguments and must have questioned him with a certain amount of incomprehension: “deep conviction,” “self-revelation,” “emotional”? The president tried another tack. President: “If I wanted to have a copy made of a Van Gogh, whom would you recommend?” Bremmer: “I would say, have a good reproduction made.” President: “Yes, but I want to have it copied.” Bremmer: “I would say, do not have it copied. It is impossible to make a good copy of a Van Gogh.”44

Ergo: there is no such thing as a successful forgery. The court left this immunization for what it was and asked him which canvases were genuine. According to the newspapers he named eight paintings as authentic, the same ones he had said were part of Van Gogh’s oeuvre the day before when he served as a witness. Once again, the newspapers were also referring to Veth’s brochure as their source and not to what he actually said; a ninth Wacker Van Gogh, The Reaper, was not mentioned by the press.45 Bremmer took advantage of the opportunity in the presence of the court to compliment Justi for the purchase of Daubigny’s Garden, the Van Gogh

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for which Justi had been so fiercely attacked in Germany. Had Bremmer heard about Scherjon’s maneuver against Justi? Bremmer and Scherjon had collaborated in the battle over the Wacker Van Goghs and had kept company in Berlin. It is possible that Scherjon’s strong-arm approach became too sordid for Bremmer and he wanted to make a gesture to distance himself from this attempt at blackmail. Justi was then sworn in as an art expert and declared that the Wacker Van Goghs were fakes, as fake as fake paintings could be. The newspapers differed in their rendering of his words. The Berliner Tageblatt and the Berliner Börsen-Courier said his statement referred to all 30 paintings and that he would not have made any exceptions.46 According to De Wild’s notes, his remark had to do with sixteen Wacker Van Goghs that had been brought together in the Nationalgalerie in early 1929 at the time of the Van Gogh exhibition. De Wild wrote that Justi expressed reservations about Two Poplars and said that it was good, much better than the other Wacker Van Goghs.47 Was this Justi’s response to Scherjon’s blackmail? None of the

. Tuesday, April , . Justi, standing, provides an explanation of The Sower. Scherjon, center front, had warned Justi behind the scenes not to deny the authenticity of Two Poplars (F ) in court. If he did, Scherjon threatened to declare that three Van Goghs in the Nationalgalerie were fakes.

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Dutch and German newspapers mentioned Justi’s reticence with regard to the authenticity of the canvas. De Wild’s account is probably correct: Justi limited himself to sixteen canvases.48 His reservations about Two Poplars, which was not in the Nationalgalerie in 1929, may not have been a recognition of authenticity as such, but it was striking nonetheless. Why did he single out this particular canvas? Did he yield to Scherjon’s blackmail after all? Perhaps. If that was the case, however, it sheds quite a different light on Bremmer’s compliment: it means Bremmer was not distancing himself from Scherjon’s blackmail but was rewarding Justi for his willingness to please. Another possibility is that Justi was hesitating, since Scherjon apparently had a very strong hand: references in Vincent’s letters; certificates of authenticity by the “aestheticians” Bremmer, De la Faille, Meier-Graefe, and Rosenhagen; fingerprints that were allegedly Van Gogh’s, identified by a police specialist; statements about the paint by the restorer Traas and the restorer/chemist Dr. De Wild; and cries of jubilation from the critics De Gruyter, Hammacher, Havelaar, and others. Justi told the president that he had a certain gift for telling the difference between genuine and fake, and had had years of experience in looking at paintings. He argued that there were blatantly obvious differences in composition, color, and brushwork between the genuine and the fake Van Goghs. When the president asked his opinion of the “approximately six paintings” that the Dutch experts had endorsed as genuine, Justi said he regarded them as fakes as well. In saying this, he increased the number of forged works to about 20, since Kröller-Müller’s Seascape and Matthiesen’s Self-Portrait (F 523) belonged to the sixteen that had been in the Nationalgalerie in early 1929.49 Justi did not mince words: Self-Portrait was one of the most hideous paintings he had ever seen. The president noted that there was an unbridgeable gap between Justi and Bremmer: scarcely one hour earlier Bremmer had praised this work as one of Vincent’s most beautiful color compositions.50 Justi responded sarcastically that Bremmer searched for the spirit of Van Gogh, and perhaps he had found traces of his spirit in this copy. This triggered a heated dispute between Justi and Bremmer that was cut short by the judge. At the request of Wacker’s lawyer, Eugen Spiro (born 1874), painter and chairman of the Berlin Secession, then made a statement. The defense said that the work of a painter can best be judged by one of his fellow artists.

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Very well, then, according to Spiro all the paintings condemned by Justi were unquestionably by Van Gogh. On the other hand, a canvas that Justi had called a masterpiece was actually quite weak. The public prosecutor then asked the judges to allow two other painters to testify as counter experts the following day. The court then heard from Donath, an accountant summoned by the public prosecutor to appear in court. His statement on the sketchy and incomprehensible bookkeeping kept by the Otto Wacker Gallery undermined Wacker’s credibility. The gallery had never been involved in the sale or purchase of paintings from Switzerland: there were no bills of lading. But such documents did exist for shipments from Düsseldorf, the home of Otto Wacker’s brother – the painter and restorer. Also missing were details about the source of the gallery’s capital, although large amounts had been transferred out to an untraceable destination via the Deutsche Bank. The statements made by De la Faille, Meier-Graefe, Rosenhagen, Bremmer, Scherjon, and Justi all agreed on one point: not all the Wacker Van Goghs could be attributed to the master. But they did not agree on the contention that all of them were forgeries. The conclusion drawn by De Maasbode: after so many contradictory opinions by the experts, Wacker could be sure of getting one leg acquitted.51 Wednesday, 13 April: Concealment This was the first day that the technical experts were asked to talk about their analyses. These speeches would not be interlaced with unwieldy concepts like feelings, intuition, signatures, line, and composition, but with concrete facts produced by the hard scientific analysis of fingerprints, paint, media, canvas, and X-rays. Garnier of the dactyloscopic service of the Utrecht police declared that he had found fingerprints on Two Poplars that had also been identified on undisputed canvases in the Kröller-Müller collection. All the fingerprints on all the canvases shared five points of agreement. According to the Berlin police commissioner Müller, this was not considered proof by international standards: “For an argument to have evidential value there must be at least twelve points of agreement, not five.” In addition, Müller had not found any fingerprints on the Wacker Van Goghs or Van Goghs in the Nationalgalerie.

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Now De Wild presented his findings. He focused on his analysis of genuine Van Goghs and took care to keep Matthiesen’s Self-Portrait, Dale’s SelfPortrait at the Easel, and Bremmer’s Haystacks out of the discussion. He first told the court that he had analyzed the chemical composition of the paint and media of two dubious Wacker Van Goghs – Two Poplars and Seascape at Saintes-Maries – and then of 22 Van Goghs whose authenticity was uncontested. The composition of the paint and medium was the same in all these canvases. “The conclusion that can be drawn from this is obvious,” wrote the NRC. According to the newspaper, De Wild said, “A number of paintings whose authenticity is being denied appear to have a high resin content in the paint.”52 The addition of resin, he explained, made the paint dry more quickly, something that was alien to Van Gogh’s way of working. This is what distinguished these works from the genuine Van Goghs. De Wild did not say which Van Goghs he analyzed whose “authenticity is being denied.” The judge and the defense did not ask him to be more specific, nor did the journalists. On the contrary, everyone praised his presentation. De Telegraaf of 19 April 1932 wrote that every Dutch expert who had participated in the trial wanted to prove himself right, but that De Wild was an exception: “Only the restorer Dr. de Wild remained completely professional and went no further than to justify his own scientific analysis. For this reason many found his statements disappointing, but no one doubted their objectivity.”53 In the last of a series of anonymous articles, Het Vaderland was the most thorough in reporting his statements and wrote that De Wild received compliments from the public prosecutor for his research, “ [...] who wished that all the experts had provided such clear-cut, confident results.” The article ends with this: “Scientific research can prove a great deal with unwavering certainty, but not everything can be proven in this world!”54 The writer of this hymn of praise – as we now know – was none other than De Wild himself.55 Did De Wild consciously focus all his attention on the genuine Van Goghs he had analyzed? It certainly looks like it. In doing so, he diverted attention from the number and identity of the fake works he had investigated. De Wild could have begun his presentation with all the works he had analyzed that were attributed to Vincent van Gogh. He then could have provided an overview of the results of his research: the names of the fake and genuine Van Goghs. That did not happen. What if the judges had asked him to be

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specific about the names and characteristics of all the fake works he had investigated? Would De Wild have openly discussed the spuriousness of Self-Portrait (F 385), Self-Portrait (F 521), Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523), Haystacks (F 625bis), and The Sower (F 691)? Or would he have withheld his findings about these paintings? All this belongs to the almost immeasurable realm of historical speculation. De Wild had three opportunities to tell the truth about Haystacks, SelfPortrait, and Self-Portrait at the Easel: in 1929, in response to Scherjon’s brochure; in March 1932, when Veth issued his publication; and finally one month later as an expert in court. All three times he chose to remain silent, and three times he carefully drew a veil over the truth about the property of Bremmer, the Matthiesen gallery, and Chester Dale. This situation would persist for many years to come. The questioning of the painters Eugen Spiro and Leo von König received little press coverage. Apparently what they said contained no new perspectives, although De Wild noted that the witness for the prosecution Van König thought Scherjon’s Two Poplars was “very beautiful.”56 According to Börsen-Courier of Berlin, he said it was “definitely genuine.”57 But the artist Kurt Wehlte, another witness for the prosecution, was the focus of total attention. He was a teacher of painting at the fine arts academy in Berlin and had taken X-rays of a few genuine and fake Van Goghs. He showed the judges some photos of the paintings, which at first glance looked like duplicates. Such was the case with the genuine and dubious paintings of The Sower (probably F 689 and the Wacker Van Gogh F 691 − HT). In all these photos, however, the same phenomenon was present, Wehlte explained. The X-rays of the genuine canvases produced a clear, vivid image while those of the dubious paintings revealed a jumble of lines. “In Wehlte’s words,” wrote the NRC, “the master painted with a steady hand, while the forger or copyist layered paint on top of paint until he achieved the desired result. The difference can clearly be seen in the photos of the genuine Van Gogh; there the painter was consciously heading towards his goal. In the other work the painting method is more hesitant and indecisive.”58 Without expressing any opinions about authenticity, he said it was inconceivable that the same painter would approach his work in such completely different ways. In the afternoon Dr. Ludwig Thormaehlen, curator of the Nationalgalerie and Geheimrat Justi’s foremost employee, was heard from. According to

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him, all the Wacker Van Goghs in the courtroom were fakes. The landscape paintings contained illogical elements and were made by someone who had never been at that location. The forger probably based them on drawings by Van Gogh but understood the drawings incorrectly. De Maasbode wrote, “In his talk, in which he concentrated on the paintings, he pointed out that the large painting of cypresses, whose authenticity is disputed, was painted with a kind of paint that Van Gogh never used. He declared all the paintings, including that of the cypresses, to be fakes.”59 The questioning of Thormaehlen lasted the entire afternoon and was interrupted by Scherjon, De Wild, and the defense. When a debate erupted between the defense lawyer and Dr. Thormaehlen over The Zouave, the chairman lost his patience and asked loudly, “Is there one single expert in the room who believes in the authenticity of The Zouave?” When no one answered, he asked the defense lawyer to terminate the debate.‘60

At the end of the session, the president stated that the technical experts could not come to an agreement on the canvases either, although they had unanimously concluded that eleven of the seventeen paintings present in the courtroom that day were forgeries.61 Thursday, 14 April: Arguments from the experts Hellmuth Ruhemann, chief restorer of the Staatliche Gemälde Galerie in Berlin, examined sixteen Wacker Van Goghs and concluded that eleven of them were fakes. He had X-rays taken of the dubious canvases and compared them with those of genuine Van Goghs. He said the forger had learned from his own work, for the later works have more in common with the originals by Van Gogh. The forger was constantly using different materials, and the thick brushstrokes that are so characteristic of Van Gogh were much too exaggerated. Ruhemann thought that Scherjon’s Two Poplars was much better than the other canvases, incidentally, and also abstained from judging Bremmer’s Haystacks.62 Two chemists from the state museums, E. Täuber and K. Brittner, testified as experts on the analyses they had each carried out on the composition of the paint used in the fake paintings. They came to the same conclusion:

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the paint contained resin.63 The accounts in the press are not very precise: which paintings did they examine? In his notes on Täuber’s testimony, De Wild wrote that he examined three genuine and three fake Van Goghs, but he does not say which ones. He wrote even less about Brittner’s investigation of the paintings. The archives of the Nationalgalerie contain a report by E. Täuber that he drew up a few days before the trial, in which he writes that genuine and fake Van Goghs were shown to him: “Five or six paintings in total.”64 He does not say which paintings these were. Saturday, 16 April: Closing arguments In his closing argument, the public prosecutor said that many people were surprised with the course of proceedings in Alt Moabit. The courtroom, he said, had been transformed into a kind of gallery where the genuine Van Goghs, taken from museum walls, stood out among the forgeries like jewels among shards of glass. All the proposals by the accused to increase the amount of evidence had been followed up on, and the court had even had experts brought to Berlin from the south of France and the Netherlands. The experts’ statements had taken up a great deal of trial time due to the unusual subject. The public prosecutor drew a distinction between the statements made by the aestheticians – who were led by their feelings and of whom Bremmer was the leading example – and the chemists and art scholars, whose chief representative was Justi. The prosecutor ruled out the possibility that Van Gogh painted with resin. To do so would have been artistic suicide, since such paint crumbles after just a few years: “[...] in 22 canvases examined by Dr. de Wild, the expert par excellence, no traces of resin were found,” wrote the Nieuwe Courant in its coverage of the prosecutor’s argument. The prosecutor concurred unreservedly with Justi’s statement and contended that in eleven of the sixteen Wacker Van Goghs present in the courtroom there wasn’t the slightest reason to doubt that they were forgeries. It was impossible to say with a resounding “yes” that all the paintings were fakes, but there was no question that a substantial number of them were. Then there was the question of Wacker’s prior knowledge. The public prosecutor examined all the facts that had been presented during the trial regarding the provenance of the Van Goghs: the mysterious Russian, the

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cancelled meeting, the statement of the Russian authorities, the chemical analysis, etc. He demanded a prison sentence of a year and a half, with two weeks for falsification of documents, fraud, and breach of property rights. Wacker had inflicted a great deal of damage on the German art trade with his forgeries and ought to be sent to jail, but the absence of a criminal record could be seen as mitigating circumstances. The defense lawyer thought the evidence of Wacker’s prior knowledge that the Van Goghs were forgeries was insufficient, and he blamed the entire affair on the jealousy of fellow art dealers. Wacker had always asked the opinion of experts: six experts had written no less than 66 certificates of authenticity for his Van Goghs. It was true that some of them had reversed their opinions, but that could not be blamed on Wacker; it merely said something about their own competence. The defense lawyer had nothing but praise for Bremmer. He did not want to detract from his testimony, he said, but both Bremmer and Scherjon had elevated Van Gogh to such lofty heights that they regarded the less successful paintings of their national hero as forgeries. Meier-Graefe was like an oyster: he crept back into his shell of doubt whenever an unambiguous judgment was asked of him. De la Faille was the Van Gogh numbers man, not an expert. For a while, the defense lawyer had suspected that De la Faille had initiated his action against Otto Wacker after it appeared that he would no longer be able to sell his paintings. But the lawyer saved the vials of his wrath for Justi. Justi did not know the first thing about Van Gogh, as experts in the German art world had attested. Most of the Wacker Van Goghs were not signed, so they could not be seen as falsified documents. The real culprit was De la Faille, who first regarded all the works as genuine and then declared they were fakes. It was he who should have been on trial, not Otto Wacker. Tuesday, 19 April: Judgment Following the defense of the experts, the Dutch press hinted at acquittal for want of proof, but it all turned out quite differently. The court convicted Otto Wacker to one year’s imprisonment for continuing fraud, partly in connection with serious falsification of documents. He was acquitted of the charge of breach of property rights.

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The court found the story of the Russian completely illogical, nonsensical, and untrue. After hearing the statements of critics, dealers, historians, and painters, it concluded that there was full agreement on the spuriousness of eleven paintings. The grounds of the judgment read as follows: The court found the assessment of the expert De la Faille, who first decided all the works were genuine, later decided they were all fakes, and finally concluded that five were genuine, of little value. By contrast, the Dutch experts Bremmer and Scherjon made statements by which they were able to establish the belief that they possess a thorough knowledge of Van Gogh’s nature and art, but the court could not avoid the impression that in their very understandable enthusiasm for the great son of their country, both these gentlemen assess everything connected with him quite differently than others do. Bearing these circumstances in mind, along with the statements made by art critics Justi, Thormaehlen, and Ruhemann, as well as the scientific analyses of other experts, and in view of its own skill in passing judgment, the court also hold four other paintings to be forgeries which the Dutch experts consider genuine. With regard to two other paintings that are of substantially higher quality, the court has not ruled out the possibility that they are genuine, to the benefit of the accused. [...] Concerning the paintings that were not made available for use in the courtroom, the court declares two genuine and all the others forgeries. Even if a genuine painting should be found among the so-called forged paintings, it would not influence the court’s opinion with regard to the whole.65

The Berliner Börsen-Courier, from which this text was taken, did not name the titles or F numbers of the paintings, nor did any of the other German newspapers. But there is an interesting difference between them and the Dutch newspapers. The NRC clarified the sentence contained in the judgment concerning the “two canvases of substantially higher quality” by parenthetically mentioning the titles of two paintings: Haystacks and Two Poplars. The question is whether the judgment actually included these titles by name or whether the NRC correspondent added them, and if so, whether he or she did so on the instructions of others. I suspect it was a journalistic addition. There is no way we can be sure, but in the judgment of the case as heard in appellate court, which was essentially identical to the judgment cited here and fragments of which were published in the

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March 1933 issue of Kunst und Künstler, no titles or F numbers were mentioned either. 66 Then there is the court decision on the paintings that were not in the courtroom, two of which were genuine. No journalist took the liberty of filling in the titles, but for those interested in the case that was really not a drawback. They could derive comfort from the decision and see it as protection for their own cherished property. Indeed, if anyone asked, they could always explain that the judges had declared it genuine. It is known that Seascape and Self-Portrait at the Easel were not in Germany at the time of the trial. Most of the Wacker Van Goghs that were not present at the trial, according to the judgment, were in Germany. Very well then, De Wild had declared that Seascape, which was in The Hague, was a genuine Van Gogh – that the paint contained no resin, unlike that of the fake Van Goghs. He had said nothing about resin in Self-Portrait at the Easel, which was in New York. That makes both canvases candidates for the two further unidentified genuine Wacker Van Goghs. Moreover, the judgment left open the possibility that a few more genuine canvases might be among the approximately fifteen that were not present at the trial. The judges did not attach much value to the assessments of the aestheticians. They had been sidelined because the judges regarded themselves as qualified enough to decide on matters of authenticity. The three judges had no background as art experts: the chairman was an appeals judge, a lawyer. The lay judges were an innkeeper and a businessman.67 It must have been painful for De la Faille, the compiler of the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, to be dropped as an expert by the judges while his opponents were given the benefit of the doubt from the very beginning. It may have been cold comfort for De la Faille that the judgment did not give Bremmer and Scherjon everything they wanted (in their view the Van Goghs from the Otto Wacker gallery included nine genuine works), but De la Faille’s reversal and De Wild’s concealment left the “core theory” standing, which held that fake Van Goghs had been collected around a core of genuine works. The judges upheld that theory. A few days after the trial, father and son Mak van Waay, De la Faille’s former partners at the A. Mak auction house, poured oil on the flames by announcing that they were terminating their relationship with De la Faille. Referring to Veth’s Schoon schip!, they distanced themselves from De la

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Faille’s transactions with Wacker. De la Faille had conducted those transactions entirely without them. They also had nothing to do with De la Faille’s assessments mentioned in the brochure, and “positively refuse to accept any liability for whatever Mr. Baart de la Faille is said to have declared or done according to the brochure Schoon schip!”68 Nationalism Wacker (“I’m innocent”) and the public prosecutor (“the sentence is too light”) fought the judgment, and on 18 October 1932, the appeals trial began. It would drag on for more than six weeks and comprise twelve sessions, and the judgment, delivered on 6 December, would not be good news for Wacker: a prison sentence of one year and seven months and a 30,000-mark fine or 300 days’ imprisonment, the three-year loss of civil rights, and the costs of the action. Wacker would be taken into custody immediately on account of the risk of escape. The ruling of the court on appeal left Bremmer’s core theory intact. The sessions of the appeals trial were a repeat of the same moves. It could hardly have been otherwise: for the most part the trial drew on the same witnesses and experts (De Wild was substituted by the restorer J.C. Traas), who were out to protect their reputations and interests. No doubt they did their best to tighten up their arguments, but none of them produced any facts that might have given the case a different twist. Once again, there was Wacker with his silence about the mysterious Russian, his suspect bookkeeping and, as was to be expected, the elaborate but contradictory statements of the experts. Nevertheless, there was one striking difference. In April, the opposing parties had still offered each other gestures of good will, such as Bremmer complimenting Justi on his controversial purchase of Daubigny’s Garden. In reporting on the April proceedings, De Telegraaf had written, “In general, the German experts were of a considerably higher caliber than the Dutch. With one exception, the Dutch gentlemen took the side of the defense.”69 (The exception was De Wild, whom the newspaper praised for his objectivity.) This indulgent attitude among the experts, witnesses, and journalists had almost entirely disappeared by late 1932. The Dutch press detected bitterness over the lack of understanding for the arguments of the Dutch experts. An intensification of the conflict was also discerned,

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which was expressed in unrestrained nationalistic rhetoric: Holland against Germany. In April the flag-waving had been dormant, as when Bremmer was not shown enough respect by the German experts and newspapers, according to the Dutch press. In the appeals trial, an inextricable part of the sparring match was proving one was right. The political climate in Germany undoubtedly played a role in this shift, for between the trial in April and the appeal in November a political upheaval had taken place there, intensified by the crisis that had been triggered by the stock market crash of 1929. The economic decline went hand in hand with increasing political violence. Conservatives, National Socialists, and Communists fought each other tooth and nail, although they were in full agreement on one point: parliamentary democracy had to be dispensed with immediately. Voices for moderation and compromise

. The Sower (F ), . x  cm., a Van Gogh from the Otto Wacker gallery that De la Faille, Bremmer and Scherjon all declared a forgery. “ [...] people in Holland don’t strut and march like that when they sow!” was what Engineer V.W. van Gogh said in his comment on the spuriousness of the Wacker Van Gogh The Sower (F ) during the Otto Wacker appeals trial in November .

. Nazi election poster, .

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fell silent. In the presidential elections of 13 March 1932, the conservative Von Hindenburg received 18.5 million votes and Hitler 11.5 million. In the parliamentary elections held that July, the Nazis achieved a resounding electoral victory. They lost some of their gains in the parliamentary elections of 6 November, but they were still the largest party.70 Germany was adrift and once again fell under the spell of aggressive nationalism. In May 1932 the Reichsverband Bildender Künstler Deutschlands (National League of German Artists) called for an emergency decree to limit public funds being spent on the work of a dead, non-German artist to 10,000 marks. This was the League’s total rejection of the purchase of Van Gogh’s Daubigny’s Garden, for which Justi had paid 240,000 marks three years earlier.71 The turning tide could mainly be read in the attitude of Dutch journalists and experts, who reacted by identifying entirely with their flag. It was Scherjon who fired the first shot. Wackerian scholarship In October 1932, prior to the appeals trial, Scherjon published his Catalogue des Tableaux par Vincent van Gogh décrits dans ses lettres. Périodes: St. Rémy et Auvers sur Oise (Catalogue of the Paintings of Vincent van Gogh Described in his Letters. Periods: St. Rémy and Auvers sur Oise). No less than three forewords grace the book, written by Scherjon, Bremmer, and De la Faille. The latter praised Scherjon for going to such great lengths to purify Van Gogh’s work. Scherjon in turn praised De la Faille for the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné. Bremmer economically stated that the last word on Van Gogh’s oeuvre had not yet been said. De Groene Amsterdammer announced the publication of the catalogue and spoke of tres faciunt collegium, a remarkable company, and also made mention of Veth’s brochure.72 Observers at the Wacker trial would hardly have been surprised to learn that Self-Portrait at the Easel, Haystacks, Two Poplars, Self-Portrait, and the five other paintings from the Wacker gallery were considered genuine by Bremmer and Scherjon because according to their special reading all appeared to have been mentioned in the Van Gogh letters. So these paintings were pictured in Scherjon’s catalogue as well. Scherjon also used his catalogue to carry out the threat he had made to Justi in April, and in quite a unique way. According to Scherjon’s read-

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ing, Vincent’s letters do not say a thing about the three Van Gogh paintings owned by the Nationalgalerie – Lovers (F 485), The Harvest (F 628), and Daubigny’s Garden (F 776). Consequently, they are not depicted in the catalogue.73 The other version of Daubigny’s Garden (F 777), owned by the Swiss collector R. Staechelin, is included, however, and the citations from Vincent’s letters supposedly suggest that the master painted the scene only once. The tenor of Scherjon’s catalogue is clear. Justi may regard himself as a Van Gogh authority, but he is entirely unworthy of the name. He did not begin to appreciate Van Gogh’s artistic value until others in the Netherlands and Germany had made the discovery first; actually he was just following the crowd, someone who did not have a clue about the real Van Gogh, since all three of the paintings he bought were fakes. Justi responded promptly with an article in Museum der Gegenwart entitled “Wackerian scholarship,” which was dripping with sarcasm, contending that Scherjon did not know how to read, quote, or look. Justi closely examined Scherjon’s selective reading of Vincent’s letters and argued that his defense of the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs was totally without basis. He concluded that Van Gogh was the greatest Dutch painter in centuries, and that the scorn heaped on the bungling Berlin experts (read: Meier-Graefe and Rosenhagen) was to be expected. But “the fact that these pathetic forgeries would be defended from Holland, of all places – and by what means! – came as a great surprise.”74 The Dutch press showed little interest in the content of Justi’s criticism but pounced on his sarcastic language. De Gruyter praised Scherjon’s catalogue in Het Vaderland – “a superb and useful work” – and condemned Justi’s criticism: “What Justi writes about the Chester Dale portrait is so exceedingly shallow and misleading that it boggles the mind.” He called Justi’s attitude towards Scherjon “scandalous” and “absurd.”75 Zwartendijk also denounced Justi’s criticism and commended Scherjon, but she was critical of the method of using Vincent’s letters to prove authenticity. She expected little from such an approach – too many interpretations were possible – and had just as little confidence in the intuition of the “aestheticians,” i.e., Meier-Graefe, Rosenhagen, Bremmer, Scherjon, and De la Faille. The judges should have relied more heavily on the statements of chemists and on the X-rays, she said, since they “are completely disinterested.”76 De Wild’s concealment proved to be effective.

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“Conspiracy” The Algemeen Handelsblad saw Justi’s consistent rejection of all the Wacker Van Goghs as a conspiracy hatched by the Nationalgalerie and the German art scholars and dealers. Their first goal was to discredit Scherjon, the “ausländischen Kunsthändler,” who could have made things difficult for the German art scholars with his scientific evidence, in order to eliminate him as an expert. Once this had happened, half the battle would be won. All that remained was to convince the court that Bremmer was an artistic dreamer, a “Schwärmer” [zealot, HT] who could speak very movingly about Vincent’s art but whose opinions were totally lacking in value from a scholarly point of view [...] For a few days we could only suspect who the driving force was behind this conspiracy − nothing could be proven. But now we know!77

This is followed by a few more paragraphs, equally agitated in tone and without any persuasive facts, and finally the revelation that Justi was the instigator of the conspiracy. According to the newspaper, Scherjon’s vigorous response was the conspiracy’s death blow. Almost the entire German press corps gave the appeals trial a miss, but the Dutch press were there in force. They praised the presentations of the Dutchmen Scherjon, Garnier, Bremmer, and Traas, and criticized those of Justi, Thormaelen, Wehlte, and other German experts. According to Bremmer, you had to be a Dutchman to judge the work of Van Gogh: “This has nothing to do with nationalism. We Dutchmen are simply the purest race in the world.”78 Engineer Van Gogh, who almost never voiced his opinions about authenticity, recognized the hand of a German forger in a Wacker Van Gogh, The Sower, since “people in Holland don’t strut and march like that when they sow!”79 These and similar comments may be good indications of the lethargy people were feeling because of the lengthy trial, of their boredom at having to hear the same arguments all over again, their irritability resulting from the day-long sessions, and their dismay at the sight of the S.A. in the streets of Berlin. Even so, the mood among the journalists, witnesses, and experts was more intense than it had been six months before. Until May 1932, reports from the Dutch and the German press on

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the Wacker affair had been characterized by a mixture of humor and gravity. The humor was featured in regular columns, such as the one written by Kurt Tucholsky’s alter ego, Kasper Hauser: Van Gogh painted a total of 476 canvases; 481 of them are hanging in Switzerland – the rest are in German hands.80

There were cartoons, satirical poems, street humor: Germans, buy only German Van Goghs!81

By the fall there was hardly any attempt to play things down; the ironic tone had disappeared. Sure, De la Faille was now being graciously praised as the expert who had the courage to admit his own mistakes and was taken back into the Dutch fold. The Algemeen Handelsblad and Het Vaderland offered him protection from the public prosecutor, who came right out and asked De la Faille if he had been pressured to revise his opinion of the Wacker Van Goghs: And when the witness began a rather long-winded answer, that he had taken a close look at one of these canvases, the Two Poplars, in the hotel room of Mr. Scherjon, and naturally had discussed the merits and demerits with Mr. Scherjon (who is the owner of this painting), the prosecutor raised his voice, emphatically reminded him of the meaning of his oath, and asked him point blank, “Was it aesthetic or commercial motives that caused you to change your opinion about this painting?” A flurry of emotion swept through the courtroom. From the bench of Dutch experts a native expletive was heard, followed by an indignant “This is too much!” Wacker’s defense lawyer had jumped to his feet. And in the painful silence that fell, Mr. Baart de la Faille, scarlet with rage, thundered “Aesthetic!”82

The anger of a convert or the feigned agitation of a theater-lover? The public prosecutor was satisfied with this answer. After the session he even supposedly told De la Faille that he had phrased the question harshly in order to quash any rumors that may have been making the rounds.83 During the appeals trial De la Faille was only heard as a witness. In that role he was a pawn in the hands of Bremmer and Scherjon: his conversion

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on 11 April had strengthened belief in the infallibility of Bremmer’s intuition regarding authentic Van Goghs, and his foreword in Scherjon’s catalogue had legitimized Scherjon’s exegesis of Vincent’s letters and his ability to distinguish genuine from fake. When asked, De la Faille let it be known that he disagreed with the gentlemen over the occasional Wacker Van Gogh, but it all sounded like the powerless fuming of an unstable devotee. So the role he played in the Berlin production in October and November was a minor one. At the same time, he had the lead in a play in Amsterdam that was partly seen as a reprise of the Wacker affair: the Chanterou affair. Chanterou On 11 October, the firm of A. Mak, of which De la Faille was now the only director, conducted a sale of over 90 modern French paintings. More than 60 of them were the property of a certain Dr. L.J. of Brussels, who in turn had bought them from Raphael Chanterou, former secretary of the Salon d’Automne and founder of the L’Amicale des Artistes and Maison des Artistes, all located in Paris. According to the catalogue, some of the works had been given to Chanterou by the artists or their heirs as tokens of friendship. The sale catalogue listed paintings by Matisse, Chagal, De Chirico, Van Dongen, Utrillo, De Fresnay, Pascin, Dufy, Kisling, and others. The prices were relatively low. Almost all the works found new owners at the sale. The event was a financial success for De la Faille, who as auctioneer earned ten percent of the selling price. A few weeks later, the French magazine Comoedia cast doubt on the authenticity of the auctioned works.84 De Maasbode immediately picked up on the story and conducted a thorough investigation of the collector Raphael Chanterou in Paris. De la Faille was aghast at the daily revelations being printed in De Maasbode. As it turned out, Chanterou had never been the secretary of the Salon d’Automne. The L’Amicale des Artistes and Maison des Artistes which he had founded did not exist. In fact, almost no one in the Paris art world knew who he was. What’s more, dealers and artists denied the authenticity of most of the auctioned paintings. De Maasbode approached a few painters whose works were featured in the catalogue. Moise Kisling (1891-1953) flatly disavowed Self-Portrait of Kisling, which supposedly he had made. The signature was not his. Raoul Dufy (1877-

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1953) was astonished to see himself credited as the maker of three paintings: Landscape, View of a Village in Algeria, and Woman and Cow. He had never heard of Chanterou. Other artists reacted similarly. The story was carried by several other Dutch newspapers. “There are indications here of fraud on a grand scale,” wrote De Telegraaf of 17 November 1932, “and preliminary discussions are already taking place in advance of taking the case to court.”85 De la Faille issued a statement on the provenance of the paintings, which he had put on the market for the collector, the “Brussels doctor L.J.”: “I am convinced that an en bloc forgery of the entire collection is impossible. [...] A few may be forgeries, but contriving a cunning scheme to sell the work of 60 French masters – all of it forged – is out of the question.”86 He promised to conduct his own investigation of the provenance of the paintings, but the press beat him to it. De Maasbode discovered that hidden behind the Frenchman Raphael Chanterou was the Belgian Gabriel Dubois: not a collector but a restorer, who, with his wife and son-in-law, took great pleasure in the painting and selling of “old masters,” activities that put Dubois in intimate contact with the French legal system and earned him a thirteenmonth prison sentence. After making more inquiries, De Maasbode learned that the “Brussels collector Dr. L. Joux” was not a real collector but an eye doctor who allowed the destitute Dubois family to pay for medical treatment with paintings, supposedly by modern masters, and who also bought canvases from Dubois out of what he called a sense of piety.87 Now De la Faille was in a very tight spot. He did not doubt Joux’s integrity and asked him to take back all the paintings that proved to be inauthentic. Joux agreed. As De la Faille told Het Algemeen Handelsblad: I told this to the principal buyers, but it proved impossible to cancel the sale because many of them refused to release the paintings, one because he believed the painting he had bought to be genuine, a second because he had obtained the painting so cheaply that, genuine or fake, he wanted to keep it for what it was, and a third because he wanted to return a few paintings and keep the rest. 88

De la Faille then named the paintings whose authenticity had been established and expressed the hope that the artists who had been approached would take legal action against Chanterou. He himself bore no guilt, he felt, because an auctioneer is not a salesman and need not concern himself

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with properly documented statements of provenance: “Many people hand their goods over to agents so they can remain anonymous. I do my best to avoid anything that does not strike me as authentic.”89 He argued that with a profit of ten percent, an auction house could not be held responsible for the full purchase price. The journalist responded by pointing out that the buyer assesses his risk by going to an auction house with a good name. De la Faille concurred, which was why he prevailed upon Dr. L. Joux to annul the entire sale. Anarchy Het Volk urged the Dutch judicial authorities to take action: did De la Faille actually make an effort to convince himself of the paintings’ provenance, or did the French painters perhaps lie to him because of the publicity involved and in order to drive up the prices – had they in fact declared their own work to be forgeries? On 24 November 1932, the member of the Lower House of parliament for the Social Democratic Labor Party, J.H.A. Schaper, urged the government to intervene. The reputation of the Netherlands in the art world was in danger. He asked the Minister of Education, Arts, and Sciences, Jan Terpstra: Has the minister followed the events concerning the falsification of paintings, etchings, etc., at the Wacker trial in Berlin and the art sale conducted by the firm of A. Mak in Amsterdam? If so, is the minister not of the opinion that our country’s good name in the realm of art and commerce is being seriously damaged internationally by the practices of so-called “experts” and dealers in “art” who are motivated more by the love of gain than by any actual love of art? Is the minister prepared to launch an investigation of this matter, in consultation with his colleagues at the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and Justice if need be, to provoke legal action if necessary and if possible, and to publish the results?”90

In late December, the minister let it be known that while any repetition could indeed be harmful to the reputation of the Netherlands, a single case did not require immediate attention. He also said that he and his colleague at the Ministry of Justice were considering taking legal action. The Dutch

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and Belgian legal authorities then got in on the act. The case dragged on for months and finally died out. De Telegraaf then seized on all the commotion arising from the Chanterou case. It asked dealers and auctioneers if they should not be held legally responsible for the authenticity of the art and antiques that they sell as agents or owners. The responses exposed a sharp disagreement in legal interpretation: De la Faille thought the auctioneer or commissioning authority was not legally responsible, and he was backed by the cream of the crop, including J. Goudstikker, J.H. De Bois, and A. Vecht. There were also art dealers who wanted to see some regulation in the question of liability but wanted to limit it to a period of one year, since no one can be held liable forever. According to the newspaper, very different provisions applied in different parts of the country, provisions that protected the seller and not the buyer. The firm of Huinck & Scherjon took a sly dig at De la Faille: “[We] consider it desirable that something be done about the so-called third-rate and stage-managed auctions, where usually not a single painting sold with a big name attached is actually ‘genuine.’” As De Telegraaf concluded, “[...] full-blown anarchy has been unleashed in the Netherlands in this regard.”91 This modest questionnaire conducted by De Telegraaf was one of the few times during the period between the wars that dealers openly reflected on their responsibility toward buyers. Annus miserabilis By the end of 1932 De la Faille was a pitiable man. It was his annus miserabilis. In the art world he was known as the genuine-fake-genuine Van Gogh expert, and his judgment had come full circle within the space of four years. For a few days in April – at the start of the Otto Wacker trial – he oscillated between following his conscience and denying it, but in the end he decided to go along with those who in countless ways had opposed him: Scherjon, Kröller-Müller, De Gruyter, Veth, and many others. In doing so, he was in fact recognizing the authority of the one expert who had not deigned to involve himself in the discussion at all: Bremmer. There was the repudiation of the Berlin court, the moribund existence of his brainchild – Friends of Vincent van Gogh – the open distancing by his former partners and, to top it all off, the Chanterou affair.92 He was the subject of derision, the target of

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ad hominem attacks, the focus of indignation in the Lower House, and the cause for action by the legal authorities. It was a tragic aspect of his personality that he energetically launched his struggle for a cause, pursued it with full conviction, increased the tempo, defied all sneers and criticism, and even appeared to take some pleasure in defending his own opinions against the prevailing current – then after four years he abruptly called to a halt his open battle against forged Van Goghs and adopted the attitude of a convert to the position he had once so vigorously opposed. If De la Faille had only been an egotistical and calculating personality, someone out to protect his own interest or to save his own skin, he would have dropped the case of art dealer Otto Wacker’s fake Van Goghs. But his principles, impulsiveness, and pugnacity pushed him along, far past the point at which he could have left the field of battle with minor personal and professional injuries.

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6

Retaliation

“The walking wounded” is what the critic Albert Plasschaert called Bremmer and De la Faille after their performance in Berlin. According to Plasschaert, Bremmer had been toppled from his pedestal. He had unreservedly sided with a dealer who came to admit that some of his goods were fakes, had ignored the vague provenance of the disputed canvases, and had based his assessment on aesthetics alone. It was a game with high stakes, and even after all those years he had been forced to defend himself to the hilt. But his performance had been less than convincing. For Plasschaert it was patently obvious that Bremmer had not traveled all the way to Berlin just to separate the genuine Van Goghs from the fakes: It had to do with gaining authority over a docile herd. For Bremmer it was all about the purpose of his life and to a certain extent his future (which was connected to that of Scherjon and others). For if this commercial aesthetician were to lose his advisory position, how he would tumble in the eyes of all those who willingly accept his pedantic analysis and despotism just for the sake of the purchasing power he represents! It was all about that authority, which has clearly lost some of its power, and that was why Van Gogh only seemed to be of primary importance to Bremmer at this trial. Actually he was secondary.

And what about De la Faille’s unexpected change of heart as he stood before the judges? “Either De la Faille is a man whose judgment is overly dependent on feelings – it simply floats around and is so mercurial that it almost resembles opportunism – or there is a visual ignorance in his criticism that makes it easy for him to move in the opposite direction, and at the most critical moment!” Actually, said Plasschaert, all the Dutchmen returned from Berlin in a damaged state, with one exception: “the chemist

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De Wild, who only had to repeat his investigations and the conclusions he had drawn.”1 Plasschaert’s comments about Bremmer and De la Faille in De Groene Amsterdammer of 23 April 1932 contained a great deal of truth, yet today, after so many years, we can say that he was wrong in his assessment of De Wild. He was right to point out that it all boiled down to Bremmer’s authority. For this reason it has been argued that the Wacker affair was Bremmer’s Waterloo as an expert; if so, Plasschaert must have been a fortune teller.2 Can his comments be taken as a serious prophecy? Did Bremmer really suffer a loss of authority as a result of the Wacker affair, and if so, in what respect and to what extent? But more particularly: was he deposed as a Van Gogh expert? And De la Faille? Plasschaert degraded him as a Van Gogh expert, and according to some writers the Wacker trial did irreparable damage to his reputation. But is this true?3 In this chapter we will examine the effect that the trial in Berlin had on these two leading figures – Bremmer and De la Faille – based on a few Wacker Van Goghs. As we shall see, retaliation trumped reason when the authenticity of Bremmer’s Wacker Van Gogh Haystacks (F 625bis) was called into question. Patronage Did Bremmer suffer a loss of authority after Wacker? Yes, but by no means as abruptly as Plasschaert expected: not in all the roles he played, and not as a result of the Wacker affair. As the thirties passed he steadily lost influence as a patron, dealer, and critic, but for different reasons. Bremmer derived much of his power in the Dutch art world from his position as advisor to the Kröllers, which until 1932 was a very profitable activity. Bremmer’s invoices for the years 1930 and 1931 are stored in the archives of the KröllerMüller Museum. He enjoyed a fixed annual income of 3,000 guilders (about € 25,000 at today’s price level). He also received an allowance of about the same amount to cover attendance at art sales and other expenses.4 No small sum at the time. At least as important for him were the indirect benefits. Being the Kröller’s advisor made him an esteemed guest among dealers and artists. Although the terms of his agreement with the Kröllers prevented him from accepting any commission from dealers for purchases made on behalf of their collection, Balk calculated that the Paris art dealer Paul Rosenberg

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systematically charged less for works of art that Bremmer kept himself than for works paid for by the Kröllers. For every 100 guilders that they paid to Rosenberg, Bremmer paid 30 to 50 guilders for a comparable work.5 Other than this, few sources have survived that might contain evidence of the indirect benefit Bremmer enjoyed as advisor to the Kröllers. The agreements with Wacker for 1928-1929, however, also show that Bremmer paid considerably less for a Wacker Van Gogh than Kröller: 8,000 as opposed to 18,000 guilders respectively. In 1932 the Kröllers stopped buying art for financial reasons, and Bremmer’s position as paid advisory came to an end. In their agreement with the Dutch state, the Kröllers made it clear that the painting collection formed a complete whole: no works could ever be added to it. That made the collection effectively a personification of Helene KröllerMüller, with the Dutch state acting as guardian of the works of art and ultimately of her memory. This arrangement was the crown of Bremmer’s work. Now his ideas and taste would assume a definite shape, and the state would never sell off the collection. But this recognition also had its drawbacks. Since no one like the Kröllers offered to employ him after 1932, he ceased being the kind of broker in money and favors that he had been for dealers, artists, and others. There was a more general basis for Bremmer’s shrinking role as patron, however. The Netherlands remained in the grip of the Depression much longer than other capitalist countries, which had a prolonged negative effect on the art trade. Bremmer was not able to sell as much of his artists’ work to course participants and collectors during the thirties, and consequently his visits to art sales, art dealers, and studios became less relevant. For example, Bremmer had dozens of paintings in stock by one of his protégés, Henri Daalhoff, which he could no longer sell at twenties’ prices. Finally he was forced to sell them far below the purchase price. Nor was he getting any younger: in 1936 he passed his 65th year. His plan was to enlist his younger brother-in-law to teach the courses in practical aesthetics that had kept him traveling around the country for so many years. Infallible Bremmer was not finished as a Van Gogh expert after the Wacker affair. German and Dutch journalists did not drop him, either during the first trial or during the appeals in October and November 1932. Sly digs such

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as those made by cartoonist Piet van der Hem could be seen as amusing and probably did little to upset him or his associates. In her unpublished biography H.P. Bremmer, dienaar der kunst, Bremmer’s wife wrote that the essence of the trial had had little impact on “the crowds.” Bremmer’s “infallible insight” into Van Gogh the man and artist had held its ground, she wrote, a fact that was fully acknowledged by Meier-Graefe and the press.6 The biography constitutes the reflections of an almost uncritical, admiring wife, which gives it a definite bias, but as far as I can tell it is consistent with what was being written about her husband at that time.7 Art critics, with the exception of Plasschaert, did not try to knock Bremmer down. In a 1940 retrospective of the Wacker trial, De Tijd praised Bremmer’s performance: “The total impression was that the Dutch experts were more ‘forewarned’ and cautious in their assessment than the German.”8 What Bremmer’s extensive circle of associates – the dealers, collectors, course participants, and artists – thought of his performance, however, is not known. The faithful among them would have expected the court to recognize as genuine all eight (actually nine, as only a few knew) of the Wacker canvases that he had declared as such. Instead, only four made it to the finish line. But both Bremmer’s and the court’s assessments held open the possibility that a few Wacker Van Goghs could still be admitted to the master’s oeuvre. Moreover, the Berlin judges praised Bremmer’s great insight into Van Gogh’s soul. They may not have endorsed him one hundred percent, but they did accept his core theory, thereby granting it legal legitimacy. Anyone who had trusted Bremmer for many years could reason that the German judges did not really understand Van Gogh at all, and that Bremmer would be proven right in the end. Trust in Bremmer’s eye was confirmed in 1936 when a collector asked him for certificates of authenticity for five paintings by Van Gogh. The collector had recently bought them from the widow of a cousin of the Maris brothers. Bremmer declared them all forgeries. The duped collector tried to recover his money from Mrs. Maris-Hubert, and when that failed he went into litigation in The Hague.9 There are numerous other incidents that reflect Bremmer’s continued credibility as a Van Gogh expert. A good example is the sale of the Wacker Van Goghs Self-Portrait (F 385) and Cypresses (F 614) in the Netherlands between 1928 and 1939. De la Faille regarded both canvases as fakes. He rejected them in the Supplément (December 1928) and

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Les faux Van Gogh (January 1930), and he did not revise his judgment during the trial in Berlin. Bremmer, on the other hand, said they were genuine. In 1929, the Matthiesen Gallery had attempted to have the writ of attachment lifted that had been placed on both canvases by the courts, but to no avail. The gallery had almost found a buyer in Mrs. Kröller-Müller, but the courts refused to release the canvases in view of the upcoming trial. In March 1933 the public prosecutor in Berlin withdrew the attachment and the paintings were sent to Amsterdam. The Huinck & Scherjon gallery then bought them from Matthiesen.10 One piquant detail: according to the “Exportvaluta-Erklärung,” which was signed by someone from the Nationalgalerie, the sale concerned a consignment on approval of “Two paintings supposedly by Van Gogh.”11 This was consistent with the assessment of museum director Justi and his people. As a result, Huinck & Scherjon paid only a fraction of the export tax that would have been charged if the Van Goghs had been genuine. Unfortunately, history does not tell us whether the Huinck & Scherjon gallery complained about the use of the word “supposedly” in the declaration, but they did market it in the Netherlands as a real Van Gogh. De Gruyter praised both paintings in Het Vaderland of June 1933: “I have a higher opinion of this Cypresses than the Monticelli-like version (although admirable) in Mrs. Kröller-Müller’s collection [...].” He described Cypresses (F 614) as agitated, rumbling, and tormented: “One senses in it the approaching end. The painting developed into a complete vision, a symphony in color and line, disturbing and sublime.”12 The canvas made its way to the collection of Van Deventer and then on to that of W. van Beuningen. During the Wacker trial, Justi had declared Self-Portrait (F 385) to be fake – as fake as fake could be. De Wild said nothing about it in his paint analysis, but Bremmer had given it a rave review. One year later, after the canvas had been cleaned by restorer J.C. Traas and was being shown by Huinck & Scherjon, De Gruyter sang its praises. He confessed to once having doubted its authenticity, but now he was abandoning all misgivings: “[...] not only is it as genuine as gold, but I would even call it a brilliant Van Gogh, attesting to an ingenious, expressive clarity of observation and artistic rendering that rules out all doubt concerning the maker. This restrained, probing vision can only be Van Gogh’s. Painted with fervor and simplicity, and marvelous in its color, but with a radiantly light coloration that tends toward the monochrome and is difficult to photograph, even after having been cleaned.”13

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The praise in the newspapers, and the sale of Wacker Van Goghs, would not have been possible without Bremmer’s blessing. Based on about 1,200 surviving duplicates of certificates of authenticity from 1941-1955, Hildelies Balk has determined that Bremmer designated 45 works as Van Goghs during that period. She rightly concludes that the uncertainty in the art world resulting from the case against Otto Wacker seems to have done Bremmer more good than harm.14 The trust that Bremmer’s circle placed in his ability to judge between genuine and fake Van Goghs was to be put to the test a few more times, but during the thirties and forties it would not be fundamentally harmed. Only after his death in 1956 would all the Wacker Van Goghs be struck from the list of genuine works. The most important indication of Bremmer’s great influence in the question of authenticity was provided by a trio of Van Gogh catalogues in which the Wacker Van Goghs would play a prominent role. Compiled by Scherjon and De Gruyter; De la Faille; and the newly built Rijksmuseum KröllerMüller; the catalogues would also constitute a source of worry for Bremmer. As we shall see, the price he unwittingly paid to maintain his authority was high: his own Wacker Van Gogh Haystacks became unmarketable. Disciple The Wacker and Chanterou affairs were decidedly harmful to De la Faille’s position as an art expert. His job as director of the A. Mak auction house was over. He traveled through Czechoslovakia and Yugoslavia for the Dutch Tourist Information Bureau and gave slide show lectures on the Zuiderzee Works, flower bulb cultivation, and Vincent van Gogh. He earned his living as a journalist and did travelogues in the Netherlands and radio talk shows. He dedicated himself to what are now called “worthy causes”: he directed stage plays for the Jonge Vrouwen Gilde (a young women’s theatrical troupe) to benefit work camps for unemployed youth; he was a member of the committee to honor the writer Frederik van Eeden and a member of the Netherlands-Czechoslovakia Society, raising his voice in protest when France and England bargained Czechoslovakia away to Hitler. He was active on many fronts, as he had been in his earlier years, but the art trade became less important. Was it because of Wacker and Chanterou? Perhaps, but the economic crisis, which affected many in the Dutch art world, makes

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his position difficult to assess. He was not the only one who was forced to reduce or terminate his activity in the art market. In the eyes of Plasschaert, Engineer Van Gogh, and others, the trial in Berlin had caused De la Faille’s downfall. Bremmer and De la Faille were rivals, and not only when it came to the question of authenticity. With his knowledge of Van Gogh’s French period, De la Faille wanted to establish himself as a specialist in that area. But in 1932, De la Faille the Francophile was compelled to recognize Bremmer as his superior in his own specialty (the contested canvases of Otto Wacker would all come from Van Gogh’s French period) – and without Bremmer having written a systematic publication on the subject. Nor did Bremmer have to undertake such a project, since that job fell to others during the thirties, De la Faille among them. De la Faille could still qualify as a Van Gogh expert, despite Wacker. His trump card was the catalogue raisonné. No one else had such a work on the master to his name. The 1928 catalogue was sold out, but international demand for exhibitions on Vincent van Gogh and reproductions of his paintings and drawings continued unabated, as did interest in his life story. The German Van Gogh world gradually came to a standstill as a result of the Nazi regime. Exhibitions were rare. Hermann Göring wanted to sell off all the Van Goghs in German museums, but new collectors in Germany were not forthcoming. This situation was largely offset by increasing American interest, however. In 1935 Alfred H. Barr, Jr., the passionate director of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, organized the first extensive Van Gogh exhibition in the United States. The 127 paintings and drawings – more than half from the Kröller-Müller collection – attracted enormous interest, partly thanks to Barr’s publicity skills: 123,339 visitors in New York in six weeks’ time and 227,540 in San Francisco. According to some people in the American art world, Van Gogh was passé, but for many Americans, becoming acquainted with the work of the “mad Dutch artist” was an unforgettable experience. Critics praised it unanimously, journalists abandoned all doubts, and dealers and collectors watched as the market value steadily increased.15 The American Van Gogh exhibition also stimulated the demand for an overview of Vincent’s work. De la Faille, with all the data and photographs in his possession, started work on a new edition of the catalogue raisonné. Scherjon and De Gruyter were also eager to take advantage of this new market by issuing catalogues.

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Doubt In 1937 Scherjon and De Gruyter published Vincent van Gogh’s Great Period: Arles, St. Rémy and Auvers-sur-Oise (Complete catalogue), that is, paintings from the period that De la Faille regarded as his specialty. The writers were determined to rectify De la Faille’s errors about the fake Van Goghs. The catalogue, a magnificent large-scale publication with many black-and-white illustrations, claimed to contain reproductions of all the paintings from the last 30 months of the artist’s life. It cannot qualify as a catalogue raisonné, however – not by any standards, past or present: the provenance, exhibitions, and literature pertaining to the other paintings are completely lacking. Authenticity is substantiated exclusively by quotes from Van Gogh’s letters that mention the place and time of execution. Scherjon had been following this restriction ever since the fight over Chester Dale’s Self-Portrait at the Easel in 1929, when De Wild’s paint analysis produced results that were undesirable for himself and for other interested parties. Bremmer’s influence on the choice of canvases is obvious: eight of the nine Wacker Van Goghs that he had declared authentic are reproduced in the catalogue. Not included is Landscape (F 824).16 The reason for this is unclear. Scherjon, De Gruyter, and Bremmer never discussed it any further. All the works in the catalogue are “absolutely authentic,” wrote Scherjon and De Gruyter emphatically, adding the following footnote: “The only exceptions, or possible exceptions, are the [...] St. Rémy canvases nos. 18 and 162, about which the authors have misgivings.”17 This is their own numbering system and refers to the Wacker Van Goghs Haystacks (F 736) and Haystacks (F 625bis). Nowhere in the catalogue is Bremmer mentioned by name as the owner of F 625bis. An act of piety? After all, he was the Van Gogh expert par excellence, and Scherjon and De Gruyter were constantly deferring to him in the press. He had business relations with the Huinck & Scherjon gallery, and Scherjon considered him a friend. Did they want to spare him? Were the compilers attempting to reconcile truthfulness with friendship? Probably not. Stylistic analysis, no matter how scanty, is almost totally absent in the catalogue.18 Haystacks is one exception, although the authors did ease the pain for the owner by including a reference in Vincent’s letters. Their caption for the reproduction read: “This painting, a bit too methodical in brush technique but superb in color, could be a preliminary study for

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 and . Certificate of authenticity from H.P. Bremmer for Haystacks (F bis), his own property, written on the back of the photo, dated May , .

no. 17 [...].”19 This innocent-sounding stylistic analysis was Scherjon’s own way of toying with the knowledge – known to him and Bremmer but hidden from all other readers – that both versions of Haystacks were fakes, a discovery that De Wild had made by examining the paint. (I am assuming that De Gruyter was not in on the secret.) As we now know, Scherjon could also have used this undisclosed paint analysis to strike out at the paintings owned by Chester Dale or Van Deventer, but he decided not to. There is no indication – either in the catalogue or in any other publication or document – that Scherjon had revealed the spuriousness of these works. Apparently his motive was to get even with Bremmer, as when he dealt a blow to Justi by criticizing the authenticity of the Nationalgalerie’s Van Goghs. Bremmer must have taken the doubts about his Haystacks seriously and felt that the words “possible exceptions” and “a bit too methodical in brush technique” were harmful to his interests, because on 3 May 1937, just as the catalogue was being published, he issued a certificate of authenticity for the canvas for the d’Audretsch Gallery in The Hague, which had it on consignment. It hardly seemed necessary: he had already announced the work’s authenticity five years before in Veth’s Schoon schip! His rush to set it down in writing once again is understandable, however, in view of the catalogue’s publication.

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Passions Willem Scherjon died in 1938. The following year, the second edition of De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue raisonné was published in English, German, and French. It was devoted exclusively to the paintings.20 In the preface De la Faille wonders whether such a work will ever be completed. The answer is negative. All of us, he says, are still too close to Van Gogh, and we have our opinions as to what is genuine and what is fake, which we want to defend at any price: “Only with the passage of time, as passions cool and personal feelings are silenced, will each painting find its true place.” The catalogue is a fully researched work, with provenance, exhibitions, and literature listed in addition to the illustrations. It is somewhat surprising that De la Faille now recognized as genuine seven of the nine Wacker Van Goghs that Bremmer had pronounced as such – two more than those included in his court testimony of 1932: Van Beuningen’s Cypresses (F 614) and Van Deventer’s Self-Portrait (F 385). Now he differed from his former rivals on only one canvas, The Reaper, the painting that the police had confiscated from Leonhard Wacker’s studio in 1929 and that De la Faille had not listed in his catalogue but in Les faux Van Gogh. It is not included in the 1939 edition either. He also omitted Landscape (F 824), as Scherjon and De Gruyter had done. A piquant detail: De la Faille’s list of owners for Two Poplars includes “Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon” and “Private collection, Japan.” His own brief period of ownership (he bought the canvas from Huinck & Scherjon in 1935 and sold it at a profit) is unmentioned.21 The reader searches in vain for a clear explanation behind the change in De la Faille’s assessment of the Wacker Van Goghs. The organization of the catalogue is rather strange in this regard. Six of the Wacker Van Goghs are not numbered among the other canvases but are shown together in the back of the book on pages 554 through 556. De la Faille’s comment reads as follows: “Contrary to what I said in my book Les faux Van Gogh, I now regard the following numbers as paintings from Van Gogh’s own hand. They are from the Wacker collection in Berlin. Dutch experts such as Messrs. H.P. Bremmer, W. Scherjon, W.J. de Gruyter, etc., share my opinion. As for the German experts, they regard all the paintings from the Wacker gallery as fakes.”22 (I am overlooking the fact that the German expert Rosenhagen steadfastly insisted that Two Poplars was a real Van Gogh, but De la Faille is probably referring to the experts from the Nationalgalerie.) They “share my

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opinion” is a turn of phrase that sounds a bit ludicrous, now that we know the history: as if De la Faille had passed judgment on his own, based on reasonable grounds, which was then endorsed by his former detractors. But why did he set these six paintings apart? Why did he mention the German experts seven years after the Wacker trial? And why did he place a seventh Wacker Van Gogh, of all things – Bremmer’s Haystacks (F 625bis) – along with the rest of the paintings in the catalogue according to number? It is shown on page 435 among the paintings that Vincent would have made in September 1889 during his stay in Saint-Rémy. De la Faille’s comment on Haystacks is intriguing: “According to German experts the painting is a forgery. The authors of the book Van Goghs hoofdperiode, W. Scherjon and W.J. de Gruyter, are somewhat in doubt as to its authenticity.”23 Unlike Scherjon and De Gruyter’s catalogue, here Bremmer is named as the owner of the painting. He would not have been thrilled to see it. He must have wondered why De la Faille was not able to omit these damaging remarks. Persistent doubts about the authenticity of a canvas threaten to make it unmarketable. His fears were not exaggerated: despite Bremmer’s attempts to sell it, the canvas would remain in his possession until his death. Back to De la Faille’s comment that Scherjon and De Gruyter “are somewhat in doubt as to its [Haystacks] authenticity.” Why did he content himself with this very brief statement? He was not in full agreement with their judgments. Scherjon and De Gruyter declared as fake Daubigny’s Garden (F 776), Justi’s controversial purchase for the Nationalgalerie, simply by omitting it from their so-called comprehensive catalogue. De la Faille defended the painting’s authenticity and inveighed against their omission. De la Faille could be very demanding when the situation called for it. Is it not possible that his decision to repeat Scherjon and De Gruyter’s stylistic analysis of Haystacks was not at all based on what they wrote in their catalogue? Did Scherjon tell him something in confidence that both Scherjon and De Gruyter, as well De la Faille himself, only dared to present in an ambiguous way? Whether Scherjon discussed the canvas with De la Faille cannot be confirmed unequivocally, but there is an indication that someone informed De la Faille of the negative results of the paint analysis of Haystacks. Although it cannot be found in any published document or letter, De la Faille’s own, preserved copy of the catalogue of 1928 contains deletions and additions

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that he made page by page, including annotations that throw an unexpected light on what probably took place behind the scenes. As we say, the devil is in the details. In the margins next to the entries for two Wacker Van Goghs, De la Faille added words that do not appear with any other Wacker Van Gogh in the catalogue: “bij de Wild” – with De Wild. The first canvas with these three words is The Sower (F 691), one of the five Wackers in which De Wild had found resin and that Bremmer, Scherjon, and De la Faille had consistently declared as fake starting in 1928: they never openly disagreed about its authenticity. The second canvas with

. De la Faille’s annotations for Haystacks (F bis), owned by Bremmer. On the left, in pencil and crossed out: “bij de Wild” (with De Wild).

. De la Faille’s annotations for The Sower (F ). On the left, in pencil: “bij de Wild.”

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“bij de Wild” written beside it (and then crossed out) is Bremmer’s painting Haystacks. As we now know, De Wild had also found resin there and had established the work as a forgery on those grounds. Perhaps Scherjon had dropped a few hints to De la Faille. First denounce as fake a painting in which neither man had any idealistic or material interest, then expose the forged painting belonging to an authority whom they dared not attack directly. De la Faille would have had little trouble tripping up the man who had been making his life miserable since 1928. But then why not reject the canvas in his own words? The reason may be that in doing so De la Faille would have jeopardized his credibility. Within a period of ten years he would have declared Haystacks as genuine (January 1928), fake (November 1982), genuine (April 1932), and then fake again (1939). Scherjon, too, would have sacrificed a great deal of credibility if he had called the painting a forgery: in the struggle against De la Faille, and in his statements before the Berlin judges, he had consistently called it genuine. Hence a compromise by way of stylistic analysis that was just as effective in striking at Bremmer’s material interests. The damage to the painting’s reputation was a fact. But what would Scherjon and De Gruyter’s motive have been? Hypocrite The critic De Gruyter defended Bremmer and Scherjon’s position on the Wacker Van Goghs in the newspapers, and made their viewpoints his own, until 1933. After that year, an estrangement can be detected between him and Bremmer, who was almost 30 years his senior. In a letter to the painter Aart van Dobbenburgh, written in 1935, De Gruyter ventilated his feelings about “Bremmer and all his quibbling” and called him a “narrow-minded hypocrite.”24 De Gruyter’s exasperation with Bremmer came to light in April 1937 and became the driving force behind an out-and-out controversy in Het Vaderland that dragged on for weeks. De Gruyter had become one of that newspaper’s permanent staff members. The dispute began rather innocently. In a review of an exhibition at the Nieuwenhuizen Segaar Gallery in The Hague, De Gruyter had some critical things to say about the work of Charley Toorop, a protégée of Bremmer, but De Gruyter did not expect Bremmer’s followers to have any difficulties with her work because it was “an artistic product recognized by Mr. Bremmer.”25 The remark did not go

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down well with many readers. The newspaper published letter after letter, and De Gruyter faithfully answered each one. Gradually he became more and more critical of Bremmer’s demeanor, his doctrinaire approach, and conflict of interest. At first De Gruyter piously insisted that he had nothing personal against Bremmer (although in the letter to Van Dobbenburgh he candidly admitted his “hatred” toward the man), but he did denounce his dictatorial influence on his followers’ purchasing patterns and artistic perception: “Apparently the world has need of its Stalins and Mussolinis, which is as noticeable inside the realm of art as outside.”26 It was not the kind of comparison that would have brought the letter-writers and De Gruyter closer together, but that may not have been his intention. Jan Engelman supported De Gruyter in De Groene Amsterdammer and also accused Bremmer of a conflict of interest: “No one would ever insist that a critic ought not to own one of the objects he writes about with so much interest and love, as long as he acquires it in an honorable way. Likewise, no one would deny the critic the right to sell something he owns if he finds it necessary. As long as it doesn’t happen in such a way that the artist sees the critic as a ‘marchand ganté,’ a man who appropriates the profits to which the artist is entitled. So to create an honest situation and to avoid temptation, the critic is perhaps well-advised not to fill his house with works of art from the rafters to the back wall of the bathroom.”27 Finally, Bremmer’s admirers turned to the directors and commissioners of Het Vaderland and demanded that De Gruyter be dismissed, but De Gruyter managed to avert this catastrophe by offering a humble apology.28 Anyone who had still been in the dark certainly wasn’t after this affair: Bremmer could count on a host of influential admirers. After 1932 they began to take a more cautious attitude toward Haystacks, and not only because of the involvement of De la Faille and Scherjon in the appraisal and sale of the Wacker Van Goghs. They also must have realized that many people in the Dutch art world always placed Bremmer’s authority with regard to genuine and fake Van Goghs above their own. During the legal proceedings against Wacker in April 1932, Bremmer distanced himself from Scherjon’s criticism of the authenticity of the Van Gogh paintings owned by the Nationalgalerie. He countered Scherjon’s attempt to blackmail Justi by complimenting Justi in court for the controversial purchase of the very costly Daubigny’s Garden. It was Bremmer’s

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gesture of decency. It did not keep Scherjon from omitting the work from his Van Gogh catalogue of November 1932, along with two other Van Goghs from the Nationalgalerie. In 1937 Scherjon made a concession: he and De Gruyter decided that only two of the paintings were forgeries, not three. One of them was still Daubigny’s Garden. It must have disappointed Scherjon that Bremmer did not fully support him in his attack on Justi, but Bremmer was not the kind of man to let others lay down the law for him when it came to questions of authenticity. It is striking that in his Beeldende Kunst of 1930 and 1934, Bremmer spoke so favorably of Scherjon’s Two Poplars and Kröller-Müller’s Seascape but said not a word about any of the other Wacker Van Goghs.29 There was another aspect of Scherjon’s attitude that must have bothered Bremmer. Wasn’t Scherjon one of his pupils? Shouldn’t a pupil adhere to what the instructor teaches? The fact was that in 1932, the same thing happened to Scherjon that had happened to De la Faille and others: the instructor could not tolerate his pupils striking out on their own. The estrangement between Bremmer and Scherjon also had a professional basis. Ever since its formation in 1930, Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon had had a link with Bremmer through his Beeldende Kunst, of which he was the sole editor. Art dealers advertised in it, but they noticed that Bremmer paid less and less attention to their wares in his reviews. Other advertisers felt the same way. It bothered them that the reviews showed an increasing preference for a few art dealers in The Hague, and they became less and less inclined to support the publication with their advertising income. Bremmer was pressured by the publishing company De Spieghel to do something about the situation. The publisher suggested enlarging the editorial staff, but Bremmer would not hear of it. In 1937 he stepped down, and Beeldende Kunst was continued by an editorial trio who managed to breathe new life into the magazine and increase the number of subscribers and advertisers.30 In a letter to Bremmer’s wife, the publisher justified the decision by reminding her that it had purchased Beeldende Kunst from Bremmer for about 2,000 guilders in the expectation that their joint efforts would increase profits. But the number of subscribers had dropped steadily, and the publisher sensed “an aversion from the advertising art dealers when Mr. Bremmer began working more closely with the Nieuwenhuizen Segaar Gallery in The Hague.”31 It was clear that the commercial interests of art dealer Scherjon were no longer in line with Bremmer’s.

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Paradox The Dutch Van Gogh world did not calm down after the Wacker affair. New coalitions formed behind the scenes. Former enemies became friends, former friends became enemies. The words “friends” and “enemies” should be read in quotation marks: they were chiefly instrumental relationships, serving material and idealistic ends. Bremmer’s main concern was preserving authority, but the struggle had a paradoxical effect, causing him to lose authority as well as gain it. Sometimes it happened in his own backyard, as when he lost his firm grip on Scherjon and then De Gruyter regarding the question of authentic Van Goghs after April 1932. The fact that Scherjon probably made effective use of his knowledge of De Wild’s paint analysis of Haystacks within a small circle, questioning its authenticity with De Gruyter, of all people, and thereby damaging Bremmer’s interests, suggests estrangement between Bremmer and his old supporters. Bremmer was in a tight spot. Making a public statement about Haystacks would attract attention and might be counterproductive. And Scherjon knew that Bremmer would not enter the fray because it was beneath his dignity. Bremmer’s engagement in the Wacker affair was only sporadic. Nor was it necessary. There were others who fought the battle for him between 1928 and 1933, starting with Scherjon and De Gruyter. They did the dirty work on his behalf. But by 1937, Bremmer had not a single follower who could defend his interests with the energy of Scherjon. Yet it can be argued that Bremmer managed to hold his own with regard to the authenticity question after the Wacker trial and even made a profit. The core theory concerning the Van Goghs of art dealer Otto Wacker no longer had any active opponents. The German experts had died or been silenced by the Nazi regime. Bremmer’s theory was endorsed by Scherjon and De Gruyter and confirmed in 1937. De la Faille accepted it in 1932 and affirmed it in his revised Van Gogh catalogue raisonné. Relations in the Van Gogh world had changed, but they were far from stable. There was a truce and no certainty as to how long it would last. It was possible that some authoritative party would put interests at risk once again, and preparations were being made for such an eventuality. This can be inferred by the fact that the letters and bills connected with the sale of Two Poplars, owned by the Huinck & Scherjon gallery and sold via De la Faille to the Japanese collector Magosaburo Ohara, have been preserved.32

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The documents were stored in two document folders along with the gallery accounting records.33 Studying the contents is a strange experience. The company probably sold many hundreds of works in the more than 20 years of its existence, among them work by illustrious artists such as Henri Fantin-Latour, Claude Monet, George H. Breitner, Floris Verster, Paul Jongkind, Gino Severini, and Vincent van Gogh. So the accounting records must have been much more extensive than this. But documents have been preserved for only some of the sales. There is not a bill, letter, or memo from the sale of drawings and paintings by Van Gogh. But the correspondence with De la Faille over the sale of Two Poplars to Japan has been preserved. Did Huinck and Scherjon regard his letters as a trophy after the bitter struggle of the Wacker affair, or were they afraid that De la Faille might make another about-face at some point? His deliberate decision to isolate the six Wacker Van Goghs in his catalogue, with the denial of authenticity by German experts, appears to suggest they are right. In the latter case, the contested correspondence might have served them well. Fadeout Mrs. Kröller-Müller died in December 1939. She was succeeded as director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller by her secretary and confidant, Salomon van Deventer. He gave a few paintings from his collection out on loan and had a catalogue compiled of the Van Gogh collection, in which both Seascape (F 418), then part of the state collection, and his own Self-Portrait (F 418) occupied a prominent place. The Van Goghs were not organized according to F numbers. In 1939 Van Deventer not only had the critics’ exultant reviews of his Wacker Van Gogh to rely on, but he was also able to draw support for the work’s authenticity from the Scherjon-De Gruyter and De la Faille catalogues. In March 1940 the museum scheduled a lecture by Maurits van Dantzig, an Amsterdam painter and restorer. Van Dantzig availed himself of the opportunity to voice his doubts about the authenticity of a few of the paintings. He summarized the most typical characteristics of the paintings by Van Gogh and argued that they were not present in Seascape. Mrs. KröllerMüller would have turned over in her grave. Bremmer did not take the

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analysis seriously; public disputes over the authenticity of the Wacker Van Goghs were not welcome during the war years. During the Second World War, Van Deventer did business with the Germans. He sold a few of the collection’s leading pieces – including a Lucas Cranach and a Hans Baldung Grien – to Field Marshall Hermann Göring, and went to prison for it after the war. His replacement, W. Auping, reissued the 1938 Kröller-Müller catalogue of the work of Vincent van Gogh. Seascape was one of the few paintings reproduced in the catalogue. It was accompanied by passages from Vincent’s letters that were supposed to corroborate its authenticity. In this edition, too, the museum used its own numbering system. The Faille numbers were nowhere to be seen.34 The painting was loaned out for exhibitions in Basel and Gouda. Auping died unexpectedly in 1947. In the museum’s Van Gogh catalogues, which were first issued in 1949 and were the responsibility of the new director, Abraham M. Hammacher, the painting was accompanied by the following text: “This canvas is from the gallery of Otto Wacker and was purchased by Mrs. H. Kröller-Müller in 192829. She was convinced of its authenticity, although it was contested. Baart de la Faille also included the canvas in his catalogue, regarding it as genuine after some hesitation. Bremmer and Scherjon have confirmed its authenticity. Compare with the drawing of this theme.”35 From that moment on the museum referred to the paintings by using the corresponding F numbers. Seascape was not shown during the “Vincent van Gogh” centenary at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in 1953. Nor was it shown in the Haags Gemeentemuseum or the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, where the hundredth birthday of the master was also celebrated with large-scale exhibitions. In 1953 Van Dantzig recalled the Wacker affair in his book Vincent? and stated that opinions still differed on six Wacker paintings, among them Seascape, which he himself did not regard as a Van Gogh.36 In the subsequent editions of the Van Gogh catalogue, Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller added the following sentences to the accompanying text: “Compared with drawings of the same or similar motifs, the components of the painting appear rather weak. For these reasons it is not being exhibited.”37 It would take until after 1980, however, before the museum would definitely label it as a fake Van Gogh.38 Van Deventer’s Self-Portrait suffered a similar fate. After being dismissed from the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, Van Deventer terminated the loan

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arrangement and assumed that both this canvas and Seascape would be included in the new Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, which was compiled by the Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksinstituut voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, or the RKD) during the sixties. He got wind of a rumor that Self-Portrait was not going to be included, and in 1969 he contacted the compilers. Van Deventer found it unacceptable that the RKD would question Bremmer’s competence to judge Van Gogh’s paintings, thereby casting doubt on Self-Portrait.39 His protest had no effect. Times had changed: 30 years after his death, Bremmer’s authority appeared to have faded out.

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7

An uneasy legacy

Far away in America, Chester Dale kept abreast of what the German and Dutch press were writing about the Wacker trial. The outcome must have put his mind at ease. He may have recognized his own Self-Portrait at the Easel in the verdict of the Berlin judges, who spoke of the “high quality” Wacker Van Goghs outside Germany. He hung the picture in the dining room of his New York apartment. It was no longer controversial, and illustrations in French and English publications saw to it that the message – that it was indeed a genuine Van Gogh – reached the broader public. To give just one example: the publisher of Thomas Craven’s Modern Art advertised the book in the New York Times with a reproduction of the work and a quote from Craven: “His face was a thing to turn one’s soul. I doubt if nature in her most audacious moods had ever before planted so unselfish a spirit and so many heroic impulses in such a repugnant carcass.”1 Self-Portrait at the Easel is also one of only two Van Goghs illustrated in the book. From 1942 the picture was on display for all to admire in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, and was invariably listed in the museum’s catalogues as a work of the artist. Since 1984 it has been inventoried as an “Imitator of Van Gogh,” and has disappeared from the galleries. An intriguing question: is it really possible that for forty years the museum remained ignorant of the truth about the canvas? Was Chester Dale ever questioned about the picture’s doubtful provenance and if so, how did he – and the museum – react? These rather obvious questions could not be answered through the sources available in the Netherlands, but research at the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution and at the National Gallery of Art provided a fascinating insight into the attitude of a collector seeking to protect his property, and the dilemmas facing the museum once it became aware that the work was a forgery. The records

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. Berend Berenson and John Walker during the thirties in the I Tatti garden near Florence.

show that both Dale and the museum knew about the doubts surrounding Self-Portrait at the Easel – they were informed not once but several times by a number of prominent figures in the art world. Until Dale’s death in 1962, and for many years thereafter, this was done mostly behind closed doors. The ins and outs of the story are the subject of what follows.

. The National Gallery of Art in Washington.

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A Director’s Dilemma How does a museum without either works of art or money create an outstanding collection? By collecting collectors who will later become donors. This was the simple answer provided by the curator – and later director – of the National Gallery of Art in Washington, John Walker (1906-1995). Walker discovered his passion for art at a young age. Upon completing his degree in art history (summa cum laude) at Harvard University, he traveled to Italy in 1930 to continue his studies with Bernard Berenson (1865-1959), a famous connoisseur of the art of the Italian Renaissance. The contact with Berenson and his entourage at Villa I Tatti, near Florence; the excursions to churches, museums, collectors, and dealers; the study in libraries and archives: these were art-lover Walker’s halcyon days. Working as adjunctdirector and professor in charge of the fine arts at the American Academy in Rome, he had the use of a car – still a rarity in those days – allowing him and his students and colleagues to study interesting works at first hand. Walker was an ambitious man: his greatest desire was to preside over a prestigious museum. This dream was partially realized in 1937, when he became chief curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington. The museum was the brainchild of multi-millionaire and former Secretary of the Treasury Andrew W. Mellon (1855-1937), who wanted to give the United States its own national storehouse of art, an American equivalent of the National Gallery in London. The government provided the land on Constitution Avenue, which runs from the Capitol to the White House, while Mellon paid for the design and construction of the new museum. He and the government had counted on the nation’s major collectors to provide the museum with its collection but in 1937, when the foundations were laid, this seemed all but impossible. The building, an impressive Neo-Classical pile, was to house 140 galleries, but so far only a single gift had been made: 125 paintings and twenty-three sculptures from the collection of Andrew W. Mellon himself, who had died that same year. There were certainly a number of masterpieces in the group – for the connoisseurs, at any rate: Botticelli’s, Adoration of the Magi; Raphael’s Alba Madonna; a Crucifixion by Perugino; Venus with a Mirror by Titian; Van Eyck’s Annunciation; Rembrandt’s Joseph Accused by Potiphar’s Wife; and Velázquez’s Pope Innocent X. These had been acquired by Mellon in 1932 from another national treasurehouse, the Hermitage in Leningrad, sold to him by the Soviets who were

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in desperate need of cash. Still, the museum in Washington was unlikely to live up to its name with just one work of art per gallery. In the years preceding the opening in 1942, John Walker and his director, David Finley, busied themselves with convincing the country’s most renowned collectors to lend or donate works of art. They faced any number of hurdles. For one thing, there was a great deal of competition with other museums, who were in pursuit of the identical group of wealthy patrons. Most of these institutions were also interested in the same kinds of pictures – paintings by the Italian, Dutch, and Flemish Old Masters. Simultaneously, the number of museums continued to increase. From the end of the nineteenth century onwards, American cities had sought to consolidate their identity and position through the establishment of art institutions. Furthermore, the founding of the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1929 changed the American museum landscape forever. It had now become acceptable to both collect and display works of art by living artists. Then there was the stipulation that only works of equal quality to those from the Mellon collection were allowed to enter the museum, whether as acquisitions, gifts, or long-term loans. Admittedly, quality is an elastic concept, but this legacy could be expressed in both monetary terms (the value of the recently purchased paintings from the Hermitage) and in artistic value (the appreciation of works of art by the same artist by other museums, critics, or scholars). The bar was set high: this was the only way to provide the museum with a leading position in the Western art world. Mellon’s stipulation meant the museum could exhibit neither copies nor forgeries, nor incorporate them into its collection; but what was one to do when a collector owned both genuine and suspect works? Tell the truth, with the risk that they would be offered to a competing museum? And what if the rival accepted them? Should one then reveal the truth? This would have been more than a little perilous; one museum casting doubt on the collection of another was simply not done. Walker discusses this dilemma in his 1974 memoirs in relation to the Old Master collection offered to the National Gallery by multi-millionaire Samuel Kress (1887-1956). Kress, a former schoolteacher, had amassed a fortune with a chain of 5- and 10-cent stores. He was in the habit of buying paintings in the same way he would purchase stock for his emporiums: in bulk, preferably at a discount, and by haggling over every penny – much to the despair of his

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art dealers, who were hardly used to such behavior. In 1938 Kress declared himself prepared to donate 393 Italian pictures. Among them were a number of masterpieces, but Kress was not thought to have a keen eye for quality. Walker was aware that two-thirds of the collection consisted of copies, fakes, and mistaken attributions. He kept this knowledge to himself, in an effort to avoid offending Kress, but the rules of the museum forbade him from accepting anything that was doubtful. He therefore asked if he might be permitted to make a selection, but Kress refused: for him, it was all or nothing. According to Walker, he then had only one option and that was to lie. He had, however, what he calls “a Jesuitical justification”: even among Mellon’s gift there had been what he euphemistically calls “undistinguished works.” “Couldn’t one argue, bearing these Mellon duds in mind, that the Kress works of art were of a similar high standard of quality to (some of) ‘those in the collection acquired from the donor’? With this rationalization, which still makes me shudder, I designed the affidavit and put myself on record that the Kress gift met Andrew Mellon’s stipulations.”2 In the passages that follow, Walker further reasons that over the years he would surely be able to weed out the more than 260 dubious pictures, replacing them with real masterpieces – a task in which he claims to have succeeded. There was one aspect of this deed, however, that he fails to mention, but to which Simpson draws attention in his book on the profitable relationship between the connoisseur Bernard Berenson and the Duveen Brothers (with galleries in London, New York, and Paris): with his affidavit, Walker provided Kress with a tax rebate that was far and above the actual value of the collection.3 In his autobiography, Walker portrays the many collectors he sought to win for the National Gallery with a great deal of humor, respect for their achievements, and attention to their eccentricities. Each of them is colorful, powerful, and wealthy, making great demands on the museum and its staff. He notes that a curator or director needs to have two things: a thorough knowledge of art history and excellent diplomatic skills. Art scholars often have the knowledge the collector lacks, but the latter has the art the museum cannot afford. A curator or director must remain on good terms with every potential donor: he is a collector of collectors, whom he hopes will one day become benefactors. As an expert, he seeks to influence the collector in his choices; the works, after all, have to fit into the museum’s collec-

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tion. A diplomat, on the other hand, knows how to reconcile conflicting interests and desires. Walker employs an engaging analogy in this regard: the curator or director behaves like an intelligent woman who coaxes her husband into agreeing to something he had actually wanted to refuse, but which she had her heart set on. Walker never played this game to the end, he claims, and was always resolutely determined to do nothing but serve the best interests of the museum: to create a balanced collection that could compete with those of the best museums in the world. Acquiring Chester Dale’s collection of modern French paintings was high on his list. Dale’s Trump Card In 1935 Chester Dale retired permanently from banking and began concentrating his efforts on securing his position in the American art world. As the owner of several hundred masterworks, he was very much in the sights of American and foreign museums. He was extremely good at playing the game that condemns collectors and museums to one another. He hinted to the director of the Chicago Art Institute that he would eventually donate his entire collection to his museum. The management of the National Gallery was told the same thing in confidence, but others, too, felt they could count on Dale’s favor. He strengthened the illusion with “long-term loans,” which the museums regarded as “gifts.” He became a trustee of many an institution, among them the Philadelphia Museum, the National Gallery in Washington, the Chicago Art Institute, The Metropolitan Museum, and the Museum of Modern Art. If things failed to go his way, he was in the habit of suggesting he might in the end bequeath his entire collection to the Louvre.4 For these museums, dealing with a collector like Chester Dale was like running the gauntlet. Some of them maintained the stipulation that only works by artists who had been dead for more than twenty or fifty years could be displayed or enter the collection. The reaction of Chester Dale in Time: “You don’t suppose that I would give my collection of Picassos, for instance, so they could bury them in the cellar until 20 years after Picasso dies.”5 The National Gallery worked under this regulation and the board was well aware that it prevented them from acquiring works that could form a bridge to the contemporary world. In order to be able to acquire Chester Dale’s collection, the museum waived this rule in 1940.

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. Diego Rivera, Chester Dale ().  x  cm. On the table is the catalogue Masterpieces of the National Gallery of Art, opened to the page showing his cherished possession: the Wacker Van Gogh Self-Portrait at the Easel (F ).

At the opening of the National Gallery in 1942, Chester Dale was given three galleries for the permanent display of his collection. He gave seventyone paintings on long-term loan, among them three Van Goghs: La Mousmé (F 431), Olive Orchard (F 656), and Self-Portrait at the Easel (F 523). The works were much praised in the press: “The self-portrait in it is one of the best of the series that Van Gogh did of himself; some say that it is the best. (...) It is a burning, thrilling thing and, as in all Van Gogh, it is a perfect treatise in color.”6 Dale provided the museum with information on all his pictures, but failed to mention the controversy surrounding the selfportrait: there is no mention of De la Faille’s Les faux Van Gogh, nothing on De Wild’s negative findings on the make-up of the paint, and not a word on the devastating report by the anonymous Paris restorer. Moreover, Dale altered the provenance. In previously published catalogues of his collection,

dale’s trump card


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the provenance is given as “O. Wacker, Berlin”; in French Paintings from the Chester Dale Collection, however, which appeared in 1942 under the auspices of the National Gallery with a foreword by John Walker, the picture is listed as “Mme J. van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam.” Her name was a guarantee of authenticity, while Otto Wacker’s was not.7 Dale thus turned the museum – ignorant of the scandal surrounding it – into an accomplice in his quest for the picture’s legitimation. The painting had the honor, together with La Mousmé, of being illustrated in the National Gallery’s first catalogue of its collection, Masterpieces of Painting, published in 1944. This folio-format publication, illustrated with costly color reproductions, quotes a letter from Vincent to his brother Theo from 1888 that ostensibly supported the attribution. The invented provenance, “Mme J. van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam,” was reiterated in all the museum’s catalogues published until 1984. There is no indication that in 1942 Finley and Walker knew anything about the affair surrounding the Wacker Van Goghs that had played itself out ten years earlier in the Netherlands and Germany. In 1950, however, everything changed. Washington, 1 March 1950 On 1 March 1950, Vincent Willem van Gogh sent a letter to Finley protesting against the provenance of Self-Portrait at the Easel, which in Masterpieces of Painting was given as “Mme J. van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam.” He wrote that the canvas had never been in his mother’s collection, and that he had never seen it at her home. He could only assume, he wrote, that the museum was unaware of the Wacker affair, and suggested Finley consult De la Faille’s Les faux Van Gogh. He emphasizes that it was not his intention to make a claim for the painting one way or another – he was well aware of the risk of suggesting to a collector that one of his pictures might not be genuine – but the reference to Les faux Van Gogh can only have been intended to prompt the museum to look into the question of the work’s authenticity. The management hesitated, but Vincent Willem remained undaunted: in 1952 (and again in 1961 and 1971) he urged the National Gallery to correct the provenance.8

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New York, 23 June 1950 On 23 June 1950, Walker met De Wild, who asked him if Chester Dale had finally gotten rid of Self-Portrait at the Easel; after all, it was a forgery. De Wild informed Walker that he had found resin in the paint, as he had in all the other Wacker works. Walker was shocked and reported the conversation to his superior, Finley: “Is it better to forget the conversation ever took place? Should we tell Chester?”9 Washington, 22 May 1951 On 22 May 1951, while on a lecture tour through the United States, De la Faille spoke to Walker, telling him outright that the painting had never belonged to Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. He also informed him that he was sure the picture was not by Van Gogh, and that for this reason it would not be included in his new edition of the oeuvre catalogue.10 De la Faille repeated the message a year later. At this point there was no other complete catalogue of Van Gogh’s paintings on the market, and no other scholar working on one. It was impossible for the museum to ignore De la Faille. The National Gallery finally mustered up the courage to confront Dale in 1953, suggesting that he allow the museum to correct the provenance in its catalogue of the collection. Their request, however, fell on deaf ears. By this time, Vincent Willem van Gogh had met Dale several times, both in the United States and the Netherlands, and had undoubtedly informed him personally of the error. Dale is supposed to have responded with the memorable words: “I know of course that this is a controversial painting, but as long as I am alive, it will be genuine.”11 And so it was. The painting stayed on display and remained listed in the catalogue as a work by Vincent van Gogh, with its provenance given as the collection of “Mme J. Van Gogh-Bonger, Amsterdam.” For and Against Despite Dale’s veto, the museum refused to drop the matter and began an investigation of its own. Research into the literature was in the first instance extremely reassuring: De la Faille’s 1928 catalogue, Scherjon’s pamphlets of 1929 and 1932, as well as De Gruyter’s Vincent van Gogh’s Great Period. Arles,

for and against


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St. Rémy and Auvers sur Oise (Complete Catalogue), published in 1937. It seemed that many writers from before the Second World War believed the picture to be genuine. The only dissident voice of any authority remained De la Faille and his Les faux Van Gogh of 1930, but even he appeared to have later changed his mind, as evidenced by the catalogue raisonné of 1939. The pre-war literature seemed to offer solid grounds for endorsing the painting, but even later there were some who remained convinced, for example the author of a 1954 German dissertation on Van Gogh’s self-portraits. The same was true of a more popular book on the subject from a few years later.12 There were, however, also a number of publications that cast doubt on the picture, and by the end of 1961 John Walker – who had succeeded David Finley as director in 1956 – had on his desk a list of twenty-one publications for and sixteen against the authenticity of Self-Portrait at the Easel. These references were of various kinds: scholarly works, newspaper articles, illustrations with captions, internal memoranda, etc. There were also mistakes in Walker’s calculations: Veth’s Schoon schip!, for example, was erroneously counted among the “no” votes. Whatever the case, it must have been clear to Walker that the painting was at best highly controversial. But how to react to questions posed by outsiders? Self-Portrait at the Easel was still on display when in 1966 an art historian asked Walker for a photograph of the painting, which he wished to include in a book on art forgeries. Walker agreed to supply the illustration, but wrote to the author that the picture in fact had no place in the book, citing the large number of publications that considered it to be genuine. The almost equally large number of notices in which it was regarded as a fake remain unmentioned.13 In another instance, after visiting the museum with her class, a schoolteacher expressed her surprise at the attribution to Van Gogh of the self-portrait. The museum answered that although there could be no doubt the picture had weaknesses in terms of style, scientific examination and chemical analysis had revealed there to be no problem.14 The issue of the painting’s status became increasingly problematic for the museum. In 1968 the paint was subjected to a new dating method based on lead content that had been published in the influential magazine Science.15 The result was heartening: the paint appeared to date from 1890. The museum’s relief was short lived, however, as the method appeared to have a margin of error of several decades. The paint could thus just as easily

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have been manufactured in the twentieth century. In the 1970s the museum consulted several art experts on the matter, all of whom rejected the picture out of hand. Still, it would take until 1984 – many years after Dale’s death – before the museum dared to present to the Board of Trustees a report by John Rewald, a renowned scholar of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painting, which declared the work an unequivocal forgery. Only then was the decision taken to remove it from the display of the permanent collection. Role-playing In his memoirs, Walker describes himself in relation to his collectors as alternately an art expert, diplomat, friend, and spouse. Elegant, but somewhat deceptive descriptions, for they suggest a certain equality. We can undoubtedly also recognize in him the courtier, a man who sought to achieve his goals through dissemblance and flattery. There is also no denying that there was always an element of subordination in the relationship, and so yet another role comes to mind: that of the servant. In his autobiography of 1974, Walker never says anything directly, but in 1990, many years after his retirement, he discussed his relationship with Chester Dale in less circuitous terms. Walker describes him as a difficult and extremely egotistical man, who demanded constant attention and who with his wrangling made life extremely difficult for the director and his colleagues, even to the point of becoming an obstacle to winning other interesting collectors for the museum. There was a constant fear that he would eventually choose to house his collection somewhere else, and this was one of the reasons for making him chairman of the Board of Trustees in 1955. This failed to bring the hoped-for relief to the museum management, however, as more than before they were forced to endure both his capricious behavior and hourlong conversations on the telephone or at his home in order to appease him. “(We) would go up practically with bended knees and eight martinis and beg him,” Walker said in 1990, but once peace had been made there was plenty of drink, merriment, and food.16 John Walker’s childhood friend, First Lady Jacqueline Kennedy, did not fail to notice the effects, and wrote him a consoling letter in 1961 that contains the following telling passage: “You sound tired + wise + girding for the struggle – just the way you must sound when they say: “Chester Dale is on the phone” – (burn this letter!).”17

role-playing


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Dale left everyone in doubt about the fate of his collection of modern French painting up to the last minute. Who would it go to upon his death – the Metropolitan Museum, the Museum of Modern Art, the Chicago Art Institute, or perhaps, after all, the Louvre? Only after his death in 1962 was it revealed that he had in fact bequeathed his entire collection to the National Gallery of Art.

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8

Between a rock and a hard place

The Vincent van Gogh “global authentication monopoly” was in the hands of four Dutchmen, wrote the editors of Connaissance des Arts in 1952: J. Baart de la Faille, A.M. Hammacher, “Engineer” V.W. van Gogh, and W. Sandberg, since “without the signature of any one of them, no certificate of authenticity is of value.”1 It was a bare bones list, to be sure. Bremmer’s certificates were also a surefire way of putting drawings by Van Gogh into the hands of buyers, and so were those signed by the Flemish Van Gogh expert Marc Edot Tralbaut. The list contained a mistake as well. In 1952, Willem Sandberg, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, was not issuing certificates of authenticity – not any longer, that is. But Connaissance des Arts was not far from the truth. The art market recognized the Van Gogh seal of approval on only a few certificates of authenticity. If the dealers, collectors, and museums had always been in agreement, they would have had no cause for alarm. But unanimity on questions of authenticity could not be taken for granted in the art world, let alone the Van Gogh world. As we saw in the struggle over the Van Goghs of Otto Wacker, fierce clashes among experts were not unusual. Bremmer managed to preserve his authority on questions of authenticity, although he was not able to keep his old and new enemies from rendering his Wacker Van Gogh Haystacks (F625bis) unmarketable. The absence of Bremmer in the list of Connaissance des Arts was no oversight, by the way. Power relationships in the Van Gogh world had changed. By 1952 Bremmer had slipped a bit into the background as an expert and De la Faille was in the spotlight once again. But they both had to share their authority on questions of authenticity with Hammacher, director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller from 1947 to 1963, and with Engineer Van Gogh. After the war, all four passed judgment on works of art brought to them by owners eager for a Van Gogh attribution. The subsequent disagree-

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ment between the experts and the owners – and among the experts themselves – gave rise to a renewed conflict of interest in the Van Gogh world, a conflict that would continue for decades. They and other experts were faced with the task of defending their authority and their intellectual independence. How they managed this will be discussed here and in the next three chapters. This chapter will focus on the painting Study by Candlelight, which cropped up in France shortly after the Second World War and was attributed to Van Gogh by De la Faille. The conflict over this work bears all the traces of a revelation that sent shock waves through the art world in 1945. The Van Meegeren case In Amsterdam on 12 July 1945, the Military Authority (the post-occupation transitional government in the Netherlands) announced that Han van Meegeren, a painter who was under arrest, had confessed that six pictures that had been attributed to seventeenth-century masters by countless experts were his own work. Not Johannes Vermeer, not Pieter de Hoogh, but he himself – Han van Meegeren – had allegedly produced paintings with titles like Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, Christ in the House of Mary and Martha, and Interior with Card Players. Van Meegeren hoped that by confessing, he would avoid a charge of collaboration (he had sold his “Vermeers” to Hermann Göring for more than 1.5 million guilders), knowing as he did that the punishment for collaboration was much more severe than the punishment for forgery. Van Meegeren’s confession became world news. Big names from the Dutch art world had praised the pictures as being the work of Vermeer and De Hoogh. Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus, which surfaced in 1937, had been attributed to Johannes Vermeer by Dr. A. Bredius, the great expert on Old Dutch painting. Other authorities backed him, including Dr. A.B. de Vries, director of the Mauritshuis; Dr. G. Knuttel Wzn, director of the Haags Gemeentemuseum; and D. Hannema, director of the Boijmans Museum. Art critics such as Bremmer, Veth, Hammacher, and Engelman had hailed the work as a masterpiece. Van Meegeren also claimed to have painted The Last Supper, which appeared in 1941. It, too, was attributed to Vermeer by an illustrious company

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of experts: D.C. Röell, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam; Dr. A.F.E. van Schendel, director of the Rijksmuseum, and his replacement Dr. C.M.A.A. Lindeman; and again Hannema of the Boijmans Museum. They had made sure that the paint and canvas were from the seventeenth century by seeking the opinion of technical experts, including Dr. A.M. de Wild. All the touted paintings had been purchased for considerable sums by the owners of prestigious collections, which would not have been possible without the blessing of these authorities. Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus was purchased for 540,000 guilders for the Boijmans Museum, while the Rotterdam harbor baron D.G. van Beuningen added The Last Supper to his private collection to the tune of 1,600,000 guilders. Did all these authorities get it wrong in attributing the paintings to one of the greatest Dutch artists in history, or was Van Meegeren’s confession simply the big talk of an unappreciated and frustrated painter? When this question was finally answered, the initial disbelief quickly gave way to dismay as Van Meegeren provided a detailed explanation of how he had made his “seventeenth-century masters.” But when he actually painted a “Johannes Vermeer” under police supervision, the shocking truth could no longer be ignored.2 Van Meegeren’s confession was not mere bluster. Silence The affair made a deep impression and exposed an aspect of attribution that filled the judicial authorities with concern. If Dutch experts could so easily be led down the garden path to accept fake works of art as genuine, they constituted a considerable threat to the Dutch art trade and to Dutch culture that had international ramifications. How could this be prevented? After Van Meegeren was convicted on 12 November 1947, a few individuals claimed that they had not let themselves be deceived and had been quite aware that Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus was a forgery. Harry van Wijnen, who studied the reception of Emmaus between 1937 and 1945, is not so sure. Few people committed their doubts to paper before 1945, so those who later insisted they had known all along did not have much to stand on. There did appear to be a couple of exceptions, however. One of them was the Duveen firm of international art dealers. Two Duveen employees had had the opportunity to see the canvas in a vault in Paris on 4 October 1937,

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before it was sold to the Boijmans Museum. They warned Duveen’s New York office in a telegram that has been preserved: Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus was a “rotten fake.”3 The company kept this assessment to itself. The same was true for Dr. J.Q. van Regteren Altena, collector and professor of art history at the University of Amsterdam. He failed to appear at the discussion of The Last Supper in March 1941 in the boardroom of the Rijksmuseum, but he did tell an art dealer that the canvas was a fake.4 He, too, kept his opinion to himself and did not reveal it until the trial. The Duveen firm was complying with the unwritten rule of the art trade: to remain discreetly noncommittal when it comes to questions of authenticity. And Van Regteren Altena? Was it simply a matter of not wanting to be bothered to take up his pen, or was his silence an expression of collegial solidarity? Whatever the answer, this discretion coupled with the unrestrained enthusiasm of experts and critics meant that the forger and his accomplices were able to carry on undisturbed. The lesson that the judicial authorities

. De la Faille attributed Study by Candlelight (F a),  x  cm, to Vincent van Gogh in . Current location unknown.




. According to Bremmer, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat was Vincent van Gogh’s own work. Current location unknown.


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learned from the case was that more should be done to catch the forgers, but actually carrying this out proved far from simple. In May 1948, the National Criminal Intelligence Division (CRI) began an investigation of a painting that had been presented as a Van Gogh and submitted to the Stedelijk Museum for authentication. The work was unsigned and the owner made no attempt to sell it as “genuine and unfalsified.” For this reason the CRI concluded that no crimes had been committed and suspended the investigation.5 Shortly thereafter, a few more paintings popped up that the owners attributed to Van Gogh and that had never been shown in any exhibitions or mentioned in any catalogues. This case did seem to have indictable aspects. Although De la Faille had declared one of them – Study by Candlelight (which had been sold for a great deal of money to an American millionaire) – to be a genuine Van Gogh, and Bremmer had confidently asserted that another painting – Self-Portrait with Straw Hat – was from Van Gogh’s own hand, it had come to the attention of B. Kist, Amsterdam public prosecutor, that the directors of the Stedelijk Museum were convinced the paintings were fakes. The museum was backed by Engineer Van Gogh. The Engineer In 1945 Vincent Willem van Gogh was the owner of the largest number of works by Vincent van Gogh: about 200 paintings and 450 drawings. He also owned Vincent’s correspondence with his father, Theo van Gogh, who died in 1891 when Vincent Willem was scarcely one year old. Those who asked the Engineer why he had not chosen a profession in the art world like Vincent van Gogh and other family members (three of his father’s uncles were also art dealers) was told that his mother, Johanna van Gogh-Bonger, and her second husband, the critic and artist Johan Cohen Gosschalk (1873-1912), had conveyed very little to him about art that he found worthwhile. This is a surprising statement. After all, he had been surrounded by hundreds of works of art as a child. Paintings and drawings by Van Gogh had hung on all the walls of his parents’ home in Bussum and, after 1901, in Amsterdam. He had also become acquainted with many people through his mother and stepfather, including the artists Richard Roland Holst, Jan Pieter Veth, and Marius Bauer as well as men of letters such as Willem Kloos, Frederik van

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Eeden, and Lodewijk van Deyssel. A rich breeding ground for developing a grasp of art as a child, it would seem. By his own admission, however, it all passed him by. As a kind of explanation, he said that anything having to do with art at home had been surrounded by an aura of rapture and worship, which he heartily disliked. Vincent Willem did embrace the socialist ideals of his mother’s circle, which remained with him all his life. Johanna was one of the initiators in establishing the Social Democratic Women’s Association. Her youngest brother, the lawyer Willem Adriaan Bonger (1876-1940), whom she greatly admired, was an original thinker. His pioneering dissertation on the economic basis of crime, written in French in 1905, was influenced by Marxism and purported to be a synthesis of scientific and social doctrine. He became the first professor of sociology and criminology in the Netherlands in 1922 and was a prominent and active member of the Social Democratic Labor Party (SDAP).6 The Engineer was also a member of the SDAP, but not nearly as active as Bonger. Describing the extent of his activity, his son Johan van Gogh (1922) said in 2005, “He scribbled election slogans on the street and spent Sunday mornings teaching VARA subscribers [the socialist broadcasting company] how to build radios.”7 Within the Engineer’s social circle, art and socialism were inextricably linked. His first marriage in 1915 was with Josina Wibaut (1890-1933), daughter of F.M. Wibaut (1859-1936), Amsterdam’s influential social-democratic alderman. His nickname was “The Mighty One.” After the Van Gogh exhibition in 1930, she successfully urged her husband to give his collection to the Stedelijk Museum on loan.8 In 1937 in De Socialistische Gids, of which W.A. Bonger was the editorial secretary, the Engineer spoke out in favor of a different policy for museums that, according to him, should be “true national institutions.” Museums, the Engineer wrote, only attract a broad public when they mount large exhibitions devoted to the big names in art history: Rembrandt, Vermeer, Hals. After the exhibitions close, the museums return to their isolated state as warehouses avoided by the public, since museums are mainly interested in the preservation of objects and not in contributing to the “edification of the people.” Museums should reform their exhibition policy to make themselves more attractive for the whole population. People who visit museums should leave them feeling intellectually enriched.9 His proposal did not come out of the blue. It built on what

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was already being implemented elsewhere, particularly by Alfred Barr of the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But the Engineer had adapted these ideas to F.M. Wibaut’s socialist ideal of bringing art to the people. So the Engineer’s answer that he had never acquired much of an understanding of art at home, and therefore decided on a career outside the art world, was really incomplete. His uncle’s works of art were a constant occupation. But his decision to study mechanical engineering at the Institute of Technology in Delft bespeaks a willful character, a quality that would assert itself on other occasions. He did not do what was expected of him, which for the Engineer would have meant living off another man’s glory. In fact, by making this choice he was trying to liberate himself from the burden of fame inherited from his uncle and namesake. Vincent Willem received his engineering degree in 1914 and left for the United States the following year, where he picked up ideas on the organization of labor in commercial enterprises. There he became acquainted with the work of F.W. Taylor, who devised the principle of corporate “scientific management,” a relatively unknown concept in the Netherlands at the time. Taylor advocated the rationalization of industrial operations to increase profits and results. He gave priority to the interests of the company. The Engineer recognized that one aspect of this principle was closely aligned with the cause of the labor movement, and when he returned in 1920 he set up the first Dutch management consultancy with Ernst Hijmans, a former fellow student from Delft. They began promulgating a Dutch version of Taylorism that was consistent with the aim of the social democrats to bring about a gradual improvement in working conditions by introducing breaks, shortening the workweek, and reducing working hours. During the twenties his father-in-law arranged for him to be given the job of improving the efficiency of the government ministries. By the early thirties he had set himself up as an independent advisor.10 Vincent Willem’s decision to enter a technical field did not stem from a lack of interest in the art of Vincent van Gogh, however. That was something that always kept him going. In 1905, when he was fifteen, he helped organize an exhibition of more than 470 paintings and drawings by Van Gogh at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam. When he went to the United States in 1915 his mother joined him there and translated the letters of Vincent and Theo for an English edition of their correspondence. It is safe

the engineer


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to assume that she regularly discussed this work with her son. After her death in 1925 he continued her efforts to make Van Gogh’s work more widely known, although he left much of the exhibition organizing to others – until 1930 mainly to De la Faille. The sale of paintings and drawings, however, by which his mother managed to increase Van Gogh’s reputation, was something he pursued only intermittently.11 When the loan was made to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1930 of 92 paintings and 143 drawings by Van Gogh and 21 works by his contemporaries, it more or less marked an end to the 40 years of sales from his own Van Gogh collection.12 Turning the management of the collection over to the Stedelijk Museum had its practical as well as its ideal side. He never was able to hang all the works in his home in Amsterdam. In 1927 he stored some of them in the unheated attic of his summer house in Laren. The loan put an end to this situation, and suited his socialist mission to “edify the masses” by means of art.

. At the opening of the Van Gogh collection in the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam on  February . From right to left: Mayor de Vlugt, V.W. van Gogh and family.

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After the war, the Engineer intensified his involvement with his collection. According to his son, Johan van Gogh, “My father thought that with his career as a management consultant he had proven that he could make a living without his inheritance from Vincent.”13 His paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh and contemporaries survived the war unscathed. But he did suffer great personal loss. His eldest son, Theo, was executed by firing squad for his participation in the student resistance just before liberation, and his uncle, W.A. Bonger, fearing retaliation by the German occupiers in response to his anti-Nazi writings, committed suicide on 14 May 1940. The Engineer was quite willing to allow the paintings and drawings to travel outside the Netherlands (although he did not want them to be exhibited in Germany, Italy, or Japan). This was in line with his pre-war ideas about reforming museum policy. While the Van Goghs constituted the heart of the Stedelijk’s art division, they remained a static whole. He hoped that exhibiting them at home and abroad would awaken new interest in Van Gogh. He also wanted to see more cooperation between museums, and he was the driving force behind the Museumjournaal (the first issue came out in 1956), a joint magazine of the Stedelijk Museum, the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, and the Van Abbemuseum. To provide support to painters, he set up the Theo van Gogh Foundation to purchase works of modern art. The foundation was sustained by means of a surcharge on the price of admission to exhibitions of works from the Engineer’s collection, and the paintings acquired by the foundation were given on loan to the museums involved. Sandberg The Engineer found a kindred spirit in Willem Sandberg, and they became friends. Sandberg was appointed curator and adjunct director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam in 1938. During the Second World War he joined the Artists’ Resistance, and in 1943, as a member of Gerrit van der Veen’s resistance group, he plotted an attack on the Amsterdam municipal registry. The attack was only partly successful. The occupying forces rounded up many of his comrades-in-arms and executed them by firing squad. This forced Sandberg to go into hiding, and he spent a few days during this

sandberg


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period in the home of the Engineer in Laren. In 1945 he became director of the Stedelijk, thereby enhancing his reputation as a defender of modern art. For him, art was an engine and mirror of social change. The animated Sandberg strongly believed in social progress and made no secret of his communist sympathies, although he was not a member of the Dutch Communist Party or of any organization domination by communists. He was known as a good organizer and was what we would now call a “networker.” Many artists, municipal politicians, government officials, and ordinary citizens knew him personally.14 Managing the Van Goghs required the Stedelijk Museum to face many unavoidable questions about authenticity. Experts and owners asked Sandberg and the Engineer for their assessment because it carried so much weight. The Engineer’s word was particularly sought after because he united in himself those qualities that gave him authority in the art world: he was related by blood to Vincent and Theo van Gogh, he grew up with his uncle’s paintings and drawings, he owned the largest collection of Van Gogh’s works, he had served as curator of Van Gogh exhibitions since 1945, and after 1954 he had supervised a new edition of the letters of Vincent van Gogh. Although being named after his famous uncle did not really add anything to his authority, it did suggest so much. Only Hammacher, director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, could match him as the manager of a large Van Gogh collection. At first, however, the Engineer did not deem himself capable of judging genuine from fake, so he avoided owners’ questions. Gradually he became convinced that he really could assess the authenticity of works by his uncle, although he preferred to appear detached to the outside world. Within a few years of the war’s end, the Stedelijk Museum and the Engineer found themselves involved in three cases having to do with genuine and fake Van Goghs: the self-portrait Study by Candlelight (F 476a), Dutch works by Vincent that had gone missing, and the Van Gogh collection of Dr. Gachet and his son. Here we will deal with the conflict over Study by Candlelight. The controversies over the two other cases will be discussed in the following chapters.

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. De la Faille giving an analysis of Self-Portrait by Candlelight in Beverly Hills in February .

Study by Candlelight In October 1948, De la Faille wrote an enthusiastic article in the art magazine Phoenix on a recently discovered self-portrait, Study by Candlelight, which Vincent van Gogh supposedly painted in Arles in 1888: “How the life throbs and glows in the head of this extraordinary, ultra-subjective artist; how poignantly honest Vincent was in giving himself over to this portrait.” The painting is unfinished; the lower part of the canvas is not painted. There, on an almost empty portion of the canvas, we see the face of a Japanese actor along with some Japanese characters. It is an expression of Vincent’s great admiration for all things Japanese, said De la Faille, and for prints in particular. He had one misgiving, however: the color is not identical to the palette of Vincent’s Arles period. But there was an explanation for this. According to the inscription on the painting, “etude a la bougie” (written without French accent marks), Van Gogh has painted himself by candlelight. De la Faille said this explains the bright lemon yellow and orange background, which encircles the head like a halo.15 He had little to

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say about the painting’s provenance. It was found in a private collection in France, but the owner wished to remain anonymous. Study by Candlelight was sold via Reeves Lewenthal, director of the Associated American Artists Galleries, to William Goetz – head of the movie company Universal Pictures, millionaire, and collector of modern art – for a cool 50,000 dollars in 1948. When Goetz bought the painting he was given a certificate of authenticity from De la Faille and another from Paul Gachet, son of Dr. Paul Gachet, the doctor and artist who was Vincent van Gogh’s friend for the last 66 days of his life. Gachet the younger was heir to a large collection of Impressionist paintings that his father had managed to accumulate through his friendship with Paul Cézanne, Camille Pissarro, Van Gogh, and others. Persons interested in the lives and work of these artists often consulted with Dr. Gachet and his son. The American public was able to see the painting for the first time in February 1949 in Beverly Hills. Among the curious (according to the newspapers all of Hollywood turned up) were Thomas Mann and Shirley Temple.16 De la Faille was paid by Associated American Artists to give a lecture on the self-portrait. He told the New York Times that it was one of the best existing portraits of Van Gogh, repeating his arguments from the Phoenix article. In an effort to anticipate any misgivings, he said, “I was glad to find this picture genuine, as I am shown so many false Van Goghs.”17 He then began a Van Gogh lecture tour that took him on a three. New York, October . V.W. van Gogh with Self-Portrait (F  verso). The photographer wanted to capture the physical similarity between the Engineer and his uncle for the American public.

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month journey across the United States and ended in New York. Despite the favorable publicity and valuable certificates of authenticity, the proud owner’s joy was short-lived. Indictment On 25 May 1949, Het Parool reported that Willem Sandberg had labeled four recently unearthed Van Goghs as fakes. Two of them were of particular interest: Study by Candlelight and Self-Portrait with Straw Hat. A few days later, Sandberg’s assessment was seconded in the newspaper by the Engineer, though he expressed himself a bit more cautiously at first: he doubted the authenticity of Study by Candlelight. He said the canvas was based on the self-portrait that Vincent had painted for Gauguin in 1888, but that the inscription was unusual and the Japanese characters were carelessly painted, while Vincent always went to great lengths to copy such characters with precision. Initially the Engineer was just as hesitant about the authenticity of Self-Portrait with Straw Hat, but Hans Jaffé, curator of the Stedelijk Museum, claimed to have convinced him that the painting was just a jumble of elements from other Van Gogh pictures and was therefore a fake.18 The two other forged works mentioned by Sandberg – Landscape and Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles – quickly disappeared from the pages of the papers. No expert spoke up for them (De la Faille called Bedroom “rubbish”). The assessments of the self-portraits were contradictory, however, and contradictory assessments make for good press coverage. De la Faille issued a certificate of authenticity for Study by Candlelight, while Bremmer declared in black and white that Self-Portrait with Straw Hat was authentic. A second and more important condition for press attention was that considerable sums were at stake in the sale of the works. At the request of an unknown owner, Bremmer was shown Self-Portrait with Straw Hat by the Dutch painter Nico Eekman, who was living in Paris. Bremmer supposedly said to Eekman, “A magnificent Van Gogh, genuine without a doubt. Don’t let your client sell it for any less than 100,000 guilders!”19 Bremmer’s certificates of authenticity for works by Van Gogh were still desired by dealers and owners and carried a certain amount of weight, but he stubbornly refused to discuss Self-Portrait with Straw Hat with the press. Except for Eekman, no one was willing to defend Bremmer publicly.

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Eekman said the owner wished to remain anonymous and did not want to part with the picture. This decreased the story’s newsworthiness, since the third condition for press attention in matters of authenticity was that the owner and expert had to make attempts to win other experts over to their cause. Bremmer’s circle of well-disposed course participants, critics, dealers, and collectors all kept quiet. They were far less numerous and powerful than in the years before the war. After a few days, Self-Portrait with Straw Hat disappeared from the pages of the newspapers. Study by Candlelight, on the other hand, would exercise minds for many years to come because the new owner, William Goetz, felt his interests were under attack and responded with countermoves. In De la Faille he had found an expert who was prepared to defend his convictions in public. According to the article in Het Parool, Sandberg had filed a complaint a few months earlier – in January 1949 – with B. Kist, the public prosecutor, regarding the forgery of four paintings by Vincent van Gogh. He did this at the urging of the prosecutor, who must have known that a resulting lawsuit was far from certain since the case of the four paintings had occurred for the most part in France. Nonetheless, Kist wanted to put an end to the trade in forged Dutch masters, aware that rumors of Dutch “forgery factories” were making the rounds in Western Europe and the United States. According to cartoonist Leendert Jordaan, the rumors had even reached the Pearly Gates, where the assembled artistic luminaries seem doubtful as to whether the person standing before them, who claims to be Vincent van Gogh, is actually the genuine article. For Sandberg, filing a formal complaint was an unusual step. Neither he nor any of his predecessors had ever worked with the legal authorities to expose forgeries. Ever since the Stedelijk had been given the Van Goghs on loan, the museum had been repeatedly confronted with works wrongfully attributed to the master. Sandberg hoped that by taking this step he would “drastically curtail attempts to burden the great name of a Dutch artist with inferior work.”20 Sandberg was pressing for the establishment of a Central Expertise Institute that would be able to do its work without any constricting ties to commercial interests. Such an institute would conduct integrated research on paintings from many different angles: art history, graphology, chemistry, X-rays, and provenance. The idea for such an institute was dear to the hearts of both Sandberg and the Engineer. The Engineer told Het Parool that it was

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. Jordaan’s commentary of  June , on the rumors that “forgery factories” were operating in the Netherlands. [cartoon captions: IN PAINTERS’ HEAVEN / “Do you think he’s genuine?”]

time to put a stop to the veritable stream of forgeries, and he hoped that Sandberg’s complaint would have a preventive effect: “I know what I’m talking about: not an exhibition of Vincent’s work goes by without people coming up to me with their so-called ‘Van Goghs.’ Even before looking at their wares, I’m always tempted to snarl at them just as I did once with another Van Gogh discoverer in Bergen, Norway: ‘Make that yourself, did you?’”21 Sandberg’s complaint in Het Parool of 25 May instantly became national news. The newspapers reported it with compelling headlines: “Museum director fights against forgeries,” “Vincent Van Gogh forgery factories,” “Appalling number of fake Van Goghs.”22 The foreign press announced the news with headlines like “Fake Van Goghs flood the market.”23 Sandberg told the press he had seen the painting, or one that looked very much like it, in Paris back in 1946 at the Louis Carré gallery. Even then he had doubted

indictment


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its authenticity: the stylistic deficiencies, the absence of a signature, the text “etude a la bougie.” In December 1948 he had a photograph of the painting examined once more by the aforementioned Maurits van Dantzig, an art expert who specialized in forgeries, and by Jaffé. As far as Sandberg was concerned it was undoubtedly a fake.24 De la Faille thought the legal action was excessive. He told journalists that there were ten incorrect attributions a year at the most, not “hundreds,” as Sandberg and his associates had argued. He was not impressed by the criticism: “I was and continue to be fully convinced that this is a work by Van Gogh.”25 De la Faille was disappointed in the attitude of Sandberg and the Engineer. He found their behavior rash, and he challenged their expertise. After all, whose catalogue raisonné had brought him worldwide prestige as an expert, and who had done more than anyone else to expose Van Gogh forgeries? As he pointed out, he had proposed the establishment of an expertise institute as early as 1925, and his words to the journalist also included something that had the distinct ring of tribute: “If it [the expertise institute] is so highly desired by Mr. Sandberg, the expert would certainly have expected him to have discussed it with himself and with Dr. Bremmer, who has been campaigning against Van Gogh forgeries since 1905.”26 Confrontation William Goetz, the spanking new owner of Study by Candlelight, was just as unpleasantly surprised by Sandberg’s move and reacted in an appropriate fashion. He asked the mayor of Amsterdam, A.J. d’Ailly, whether Sandberg had made his statements in his capacity as museum director. He also sent the Dutch consul in New York a letter of protest. Goetz’s lawyer approached the Amsterdam public prosecutor to protest the “wilful, vicious, uncalled for, and slanderous statements” made by Sandberg. Goetz’s offer to the prosecutor is interesting. “Recognized and impartial art experts of your choice will be given every opportunity to study this painting in New York or California in order to corroborate the opinions of first-rate experts who have already acknowledged it as an important work.”27 It was to be an independent investigation, but aimed at “acknowledging” the work’s authenticity. He then sent his lawyer to Amsterdam to recoup his losses. The lawyer proposed to Sandberg that experts be asked to make a statement. If Sandberg refused,

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the lawyer would take him to court for defaming the character of the painting. To this end, the owner would demand a symbolic sum of ten cents for damages. If the experts proved Sandberg in the wrong, it would be a smear on his reputation. If Sandberg persisted in his criticism, Goetz would still take him to court. In the unlikely event that the experts should decide the canvas was a fake, Goetz knew where to turn: to Lewenthal, who sold him the painting, and De la Faille, who was paid for his certificate of authenticity. Sandberg asked for time to reflect. The mayor obtained legal advice on whether Sandberg had made his criticism as museum director or as a private individual. The answer is sobering: “The action of Mr. Sandberg with regard to paintings that have been wrongfully attributed to Van Gogh was done entirely outside his function and his duties as director of the Stedelijk Museum. Mr. Sandberg acted as an art connoisseur and expert, as anyone else possessing these qualities might have done. While he may partly derive his authority from the function he holds, this does not mean that he must be seen as having acted in the exercise of that function.”28 Sandberg answered the mayor that care of the Engineer’s collection had been entrusted to him as the director of the Stedelijk Museum, and he asked him whether he, Sandberg, would not be obliged to turn to the courts if paper currency of dubious authenticity had been offered to him. The city wisely chose not to answer this basic question.29 What was clear, however, was that his employer was not going to support him. Sandberg found himself between a rock and a hard place, between two representatives of the Dutch state. He began his lawsuit at the request of the public prosecutor, who wanted to put an end to the flood of forged art, and was being stopped by his superior, the mayor of Amsterdam, who did not want the city to be held liable on account of his action. As is later shown, the mayor was also listening to the Dutch government’s concerns about diplomatic relations with the US. Goetz’s lawyer then went to see the Engineer, who gave him a declaration stating that he only knew the painting from reproductions and could not make a final judgment without having seen the work with his own eyes. By doing this he did strip his judgment of its sharp edges, but it was still less than the owner had wanted to hear from the mouth of the Engineer. In the newspapers others joined in the authenticity battle. The American journalist Irving Stone – author of Lust for Life, a romanticized biography of Van

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Gogh that had sold more than two million copies in the United States at the time – called the painting genuine.30 Whether the transatlantic sparring match would actually go to court in the Netherlands was uncertain. Something else had come up to muddy the waters. For quite some time, the Dutch government had been planning to mount a major Van Gogh exhibition in the United States beginning 15 October 1949 – at the Engineer’s initiative, no less. The lion’s share of the art would consist of works from the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller and from the collection of the Engineer, who had already promised about 50 paintings from the Foundation for the trip to the New World. Legal actions instituted by Goetz threatened to make a dreadful mess of things. The Engineer was afraid his pictures would be impounded on account of his statements about Study by Candlelight, thereby jeopardizing the two planned exhibitions at the Metropolitan Museum in New York and the Art Institute of Chicago. The conflict over authenticity had more than just an aesthetic and a legal aspect. Politics would play a significant role as well. National interest For quite some time, Europe had been living with an “iron curtain,” to cite Winston Churchill’s famous words of March 1946, which divided the communist dictatorships from the Western European democracies. The Dutch image of communists as courageous resistance fighters struggling against the German oppressors was replaced by a picture of communists as active supporters of the Soviet dictatorship. The common belief was that the communists’ aim was to disrupt free society, since they kept calling for strikes despite the fact that Western Europe was suffering from a shortage of able-bodied workers to repair the immense damage inflicted by the war. Moreover, they approved of the establishment of dictatorial regimes in Eastern Europe, which had only just wrested itself from the horrors of Adolf Hitler’s dictatorship. In February 1948, the Dutch Communist Party (CPN) celebrated the communist takeover of Czechoslovakia as “a splendid victory.” The vast majority of Dutch people saw communists as subverters of freedom. Speaking of this period many years later, Sandberg said, “I remember being called day and night, often for months at a time. We heard the word ‘murderers’ and we were treated to every possible type of

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. The reaction to Sandberg’s report of forged Van Gogh paintings in the Algemeen Dagblad of  May . His communist sympathies made the complaint suspect. [cartoon caption: LA GIOCONDA . − What are you hiding behind that mysterious smile, O lovely one?]

verbal abuse. Our phone lines were cut. All kinds of things were done to you that were completely illegal, simply because you were reputed to be a communist.”31 The Algemeen Dagblad illustrated an article on the Van Gogh question with a cartoon that connected the hardening of political relations between East and West with art forgeries. The cartoonist replaced the face of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with that of Joseph Stalin and asks, “What are you hiding behind that mysterious smile, O lovely one?” The uproar over aesthetics and authenticity was seen as the machinations of communist agitators. Elseviers Weekblad also discerned political agitation in Sandberg’s statements on Study by Candlelight: “Recently we pointed out that Mr. Sandberg – who admits to being a confirmed communist – is not the appointed director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. In an excess of progressive zeal, this director has a penchant for inviting the most extreme and left-wing groups into his building. Recently at such a gathering a scuffle broke out. This same Mr. Sandberg has disgraced the entire country with his impetuous declaration that a Van Gogh owned by an American is

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a forgery. There is no doubt that Mr. Sandberg will bring us more discredit, but do not imagine it is entirely unintentional. All this disgrace and all this squabbling are part of a campaign to undermine the peace, order, and security of Western Europe.”32 While not every newspaper made this connection, Elseviers Weekblad and Algemeen Dagblad were expressing a view held by many that the battle over the authenticity of Study by Candlelight had international political ramifications. All this commotion was a source of great concern to the Dutch government, for relations between the Netherlands and the United States were already strained. The Netherlands was fighting a colonial war in Indonesia, much to the displeasure of America. Then, on a completely different front, there was the negative publicity in America over the spectacular forgeries made by Han van Meegeren. The news that Sandberg and Engineer Van Gogh had labeled Goetz’s brand-new painting as a fake made headlines in the American newspapers as well, just when the Van Gogh exhibitions could have compensated so nicely for all the bad press. They might have supplied the requisite goodwill as well as the necessary foreign currency. The national authorities feared that the conflict over authenticity would become politicized. The Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences told the Dutch consul in New York that the question was “exceedingly unpleasant and unwelcome.”33 The Netherlands Information Bureau, a division of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in New York, wrote to Sandberg: “As you know, besides being a very wealthy film magnate and art collector, Mr. Goetz is also a close personal friend of President Truman and is generally regarded as a very influential man in America.” The bureau also wrote that, for the sake of relations with America, the consul general wanted to avoid a lawsuit and had won Goetz over to the idea of having the painting inspected by a few Dutch experts. It explained to Sandberg that “the relationship between the Netherlands and America is unfortunately rather sensitive on a number of points.” That sensitivity had to be humored. The bureau asked Sandberg politely if he would cooperate.34 The message was clear: Sandberg had to keep his mouth shut. A friend asked Sandberg point-blank why he had declared Study by Candlelight a fake: “I don’t understand you, either. Even though you’re perfectly aware that Mr. William Goetz is an American citizen, and that he is doing a great deal for art in general besides having bought a Van Gogh for a lot

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of money, and hard American dollars at that – you casually call his Van Gogh a fake. Look, Wil, we’ve had a major loan from the USA [through the Marshall Plan] and hope to borrow more, and we also hope they’ll keep their hands off the Indies ... all these considerations have to be taken into account in any judgment of the authenticity of this Van Gogh. So I really don’t understand you.”35 The proposal of the consul to send Dutch experts to America was greeted with skepticism in The Hague. Goetz demanded that the experts make an impartial statement. The Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences told the consul “there is practically no expert inside or outside the Netherlands who hasn’t been involved in this or a similar Van Gogh affair, for a longer or shorter period of time. All the reputed or actual Van Gogh experts are involved to some extent, and no one is especially inclined to stir up this hornets’ nest.”36 The Dutch government saw that no Dutch art expert had put his name forward, and it looked as though Engineer Van Gogh might withhold his contribution to the exhibitions in America for fear of confiscation. Commission To break the impasse, the director of the Metropolitan Museum offered to appoint a commission of experts to come to a unanimous judgment: if the painting was a Van Gogh, it would be included in the exhibition.37 The Engineer agreed, and in late September a ship from the Holland-America Line set sail for the United States carrying 142 works by Vincent van Gogh under the care of the Engineer and Hammacher. The Americans estimated the value of the contribution at more than three million dollars. In New York, the paintings and drawings were welcomed with great festivities. The route from the harbor to the Metropolitan Museum was cordoned off by soldiers and traffic was halted. But for the Engineer and Hammacher, there was unpleasant news in store. The directors of the Metropolitan had failed to keep their promise to have the commission’s report on Study by Candlelight ready for their arrival. The trustees of the Metropolitan, wealthy businessmen who ran the museum and kept it going by means of donations, had a completely different take on how to settle the controversy and wanted to discuss it with the Engineer and Hammacher. As Hammacher later recalled in 2001: “The trustees had

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. Engineer V.W. van Gogh and Chauncy McCormick, director of the Chicago Art Institute, unload paintings under police escort in late January 

brought their lawyers along. They wanted to meet with the Engineer and me to discuss the question of the fake painting, a painting we had not yet seen. They thought it was a question of some significance and conveyed to us a message from the lawyer of the owner, William Goetz: the painting would be included in the exhibition. Mr. Van Gogh exploded with rage. He refused to allow a forged work to be exhibited. He was told that he, the Engineer, had never actually seen the work and that they had the right to challenge him on this point. According to Hammacher: [the Engineer said,] ‘If that is the case, then stop unpacking immediately. There will be no exhibition.’ He turned to me and asked, ‘What are you going to do?’ I told the trustees, ‘I can’t take you on single-handedly. You’ve got lawyers. I’ve got to get in touch with The Hague immediately. The Dutch government is going to have to get me the support of an extremely good lawyer without delay.’ The case was at a standstill, hanging between favourable and unfavorable. I didn’t want to go to battle on my own. I proposed that the painting not be shown in the galleries but in the entrance to the galleries, with information about it that was as objective as possible. This was rejected. The trustees said, ‘It is to be shown among the other works or not at all.’38

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Tensions mounted when Goetz’s lawyer threatened to have the Engineer’s Van Goghs impounded.39 He also raised the possibility of suing him for damages to Goetz’s property. Bluffing or not? He must have known that an American court would not automatically decide in his client’s favor. There were few legal precedents involving cases like this one, and the fate of the canvas would be placed in the hands of a jury of laymen. Why should laymen attach more value to the judgment of De la Faille or Paul Gachet than to the words of Vincent van Gogh’s relative and namesake? The chance was great that the case would not be decided in Goetz’s favor. Finally Goetz and the Engineer agreed to the proposal to have judgment passed by a commission. The Metropolitan approached the former director of the Museum of Modern Art, the distinguished Alfred Barr, as well as Sheldon Keck (Brooklyn Museum, New York), James Plaut (Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston), and George Stout (Worcester Art Museum, Worcester), none of whom was a Van Gogh expert. The Engineer promised to withdraw his negative assessment if the commission should declare the painting authentic. Goetz, too, agreed to reconcile himself to the commission’s judgment.40 Because of all the commotion, the opening of the exhibition was delayed,41 but on 20 October 1949, five days later than planned, the Metropolitan Museum of Art opened its doors for the exhibition “Van Gogh: Paintings and Drawings.” Fallibility On 25 November 1949, the commission pronounced its judgment, “with full recognition of its own fallibility.” It had compared the painting with the works at the exhibition and found it “strident in color, weak in drawing, and uncertain in the modeling of the head. In construction, the painting shows several deviations from Van Gogh’s customary procedure.” The commission did not want to accept it as an original work of Van Gogh but also admitted that its authenticity would probably never be definitely established. It concluded: When the body of work by an artist once has been established, it is assumed that before a hitherto unknown work purporting to have been made by that artist can be accepted as genuine, the claim of authenticity must rest upon adequate and convincing grounds. The assumption is not that the work is authentic until

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proved otherwise but that work is to be doubted until an overwhelming body of evidence and opinion attest its validity. In spite of the obvious and general resemblances between the Goetz painting and works by Van Gogh, the committee concluded that these resemblances were superficial and unconvincing.42

This conclusion is striking in two respects. The first is the phrase that authenticity is to be held in doubt as long as the opposite has not been proven. Probably the legal approach to questions of authenticity in the United States played a role here. De Gruyter commented on this in 1950: “It is not possible to declare a work of art false in the positive sense in America because the law can regard such a declaration as an attack on private property.”43 The second is the remark that Van Gogh’s entire oeuvre is known. All the experts had to go on were two publications: the authoritative catalogues raisonnés of 1928 and 1939. In 1949 the only oeuvre catalogues were those of De la Faille.44 But the same De la Faille had confirmed the authenticity of Study by Candlelight and announced that it would be included in the third edition, yet to be published, under number F 476a. Customs Most American and Dutch newspapers reported that the commission had declared the work a fake.45 Goetz did not want the Metropolitan to show Study by Candlelight with a notice beside it explaining that it was not a Van Gogh: “This picture has been subjected to enough indignities.”46 De la Faille was furious. He told the press that “the experts from the Metropolitan Museum” were “utterly devoid of expertise.”47 Speaking in a private setting he referred to them as “big blockheads.”48 He stuck by his opinion that Study by Candlelight was an authentic self-portrait and wanted to ask “recognized European experts” for their judgment.49 Goetz formally commissioned De la Faille to have the self-portrait examined in Europe. In the Netherlands De la Faille complained that his choice was limited. He insisted that museum directors should not issue written certificates of authenticity, while other experts did not want to become involved in the case because of the Van Meegeren affair. Finally, in the spring of 1950, he succeeded in putting together a five-member commission that would pass a judgment. Of these five, only C.W. Huinck, director of the Huinck &

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Scherjon gallery, could boast of having had prolonged experience with the work of Van Gogh. But neither he nor any of the other commission members had published anything on Van Gogh’s oeuvre. The other experts were: Dr. C.H. de Steurs, former curator of the print collection of the Rijksmuseum; W.C. Feltkamp, brother-in-law of H.P. Bremmer and author of books about modern art; A. Schoeller, a French art expert; and A.C. Willink, a painter of magical realism. After looking at the painting they each resolutely declared that the canvas was a real Van Gogh. Huinck commented, “A work by Vincent van Gogh without a doubt, and one of the most important.”50 The owner was satisfied with this statement and publicized the judgment of the “European” experts far and wide. He had the painting shipped back to New York, where an unpleasant surprise awaited him. The customs officials demanded 5,000 dollars in import duties, being ten percent of the purchase price in 1948. The reason was simple. Because of the triumphant stories in the press, the tax authorities had been alerted to the fact that a painting was being imported to which an American commission had denied the label “original.” Original works of art were exempt from import duties, but “reproductions” were not. The judgment of the European experts was no concern of theirs. Goetz protested to the Department of the Treasury, which decided to undertake its own investigation. It called on the head of the technical research department of the Metropolitan Museum, which estimated the age of the painting at 50 to 60 years. It also engaged a linguist to decipher the Japanese characters, as well as a graphologist, who said that the signature, the dating, and the inscription closely resembled the handwriting of Van Gogh. On these grounds, the Secretary of the Treasury decided it was a real Van Gogh and therefore exempt from import duties.51 Goetz and De la Faille let the press know that the authenticity was now beyond all doubt. The New York Times added an ironic comment: “As for the original decision by the Metropolitan jurors, only their honorable concession of their own fallibility seems likely to go unquestioned today. Matters of this sort, by their very nature, are never settled to everybody’s satisfaction, and very likely the art experts will go on bickering for a long time. But most of us learned long ago never to argue with the customs man.”52

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Bickering The newspaper’s prediction that art experts would long be bickering over the painting’s authenticity never came true, as far as I can tell. It all depends on what is meant by bickering. If it means “discussion” – that is, presenting and verifying the facts in order to learn the truth – then the harvest is meager. In February 1951, the seventeen most important protagonists – including Gachet, De la Faille, the Engineer, Sandberg, and Goetz – were given a detailed inquiry form containing some 40 questions about Study by Candlelight and related portraits. The sender wanted to write an article in order to “stimulate interest in art and art studies.” The questionnaire was not issued by an academic magazine but by the daily Het Vrije Volk.53 The responses were probably disappointing. In any case, an article on the answers never appeared. In 1953 Van Dantzig published his method for unmasking forgeries known as “pictology” (which I will discuss in the next chapter), and his analysis supposedly showed that the work was not a Van Gogh.54 But pictology as a method of establishing the authenticity of works of art, in this case by Vincent van Gogh, was a poor fit. If “bickering” is understood to mean “debating,” or presenting the facts in such a way that one is confirmed in one’s own opinions, then the remark in the New York Times was certainly prescient. De la Faille never wavered from his opinion about the authenticity of William Goetz’s painting. He saw himself proven right once and for all in 1954 when a new edition of Vincent’s letters was published and the painting appeared (according to his reading) in a hitherto unknown letter.55 He repeated his standpoint a few years later in an issue of a series of brochures he was editing, Les Cahiers de Vincent van Gogh. Goetz’s painting was presented as a Van Gogh in exhibitions in the US during the fifties, but after 1959 the exhibition history becomes murky. De la Faille was never able to carry out his plan to include the painting in the third edition of the catalogue raisonné. He died in 1959. His uncompleted catalogue was revised by an editorial committee, however, with the financial support of the Dutch government. De la Faille’s widow attended a few editorial meetings during the sixties but remained ignorant of the modifications being made by the committee until the book was published. The large and expensive book came out in 1970, still under his name. This posthumous magnum opus – The works of Vincent van Gogh: His paintings

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and drawings – calls Study by Candlelight one of the works that De la Faille wanted to include but that the editors did not regard as a genuine Van Gogh. The editors cite literature with arguments both for and against, but do not provide any explanation for this decision.56 The widow was quite put out by the printed result and complained to the chairman of the committee. His answers failed to satisfy her. She considered instituting interlocutory proceedings and hired a lawyer. One of her grievances was the absence of F 476a, Study by Candlelight.57 In 1970 William Goetz’s heir put his entire painting collection up for sale, but without Study by Candlelight. As far as I can determine the work has not been exhibited since then. Catalogues published after 1970 have omitted it.58 In a recent exhibition catalogue on Vincent’s portraits and self-portraits it is conspicuous by its absence.59 Its current location is unknown. The battle over Study by Candlelight shows that casting doubts on the authenticity of a painting or denying it outright can be seen as damage to valuable property. The owner defends himself and calls on the assistance of experts, who consolidate the argument in favor of the work’s authenticity. Power is also exerted in various forms. The owner tries to gain control over his antagonists and their views. If they are no longer able to express themselves freely, the unwelcome tidings are apparently stifled as well. Goetz used legal weapons to broaden the conflict: he received support from representatives of the Dutch government in order to silence Sandberg. The city of Amsterdam washed its hands of Sandberg while the Ministries of Foreign Affairs and of Education, Arts, and Sciences urged him to keep quiet. It is interesting how the conflicting interests, represented by government officials, were responsible for the controversy. The Amsterdam public prosecutor felt obliged to take bold action against forgeries, regardless of who owned them. The ministries wanted to improve relations with the United States, so unfavorable statements about the property of an influential American were unwelcome. The principal lesson taught by the history of Study by Candlelight is how effective it is to threaten with legal weapons. After Goetz threatened to take legal action against them in June 1949, Engineer Van Gogh and Sandberg never made any more public statements about the authenticity of the painting. Sandberg did not bring it up again until 1975.60

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9

Among art experts

“The government is not a judge of science or art.” These legendary words spoken by the Dutch statesman Johan Rudolf Thorbecke in 1862 have become the touchstone for the relationship between art and government in the Netherlands.1 They eliminate any possibility of Dutch politicians deciding on questions of authenticity. Rulers of states whose art is inextricably linked to national identity may very well feel called to pass judgment on such questions. An example is Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was also king of Prussia. In 1909 Wilhelm Bode, chairman of the Royal Museums in Berlin, bought a sculpture – Leonardo da Vinci’s Florabuste – from a British art dealer, to the great satisfaction of Wilhelm II. It fit in well with the other spectacular purchases being made by the museum and alarmed the British, not only because there were few works by this famous artist on the market or so much money was involved, but mainly because in their eyes it was an expression of German political, military, and economic expansion. But when British art experts uncovered evidence that the bust was a fake – evidence that Bode regarded as utterly worthless – the agitation gave way to gloating, Wilhelm II decided to get involved in the struggle over authenticity: the honor of Germany was at stake.2 Thorbecke was wary of state power manifesting itself through art, so both he and his successors took great pains to distance themselves in public from statements on authenticity. This was reflected in the attitude of government officials who were charged with exhibiting and caring for works of art. To my knowledge, the curators and directors of Dutch museums have never been legally prohibited from making judgments on authenticity. Nevertheless, only one or two have voluntarily and openly become involved in disputes concerning the authenticity of art, in this case the works of Van Gogh. In this chapter, I will be discussing an attempt by Engineer

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Van Gogh and Sandberg to engage the state in such a role by means of an organization, the Expertise Institute (full title: “Institute to promote sound and independent expertise with regard to works of art”). After their attempt failed, they refocused their efforts by setting up a private organization to carry out the same task. An unavoidable aspect of this discussion is how the organization was to monitor its control over research on the authenticity of works attributed to Vincent van Gogh, and what it ought to do if its experts issued contradictory statements regarding that authenticity. Lost works With the post-war controversies over questions of authenticity – the “Old Masters” of Han van Meegeren and the affair of Self-Portrait with Straw Hat and Study by Candlelight – the Engineer and Sandberg became more and more convinced that the assessment of works attributed to Dutch artists should no longer remain in the hands of independent persons. The Engineer probably recalled the behavior of a few experts involved in the case of the Otto Wacker Van Goghs. Speaking on this subject in 1930, he said, “Despite the irrefutable evidence that I had in my own hands, I came up against an impenetrable wall built by wealthy and powerful individuals who realized it was in their best interest not to tell all the secrets.”3 He must have realized that the art experts back then had not been motivated solely by a quest for truth. A national institute, however, would better guarantee the experts’ independence. No doubt the Engineer’s views were supported by the staff of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, where his Van Goghs were on loan. The first experience of Stedelijk teamwork was in the autumn of 1947. Sandberg was approached by Adrianus Marijnissen, a tax official from Breda. Marijnissen owned almost 250 paintings and drawings that were purported to have been made by Vincent van Gogh during his Dutch period. Could these be the works that Van Gogh had left with his mother before leaving the Netherlands in 1885? It was known that Bremmer had arranged for the sale of some of the works in 1903 at the Oldenzeel gallery in Rotterdam.4 What about the rest? Did it all just disappear? Was it destroyed, or was some of it saved? And if it was saved, had it become the property of Marijnissen?5 Johanna van Gogh-Bonger had already tried to track down these lost works during the 1910s and to gain possession of them, but without success.

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. H.L.C. Jaffé, W. Sandberg and Engineer V.W. van Gogh setting up the exhibition of the Theo van Gogh Collection in the Stedelijk Museum in .

Sandberg asked Hans Jaffé to examine Marijnissen’s drawings and paintings. Jaffé was the acting director of the Amsterdam city museums who had done some writing on Van Gogh, including an almost completed dissertation that had gone missing during the war. Sandberg also asked the restorer Maurits van Dantzig for his opinion. Jaffé and Van Dantzig found the question interesting, but the conclusion they reached in late 1948 must have been disappointing for Marijnissen: a fairly large number of the drawings and paintings were not by Van Gogh. Some of the drawings had been made on paper that dated from after 1900, and they suspected the signatures had been forged. Van Dantzig was not yet ready with his investigation of the paintings, but after six months (the question of Study by Candlelight was receiving full media attention) Jaffé wrote to Marijnissen and told him that not a single drawing or painting was from the hand of Vincent van Gogh. The newspaper reports of Dutch “forgery factories” in the south of the country were undoubtedly referring to the Marijnissen collection.6

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State of emergency In 1949 the Engineer and Sandberg began pressing for the establishment of a central expertise bureau: an authoritative organization that would operate under the auspices of the national government. The Provisional Arts Council of the Minister of Education, Arts, and Science gave them a recommendation, thereby providing them with a sense of support. There was little action to back it up, however, and in 1950 Sandberg went to talk to his employer, the city of Amsterdam. He did not mince matters. They were in a “state of emergency,” he said. Forgeries of Frans Hals, Vermeer, and Van Gogh were spoiling the good name of Dutch art. Sandberg explained it this way: the owner of a painting that has not yet appeared in the official catalogues and handbooks works his way down the list of known experts until one of them is willing to acknowledge his picture as an original painting by a well-known artist. This recognition suddenly increases the value of the work enormously, often a hundredfold, so the owner can easily afford such an assessment. A piece has to be glaringly fake not to be given an expert’s signature. This situation has caused the prestige of certificates of authenticity to drop enormously in recent years. At the moment there are several canvases on the world market that have been attributed to Vincent van Gogh by experts but are unmarketable, according to their owners, unless they bear a certificate signed by yours truly.

Sandberg was not willing to conduct assessments on his own, however, because “it is almost impossible to be one hundred percent certain about the authenticity of a work by a deceased master, while proving that a work is false is possible in very few cases.” He called for teamwork, since “a painting can only be judged with a likelihood bordering on certainty when it is examined in terms of chemistry, X-rays, graphology, stylistic analysis, and provenance. That requires the collaboration of five specialists. [...] Each of them issues a separate report of the research carried out in his area; if the specialists agree, the case is simple. If they do not agree, they have to sit down and try to reach a consensus.”7 What Sandberg did not deal with was the problem of what to do if the experts continued to disagree. There was no response from his superiors. Undaunted, Sandberg wrote to the mayor and aldermen a few weeks later, describing a recent experi-

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ence he had had with forgeries and thereby hoping to press home his appeal for a central expertise bureau. At the request of the Israeli and Dutch authorities he had set out for Paris with Dr. A.B. de Vries, the director of the Mauritshuis, to look at some artistic treasures owned by a deceased Jewish collector. The heirs were prepared to donate the collection to Israel on the condition that a museum be built bearing the name of the deceased man. “We thought this case might be important for the young state of Israel,” Sandberg said, “so with a high sense of purpose we embarked on a job that promised to be very extensive, since the collection comprised more than 1,000 pieces [...] with famous names such as Velázquez, Botticelli, Titian, Veronese, Rubens, Prud’hon, Corot, Daumier, Boudin, Manet, Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, and Rousseau le Douanier, sometimes many from a single master. To make a long story short, not a single one of these paintings was of any value whatsoever; all of them were extremely crude fakes.” Sandberg ended his letter with an appropriate flair for the dramatic: “Mr. De Vries and I were astonished that in Paris, among all those museums that offered so many opportunities for comparison, such an improbable collection could be put together with so little hesitation. I had seen collections like this in South America, but I could not believe that such a thing was possible in the center of European art.”8 Mayor D’Ailly of Amsterdam responded by trying to win over the minister to the idea of a central expertise bureau.9 The minister in turn sent the proposal to the National Museum Advisory Commission,10 where it died a quiet death. Expertise Institute The Engineer, however, was indefatigable. Since the city of Amsterdam and the Dutch government were not willing to make the assessment of art a government responsibility, he began work on establishing a foundation that would carry out assessments. Sandberg attempted to enlist persons from the museum world to sit on the foundation’s board of directors. One unnamed museum director politely declined and told the future secretary, the publicist Margrit de Sablonière (pseudonym for M.A. Bicker CaartenStigter, 1905-1979), that he “had talked about the institute on Museum Day and said he detected a certain hesitancy as well as the feeling that ‘adding

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one’s signature’ would put ‘one’ in a tricky position.”11 According to De Sablonière, the museums did not want to jeopardize their relations with art donors.12 Consequently, those who were most interested in setting up the institute were not from the art world. Besides Sandberg, they included J. Slagter – dike warden of Rijnland – and Margrit de Sablonière. De Sablonière had been barraging the Dutch government with letters about fake Van Goghs since the end of the war. She wrote articles for Vrij Nederland, Het Parool, and Museumjournaal and published a book about Vincent’s life and work. She was a woman with a mission. When newspapers refused to publish her articles on Van Gogh forgeries, she decided to eliminate the middleman. She had them printed at her own expense and distributed them to anyone who might be interested. At the end of 1950 she wrote in Vrij Nederland about the Van Gogh forgeries of the past 20 years and pressed for the establishment of a national institute that would evaluate the authenticity of a painting with “the greatest possible certainty at a reasonable price.” She believed it was the task of the Dutch government to make sure that “the name ‘Van Gogh’ remain unstained and that his work was purged of forgeries. As it is now the dead are being dishonored.”13 But the government refused to comment. On 3 June 1952 the Expertise Institute was founded. The founders expected that in due course the museums would come to support their work. The board of directors consisted of seven persons, including two lawyers. Initially the Engineer saw the goal of the Institute as “Helping interested persons obtain unbiased, sound opinions concerning the authenticity of works of art.” It would do this by selecting experts who would carry out well-documented assessments: “[...] this may involve a single person or a committee of three. Thus the Institute is not responsible for the judgment of the experts. Rather, it serves as the liaison between the owner of a work of art and the experts who examine it.”14 The Institute was no longer willing to tolerate certificates of authenticity consisting of just a few lines, like the ones that had become traditional in the art world. It expected Institute experts to formulate carefully researched statements, setting down the facts and arguments for or against a work’s authenticity in black and white. The idea of teamwork among experts from various academic disciplines, which Sandberg had advocated in his appeal to the government, was abandoned by the board. This was undoubtedly due to the absence of govern-

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ment support and the lack of financial resources, but it also had to do with the desire to help interested persons obtain an independent assessment at low cost. Bringing in several experts for a single work of art would only increase the prices, which less affluent owners would not be able to afford. The Institute’s board was driven by a single ideal: to keep the oeuvre of Dutch artists pure. The board set out to draw attention to the Institute’s work. On 18 July it held a press conference and organized an exhibition entitled “Fake or genuine” in the Stedelijk, which was also to be mounted in Basel, Zürich, Düsseldorf, and New York. The Institute organized test assessments. It asked two art experts to examine an Utrillo from the collection of the Stedelijk Museum. The examination revealed that the work was a fake. A drawing attributed to Vincent van Gogh by the owner was sent to Hammacher and Jaffé for assessment. Their finding: not a Van Gogh. Independent of each other they put forward the names of artists who might have made the drawing. One of them was Jakob Nieweg, who stated that although he recognized his style, it was not his own drawing but a drawing based on one of his drawings. In its annual report the Institute called the result of the assessment “very positive.”15 Anticipating the possibility that owners might expect the Institute to cover any losses incurred by a negative assessment, it stipulated “that the Institute provides assessments only at the request of the owner of a work of art, and that those who submit works indemnify the Institute against all claims if a disagreement should arise with regard to the property.”16 In the years leading up to 1957, the Institute dealt with about 150 requests for assessments. The artist for whom the largest number of requests was submitted was Van Gogh, with about 80. The Institute found nine of them to be genuine. Other attributions concerned artists such as Rembrandt, Rubens, and Fantin-Latour.17 The Institute would only carry out assessments on artists who were sufficiently represented in Dutch museums for purposes of comparison. Almost all the assessments on Van Gogh were conducted by experts from the Stedelijk and the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. In most cases each work was evaluated by one expert. Manifestly absent were the independent experts Bremmer and De la Faille. Not once were they invited by the Expertise Institute to carry out an assessment. The reason was an unwritten but conscious function of the

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Institute, which was to undermine the authority of these men and to prevent them from serving as leading figures in the Van Gogh market. This was patently obvious when the Van Wisselingh gallery asked the Institute for its assessment of the painting The Garden (F 577). The work proved to be a Wacker Van Gogh that Bremmer wanted Van Wisselingh to put on the market. The secretary wrote to Jaffé a few days later, however, explaining that the assessment had been called off, “since Mr. Bremmer had the opportunity to sell it without an assessment. [...] How long is this halo going to have its desired effect? What a shame. We could have given him quite a wallop this time.”18 The Institute was successful insofar as it was able to protect the experts from improper pressure from owners. But in mid-1957 a crisis began in which it became clear that decisions about authenticity were not based entirely on the findings of experts. Within a few months’ time, completely contradictory assessments were made of four works that the owners had attributed to Van Gogh. It all started with the controversy over a painting, l’Allée de choux, which was in private ownership in France. Differences within the Institute were further exacerbated by assessments carried out on two watercolors in private ownership in the Netherlands as well as on the painting Environs de Paris, which was the property of a collector in Paris. The controversy over l’Allée de choux was set in motion by an outsider among the Van Gogh experts. Van Dantzig Maurits van Dantzig (1903-1960), scion of a Jewish banking family, had been studying for a short time at the Rotterdam Commercial College when he developed a passion for art. He enrolled at the art academy in The Hague, then attended the Kunstgewerbeschule Charlottenburg in Berlin, and trained as a restorer at the Kaiser Friedrich Museum. The subjective opinions of art experts at the Wacker trial in 1932 astonished him, and he responded by developing an objective method for determining the authenticity of paintings. After the publication of his book, Schilderkunst, maakwerk, vervalsching [Painting, hackwork, forgery], he applied his method to the 116 paintings by Frans Hals that were being exhibited in 1937 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the Gemeentelijk Museum in Haarlem. He was thun-

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. The restorer and pictologist M.M. van Dantzig.

derstruck. According to him, no more than 33 paintings could be attributed unreservedly to the master. The others were copies, faulty attributions or outright forgeries. Van Dantzig published the results that same year in book form – Frans Hals: echt of onecht [Frans Hals: genuine or false] – thereby establishing his reputation as a maverick researcher.19 The year 1937 was also the year the Museum Boijmans handed over 540,000 guilders for Christ and the Disciples at Emmaus. Van Dantzig, who had accepted the work as a Vermeer at first, studied the painting meticulously and concluded that it was a fake. He sent an article to this effect to the Maandblad voor Beeldende Kunsten, which refused to publish it.20 The time was not yet ripe for a critical approach to this “masterpiece.” The war forced Van Dantzig and his family to go into hiding. Like Sandberg, he joined the resistance and used his knowledge of forgeries to fabricate identity documents. After the war he resumed his interest in determining the authenticity of paintings, with the works of Vincent van Gogh constituting the focus of his study. Pictology, as he called his method, was based on identifying the essential elements in the work of a particular artist. In the case of Vincent van Gogh, he distinguished more than a hundred characteristics: 1. realism, 2. no minor details, 3. main theme as large as

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possible, etc. The researcher must identify each of these characteristics in any painting attributed to Van Gogh and note them in a list. The presence of a characteristic is indicated with a plus, its absence with a minus. The painting is genuine if at least 75 percent of the total number of pluses and minuses produce positive results. If not, the work cannot be attributed to Van Gogh. His attempts to objectify art criticism in this way were met with both support and resistance. The fact that many rejected his ideas did not worry him or threaten his material existence since he was financially independent. In the eyes of the art world of the thirties and forties he was an amateur.21 The Engineer had faith in pictology though, and in 1949 he wrote to a friend, “Van Dantzig is devoting himself to evaluating brushstrokes according to the principles of graphology. There’s a lot to it, I believe. At the moment he’s assessing the authenticity of a large number of drawings and a couple of paintings in the Stedelijk Museum (they’re not genuine).”22 What the Engineer was referring to were Marijnissen’s drawings and paintings. In 1952 the Institute called upon Van Dantzig to carry out the aforementioned test assessment on the Utrillo, and during the same year he was one of the curators of the exhibition “Genuine or fake?” in the Stedelijk Museum. Writing about Van Dantzig, Sandberg said, “[...] he is completely honorable and his method is sound.”23 In 1953 he published his method in Vincent?: a new method of identifying the artist and his work and of unmasking the forger and his products. It assured him of international attention. It was also the centennial of the birth of Vincent van Gogh, which was commemorated with an exhibition of his work at the Stedelijk Museum, the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, and the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. Van Dantzig caused quite a stir when he granted an interview with Het Vrije Volk and said that one of the exhibited works, The Fourteenth of July Celebration in Paris (F 222), was a fake. The newspaper saw a big story and gave it the headline “Inauthentic Van Gogh on display at the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam: Fascinating comparison with genuine masterpieces.” Van Dantzig said that according to De la Faille’s catalogue, the provenance of the canvas did not go back any further than 1918, when it was sold at auction in Paris. That was suspicious to begin with. But it was mainly the brushstrokes, colors, and drawing of the figures that seemed off. According to Het Vrije Volk, “once again this shows the vital

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importance of pictological analysis, the method for examining art that was designed and developed by M.M. van Dantzig.”24 Van Dantzig’s tone was professional, but for the Engineer and Sandberg his revelation had touched a sensitive nerve. Actually they agreed with him. They also had serious doubts about the authenticity of the painting. Nevertheless, they hung it as a genuine Van Gogh and included it in the catalogue.25 The Engineer defended their decision in a letter to a friend: “We did it out of consideration for the lender and to avoid causing distress to others with him. It was tucked away in a corner, and I said no one would notice it. Van Dantzig could have asked about it too. If you’re smart you will not write about or against Van Dantzig. The painting was requested by Wijsenbeek [director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague], not by me or with my knowledge. People like Van Dantzig always feel misunderstood. It’s too bad for him; he’ll never get anywhere that way.”26 What a remarkable defense. The Engineer speaking here is quite different from the person who had such a fierce and principled reaction to the inclusion of Study by Candlelight in the Van Gogh exhibition in New York. It clearly shows how much social relationships can have an impact on questions of authenticity. One piquant detail: the disputed canvas was owned by the heirs of A. Hahnloser. In 1930 the same Hahnloser refused to let the Stedelijk have his Van Goghs on loan for the commemorative exhibition because De la Faille had embarrassed him and other collectors a few months earlier with the publication of Les faux Van Gogh (see Chapter 4). l’Allée de choux In March 1956, the Parish art dealer Clément Altarriba went to Holland to find an expert to examine a painting that had been attributed to Van Gogh, l’Allée de choux (73 x 61 cm). The dealer, who wanted to sell the canvas in collaboration with the art dealer Fabiani, contacted Van Dantzig and told him in a letter that the painting was from the collection of his father-in-law, Émile Bernard. This painter was a friend of Vincent’s and was regarded as an unimpeachable source. Van Dantzig looked at the painting in Paris but drew no conclusions and asked Altarriba to have it sent to Amsterdam so he could conduct a more extensive stylistic analysis. This increased the costs for the owner: after one month, transport, security deposit, customs, insur-

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ance, and assessment had already run into the hundreds of guilders. But at the end of May, Altarriba received the results of the pictological analysis of his painting. The outcome was positive: it was a Van Gogh. Van Dantzig suggested that he write an article about it and also submit the canvas to the Expertise Institute. Altarriba and Fabiani hesitated. As far as they were concerned, the conclusion drawn by Van Dantzig who, as the author of Vincent?, could be regarded as an authority on the work of the master, was quite sufficient. His certificate of authenticity made the canvas marketable. If he wanted to write an article about it, fine...as long as he did not publish it. How could Van Dantzig be sure, asked Altarriba, that “neither Sandberg nor Vincent’s nephew would ever turn against the painting”? If that were to happen the painting could never be sold. If nevertheless it were sold in the meantime, then both gentlemen could cause a great deal of trouble afterwards, as the history of Study by Candlelight in America demonstrated.27 Van Dantzig tried to allay Altarriba’s fears. Sandberg had told him, Van Dantzig, that after the Goetz affair he and the Engineer did not want to run the risk of being taken to court again. They were no longer issuing judgments on authenticity but were leaving that to the people at the Expertise Institute. The Institute was founded for this very reason, wrote Van Dantzig: to avoid affairs having to do with authenticity. Actually the Institute did no more than appoint art experts to conduct well-documented . l’Allée de choux ( x  cm).

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assessments. There was no need to worry about Sandberg and the Engineer interfering with the contents of the art experts’ work.28 Van Dantzig’s reassuring words were successful; Altarriba was won over. He asked the Expertise Institute to carry out an assessment and sent Van Dantzig’s report along with the request. But anxiety struck again. What if the Institute experts decided it was not a genuine Van Gogh? Van Dantzig brushed his concerns aside. He thought it unlikely that anything would be found to contradict his conclusions. After three months the answer arrived from the Expertise Institute. Jaffé and Hammacher had both drawn the same conclusion: the work was not a Van Gogh. Altarriba saw his hopes for a fat profit evaporate and wrote to Van Dantzig, “One wonders whether the word ‘expert’ means anything anymore, since it has become such a common practice among art experts to contradict and betray each other.”29 Van Dantzig was convinced, however, that his assessment was correct; he thought the judgments of Hammacher and Jaffé were not up to the mark. He told Altarriba that he had agreed to discuss the matter with Jaffé: “We both would like to know, as scholars, whether this is a Van Gogh or not, and both of us are eager to answer the question once and for all, if possible.” Van Dantzig proposed the idea of comparing l’Allée de choux with five Van Goghs in the Stedelijk Museum. About a hundred people would be chosen to make independent analyses of the paintings based on a list of 20 characteristics. He got a statistician to commit himself to evaluating their judgments.30 The plan was so costly, however, that it made the owner balk.31 Other proposals by Van Dantzig foundered as well. Weeks passed and nothing was done. In December 1956, an irritated Van Dantzig asked the Institute if it accepted responsibility for the assessments, and if so, whether it could be held accountable for them. If not, then it really was no more than an address list of experts.32 His letter stirred up ill feelings. The Institute did not respond, and a few months later he and Altarriba decided to publish the assessment in Connaissance des Arts. Jaffé and Hammacher’s assessments would have to be included as well. Van Dantzig sent Altarriba some comments on their assessments. Van Dantzig, Altarriba, and Connaissance des Arts all had different reasons for going to press. For Van Dantzig, an article in an art magazine was a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the value of his method. There had been support for pictology at exhibitions on genuine and fake art in Am-

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sterdam and New York. Newspapers published his articles. He had worked with psychologists in conducting observational research in order to objectify artistic analysis.33 In his eyes, however, all this attention and recognition paled in comparison with the seriousness and scale of the forgeries being perpetrated. Art experts, he believed, were failing to be systematic about their assessments. Three years had passed since the publication of his Vincent? without the art world recognizing the value of pictology as a research method. Altarriba, on the other hand, had no interest in developing a more systematic approach to the assessment of art. He wanted to use Van Dantzig’s detailed analysis to demonstrate the Institute’s incompetence. If he succeeded, he believed, it would reverse the unfavorable verdict on the authenticity of l’Allée de choux. Connaissance des Arts saw news value in the contradictory judgments of leading Van Gogh authorities. Experts arguing over the same work of art in public was not something that happened every day. In July 1957 Van Dantzig asked Altarriba to send his article, his assessment, and his comments to Hammacher and Jaffé, and in doing so he committed a blunder. In fact he was handing over control of the publication to Altarriba and the editors of Connaissance des Arts. The editors did not ask Hammacher and Jaffé for permission to publish, however, and the two were totally unaware of what was coming. To the consternation of the Expert Institute, Jaffé, and Hammacher, the pieces appeared in the October 1957 issue of Connaissance des Arts under the title “Expertise et contre-expertise d’un van Gogh.” Nor was the difference of opinion limited to this French professional journal. In the Netherlands, Het Vrije Volk published an article on the same subject. It reminded readers that in 1956 Van Dantzig had made the spectacular discovery that ten of the hundred paintings at the big Rembrandt exhibition were fakes, and that in 1954 he had declared that half the paintings at a Rubens exhibition were not genuine. The newspaper also managed to coax a statement on l’Allée de choux from De la Faille: “The painting is by Van Gogh, but the upper part may be the work of another hand.” The newspaper summarized the judgments of the experts in a box: “Two experts: NO; Third expert: YES; Fourth expert: HALF.” Van Dantzig told Het Vrije Volk that the assessments of Hammacher, Jaffé, and De la Faille actually did not count. He was using a scientific method, while they were following a purely subjective approach: “I regret to say that some of the things they are writing are irresponsible.”34

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Jaffé and Hammacher were irate. Whether they took offence at the accusation of irresponsible behavior is unknown, but they did have another reason to be indignant. The publication of their assessment constituted an infringement of their right as authors to determine whether and what they were going to publish. But as often happens in such cases, this slipup, which they blamed on Van Dantzig, overshadowed any actual problems. How should the authenticity of the works attributed to Van Gogh be established? Was it possible to purify his oeuvre without publicity? How should contradictory assessments be dealt with? Van Dantzig, however, had botched things up with the Institute for good. He received no more requests to conduct authenticity studies. Sandberg let his former brother-in-arms know that the Institute had no more need of his services. After accepting Van Dantzig’s apology, Jaffé appeared ready to continue discussing pictology and l’Allée de choux with him, but Van Dantzig’s premature death in 1960 at age 57 left those plans unfulfilled. Watercolors In March 1957, the owner of two watercolors asked the Expertise Institute for a judgment on their authenticity. The works has been in the family for quite a long time, and tradition had it that they were Van Goghs. The Institute asked Victorine Bakker-Hefting, former director of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague, to do the research. After a few weeks she came forward with a fully documented answer: as far as she could tell the watercolors were by Vincent van Gogh. The board raised objections to her conclusion, however, thereby violating its own rule never to pass any judgments of its own. It did not send the report to the owner but decided to ask another expert to make an assessment of the watercolors, in this case the art historian Professor J.G. van Gelder of the University of Utrecht. His conclusion: “This is not Van Gogh’s work.” The Expertise Institute kept the Bakker-Hefting report under wraps and sent only the Van Gelder report to the owner. Many months later, in March 1958, De Sablonière reminded the Engineer of the board’s intervention, but he responded with, “That matter with the watercolors was ridiculous to begin with – you can hardly call that intervention by the board!”35 This reaction provides us with an unexpected peek behind the scenes of the Institute. Officially, the board did not pass judgment on the authentic-

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ity of works of art that were given to the Institute for assessment. The board saw to it that the argumentation in the experts’ reports was sound, and to the outside world it always insisted that the Institute maintained a strict division between the tasks of the board and those of the experts. According to Institute documents, however, this was far from the case. In 1965 a curator from the Stedelijk Museum was asked to conduct an assessment of a painting that supposedly was a Van Gogh. In his report to the Institute he wrote, “Engineer V.W. van Gogh, to whom I showed the painting, concluded without hesitation that it was a forgery.”36 In 1959 the Swedish ambassador asked for an assessment of a pastel drawing. He himself suspected that it was not the work of Van Gogh. Sandberg wrote him back, saying that he and Jaffé had studied the work and both were of the opinion that indeed it was not a Van Gogh.37 These cases show that there never was a watertight division between the experts and the board. The board members probably worked on a case-by-case basis, deciding how formal their response would have to be toward owners and experts. Les environs de Paris In 1956 the Paris art dealer Alfred Loeb paid ten million francs (a cool 155,000 euros in today’s money) for the painting Les environs de Paris, which he attributed to Vincent van Gogh. He discovered the remains of a signature on the canvas: the letters “n” and “t” were purportedly still visible. The French restorer, Professor N. Cordovado, whom Loeb commissioned to clean and restore the canvas, seconded his opinion. Up until then the painting had not been mentioned or reproduced in any publication about Van Gogh. In June 1957 Loeb asked the Expertise Institute to carry out an assessment of the painting. The Institute proposed that he have the painting examined by two experts in the Netherlands at the cost of 300 guilders. He would also be charged for transport and insurance. This increased the costs considerably for Loeb, but he knew it was a good investment. A certificate of authenticity would certainly yield double the purchase price of the canvas. The Expertise Institute asked Jaffé and Hammacher to make an assessment of Les environs de Paris. First Jaffé studied the canvas and drew up a tentative report. His point of departure was the knowledge that Loeb had

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attributed the painting to Van Gogh. With this in mind, he compared the painting with another work from Vincent’s Paris period in the Stedelijk Museum. According to him there were major differences in brushstroke technique between the two paintings. Jaffé also saw differences in the way the sky and the rest of Les environs de Paris had been painted, but he was not in a position to unravel its structure, not having the technical means to do so. In the lower left- and right-hand corners, where painters usually put their signature, he saw overpainting. But he could find no traces of a legible signature. Jaffé’s conclusion, which he regarded as tentative, was that this probably was not the work of Van Gogh. To be sure, the painting showed “great similarity in interpretation and technique” with that of the master, but “numerous retouches had been applied to make it look even more like a work by Vincent.” The painting was probably the early work of one of Vincent’s contemporaries, Paul Signac. He wrote: “It would not surprise me if examination by the Rijksmuseum were to reveal his signature and a date of about 1885 or ’86.”38 So Jaffé took the initiative to have infrared photos and X-rays of the painting made in the laboratory of the Rijksmuseum. The anticipated results failed to appear, however.39 The painting was then sent to the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller for assessment. Hammacher saw a resemblance between the brushstrokes of Les environs de Paris and those of other paintings from Vincent’s Paris period in the Kröller-Müller collection. The working of the landscape, which took up most of the painting, showed a great variation in color and brushstroke technique. “Sometimes the direction of the strokes is flat and unvarying, sometimes it is lively; the light red touches scattered across the greens and ochres are exquisite.”40 It is striking that Jaffé and Hammacher were focusing on the same features – brushstroke and color – thereby taking notice of practically the same details of the painting technique, but with very different interpretations. By late October the Expertise Institute had two reports: one that tentatively doubted the authenticity of the painting and one that unreservedly confirmed it. The Institute told Loeb that the two experts could not agree on whether his painting was a genuine Van Gogh or not, so a third expert would have to be called in. It proposed that a scientific analysis be carried out – which, by the way, would cost Loeb even more money. Loeb hurried

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to the Netherlands for a talk with the chairman of the Expertise Institute and agreed to a third assessment. He was not shown the reports submitted by Jaffé and Hammacher. The third assessment, conducted by W. Froentjes and A.M. de Wild, was ready by December 1957, but the magic words were not forthcoming. According to their report, the possibility that the painting came from the time of Van Gogh could not be ruled out, but they were unable to answer the burning question, “Which artist made it?” So what the Expertise Institute ended up with was a technical report that neither denied nor confirmed the work’s authenticity. Jaffé was told the result and drew up his final report, which he sent to the Institute in early January 1958. He wrote that the brush technique, style, and color precluded any possibility that Van Gogh was the painter of Les environs de Paris. He abandoned the earlier suggestion in his tentative report: that the canvas was made by the young Paul Signac. Now he saw a connection with the work of another contemporary, Charles Angrand (1854-1926), and hoped that an upcoming conversation between Sandberg and the painter’s nephew Louis Angrand would “produce definite results.”41 Loeb learned about this from Slagter, the board chairman, and beat Sandberg to the punch. Loeb visited Louis Angrand and showed him a color photo of Les environs de Paris, which Angrand said he did not recognize as a painting made by his uncle.42 These were difficult times for the Expertise Institute. By May 1958 the research that was supposed to have been finished within a few weeks according to the agreement had already lasted a year, without producing a unanimous answer. The Institute told Loeb that the painting could not be attributed to Van Gogh, and handed him only Jaffé’s second, negative report.43 Crisis In February 1958, four months after the publication of the assessments on l’Allée de choux in Connaissance des Arts, and with contradictory assessments on Les environs de Paris, secretary De Sablonière wrote to the board of the Expertise Institute, telling them that these problems exposed the shortcomings of the Institute. The goal of establishing a national institute, the Central Expertise Bureau, had not been achieved. Recognition had failed to materialize. She recalled the clash with Van Dantzig. Granted, he had

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written a “discourteous letter,” but he had called a spade a spade. Was the Institute nothing but a mouthpiece for experts, or did it have authority over the assessments it commissioned and if so, on what basis? Her judgment was harsh: “The Institute is vulnerable to criticism of every kind.”44 She wanted to resign her position. Was the announcement of her departure actually meant as a decision, or did she want to cast the matter in high relief in order to provoke a discussion? There is reason to suspect the latter, since she then met personally with a few of the board members (but not the Engineer) and wrote that “right from the start the board was gripped by a certain unwillingness to establish a clearly defined basis and guidelines. Perhaps this had to do with a controversy among the members themselves (although Engineer Van Gogh was probably the only one who refused to bear any responsibility, with all the consequences that this entails), which is why the matter was constantly being shoved aside (it was instinctive).”45 This was followed a few days later by a long statement by chairman Slagter concerning the vulnerable position of the Institute: “It is dependent on the goodwill of the Stedelijk Museum, which receives, preserves, and transports the works of art. It builds on the work of experts who may receive an honorarium but ultimately do the work voluntarily. Then there are the difficult relationships between the board members and the Council of Advocacy, and the poor attendance at meetings.” The greatest handicap was the absence of rules for dealing with assessments. The question of the two watercolors and Les environs de Paris was what really rankled him: “We did not foresee the problems that would arise if two experts had differing opinions. [...] If the board were to bear no responsibility toward the owner and the Institute were only an intermediary agency, it would have to pass contradictory reports on to the owner.”46 On 24 March 1958, the executive committee, consisting of the chairman, secretary, and Sandberg, proposed to suspend assessments and observe a long period of reflection. After one year, in 1959, a decision would then be made concerning the continued existence of the Institute. The obstacles of the last years had been too big to carry on with business as usual. The heart of the problem was the disagreement between experts and the absence of the kind of authority needed to force a consensus. Science was not the answer: “There is no objective scientific method for making assessments (the only method that might make a claim to this area of competence is based on inadequate-

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ly founded premises).” So much for Van Dantzig. The committee did see quite some potential in assessments, however, if they were carried out within “a well-attended institute of art history at one or more Dutch universities where the professor-director has the authority to supervise the research.”47 The Engineer was not impressed by the executive committee’s criticism and would not hear of suspending activities. He asked secretary De Sablonière to send a memo from his hand to the board. She carried out his instructions, but sent the memo to only a few board members interspersed with her own handwritten comments. In the memo the Engineer suggested turning the secretarial work over to a lawyer. With a different secretariat, he wrote, “we would have no more difficulties.” Here De Sablonière added “...of another character (preferably no character).” The Engineer saw nothing in the idea of teamwork as proposed by Slagter: “[...] teamwork usually leads to disappointment and poor results in the most diverse cases and circumstances – that is my experience as arbiter, advisor, experts, etc. [...].” He agreed with Slagter that there was no scientific, objective method for determining authenticity. But according to the Engineer, the Institute derived its raison d’être from the absence of such methods. He also dismissed Slagter’s idea of thenceforth commissioning institutes of art history to conduct research on authenticity, supervised by an authorized professor-director. The criticism expressed by Slagter, De Sablonière, and Sandberg concerning the Institute’s lack of authority could also be read in another way: as criticism of the authority of the Engineer – that is, being an owner of his uncle’s paintings and drawings while making statements about the authenticity of his work. But the nephew would hear none of it. He found the results of the Institute “satisfactory, or even more than that.”48 The discussion dragged on for a few months without the executive committee and the Engineer reaching common ground. They did agree on one point: in the event of a conflict between experts, no rules could be formulated that would determine which assessments would have to be accepted and which ones rejected. So should the owner be sent contradictory assessments? The problem with that, according to Slagter, was that “an owner could sell the work of art in bad faith along with the report most advantageous to him, even if the board could not accept such a report.”49 The Engineer proposed that owners be charged much more for assessments. That would lighten the Institute’s workload considerably, since owners would think twice before

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requesting an assessment. But this was at odds with the Institute’s most basic ideal: to keep the oeuvre of Dutch artists pure. With costs too high, many fake paintings would remain in circulation. The chairman announced his departure, but he died on 6 August 1958 before he could carry out his decision. Secretary De Sablonière left the Institute in early 1959. Addressing the crisis, the Expertise Institute’s annual report of 1957/58 said, “Although the Institute still had some bugs to iron out, albeit to a lesser extent, it easily proved that it was vigorous enough to withstand them.” Commenting on Les environs de Paris, the annual report stated, “With regard to one painting sent to us from France and attributed to Van Gogh, research by two experts, together with scientific analysis, was unfortunately unable to provide sufficient clarity.”50 What this sentence does not say is that the Institute had sent the French owner of Les environs de Paris a negative report. The years after 1959 passed without incident for the Expertise Institute. With the onset of the sixties, board members were less and less willing to spend time evaluating reports. The secretary complained that they seldom reacted to the reports she circulated. The board was satisfied with the advancements being made in the old-fashioned certificates, however: one-line declarations of authenticity without any detailed argumentation. It also believed that the Institute’s existence was having a preventive impact on owners’ all-too-effortless claims that their works of art were masterpieces. There were no more discussions of the Institute’s founding principles, however, or of the rise of scientific assessments until 1972, the year that assessments were actually suspended. That was when the long-term loan and exhibition of the collection of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation in the Stedelijk Museum came to an end, and the works were moved to the brand new Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh next door. The move coincided with the decline of the activities of the Expertise Institute,51 thereby revealing that maintaining the Engineer’s authority and protecting him from disappointed owners was a function of the Institute. This function was taken over in 1972 by the Netherlands Institute for Art History – the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, or RKD – which because of the posthumous publication of De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue raisonné would now serve as an important authority on authenticity. The Engineer supported this changing of the guard, since he himself had referred people to the RKD when they asked for an assessment of a Van Gogh.52

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Protection and publicity The Engineer held a key position among the post-war Van Gogh experts. Ownership, guardianship, blood relationship, and knowledge made him an authority in the Van Gogh world. He saw it as his responsibility to protect the integrity of the oeuvre of his uncle and namesake. His positive pronouncements on the authenticity of works of art attributed to Van Gogh by owners and experts were given great value. On the other hand, negative pronouncements could have far-reaching consequences, both for the owners whose property was thereby devalued and for the experts who felt their opinion and authority had been tarnished. We know from the history of post-war Van Gogh controversies that denying authenticity had adverse consequences for the Engineer himself, an obvious example being the conflict over Study by Candlelight. The Expertise Institute protected him and other connoisseurs from the demands of troublesome, disappointed owners. His conviction that assessments could be substantiated, but could not result in certainty, placed limits on the discussion over authenticity. Van Dantzig, on the other hand, believed that his brainchild – pictology – was the only correct basis for determining authenticity. He asked the question, “How can certainty over the authenticity of a painting be obtained, and what method should be used?” I lack the competence to decide whether the answer – pictology – is correct or not. Nor is it relevant to the central question of the present study, although it is puzzling that, as a restorer, Van Dantzig did not devote any space to chemical and physical analysis in determining authenticity. For the same reason we can skip the question of how effective he was in applying his method.53 What is important is his conviction that it should be possible to write freely and openly about the authenticity of works of art. This is the only way that knowledge of art assessment and of the artistic oeuvre can be increased, he believed. Here, it can be argued, lies the key to the misunderstanding between the Expertise Institute and Van Dantzig. The goal of the Institute, after all, was to provide the owner with a sound and unbiased assessment. The Institute applied knowledge. It was a service that was provided for a fee to the owner, whose concern was that the transaction take place in privacy. So what Van Dantzig wanted was incompatible with the goal of the Institute. This is only one side of the story, however. The other was concerned with purifying the work of artists by routing out forgeries. During the crisis

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of 1957-58, the secretary and chairman called this the “higher aim” of the Institute. Such a pursuit was bound to involve publicity, as well as reflection on the actual basis of assessments and the most appropriate research methods. Van Dantzig had to pay for his criticism with exclusion. Chairman Slagter and secretary De Sablonière stepped aside. The authority of the Engineer, based on blood relationship, ownership, and knowledge, proved strong enough to allow the Expertise Institute to function according to his ideas. He did not have to worry about criticism. After efforts to set up a state-sponsored central expertise bureau failed followed by the Expertise Institute’s lack of recognition, at least he could depend on the Institute to safeguard him from the demands of troublesome owners.

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10

The gift

The prices of paintings and drawings by Vincent van Gogh increased steadily over the twentieth century, so owners, dealers, and auction houses could expect to earn a great deal of money by selling them. This price rise explains why conflicts over authenticity could become so heated. The buyer would convert money into an object under the assumption that in due course it would bring in even more money. It was an investment. If he should find himself in financial straits, the work of art could be offered as security. He could use it as a tax write-off by donating it to a museum. While all this is true, seeing art purchases in purely financial terms is not enough to explain the experiences of art experts who became involved in such conflicts. What could happen to them is not the same as what happens to the bank employee who discovers counterfeit notes. Disputes over genuine and fake Van Goghs had far-reaching ramifications that were not limited to the financial arena but were played out in political, social, psychological, aesthetic, legal, and moral realms as well. The consequences for the art expert were just as widespread. He might find himself in a situation in which his income, his job, and his reputation were threatened. The same was true if a Van Gogh changed hands not by being sold but by being donated. In The Gift of 1924, the French anthropologist Marcel Mauss argues that giving plays a key role in societies regarded as “primitive” (the Kwakiutl Indians of the Pacific Northwest in North America, the Melanesians of the Trobriand Islands, and others) and “archaic” (Germanic tribes, the Romans, and Hindus). Giving connects both people and groups, he says, and reflects vastly diverse aspects of human society: it is a “total social phenomenon.”1 Although Mauss pays little attention to modern industrial societies, his ideas shed an interesting light on relations in the art world, where exchange relationships also play a prominent role. Anyone with a large, beautiful col-

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lection can count on attracting the interest of museums and auction houses. Such a collector is granted a place in the hierarchy of the art world and may also receive the occasional honor. He creates a position of power if he owns a great many valuable works of art and holds out the prospect of making donations: he acquires followers. By making donations he imposes obligations on the recipient, forcing him to behave in specific ways. The gift binds the recipient to the giver. But what should a person do if he is convinced that he has been given a forged work of art? While “give it back” would seem the most obvious answer, such a response fails to address the complex social character of art donation, as we saw in the dilemmas faced by the directors of the National Gallery of Art in Washington with Self-Portrait at the Easel. But what if there is not such a glaring power imbalance, as there was between Chester Dale and John Walker (see Chapter 7)? Wouldn’t that make it a bit easier to return the fake work and remove it from the master’s oeuvre? As the controversy surrounding the painting The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F 659) shows, it was far from easy for the recipient, in this case Engineer V.W. van Gogh, to present the donor with unwelcome tidings. This episode also reveals the cautious behavior of those who in turn did not agree with the Engineer. Gachet Junior and Senior On 20 May 1890, Vincent van Gogh arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise and became acquainted with Dr. Paul Gachet (1828-1909), his daughter Marguerite (1869-1949), and son Paul (1873-1962). Under the nom de plume Blanche de Mézin, Gachet Senior wrote medical books and art criticism. Like Paul van Ryssel, he made etchings and drawings and was also a painter and copyist. Gachet enjoyed a certain celebrity status among French modern painters. He was one of the first to appreciate the painting of the Impressionists and to begin collecting their work. In exchange for medical treatment, he was given drawings and paintings by Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and others. Vincent van Gogh presented him with works as well, although he was not a patient. After Vincent’s death on 29 July 1890, Gachet père received a few more paintings from Theo van Gogh as a way of thanking him for his care.

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After Theo died on 25 January 1891, the Gachets kept in touch with Johanna van Gogh-Bonger. They corresponded about the maintenance of Vincent’s grave in Auvers-sur-Oise and exchanged bits of news about the fortunes of their loved ones. Paul Gachet fils continued the correspondence with Johanna after the death of his father in 1909. They finally met in April 1914 when the body of Theo was moved from Utrecht to Auvers-sur-Oise and buried next to Vincent. In a letter to De la Faille in 1924, Johanna called Gachet “an exceptionally amiable man,” someone who had devoted himself “entirely to the cult of Van Gogh.”2 After her death, the Engineer continued the correspondence, and he and his children visited Marguerite and Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise. The exchange of letters between the Engineer and Gachet bespoke respect and trust. Their letters were affectionate and polite – they used the formal “you,” but that was customary at the time – and related their personal ups and downs. Above all, they wrote to each other about Vincent van Gogh. But after about 40 years – in 1954 – the Engineer came to feel that Gachet fils was no longer a man with a selfless devotion to Van Gogh, and he totally washed his hands of him. Many years later he went so far as to call him “highly unreliable,” and in 1974 the Engineer would describe his view of the Gachets as follows: Gachet’s father did not think it necessary to have his children learn a trade or profession. [...] The father taught Paul Gachet etching and how to pull prints. With regard to the etching depicting Dr. Gachet, De la Faille once published an article on why it could not have been an etching by Vincent. Paul Gachet made many prints from that plate and sold them. He spent his whole life living off his father, and for him the only artists that mattered were those his father had known. He held onto the apartment in which his father had had his practice for a very long time. It was in Paris, not very far from Gare du Nord. Until his death he walked around in the winter coat that his father had worn in the war of 1870.3

The description of the Gachets contained in these sentences is the very opposite of the Engineer’s life and attitudes. Gachet Senior neglected what Johanna van Gogh-Bonger strove to achieve: making sure your child learned a profession.4 Gachet Junior did something that the Engineer actively opposed: he lived off another man’s glory. Gachet Junior never stopped wear-

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ing his father’s coat, while the Engineer made a career for himself as a management consultant. Paul Gachet’s taste, essentially progressive and nineteenth-century, was that of his father, who had died in 1909. But the Engineer provided the Stedelijk Museum with financial support for the purchase of contemporary art, and in launching the Museumjournaal he hoped to publicize the work of twentieth-century artists as well.5 Gachet fils knowingly made and sold prints from an etching fraudulently attributed to Vincent van Gogh, while the Engineer worked through the Expertise Institute to protect his uncle’s oeuvre from forgeries. And then there was the air of secrecy (not mentioned in the quoted passage) in which Gachet shrouded his father’s collection. He showed his Van Goghs to only a few interested persons; hanging on the door to the room containing the Van Goghs was a sign bearing the words “Ne reçoit pas” (Do not enter). The paintings could not be photographed, and only a few had been shown in exhibitions. The Engineer, on the other hand, continued his mother’s policy of making the Van Goghs in Europe and the US accessible to everyone by means of exhibitions, catalogues, newspaper articles, and reproductions. Even more to Gachet Junior’s detriment were the many other forged works that, according to the Engineer, he had sold in addition to the etching. In fact, Gachet had been so brazen as to donate some of them to French museums and to put his “good friend” the Engineer, guardian of Vincent’s legacy, in a difficult position in 1954 by giving him a fake Van Gogh as well, The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F 659). Trust When did the Engineer become convinced that Gachet’s Van Gogh collection consisted mostly of fakes, and how did he reach that conclusion? All the facts suggest that a sudden reversal occurred in the days after 12 June 1954 – that is, after the arrival of The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F 659) in the Stedelijk Museum. There is no letter or other document from before that date indicating that the Engineer had doubted the authenticity of one or more paintings from the Gachet collection, although he visited Gachet Senior the year of his death and afterwards met with his son and daughter a few times in Auvers-sur-Oise. Undoubtedly he would have looked at the paintings of his famous uncle.

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. Paul Gachet and the portrait of his father in the l’Orangerie des Tuileries in . The text above the painting reads “Donated by Miss Marguerite Gachet and Mr. Paul Gachet.”

The donation was preceded six years earlier by a proposal from the Engineer. In May 1948 he asked Gachet if he would like to place his Van Gogh paintings in the care of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, which the Engineer said had been founded to avoid tax difficulties and inheritance problems. In 1948, he was 58 years old and Gachet 75. The reference to the inheritance tax clearly shows that the Engineer expected his collection to be divided among his wife and children, and that pieces would have to be sold to pay that tax. That would have meant the end of the collection. Paul and Marguerite Gachet were childless, but their collection would also probably be divided up after their death. The Engineer wrote that the purpose of the foundation was to put together a fine collection to the greater glory of Vincent.6 He repeated his offer in January of the following year. Gachet welcomed the establishment of the foundation but did not respond to the Engineer’s question. He had plans of his own.

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In 1949 Paul and Marguerite Gachet donated two of their Van Goghs to the Louvre: Portrait of Doctor Gachet (F 754) and Self-Portrait (F 627), as well as a painting by Armand Guillaumin. The gift took many by surprise and was the first of a series of donations to French museums that included works by Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh, Camille Pissarro, Guillaumin, and others. In 1952 Gachet (his sister had died in the meantime) gave Van Gogh’s The Church at Auvers (F 789) to the French state, a gesture that attracted a great deal of attention since this picture had not been shown to the public before.7 The newspapers called it a donation, but in fact Gachet had sold the canvas to an anonymous Canadian, who in turn gave it to the Louvre.8 It was accompanied by a donation of what De Waarheid called “true art relics”: Van Gogh’s palette, squeezed tubes of paint and the plate for his only etching.9 The exhibition of these things at the Jeu de Paume exposed what De Gruyter regarded as a “bizarre fetish industry,” but at the same time he wrote of being deeply impressed by The Church at Auvers and Portrait of Doctor Gachet.10 In 1954 Gachet donated more works from his collection, including five paintings and a drawing by Van Gogh. One of the paintings, Roses and Anemones (F 764), had never been shown in public or photographed before.11 It was a big story for the French newspapers, which valued the entire donation at more than 100 million francs. The donations happened to coincide with a great to-do over Gachet Junior and Senior, however. In 1949 a booklet appeared by the Surrealist Antonin Artaud, Vincent van Gogh, le suicidé de la societé (Vincent Van Gogh: The Man Suicided by Society), in which Artaud blamed the death of Van Gogh on the failure of Dr. Paul Gachet and even suggested that his actions were intentional. The piece can be dismissed as the ravings of a disordered mind: Artaud had spent many years as a patient in a mental institution. In 1953 Louis Anfray, a former naval officer with a great interest in Van Gogh, criticized the etching from Gachet’s collection depicting Dr. Gachet smoking a pipe. According to the inscription, Vincent made the etching on 15 May 1890, although he had spent that day in the south of France and would not become acquainted with Gachet until five days later. Anfray also doubted the authenticity of the painting Portrait of Doctor Gachet (F 754), a repetition of a portrait with the same name (F 753) in the collection of Siegfried Kramarsky of New York. In May 1954 De la Faille alerted the Engineer to Anfray’s articles and thought it would be difficult for Gachet to refute the criticism.

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The Engineer let it pass. From May 1948, i.e. from the moment he proposed that Paul Gachet put his Van Goghs in the care of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation along with his own, until the end of April 1954, these allegations seem to have had no effect on him. There is nothing in his letters to Gachet and others to suggest that he disapproved of Gachet’s gifts to the French state. On the contrary, he applauded Gachet’s gesture.12 In a letter to the Engineer, Gachet defended his donations to the French state with the argument that “Vincent should be represented in France in a dignified manner: it is his second homeland!”13 Nor did Gachet forget the Engineer’s offer of 1948. On 12 April 1954, he wrote him, “But I would like my name, too, to appear in the foundation you have set up in Amsterdam, and to that end I would like to donate a very beautiful and important painting (0.72 x 0.90) – The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F 659).”14

. The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F ), . x . cm. Van Gogh Museum.

trust


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The Engineer thanked him for this magnificent gift and wrote him that the foundation would make him an honorary member (“conseiller d’honneur”). The painting was delivered to the Stedelijk Museum on 5 June. One month later, on 3 July 1954, Gachet actually received the certificate of honorary membership, which was quite remarkable in view of the fact that in the meantime the Engineer had become convinced that in giving him The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy, Gachet had donated a fake Van Gogh. Labyrinth On 16 and 17 June (that is, a week and a half after the painting arrived in Amsterdam) the Dutch newspapers reported the donation – “an extraordinary acquisition” – and published photos of the painting. De Volkskrant wrote of a “hitherto unknown painting by Van Gogh.”15 That was not correct, for De la Faille had written about it in his catalogues of 1928 and 1939. But like so many others, he had not been given permission by Gachet fils to photograph the canvas, so it was not reproduced in his catalogues. The newspapers bungled other facts as well. Dr. Gachet’s place of residence was correctly reported as Auvers-sur-Oise, but as a physician he would have treated Vincent after his suicide in Saint-Rémy, about 750 kilometers further south.16 The most important point, however, is that the Engineer does not seem to have shared his doubts about the authenticity of the painting with any journalist. How did the Engineer arrive at his negative assessment? He did not take any notes in June 1954 about what he had seen. The first brief description dates from December 1966, but it is of little help. He was familiar with another painting (F 660) of the same name, the same composition, and the same dimensions, however, which was painted in 1889. It had hung in his parents’ home and was sold by Johanna van Gogh-Bonger to the collector Karl Osthaus in 1912. In 1954 it was on display in the Museum Folkwang in Essen. The Engineer would have noticed that there were differences between the two canvases, but that alone would not be saying much since Vincent’s repeated renderings of the same subject were always different. In which differences did the Engineer detect the hand of another painter? What decisive factor led him to call the painting a fake? The statements

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he made in the fifties are general and provide no insight into his observations. In 2001, after conducting historical, stylistic, and technical analyses of The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy, Hendriks and Van Tilborgh, restorer and curator at the Van Gogh Museum respectively, concluded that the painting is a genuine Van Gogh, although the canvas clearly differs from the one in Essen. That does not necessarily indicate a forgery. They wrote that the Engineer’s negative views may have been a response to things Gachet wrote about Van Gogh in 1953-54 and about his behavior toward the press.17 Gachet had written that he, like the Engineer, was the only living person who had had a direct tie with the painter. This would have made the Engineer jealous. Although that is a possible explanation, the problem is that the exchange of letters that took place between Gachet and the Engineer in 1953 and early 1954 was very cordial. Gachet attended the opening of the Van Gogh exhibition in the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague in the spring of 1953, and the Engineer urged Gachet to come stay with him, which he did. Does a jealous person behave in such a way? Back to June 1954. The Engineer decided to have the picture examined, but not by the Expertise Institute. He gave the job to someone at the Stedelijk Museum, whose verdict was consistent with his own: not a Van Gogh. The Engineer also had the canvas looked at by J.C. Traas, who passed the opposite judgment: the painting was definitely by Van Gogh.18 For the Engineer, this contrasting opinion was no reason to offer the picture to the Expertise Institute. The painting probably hung in the galleries of the Stedelijk Museum for only a very short time, if at all. The Engineer stored it away in the vault. At a certain point the Engineer got in touch with Jacques Latour, director of the Musée Réattu in Arles, who suggested he have detailed photographs taken of the painting in Essen as well as the one in Amsterdam. The photos clearly showed differences in the brushstrokes, which according to Latour were an indication that the paintings were not made by the same hand. The Engineer agreed with him and was seconded by Herbert Graetz, an entrepreneur living in Switzerland who at that moment was evaluating the work of Van Gogh by means of psychoanalysis. In 1955 Graetz wrote to Sandberg, telling him that Latour’s photos proved that the picture was a fake. He also had “serious doubts” about a few other Van Goghs hanging in the Louvre.19 De la Faille planned to demote a number of Gachet Van Goghs and not

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to include them in the revised edition of the catalogue raisonné, though whether he discussed this with the Engineer or not is unknown. At least the Engineer did not correspond with him about The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy, as far as I can tell. Nor did he discuss it with Jaffé, who also kept his opinion of the Engineer’s assessment to himself. Clearly the Engineer was not alone in his judgment of the painting, but during the fifties he received no support for his negative opinion from any authoritative Van Gogh experts. The Engineer decided to visit Paul Gachet in order to question him about The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy, and he wanted to bring Sandberg and Graetz along. He also wanted to invite Latour and the French art dealer David Wildenstein, who were friends of Gachet. Gachet’s answer, sent via Wildenstein, was that he refused to meet with anyone.20 In 1961, shortly before Gachet’s death, a meeting finally took place between Gachet and the Engineer. How this conversation proceeded is unknown, but the Engineer did not change his mind afterward concerning the authenticity of the painting.21 Starting in 1954 the Engineer gradually became more and more certain about which canvases were forged and which were genuine. On 8 August 1959, he declared Two Children (F 783) to be fake: “It may have been made by one of the Gachets or by Schuffenecker, in which case the Gachets would have made the copy.”22 On 3 December 1965 he planned to visit a German art dealer who owned some of the works from Gachet’s legacy. He wanted to see them “partly with an eye to the source of the forgeries.”23 In 1971 he came upon a calculation that reinforced his unfavorable opinion of the Gachets’ Van Goghs: “In the new [Van Gogh catalogue raisonné], 75 new paintings are listed from the Auvers period plus 31 drawings. Vincent was in Auvers from 25 May to 30 July. A few days must be subtracted from this for a visit to Paris, a visit from Theo to Auvers, etc. No one can fool me into thinking that Vincent painted 75 paintings in less than 66 days, with time left over for letters to Theo with sketches.”24 On 7 February 1974, almost 20 years after The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy had been donated, the Engineer took stock of the situation. He was convinced that none of the Gachet Van Gogh paintings in the Jeu de Paume was genuine except for The Church at Auvers (F 789) and SelfPortrait (F 627). There were two other Van Gogh paintings from Gachet’s

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collection that he also thought were genuine: Marguerite Gachet at the Piano (F 772) at the Kunsthalle in Basel and Cows (after Jordaens) (F 822) at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Lille. While others had backed him in the intervening years, there were also those who disagreed with him. Dissent Writing about a conversation with his friend and Van Gogh expert Marc Tralbaut in 1959, the Engineer said, “I asked him cautiously what his opinion was of the paintings in the Jeu de Paume. He was very evasive: some of them were weak, etc. He would have to consult his notes. When asked directly about the background of the self-portrait, he admitted that an original background could be seen beneath the wavy lines. An investigation of the hardening properties of the paint might reveal when the new layer had been applied.”25 It was clear: Tralbaut would rather not voice his opinion about the authenticity of the Gachet Van Goghs. Nowhere is there any indication, moreover, that Tralbaut shared the Engineer’s convictions on this point. On the contrary, eight years later Tralbaut sent him a business gift: . M.E. Tralbaut visiting Paul Gachet in Auvers-sur-Oise.

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a small book of essays about Van Gogh in which he discussed the Gachet Van Goghs and defended Gachet against those who accused him of owning forged work. He recalled that the Engineer had once consigned The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy (F 659) to the vault of the Stedelijk. The statements made in the press on the spuriousness of the Gachet Van Goghs, which Tralbaut thought were unfounded, had not done the Engineer any good. Tralbaut called him “suspicious and not very sociable.”26 The Engineer responded immediately. It wasn’t suspicion that struck him when he first saw the painting in 1954, but doubt. He wrote to Tralbaut, “It shocked me, and I thought about it later that evening. The next morning I called [Sandberg] to share my doubts with him. Then I started investigating, which confirmed my initial impression. [...] You are the first person to report the existence of my assessment in print. I never withheld it from my acquaintances, but I never published anything about it either. While he [Gachet] was alive I thought it best not to cause sensation at his expense.”27 The death of De la Faille in 1959 kept him from including his judgment of The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy and other Van Goghs from Gachet’s collection in the third edition of the catalogue raisonné, but the Dutch government appointed an editorial committee to compile the new edition of De la Faille’s lifework. Clearly it was meant to be an authoritative source on the question of authenticity. The Engineer was curious to see how the editors of this posthumous work would deal with Gachet’s donation. He wrote to tell them that he had repeatedly compared Gachet’s Van Goghs with other Van Goghs in the Jeu de Paume, and that those belonging to Gachet were not from the hand of Vincent van Gogh.28 Hammacher responded that the Gachet Van Goghs would be treated as genuine works in the catalogue. The Engineer was stunned: I announced my assessment of the Gachet paintings 20 years ago – your letter is the first instance in all those years of anyone telling me that they did not agree with me, either totally or in part. So I have been waiting for a judgment, whatever it may be, for a very long time. In my view all you have to do is look at the paintings from the Camando collection and others hanging in the adjacent gallery and to compare them with those in the Gachet collection. The fact that I have never published anything about this is partly due to the fact that I would have been accused of being ‘impartial,’ not an art historian, etc., etc. That is why

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I always ask my acquaintances to see for themselves, and you are the first to tell me you have done just that. I am quite willing to tell [the editors of the catalogue raisonné] what I know. About five years ago we purchased a portion of the estate of Paul Gachet, which I believe confirms my suspicions. I made no attempt to disguise that purchase, but with one exception no one has ever come to see it.29

For the Engineer to say that Hammacher was the first person in all those years to disagree with him is astonishing. It indicates that either Hammacher had not given his opinion before, or had formulated it in such a way that the Engineer heard it as an endorsement of his own. It is also surprising in another way, because Tralbaut had criticized the Engineer on this point in writing just a few years earlier. As these facts suggest, the Engineer only listened to those who agreed with him. Evidence of this trait can also be seen in his remarks on a lecture he gave on The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy. In January 1970 he invited the editors of the catalogue raissoné to a meeting at the Stedelijk to discuss his arguments against the painting’s authenticity. There he showed them Latour’s photographs. Afterwards the Engineer had the impression that he had won the editors over to his point of view, and he wrote this to Hammacher.30 Hammacher responded immediately. He said the editors certainly did not endorse the claim that the painting was a forgery.31 Apparently here, too, those who attended the gathering had been overly cautious in their response to the Engineer’s negative opinion, or perhaps the Engineer had not been open to any opinion that differed from his own. Inappropriate In my account of the conflict, which was related chronologically for the most part and in which the Engineer played the central role, I did not answer the question about the authenticity of the Van Goghs owned by Gachet Junior and Senior. But authenticity is not what the story is all about. The main issue is how the Engineer defended his negative assessment of The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy and why he never published his views. What makes the conflict about the painting so intriguing is that other experts – namely Tralbaut and Hammacher – were faced with an almost identical dilemma, even though their attitude was necessarily formulated in

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response to that of the Engineer since their assessment of the Gachet Van Goghs was diametrically opposed to his: Tralbaut and Hammacher believed the paintings were genuine. They found it difficult, however, to convey this message to him. In all likelihood they had experienced something once that now, after all those years, was hard to put into words: the emotions that the matter of the Gachet Van Goghs had stirred up for the Engineer. His good friend Gachet was nothing but a con man in his eyes. But there was more to it than that. Their relationships had been shaped by the norms of the art world. A good point of access for learning about those norms is De la Faille’s posthumous catalogue raisonné, which Hammacher, the chairman of the editorial committee, offered to M. Klompé, Minister of Culture, Recreation, and Social Work, in October 1970. It was a hefty tome weighing in at five kilos and with more than two thousand illustrations. In this edition of the catalogue, all the Van Goghs from the former Gachet collection were presented as genuine works. When it came to the question of authenticity, the editors applied the following principle: all the works were regarded as genuine, but in those cases in which the authenticity had been contested or doubted by an expert, that view was noted if it had appeared in print. The text in the catalogue accompanying The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy read as follows: “This painting was donated to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation by Paul Gachet. Dr. V. W. van Gogh believes it was not painted by Vincent himself.”32 A remarkable addition, since the Engineer had never expressed this view in any publication. Why did the editors make this exception to their own rule? Because the Engineer was not just anybody, of course. But there may have been another reason. Technically it was not the Engineer who owned the painting but the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, although the painting was in his care. In the art world, it is regarded as inappropriate for the curator of museum A to make a public and unsolicited statement to the effect that a work of art in the collection of museum B is not genuine. The unwritten rule, to which all interested parties are tacitly required to conform, is that the curator of museum A is responsible for his own collection, as the curator of museum B is responsible for his. A curator therefore expects curators of other museums not to make damaging statements about the works of art in his care. The editors respected this rule

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insofar as the Engineer was concerned, even though his attitude departed from the commonly held view: what must be reported was not the opinion that the work was genuine but his conviction that it was a forgery. The editors did not report the Engineer’s unfavorable assessments of the other Gachet Van Goghs, and for the same reason. They were not in his care but in the care of other owners and curators. This rule, which is based on professional museum autonomy, requires that an expert observe specific rules of etiquette. He is not supposed to make a negative unilateral assessment of the maker of a work of art, and if he is asked directly to do so, he should take the owner’s possible sensitivities into account. It is somewhat comparable to visiting a mother and her newborn infant. Good manners require that the visitor congratulate her without reservation. Visitors who think the baby is hideously ugly are not supposed say this to the mother, nor should they announce that the baby’s father is actually another man. Visitors who insist on having the last word risk being shown the door. Exchange relationships The Engineer’s decision not to publish his assessment of the Gachet Van Goghs can best be seen as compliance with the norm for appropriate behavior regarding genuine and forged art that governs exchange relationships in the art world. In his response to Tralbaut, he defended his silence by saying that he did not want to cause any “sensation at his [Gachet’s] expense” while Gachet was still alive. Writing to Hammacher, he said he had not published his assessment because he might be “accused of being ‘impartial,’ not an art historian, etc., etc.” The last two words are telling. I know of no other document in which he uses them. What could they refer to? First, they could refer to the facts mentioned at the beginning of the chapter. In 1948 the Engineer expressed the desire to work with Gachet in order to assemble a collection of Van Goghs for the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. The motive was partly material: to avoid inheritance taxes and other forms of taxation. But it was also idealistic: to preserve and increase Vincent’s fame. He was not able to interest Gachet in the plan, however. If the Engineer had openly dismissed the Gachet Van Goghs after 1954, Gachet’s lack of interest could be interpreted as a form of revenge. Perhaps

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he felt his possibilities were limited because Gachet, by making his donations in France, had garnered a great deal of honor. Those who had openly criticized the authenticity of his Van Goghs did not occupy an authoritative position in the French art world, so their judgments were ignored. Then there was the matter of national honor. The struggle over Study by Candlelight in 1949 taught the Engineer that national authorities could take a serious interest in criticism of the authenticity of a Van Gogh. It could be seen as a potential source of tension in the relations between national representatives, who use art as a diplomatic tool. All the fuss about that painting thrust him into the public eye, which had an effect on him. If he had openly sided with the chorus of people who began denying the authenticity of the Gachet Van Goghs after 1954, all the attention undoubtedly would have been focused on him, the owner of the largest number of Van Goghs in the world. The Engineer tried to win other authoritative Van Gogh experts to his point of view. Having Tralbaut and Hammacher on his side would have strengthened his debating position. But even then there would have been reason for caution, since Gachet had given his Van Goghs to the French state. That had been an extraordinary gesture because in 1945 the French museums owned only seven works by Van Gogh.33 More than 50 years had passed since Vincent’s death, and in the country in which he had painted such a large part of his oeuvre – what many regard as the most impressive part – only a handful of his works were under public ownership. So Gachet’s donations, a total of sixteen paintings by Van Gogh in 1959, were a welcome addition. During the fifties, a situation arose that made it difficult for the Engineer to openly criticize the authenticity of these paintings. In such a case, the norm of professional museum autonomy was more applicable than ever: the only condition under which the Engineer and his supporters could openly criticize would be if the French museums invited them to do so. If the Engineer had been openly critical without such an invitation, he would have jeopardized exchange relationships in the art world. These relationships took a significant turn after 1962, when an accord was reached between the Dutch state and the Engineer over the sale of his Van Goghs to the Vincent van Gogh Foundation, for which the state put up 15 million guilders.34 The state also committed itself to the building and development of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, and the city of Amsterdam set aside a building lot.35 This put even more force behind the rule

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that a museum should not openly criticize the authenticity of art objects in another museum without being asked to do so. When the Van Goghs were within its walls, the Stedelijk Museum had an interesting object of exchange until 1972, the year the loan was terminated after approximately 50 years. Anyone interested in mounting a beautiful Van Gogh exhibition had to deal with the collections of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller and that of the Engineer (later of the Vincent van Gogh Foundation). The applicants were then obliged to accommodate these institutions by making counter-loans. With the works of Vincent van Gogh among their holdings, the Kröller-Müller and the Stedelijk could maintain and improve their position in the art world. In 1945 the Engineer planned to involve the collection in more inter-museum travel. He was an active figure in the art world by then and was directly acquainted with the rules that applied to exchange relationships. The dilemma he faced, which he must have been aware of, was this: either to make his views of the Gachet Van Goghs public on his own, thereby jeopardizing the relationship between himself (and the Stedelijk, and later the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh) and other museums, or to remain silent and thereby maintain the balance between the various museums. After the appearance of the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné in 1970, in which the editors published his denial of the authenticity of The Garden of the Asylum in Saint-Rémy, the Engineer was strengthened in his role as guardian of a portion of Vincent’s legacy. In 1974 he sent the painting to an exhibition on genuine and fake art in Minneapolis as an example of a Van Gogh forgery. Upon its return the canvas ended up once again in the vault of the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh, where it would remain until his death in 1978. Shortly thereafter, Johannes van der Wolk, who became the director of the Van Gogh Museum in 1978, returned it to the galleries. In 2000 he told me, “I wanted to know how it would behave amidst the paintings of Van Gogh. I hadn’t done any extensive research on the provenance, mind you. No thorough technical analysis had been done either. But my intuition told me that it belonged in the gallery.”36 And that, he said, tells us something about the position of the Engineer. The Engineer’s opinions would continue to plague the Gachet collection.37 In the mid-nineties the battle over authenticity would flare up again.

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11

The unfinished Vincent

After World War II, De la Faille learned that his catalogues of 1928 (L’OEuvre de Vincent van Gogh) and 1939 (Vincent van Gogh) were out of print. He began work on a revised edition, and his hope of getting it on the market looked promising. He managed to find a publisher, Librex, and in 1952 he had galley proofs printed of the two planned volumes, Paintings and Drawings. Before going any further, the publisher wrote to the director of the Stedelijk Museum to discuss the project. In his letter he told Sandberg that he valued his opinion highly and was interested in his ideas on the international distribution of the catalogue raisonné. Sandberg’s reply was prompt and icy: he had no time for a discussion, and any questions should be submitted in writing.1 Sandberg’s confrontation with De la Faille over Study by Candlelight was still fresh in his memory. Collaborating on the distribution of a catalogue that contained the contested work would be far too distasteful for him. The publisher thereupon withdrew from the project and another publisher, Martinus Nijhoff, took up the torch. In 1958 this company sent out a prospectus to booksellers announcing the publication of De la Faille’s “complete and definitive” catalogue of 1,762 works by Vincent van Gogh. The prospectus contained a sample with a foretaste of the contents: eight works chosen “at random,” with the painting Study by Candlelight (F 476a) prominently featured.2 Did those who played a role in the drama of William Goetz wonder about the clandestine preferences that may have slipped into this random choice? The revised edition of the catalogue raisonné would have enhanced De la Faille’s reputation as a Van Gogh authority, but he died in 1959, leaving behind an unfinished manuscript. In him, the art world lost another leading Van Gogh expert (Bremmer had died earlier, in 1956). A well-documented catalogue raisonné was seen as an important instrument for determining

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the authenticity of works by Van Gogh, but De la Faille’s last catalogue was already many years out of date and only dealt with the paintings. De la Faille’s unfinished manuscript became the subject of a tug-of-war between a number of interested parties: experts, collectors, dealers, museums, and representatives of the minister. Whoever completed and published it would rise to a position of influence in the Van Gogh world but would inevitably be saddled with the problem of how to deal with conflicts over the authenticity of Van Gogh’s works. Rivalries De la Faille’s work on the catalogue raisonné influenced the Netherlands Institute for Art History (the Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie, or the RKD) in its post-war plans to focus attention on collecting books, reproductions, and documents about the life and work of Vincent Van Gogh. De la Faille himself was the unwitting instigator of this project. During the war the RKD had bought his collection of photos of Van Gogh’s works as a way of supporting him financially, although De la Faille was able to retain the copyright. From that moment on, the photo collection was put in the care of art historian Annet Tellegen (1912).3 After the war, however, De la Faille gained control over his pictorial material once again. The RKD, which until the fifties was mainly known as the image archive for older Dutch art, set up the Department of Modern Dutch and Belgian Art in 1947, with Tellegen as director. Her aim was to organize the department along lines that were quite different from what was customary at the RKD. This would mean forming a collection that was based not only on pictorial material but also on contemporary sources having to do with nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists: newspaper and magazine reports, sales and exhibition catalogues, and personal documents. She had taken painting lessons from the artist Kees Verweij during the war, thereby acquiring an understanding of the craft itself. Tellegen’s idea of concentrating on documentation related to Vincent van Gogh was not initially aimed at compiling a new, comprehensive catalogue raisonné of Van Gogh’s work. That was De la Faille’s project. His catalogue had given him a leading place in the Van Gogh world which he still enjoyed, and it was expected that he would publish the third edition in the foreseeable

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future. The RKD’s interest in Vincent van Gogh took on new urgency when Sandberg and Tralbaut came up with the proposal to establish a Van Gogh Study Center in 1953. They wanted it to be affiliated with the University of Amsterdam, but the director of the RKD – A.B. de Vries – thought its proper place was with his Institute, and eventually he got his way.4 The Engineer recommended that De Vries hire Tralbaut. Tralbaut had earned his doctorate in 1948 with a dissertation on Vincent van Gogh’s Antwerp period and had built up an extensive library of books and other documents. The assumption was that in exchange for being given a job with the Dutch government he would donate this personal material to the RKD. De Vries and Tellegen were given the opportunity to look at Tralbaut’s documents at his home in Antwerp. Tellegen was not impressed. In 2005 she told me, “Tralbaut had some nice folders, each with a Faille number, but there was nothing in them. He also had a collection of neckties that reminded him of Van Gogh. I told De Vries that it didn’t make a serious impression and I didn’t think it was worth the trouble. De Vries did not discuss this with me any further. To my surprise De Vries ended up hiring Tralbaut for the job at the RKD. Why? At that time things were such that you didn’t ask any questions.”5 In mid-1955 Tralbaut began working at the RKD and in 1956 he was given an assistant, Joop Joosten (1926), who had recently graduated with a degree in art history and later would make his name as one of the compilers of the Piet Mondriaan catalogue raisonné. This is when the idea of putting together a new Van Gogh catalogue must have taken shape, since Joosten told me in 2001 that his job was to assist Tralbaut on such a project.6 Tralbaut was rarely seen at the RKD, however, and the catalogue failed to materialize. There were frequent collisions between him and the new director, Dr. Horst Gerson (1907-1978), a specialist in the art of the Dutch Golden Age. Gerson wanted a straight answer from Tralbaut concerning the donation of his library and documentation, but Tralbaut refused to commit himself in black and white. In May 1958 he was given an honorable dismissal without having donated anything to the RKD. In 1969 he would sell his Van Gogh library and documentation to the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh for 400,000 guilders, a sum that was raised by the Dutch state, the University of Amsterdam, and the Vincent van Gogh Foundation. Tralbaut was a jack-of-all-trades. He had sung opera; written art criticism, plays and books; and had worked as a sports reporter. He was the very

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model of the gentleman scholar. He lived quite comfortably thanks to his second marriage to the daughter of a wealthy entrepreneur, so he could devote all his time to his passion: the life and work of Vincent van Gogh. He acquired a reputation as an indefatigable researcher. Those who knew him found him warmhearted, hospitable, and overflowing with enthusiasm for Van Gogh. Tralbaut had a way with people. There were those who thought his animated personality was quite endearing. Speaking about him in 2001, Hammacher said, “He had a house built [in France] entirely of olive tree wood because Van Gogh had painted olive trees so often.”7 In 1953 the Algemeen Handelsblad politely mentioned a shadow side of his passion: “A fanatical and persevering man, this inhabitant of Antwerp is not afraid of carrying out a hypothesis to the point of absurdity.”8 Tralbaut became acquainted with the Engineer after the war, and they would remain friends for life. The Engineer appreciated Tralbaut’s eagerness to make Van Gogh better known, but he was critical of Tralbaut’s tendency to go off on a tangent in his books and articles about Vincent. Tralbaut also had a habit of letting his imagination get the better of him. In 1946, in the early years of their friendship, he wrote to the Engineer that riding

. M.E. Tralbaut pointing out the details of Self-Portrait (F  verso) (. x . cm) during the Van Gogh exhibition of  at the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. To his left are Douglas Cooper and Jean Leymarie.

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in the Tour de France had completely worn him out. As a reporter he had followed the event by car, but he gave the impression that he had ridden the whole thing on a bicycle. Mere research was not enough for him. He also had literary ambitions, and romanticized about the relationship between Vincent, Theo, and Johanna in a play called In de schaduw van de raven (In the Shadow of the Ravens). The play has Vincent and Johanna fall in love at first sight, but she’s already married to Theo and had given birth to Vincent Willem a few months before. Neither the correspondence between Vincent and Theo nor any other historical document makes the slightest suggestion of such a love affair. In the drama devised by Tralbaut, Vincent’s suicide is the result of his realization that he cannot be Johanna’s lover. This, too, has no historical basis. But in the play’s dénouement Tralbaut has the dying Vincent say to Theo, “Don’t forget to embrace Jo for me ... she’ll understand everything ... I’m sure of it ... and ... and ... little Vincent ... When he’s grown ... he’ll understand, too ...”9 Tralbaut’s “little Vincent” did not understand, however, not even 64 years later. In fact he hated this kind of fantasizing and scorned the idea that his uncle’s suicide was the result of his unrequited love for his mother.10 Initially Tralbaut decided not to have his production performed, but after five years he changed his mind and staged it in Antwerp. He defended his brainchild with the remark that “except for the suicide everything is purely imaginary.” He never entirely abandoned his idea of the relationship between Vincent, Theo, and Jo, however, and laid it all at the doorstep of “old man Freud” – supposedly Vincent was jealous because Theo had started a family, something Vincent himself had longed for but had never succeeded in doing. In the end, though, Tralbaut came to regard the play as the product of “my mischievous fantasy.”11 Tralbaut knew how to win people over with his warmheartedness, enthusiasm, and zeal. They saw him as a solo flyer, someone whom no one could work with. He was regarded as unpredictable, a trait that he revealed to his friend, the Engineer, on more than one occasion. In 1953 Tralbaut investigated the authenticity of a painting for the Expertise Institute and concluded that it was not a Van Gogh.12 Shortly thereafter the Engineer learned, much to his surprise, that the same work had been shown at the Van Gogh exhibition in Antwerp in May and June 1955, but this time as a genuine Van Gogh – and with Tralbaut’s added note, “Authenticated by the

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Expertise Institute.” The board of the Institute was divided over Tralbaut’s action. Supposedly the Engineer’s first response was to shrug it off. He said it was a typically “Belgian” thing to do. But the secretary, Margrit de Sablonière, called it dishonest and maintained that what Tralbaut had done was contrary to the principles of the Expertise Institute. She brought the matter to a head and threatened to step down in 1955 if the board chose to ignore the incident. The Engineer then wrote to Tralbaut and told him that he should at least have informed him of his reversed opinion.13 The Institute decided not to ask him for any more assessments. After being dismissed from the RKD, Tralbaut got in touch with De la Faille. He asked him for data for a Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, which Tralbaut said he had been working on for quite some time. De la Faille found this initiative quite disturbing, since up until then the Van Gogh catalogue had been his baby.14 Ambition When De la Faille died in 1959, almost all his photos of Van Gogh’s paintings and drawings were at the RKD. The copyright on the photos and text of the catalogues had gone to the widow, but there was no sign of a completed

. A.M. Hammacher and J.G. van Gelder in .

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manuscript that was ready to go to press, despite the proud announcements from Librex and Nijhoff of previous years that publication was “imminent.” In 1960 the Kluwer company asked the RKD for permission to publish the catalogue. After some prodding by Tellegen, Gerson told his superiors at the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences that his bureau had begun preparing a Van Gogh catalogue raisonné. Tellegen hoped that this undertaking would add some prestige to the Department of Modern Dutch and Belgian Art and increase awareness of the RKD both nationally and internationally. But Tralbaut wanted to publish a catalogue raisonné, too, and he went to visit Da la Faille’s widow. He thought she should turn her husband’s Van Gogh documentation over to him: it was of no use to her, after all, and Tralbaut could use it to compile his own Van Gogh catalogue. She made him no promises but got in touch with Hammacher, director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. In 2001 Hammacher told me he had spoken with De la Faille regularly about various works of art that hopeful owners wanted to attribute to Vincent van Gogh. In 1950 a version of The Potato Eaters had come to light that was being attributed to Van Gogh by its owners, but De la Faille refused to make a snap decision. In 1951 he arranged to meet with Hammacher and the Utrecht art historian Jan G. van Gelder (1903-1980) in the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller to talk about it. Hammacher told me in 2001 that De la Faille was sincerely interested in their arguments and did not hesitate to reveal his own uncertainty about the work’s authenticity.15 He had always been on good terms with De la Faille despite their differences of opinion, so it made perfect sense that his widow should ask Hammacher for advice. When Hammacher heard that Tralbaut was trying to take control of De la Faille’s legacy, he was horrified. If that were to happen, he said, the archive “would fall into the hands of someone whose excitement and more than hundred percent adoration of Van Gogh would cause him to treat it in an irresponsible fashion. I warned the widow, but she said she had come to the same conclusion herself.”16 Hammacher asked J. Hulsker – director of the Art Division of the Ministry of Education, Arts and Sciences – if the government would be prepared to invest in the completion of the De la Faille manuscript. He thought the final edition of the catalogue should be the responsibility of what in 2001 he called “a group of people who had been more calmly selected.”17

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. Discussion of The Potato Eaters at the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller in September . From left to right, A.M. Hammacher, J.B. de la Faille and J.G. van Gelder.

In fact, a portion of De la Faille’s archive was already at the RKD in 1960, but Hammacher’s memory is a good reflection of the mood at the time. The important thing was to prevent Tralbaut from compiling a new Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, thereby undermining Tralbaut’s authority as a Van Gogh expert. Editorial staff At the start of the sixties, Abraham Hammacher was undoubtedly one of the most important art connoisseurs in the Netherlands. Since the twenties he had written a number of books and hundreds of articles for newspapers, magazines, and catalogues. He was praised for his keen intellect, erudition, and facile pen. Above all, he was known as one of the country’s experts on the work of Vincent van Gogh, about whom he had been writing articles in the Utrechts Dagblad, Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant, and De Gids since the

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early twenties. After World War II, he let hardly a year go by without publishing something about the admired artist. As director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller, he was able to view a magnificent collection of paintings and drawings by Van Gogh every day. Hammacher’s fascination had its roots in the collected letters Vincent wrote to his brother Theo, which he had read at the age of sixteen. For him, Vincent was one of those artists who lived at odds with the rest of the world. Hammacher put it this way: art satisfies “the general human craving for an image that both wounds and heals, that can fulfill human consciousness: the magical image [...] where the divine and the mortal meet.”18 In 1960 Hammacher could look back at the success of his books and catalogues on the work of Van Gogh, a success that was evident from the reprints and translations of his books and the requests for lectures. Hammacher’s knowledge of the Dutch art world was unsurpassed. He had begun as a journalist and critic, and in the late thirties he was appointed head of the Aesthetics Department of the Dutch post office. After the war he took charge of the Art Division of the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences, and in 1947 he became director of the Rijksmuseum KröllerMüller. He was chairman of the Commission of Exhibitions Abroad and of numerous other bodies that brought him in contact with the administrative and cultural elite. In 1952 he became extraordinary professor of art history at the Delft Institute of Technology. A few years later the University of Utrecht awarded him an honorary doctorate for his achievements. In the laudation he was praised by the doctoral supervisor, Van Gelder, for his profound insight into the development of contemporary art.19 In 1961 Hammacher formed the “Editorial committee for the reissue of the catalogue of works by Vincent van Gogh” (henceforth “the editorial committee”) consisting of Van Gelder, De Gruyter, Hulsker, and Gerson – all of them heavyweights in the Dutch art world. Van Gelder had been friends with Hammacher since the twenties, and the two men had published in Elseviers Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, an important magazine for the literary and artistically minded elite before the war. In 1941 he had written a study of The Potato Eaters.20 Van Gelder’s significance was greater than that of a university scholar, however. As his former colleague Van Uitert characterized him in 2001, he was “a great networker, an organizer,”21 someone who could pull strings for his students and colleagues because of his con-

editorial staff


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nections with the government, museums, and universities. He was a member of several consultative bodies that were responsible for shaping policy on the arts, including the board of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller. De Gruyter, along with Willem Scherjon, compiled the catalogue of Van Gogh’s paintings from Arles, Saint-Rémy, and Auvers-sur-Oise in 1937. After the war he worked for a few years as director of the Groninger Museum voor Stad en Lande, and in the sixties he became head of the modern art section of the Gemeentemuseum in The Hague. In 1967 he would give up his membership on the editorial committee for health reasons and be replaced by Ellen Joosten († 2005), curator at the Rijksmuseum KröllerMüller. Horst Gerson served on the editorial committee as director of the RKD. His real love was not Van Gogh and modern art, however, but Rembrandt van Rijn; he was working on a catalogue raisonné of Rembrandt’s work at the time. In 1964 he left the RKD to take up a professorship at the University of Groningen. His successor on the editorial committee was S. Gudlaugsson (1913-1971), also a specialist in the art of the Golden Age and with little affinity for that of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Jan Hulsker (1907-2003) was a Dutch specialist who earned his doctorate in 1946 with a dissertation on the writer Aart van der Leeuw and who also did research on the correspondence of Vincent van Gogh.22 He was the director of the Art Division of the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences. When the editorial committee first met in August 1961, no pledge had yet been made by the minister. In fact, Hammacher’s initiative for the publication of the catalogue raisonné had no legal or financial basis at all. But Hulsker, who wanted to serve on the committee as government representative, expected that the minister would give the project his financial support. After all, De la Faille’s catalogue was an indispensable standard work, “a publication of great importance to the Netherlands.”23 Conspicuous by his absence on the editorial committee was the Engineer, which did not mean that his expertise was being questioned. The editors did not invite him to join because they knew he was not in favor of reissuing the catalogue and because, as the minutes of the editorial committee note, “it is well known that he holds strong views about the authenticity or spuriousness of many paintings that differ from those of other experts.”24 This argument has the ring of a pretext. The same could be said of De

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Gruyter, for example, and he was a committee member. In his 1937 Van Gogh catalogue, the Engineer upheld the authenticity of some paintings that others had denied or doubted, and conversely he declared paintings as forgeries that Van Gogh experts like De la Faille and the director of the Nationalgalerie – Ludwig Justi – regarded as genuine. The editors had no objection to working with him. The real difficulty probably had to do with something else about the Engineer that had not been committed to paper: his reputation for going his own way when it came to his uncle’s spiritual legacy. The fact that he had differing views on what was genuine and what was fake would become evident after the catalogue was published in 1970, when he marked the paintings and drawings in his copy with marginal notes like “Fake!” and “This is not Vincent.” He never published his dissenting opinions. The editorial committee hoped to complete its work on the reissue within one to two years and to avoid questions over authenticity. Consensus was the motto. The Engineer, they thought, would never accept any attempt to achieve consensus. Hammacher was well aware of his firm conviction regarding Paul Gachet’s Van Goghs. There were others, too, who saw him as a man with a mind of his own. Edy de Wilde, successor to Sandberg at the Stedelijk Museum, made the following comment in 2001: “[The Engineer] did listen to me, but if he didn’t go along with something, it didn’t happen. He often confronted the directors of the Stedelijk with faits accomplis. If he wanted to take the collection somewhere for an exhibition, he got it, even if it caused problems for the Stedelijk. Compromises were out of the question. He had a lot of charm but he rarely took other people into account.”25 Many years later, Van Gelder would characterize him as “short-tempered, irritable, brilliant, and friendly.”26 One of the principles of the academic enterprise is: we’re going to agree to disagree, and it is quite conceivable that we will continue to disagree. The implicit principle of the editorial committee, however, was: we’re going to agree to agree – an understandable attitude. People who work on a project together must be prepared to make compromises. Fundamental differences of opinion can endanger the progress and completion of a research project, in this case a catalogue raisonné. It is also important to realize that the editorial committee assigned itself a modest role at first. The documents keep referring to a “reissue.” But the idea of a modest role would not last long.

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Scholarship In September 1961 the state secretary gave the editorial committee the green light. Additional personnel were assigned to the RKD for one year to assist the editors. On Hammacher’s advice, the state secretary sent a letter to Tralbaut to inform him of the support for the reissue being provided by the Dutch government and of the names of the persons on the editorial committee. It had to be made clear to Tralbaut that by working independently he would not be able to achieve what Hammacher and his colleagues were bound to accomplish on a project commissioned and financed by the state. The message got through; Tralbaut stopped working on his Van Gogh catalogue. The ministry’s direct financial support for issuing a catalogue of a Dutch master was a unique event. Never before – or since, as we now know – had a ministry directly commissioned the publication of a catalogue raisonné. One crucial clause in the ministry’s assignment charged the editorial committee with this task: “wherever possible, the publication of the new edition will reflect the current state of contemporary scholarship.”27 There was no explanation, nor was there a plan of action for the reissue that would serve as guidelines for the editorial committee. The ministry confined itself to the notion of scholarship which, as it turned out, the editorial committee and the RKD each interpreted in its own way. As noted earlier, the editorial committee envisioned a modest role for itself, and in this respect it spoke of “keeping watch” over the publication of De la Faille’s posthumous work. While making every effort to avoid adding “divergent opinions from any single member of the editorial committee” to the catalogue, it sought to incorporate “important data that has been published since the last edition.”28 De la Faille’s widow, who attended the first meeting of the editorial committee, agreed with this aim provided that “these additions are not polemical or personal in character,” as she put it. Her words echo the bitter struggle over authenticity that her late husband had fought beginning with the Wacker affair.29 Two years later, the editorial committee clarified its position on the reissue. It did not intend to “look for or correct any deficiencies [in De la Faille’s work] or to encourage our own investigation of any unsolved issues.” 30 Only information that had been published by art scholars during the intervening years would be used. The editorial committee realized that it could not avoid problems of authenticity. How should it deal with De

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la Faille’s judgments of works by Van Gogh that were disputed by other experts? The editors agreed that they would “accept this subjective element as unavoidable, and in doubtful cases they would cite the necessary literature in order to give the reader the opportunity to form his own judgment.” 31 At the RKD, Tellegen had a different interpretation of the state secretary’s instruction to bring the catalogue academically up-to-date. A reissue that remained faithful to De la Faille’s work and views was an impossibility, in her opinion. She wanted a publication that would satisfy the academic standards she had drawn up for the Department of Modern Dutch and Belgian Art. She thought it was time to conduct new and thorough research, which would involve studying paintings, drawings, and watercolors, checking the provenance of the various works with former and present owners, documenting the exhibition history once again, etc. Her colleague Joop Joosten told me in 2001, “We wanted to conduct a study of provenance, and that would involve answering questions such as: when was a painting or drawing first mentioned or described? Who described it? What were the circumstances? When was it first exhibited, photographed, or reproduced? We believed that answering these questions would require historical research. We would have to collect as much information as we could from archives, magazines, books, and in Van Gogh’s letters. It seems perfectly obvious now, but back then it definitely was not. Vincent’s incomplete and partly expurgated letters had been used in a slapdash fashion to date the paintings. De la Faille had not arranged Vincent’s works chronologically, and that was one of the things that had to be sorted out. And there were incorrect attributions and forgeries as well.”32 In 1961 no one could have known that differences in ambition and the interpretation of the notion of scholarship would lead to clashes between the RKD and the editorial committee. The Park at Arles In 1963 the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller received a painting on approval via a French art dealer with a request for an assessment. According to the dealer it was Vincent’s The Park at Arles (F 472). This work had not been exhibited for a long time, and one of its first owners had been the Berlin

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collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy. Hammacher, who by now had retired, wrote the assessment. He asked the RKD to give him a photo of the painting from De la Faille’s collection, which it did. Tellegen had never seen the actual painting and went to Otterlo in early August to study it. There she discovered something strange. The brushstrokes in the painting at the Kröller-Müller were different from those of The Park at Arles in De la Faille’s 1928 and 1939 catalogues. Not only that, but the painting in the Kröller-Müller was bigger. Her conclusion: the painting was either a copy or a fake. The curator at the Kröller-Müller shared her view. Upon returning to the RKD she compared the photos of the original piece with those of the fake, all of them from De la Faille’s collection. Apparently De la Faille had intended to use the yet unpublished photo of the fake in the new edition of the catalogue. The photo came from a French art dealer, who had sent it to him in 1958. De la Faille had probably failed to notice the differences between the photos. This confirmed Tellegen’s conviction that thorough research was necessary, and she wrote to Hammacher insisting that “we should proceed with the utmost caution, even with the material from De la Faille, and that not a single detail should be accepted without being carefully checked.”33 The letter did not go down well. After one month she was summoned by her superior, RKD director Gerson, who was upset by the tone and content of her letter. It was not up to her to decide whether a painting was a forgery or not, he said. She was told to apologize to Hammacher, which she did. The painting was then taken to the RKD in The Hague for inspection. Tellegen had photos taken of the fake painting with a raking light that closely resembled those taken of the genuine canvas, a method that most clearly captured the differences between them. The editors agreed that the photos revealed certain discrepancies. Were they looking at two different paintings? Hammacher thought the photos in fact were of one and the same painting: the one owned by Mendelssohn. “The differences shown in the photos prove nothing about the possibility of two versions,” he said. “The painting could have been restored or retouched.” It was a plausible explanation, all the more so since the painting did not give the impression of having been carefully painted, as copies often are. Van Gelder agreed with him. But De Gruyter thought they were looking at two different paintings, and like Tellegen he doubted the work’s authenticity.

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The editors were divided and could not reach a decision. They thought the provenance of the Mendelssohn version ought to be looked into closely and that Professor Froentjes of the Forensic Laboratory of the Ministry of Justice should be asked to study the suspect work.34 Froentjes also took photos of the painting that approximated the older photo as much as possible, and in early December he wrote to the editorial committee, “A comparison between the old photo and these prints shows that the original painting has been deftly imitated, although there are still many minor differences.” 35 A few weeks later, an investigation into the archives of an American art dealer revealed that The Park at Arles had been re-canvased in 1950, which was not the case with the suspect painting. That dealer had also compared photos of The Park at Arles with the suspect painting, which he had had for some time on approval. His conclusion: a repeat performance, but not by Van Gogh.36 These results made Tellegen more convinced than ever that the new edition should be based on thorough research. In fact this was simply an extension of her official duties, which were “to verify and provide supplementary information on the works of art” and “to answer questions from within the Netherlands and abroad concerning the location, provenance, dating, or possible authenticity of work by or attributed to Vincent van Gogh.”37 As a result, compiling the catalogue took longer than the editorial committee had envisioned. The editors became irritated with what they called her “perfectionism.” She was urged to discontinue her “time-consuming personal research” and to give priority to “producing numbers,” i.e. the works by Van Gogh with Faille numbers.38 Cassandra Tension mounted between the editorial committee and Annet Tellegen, and by May 1964 they had lost all confidence in her. The men claimed she had made far too little progress over the past years. Her working method was incompatible with the promise they had made to the minister to finish the catalogue in 1964. She, on the other hand, thought it would be professionally irresponsible to publish the revised De la Faille with merely a few additions. At first she found a sympathetic ear in the person of her colleague Joop Joosten. The two of them sent a memo to their superior,

cassandra


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Gerson, pointing out all the problems with De la Faille’s legacy. He was won over, took sides, and wrote to the committee, “In making my way through the first 40 numbers I have come across so many inconsistencies, incorrect dates based on incorrect citations from the letters, doubts as to provenance, etc., that I, too, have come to the conclusion that it makes no sense to publish this basic information without a thorough revision.” Gerson saw an unbridgeable gap between the views of the editors and those of his institute, which he felt could no longer bear the responsibility for the new edition. He sent a letter to the editorial committee announcing that he was withdrawing as a member and that he had “charged Tellegen with conducting additional research in accordance with her plans.” He hoped that “a new, solid Van Gogh catalogue would emerge from this research [...] based on modern principles.”39 Gerson’s position did not go down smoothly with his fellow editors. Van Gelder hit the roof. He accused Gerson of taking three years to come to the conclusion that his RKD was incapable of handling the De la Faille revision. “After three years, 40 of the 2,500 numbers have been laid out but are not ready for the press. Somehow we’ve got to find a way out of this impasse as soon as possible. If you ask me, it won’t do to say, ‘I’m pulling out because I prefer a different kind of catalogue.’ Who’s going to take that on, I wonder?” Van Gelder was not confident that the RKD would be able to carry out such a huge project on its own and asked Gerson to reconsider.40 Gerson then made a completely unexpected about-face and demanded that Tellegen conform to the views of the committee. There wasn’t a word about the research according to her “own plans” that he had urged her to undertake earlier on. She refused, and both of them turned for arbitration to the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences, to which the RKD was accountable.41 For the ministry, the official response was quite straightforward: “[...] either Mrs. Tellegen does the work assigned to her by the director, or Mrs. Tellegen must be dismissed.”42 Van Gelder exerted pressure on Gerson to stick to his guns. His collaborators, he wrote, “have no idea what sort of official relationship they should be working under, nor do they understand the notion of copyright or the moral obligations it entails.”43 The editorial committee arranged to meet with Joop Joosten – who had temporarily replaced Tellegen as head of the Department of Modern Dutch and Belgian Art – in an attempt to have Tellegen’s work on the catalogue

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raisonné turned over to someone else. Joosten sided with her entirely: carrying out the editorial plan was professionally irresponsible. Thus began a difficult period for Gerson. To take the bull by the horns and force two staff members to resign would exacerbate relations within the RKD. But to let the matter slide would result in loss of face with the Ministry and the editorial committee. Finally Tellegen gave in, despite the moral support offered to her by her colleagues from the RKD. In 2000 she told me, “I was in danger of being branded a troublemaker. If that had happened, I wouldn’t have been able to get a job anywhere.” She realized that without the support of her superior she did not stand a chance of realizing her ambition: to make the RKD a distinguished Vincent van Gogh knowledge center. In March 1965 the editorial committee drew up a document in which she declared that with regard to the catalogue she would “set aside any desire to act autonomously.”44 She signed the declaration, deciding to acquiesce in the hope of making the best of things. “I felt like Cassandra, warning people of an inevitable catastrophe,” she told me.45 She and her colleagues continued to provide the committee with information on the paintings and drawings, but she no longer attended the weekly meetings of the editorial committee at the RKD. A colleague agreed to shuttle material between her department and that of the committee and to answer questions. She had seen the last of visits from the editorial committee. Accommodation Working out the hierarchy between the editorial committee and the RKD personnel did not mean reverting to the idea of a reissue of De la Faille’s legacy “with a few additions.” The drastic change that had taken place in the editorial style since 1964 is most clearly demonstrated in the final result of 1970: The works of Vincent van Gogh: His paintings and drawings. In 1962 the editors were still insisting that De la Faille’s legacy should not be checked or improved, while in 1970 it appeared that the exhibition history of all the drawings and paintings had been thoroughly researched. The same was true of the “unsolved matters” such as the dating of Van Gogh’s letters, drawings, and paintings: the editorial committee had wanted to leave these in abeyance, but in the end a sound investigation was conducted. The art historian Martha Op de Coul had been appointed in 1963 to carry out this

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work. In 1961 the editorial committee intended to include only additions that had appeared in scholarly art publications, but in 1966 they were given extra funding by the ministry to conduct their own research on Vincent’s drawings. And on and on. What is noteworthy for this book is how the editorial committee dealt with questions of authenticity. In 1962 the editors agreed to respect De la Faille’s judgments, while by 1970 it seems they had rejected seventeen works that De la Faille had wanted to include as Van Goghs. In addition, the editorial committee accepted six works that De la Faille himself had refused to consider genuine.46 In short, the editorial committee had steered a course independent of De la Faille, even when it came to questions of authenticity. Les environs de Paris revisited Word got around in the art world that the RKD was preparing a new edition of the De la Faille catalogue. Questions began coming in from experts, collectors, museums, art dealers, and auction houses, all of them wondering whether works in which they had an interest would be included in the catalogue as genuine Van Goghs. One of those works was Les environs de Paris. For the owner, the Paris art dealer Alfred Loeb, nothing had changed since 1958, when the Expertise Institute had issued its disappointing assessment. To make matters worse, the canvas he had paid so much for was now entirely unmarketable as a Van Gogh. Loeb must have realized that the Institute’s judgment concerning the maker of Les environs de Paris – not Van Gogh, probably Angrand – would work like a time bomb. During the sixties anyone who may have wanted to purchase a Van Gogh from his Paris period (at that time a Van Gogh cost at least ten times as much as an Angrand) probably would not have wanted to take any chances. Such a person would also have found his way to the Expertise Institute, and the unpublished report from 1958 would finally have come to light. So Loeb had to proceed with caution. He kept the canvas out of the public eye and looked for experts who supported his belief that it was a Van Gogh. He obtained a positive assessment from a French expert, someone who had no name in the Van Gogh world, let alone authority.47 In 1966, however, he came in contact with Tralbaut, whose authority on Van Gogh was still intact. Now Loeb had found a much better ally: dozens of publica-

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tions on Van Gogh to his name, a compiler of exhibitions, connections with art experts and – last but not least – a friend of the Engineer. Tralbaut threw himself into studying the painting, and his stylistic and historical research all pointed in one direction: Vincent van Gogh. Nevertheless, Loeb and Tralbaut were aware that Tralbaut’s research alone was insufficient, and that more would have to be done before the painting could be marketed as a Van Gogh. Given the Expertise Institute’s authoritative, negative judgment, publishing Tralbaut’s research could lead to an open conflict on the work’s authenticity. No one would ever risk buying such an expensive, “tainted” work. Publishing it in the Van Gogh catalogue raisonné, however, would turn the tide on the painting for good. The revised De la Faille would have just the kind of authority needed to drown out any hesitant buyer or skeptical colleague. But how to get it into the catalogue? Tralbaut knew that the editorial committee and the Expertise Institute were in regular contact over the paintings that had been reviewed by the Institute, so the idea was to persuade Hammacher and Jaffé, who had written the original assessment. It took quite some time before Tralbaut succeeded in arranging to speak with them, and in the meantime preparations were underway for the printing of his publication, which numbered more than 40 pages and was being financed by Loeb. Finally Tralbaut managed to talk Jaffé into looking at the painting once more. Jaffé studied the work in Basel on 18 August 1967, in the company of a colleague of Loeb, and he revised his judgment. Now he was convinced that Van Gogh was the painter.48 Tralbaut discussed this with Hammacher and understood him to say that the painting would definitely be included in the revised De la Faille. Tralbaut also came up with an indirect way of pressing home his position on the painting. He suggested to Loeb that the publication be dedicated to Sandberg, former board member of the Expertise Institute: “It would give the assessment an international nuance.” 49 Loeb was enthusiastic about the idea. He was worried, however, that his commercial interest in the publication might become known. But Tralbaut had a solution: in the galley proofs he changed the location of the painting from “Paris” to “Switzerland.” This way, he wrote to Loeb, “[...] no one will make the connection with you.” 50 They concealed their close collaboration as well as the financial interest Tralbaut had procured in the sale: five percent of the selling price.

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In November 1967 the first installment of Tralbaut’s Archives Internationales de Van Gogh was published under the title Comment identifier van Gogh? One whole page was reserved for the announcement that “two leading scholars” – Jaffé and Hammacher – regarded it as a work by Van Gogh. Comment identifier van Gogh? was sent to scores of prominent figures in the art world, and Tralbaut was praised for his discovery. He received compliments from director Van Schendel of the Rijksmuseum for his “extensive research,” from an art dealer for the work’s “handsome design,” and from the Engineer for “the thoroughness with which the piece was written.”51 Flattering compliments to be sure, but obviously the letter writers had chosen their words with great care to avoid expressing an opinion about who the painter of Les environs de Paris actually was. It is not difficult to imagine how Tralbaut and Loeb must have felt in December 1967, however, for Jaffé and Hammacher of the Expertise Institute had attributed the work to Van Gogh, and Hammacher supposedly had talked about including it in the catalogue. With Van Gelder’s unqualified support, Loeb and Tralbaut were more convinced than ever that it actually was true. Van Gelder wrote, “I believe I have seen the painting once in the Stedelijk Museum, not knowing the authorship had ever been in doubt. If there were any doubts, they have certainly been eliminated entirely now that a thorough analysis has been carried out.”52 Loeb and Tralbaut had no ear for dissenting noises. At the RKD in The Hague, the revision of the De la Faille catalogue was far from complete, so Tralbaut worked steadily in his attempts to carve out a prominent place in Vincent’s oeuvre not only for this painting but also for two others he had discovered: Récolte de blé dans la plaine des Alpilles (Grain Harvest on the Plains of the Alpilles) and Paysage aux environs d’Arles (Landscape near Arles). He devoted a detailed installment of his Archives Internationales de Van Gogh to Récolte de blé, which he had discovered in 1968. In the text he used the Engineer’s authority to underscore its authenticity.53 The owner was not mentioned by name, but two years later Tralbaut reproduced the painting in a publication once again and concealed the identity of the owner with the phrase “Collection particulière, Los Angeles, Etats-Unis.”54 Here, too, Tralbaut had procured a commercial interest of five percent of the selling price.

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Unloved The year 1969 marked the publication of Tralbaut’s monumental monograph Van Gogh, le mal aimé, which also came out in English. In it he reviewed the life and work of his idol in 350 pages that included hundreds of black-and-white and color illustrations. The color reproductions of his three discoveries were prominently featured.55 Engineer Van Gogh was responsible for the preface. After the first sentence – “What a moving book!” – he sings the praises of the author, for whom (he writes) he has written prefaces for many earlier books. Personally, says the Engineer, he finds such prefaces unnecessary, since the author has already written over a hundred books and articles on Van Gogh: “Tralbaut’s reputation alone is enough to guarantee the value of this work.”56 With these words, the Engineer seems to be backing Tralbaut’s Van Gogh discoveries with his own authority. But although he may create that impression, the Engineer is entirely silent when it comes to the authenticity of Tralbaut’s discoveries or of any other work in Van Gogh, le mal aimé. In this respect his preface is just as non-committal as his complimentary letter of November 1967 in response to Tralbaut’s publication on Les environs de Paris. Tralbaut now believed himself to be one of the anointed. Later he defended himself against criticism of the authenticity of the painting by saying, “Do you think that he [i.e., the Engineer] would have done that for a book containing a reproduction of the painting if he had not been convinced of it himself?”57 Having his discoveries included in the revised De la Faille seemed like a sure thing, all the more so since in 1969 the editorial committee had asked him who should be listed in the catalogue as the painting’s owner. But he was in for a disappointment.58 In mid-1969 Tralbaut learned that none of his discoveries would be included in the catalogue raisonné. The editorial committee was divided over their authenticity. The hazy provenance of the paintings became a particularly problematic obstacle to consensus.59 None of the works were mentioned in Vincent van Gogh’s letters, they had no exhibition history, and the line leading back to the master via the owners was vague. Tralbaut was aghast and demanded satisfaction in the most imperious tones. The committee’s answer was succinct and to the point. There would be no section in the catalogue containing works that did not appear in De la Faille and “over which the editorial committee had not reached a consensus on authentic-

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ity or attribution.”60 Tralbaut accused the committee of being inconsistent because he had been told that other recently discovered work would be included. The editorial committee proposed a compromise. They would reproduce Les environs de Paris in the catalogue but with a note to the reader saying that the editors disagreed on the work’s authenticity. Then Tralbaut overplayed his hand. He demanded that all three paintings be included without comment. If not, an “international press conference in Paris” would be held to coincide with the publication of the catalogue, “at which everyone would be invited to substantiate his doubts with scholarly arguments, and to which an official invitation would naturally be sent to the editorial committee. [...] The conference would be chaired by three leading figures from the art history sector.” It would expose the editors’ lack of expertise: “I deem it necessary to determine once and for all who is and who is not a Van Gogh expert.” The expert, Tralbaut wrote, “distinguishes between genuine and false without hesitation, certainly when the work before him is not merely an ordinary painting by Vincent van Gogh but a masterpiece.”61 Tralbaut terminated his friendship with the editors and threatened to take legal action, but the committee stood firm and rejected all three of his discoveries. “Tralbaut’s pent-up anger probably had to do with finances,” one editor sighed. “A most unpalatable and dangerous gentleman. Now he’s left alone with his painting, press conference or no press conference. It’s a lesson in never putting anything down on paper, however, and in being more distrustful of commerce than we’re already wont to be.”62 Fool Les environs de Paris was not to be included in the Van Gogh catalogue: it was a heavy blow for Alfred Loeb, and he urged Tralbaut to discuss it with the Engineer. At least he had never said anything negative about the painting. He could be talked into rendering a favorable assessment, couldn’t he? Whether Tralbaut tried this or not is unknown, but in 1971 Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov showed up. She was one of Van Gelder’s doctoral students, and she found the Van Gogh attribution erroneous. Since 1969 Welsh-Ovcharov had been doing research on the two years that Vincent van Gogh lived and worked in Paris: March 1886 to February

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1888. She had come across reviews of an exhibition organized by the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1886 in which a particular painting, Terrains vagues (Fallow ground), was described. Much to her surprise, the description written by these critics corresponded with the composition of Les environs de Paris. What the critics said, however, was that it was not a work by Van Gogh but by Charles Angrand. The work had never been exhibited in the twentieth century and she very much wanted to see it, so she traveled with Loeb from Paris to the safe in Basel where it was being kept to have a look. She also had talks with a nephew of the artist, Pierre Angrand, who told her he had seen Terrains vagues in the company of the artist during the twenties. Welsh-Ovcharov was sure she was right and published her findings in 1971, The early work of Charles Angrand and his contact with Vincent van Gogh. Tralbaut was horrified. He had nothing good to say about Welsh-Ovcharov and her work, and in a letter to an acquaintance he called her a “show-off ” and a “fool.”63 A discussion between Tralbaut and Welsh-Ovcharov never took place.64 In 1976 Tralbaut died and Les environs de Paris lost its standard-bearer. Loeb did not give up, however. He had in his possession indisputable statements by several experts that the canvas was from Vincent’s hand, and when the 1970 De la Faille was published the editorial committee indicated they were open to revisions and additions. No date was set for the publication of those changes, and as we now know, no revised catalogue would ever appear in the twentieth century. Nor is there evidence at the time of writing of any work in progress that might result in a fully documented Van Gogh catalogue-raisonné. This would not necessarily prevent a particular work of art from being accepted as a Van Gogh, but it would need the unanimous agreement of authoritative experts. In the seventies and eighties, however, the work was neither discussed nor depicted by any Van Gogh expert. Welsh-Ovcharov left it out of her 1976 dissertation on Van Gogh’s Paris period. In 1977, Jan Hulsker, the former editor of the posthumous De la Faille, published his own catalogue, The Complete Van Gogh.65 He completely ignored Les environs de Paris. In 1981 Loeb contacted Hammacher, the chairman of the editorial committee, and induced him to consider his painting once again. For the next year, Hammacher and Ellen Joosten studied the painting in Paris. They were unanimous in their opinion of the work’s authenticity and told Loeb that it

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would be published in a supplement to De la Faille’s 1970 catalogue.66 They believed Welsh-Ovcharov’s Angrand attribution to be incorrect. But when Hammacher’s richly illustrated Van Gogh biography came out in 1982, it contained no mention of the painting. The experts continued to express ambivalence about the maker’s identity. During the years that followed, Jaffé issued Loeb another certificate of authenticity while the RKD and a French expert sided with Welsh-Ovcharov.67 Exhibition In 1987 Welsh-Ovcharov put the finishing touches on a catalogue for the exhibition Van Gogh à Paris at the prestigious and newly opened Musée d’Orsay. The aim of the exhibition was to portray the group of painters that Van Gogh had come to know in 1886-1888. On pages 182-183 she wrote about Charles Angrand and included a reproduction of Terrains vagues. The painting itself would not be part of the exhibition. In an accompanying statement she mentions the publications written by Tralbaut in which he attributes the painting to Van Gogh under the title Les environs de Paris, and she ends with “[...] the author has attributed it to Charles Angrand.”68 This sounds as if Tralbaut has had second thoughts, but by “the author” Welsh-Ovcharov meant herself and not Tralbaut. The exhibition opened on 3 February 1988, and Loeb’s heirs were dismayed at what was written about their painting in the catalogue of Van Gogh à Paris. They immediately swung into action, and through their lawyer demanded that the museum issue an erratum saying that Tralbaut regarded the work as a genuine Van Gogh. The museum must insert the erratum in the catalogue, they insisted, which must then be sent to everyone who already owned a copy. In future editions Welsh-Ovcharov’s mistake would have to be rectified. Musée d’Orsay refused to comply with this demand and asked three Van Gogh experts and the Rijksmuseum Van Gogh to issue a verdict on the work’s authenticity. Hulsker let the museum know that he had not included it in his The Complete Van Gogh because he had been completely convinced by Welsh-Ovcharov’s study. He wrote that neither he nor his fellow editors of the 1970 De la Faille had been persuaded that it was a Van Gogh. John Rewald, the expert on Impressionism and Post-Impressionism; Van Gogh

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expert Ronald Pickvance; and the Rijksmuseum Vincent van Gogh also asserted that it was not a Van Gogh but a genuine Charles Angrand. Musée d’Orsay wanted to have these statements included in the erratum as well. The heirs decided to compromise. According to the agreement they entered into with Musées de France, the Musée d’Orsay’s highest administrative authority, the contested pages 182 and 183 would be omitted from the catalogue’s second printing.69 Some experts had come out publicly for the Van Gogh attribution and others had come out against it: Les environs de Paris had landed in the purgatorio of controversial works of art. As the years passed, a now familiar picture emerged. The heirs took great pains to find experts who supported them in their attribution to Van Gogh and their criticism of Welsh-Ovcharov. Her reading of the reviews of the exhibition of the Société des Artistes Indépendants of 1886 was fiercely attacked. They had nothing at all to do with Les environs de Paris, it was argued. Finally, via Benoît Landais, they succeeded in getting Hulsker to change his mind: he decided it was a Van Gogh. But that was not enough to silence the criticism. In 1998, during a lecture at the Van Gogh symposium held in the National Gallery in London, Welsh-Ovcharov made reference to her publication of 1971 about Angrand and Van Gogh. Her statement on Les environs de Paris reached the heirs, and they considered legal action. The majority of experts, they insisted, had attributed the painting to Vincent van Gogh. They did not want to deny Welsh-Ovcharov whatever freedom of investigation she needed, but this freedom had its limits. Armed with her academic authority, she had done serious material damage: the painting was unmarketable as a Van Gogh or could only be sold for a much lower price.70 The Hauert case In the battle over authenticity, interested parties sometimes threatened to take legal steps against art experts if they happened to be the bearer of unwelcome tidings. In the battle over catalogue contents, one interested party – the French lawyer Roger Hauert – was led to take an unconventional step: he summoned the Dutch state to appear before a French court. The cause was a painting in his possession, Sunflowers in a Green Jug, to which De la Faille had given a certificate of authenticity. De la Faille had traveled to Paris in October 1947 especially for this purpose, and on the photo of the

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painting he wrote, “I see only one man who could have painted this and that man is Van Gogh.”71 De la Faille probably told Hauert that the third edition of the Van Gogh catalogue was in the works and would include this canvas. Many years later, in 1963, a friend of Hauert at the RKD found a photo of Sunflowers in a Green Jug in a box marked “Fake Van Goghs.” Hauert wasted no time in his response. He demanded the address of the widow De la Faille who, he said, as the rightful heir, should repair the damage that De la Faille’s “breach of confidence” had caused. The RKD refused to supply the address. Hauert wanted to sell the canvas to a dealer, and the dealer asked the editorial committee to confirm its authenticity. The committee saw no reason to depart from De la Faille’s revised judgment, however. They said the painting did not appear in his manuscript for the catalogue, and they told the dealer it would not be included.72 Hammacher knew the canvas and endorsed De la Faille’s final judgment: not Van Gogh’s work. The editorial committee concurred, and in February 1970, about eight months before the publication of the catalogue, they told Hauert it would not be included.73 Hauert refused to take this lying down. He instructed a Dutch lawyer to investigate the widow and the editorial committee, and contended that De la Faille had never told him that he was revoking his assessment of Sunflower in a Green Jug. The fact that the RKD had found the photo of the painting in a collection of photos of fake Van Goghs could have been coincidental. De la Faille was already in his seventies when he began working on the new edition of the catalogue, Hauert reasoned. At that age it is common for a man to make mistakes. The editorial committee refused to relent, and Hauert decided to get even by way of the Paris courts. He brought charges against the widow, the RKD, and the editorial committee and demanded rectification. Speaking about the incident in 2001, Hammacher said, “I told the Dutch government what was happening to me. They said I could count on their support and cooperation. I went to Paris once, for a lengthy session. The painting was there in the courtroom with its back to the wall. It stayed there for hours. No one was talking about the painting. The lawyers were arguing about whether a Dutchman should be convicted in a French court. It was a serious question, and the arguing went on and on. I thought the case would take two years at least. Within one year the Parisian lawyer had died and the case was dropped. Never heard anything more about it.”74 The support that the

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government extended to Hammacher initially consisted of assigning him a lawyer who worked out of the government attorney’s office. How the government would have acted if the case had gone forward is unknown. Judge After the war was over, the government did not want to set up an Expertise Institute. The reason is unclear. Perhaps the words from the prominent 19th century Dutch Home Secretary Johan Rudolph Thorbecke – “The government is not a judge of science and art” – played a role. It is also possible that the minister was going by the advice he received from the directors of the museums, who did not want to support such a body at that time. They probably saw it as an infringement of their autonomy, and they did not want to jeopardize their personal relations with art donors. Perhaps the political persuasion of Sandberg and the Engineer, as well as the commotion caused by Study by Candlelight in 1949, also played a role. These are all speculations. We will never know the exact reasons because the documents that might provide a conclusive answer are nowhere to be found. This is what makes the publication of De la Faille’s posthumous catalogue such an interesting story: unintentionally and unwittingly, the government was drawn into conflicts over authenticity. The department’s most highly placed official for the arts, Dr. J. Hulsker, participated in the work of the editorial committee as the minister’s representative, and there is not a single document to suggest that he abstained from making such judgments. On the contrary, the 1970 catalogue listed him as an editor, and in that function he was co-responsible for the works that De la Faille had deemed genuine but the editors had not, and vice versa.75 The ministerial representative did not serve as an observer but as a participant. The direct support of the Dutch government for the reissue of a catalogue was a unique event. Never before – or since – has the government ordered the compilation of a fully documented catalogue raisonné of a Dutch master, since that is what it all boils down to: the Dutch government acting as a judge of science and art. Thorbecke would have turned over in his grave.

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Acknowledgments

Many people have discussed the subject of this book with me, either because they are directly involved in the matters dealt with here or because they have encountered similar situations in the art world. I have also had regular contact with persons who are not familiar with the inner workings of the art world but who kept me on the right track by asking critical questions. A few took the trouble to read and mark up my manuscripts as well, and have kept me from making many mistakes, both major and minor. I mention here H. Balk, R. Bordewijk, M. ter Borg, E. Couvée, H. Ebbink, P. van der Eerden, J. Ellemers, W. Feilchenfeldt, P. Hecht, P. Hefting, B. Jans, J. Joosten, T. Kōdera, S. Koldehoff, J. Koldeweij, F. Leeman, M. te Marvelde, H. van Os, W. Rappard, P. de Ruiter, E. Schrage, R. Schumacher, A. Tellegen, E. van Uitert, P. Verschoof, B. Welsh-Ovcharov, E. van de Wetering, and J. van der Wolk. Sadly, a few of the individuals whose conversations, correspondence, and/or comments contributed substantially to my book are no longer with us. They are J. Hulsker, expert on Van Gogh’s letters and artwork; A. Hammacher, director of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller and editorial chairman of De la Faille’s posthumous Van Gogh catalogue; E. Joosten, curator of the Rijksmuseum Kröller-Müller; E. De Wilde, director of the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and chairman of the Expertise Institute; W. Froentjes, director of the Forensic Laboratory of the Ministry of Justice; and M. Broekmeyer, the driving force behind the Foundation for Science and Democracy. The last-named was responsible for providing me with financial support for visits to Washington and Berlin. The Foundation also assisted in the publication of the Dutch version of my book. The families of the persons who appear in this book were also very kind in their willingness to speak with me and to entrust documents to me or

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let me peruse them. J. Baart de la Faille has custody of documents by and about his uncle, making it possible for the first time to obtain insight into his motives and actions. D. van Dantzig offered me hospitality so I could study her father’s correspondence. J. van Gogh answered my questions about his father and undertook to correct factual inaccuracies in my account. G. Girard-Loeb gave me permission to study her father’s correspondence. J. van Es granted me access to the archives of the d’Audretsch Art Gallery. I would like to thank the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences for making available to me documents having to do with the matter described in Chapter 8. The Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam granted me permission to study the archives of the Expertise Institute. I was able to explore documents there that throw new light on questions mainly addressed in Chapters 3 and 8. My thanks go to M. Knies for helping track down these documents. The staff at the National Gallery of Art in Washington opened the museum archives to me. I am grateful to P. Connisbee, Senior, Curator of European Paintings, for giving me permission to conduct investigations there. Ann Halpern helped in the study of the curators’ folders. Restorer Ann Hoenigswald provided me with details on the Van Gogh paintings in the museum collection, and researcher J. Orfila shared her knowledge of Maud and Chester Dale with me. I would like to thank B. Götze of the Zentralarchiv Staatliche Museen in Berlin for helping me make my way through the documents having to do with the Wacker affair. The Vincent van Gogh Foundation gave me permission to study and cite passages from the Memoranda of Engineer V.W. van Gogh. The Netherlands Institute for Art History – the RKD – has a wealth of material on nineteenth- and twentieth-century art, and M. Op de Coul showed me how to navigate it. She also read and commented on my manuscripts, for which I am very grateful. The Kröller-Müller Museum has a vast archive that was not fully open for research when I began my study. Nevertheless, P. de Jonge and B. Mühren made every effort to obtain permission for me to read documents that were vital to a proper understanding of many of the events covered in this book. The staff at the Van Gogh Museum assisted me in many ways. L. van Tilborgh, research curator, with whom I had numerous conversations, has commented on my articles over the years and provided suggestions for topics. C. Stolwijk, head of research, gave me many useful

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tips. F. Pabst and M. Hageman offered me invaluable help in making the museum archives and documents accessible. They also kept me from committing a number of slip-ups. A. Vriend and P. Schuil were able to turn the museum library into one of the most pleasant places imaginable for doing research. I’d like to thank the editors of Jong Holland for commenting on my article “De Goetz-affaire,” published in 2002, of which Chapter 8 is an expanded and revised version. T. Meedendorp was always willing to answer my questions on Van Gogh’s work. He was also very helpful at making sure all the i’s were dotted and the t’s were crossed. B. Landais shared his vast knowledge of the work of Vincent van Gogh with me. He made available to me his transcriptions of the correspondence of Paul Gachet and son, and was helpful in many other ways. The board of the Faculty of Social and Behavioural Sciences of Leiden University, in the person of P. Vedder, gave me the time and opportunity to begin this study. The Department of Political Science of the same university proved itself an inspiring host. The gravity and jocularity of the coffee and lunch discussions were indispensible ingredients for increasing the pleasure of my research period. I would especially like to thank J. van Holsteyn and H. Oversloot for their encouragement and observations on my manuscripts. I am also grateful to the Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research, who subsidized the English translation. Nancy ForestFlier and Rachel Esner (Chapters 3 and 7) skillfully handled the translation of the text. In conducting research that extends over such a long period and deals with the subject in a rather unconventional way, personal setbacks are almost unavoidable. I often asked myself whether an anthropologist was the best-equipped person to engage in a study of the Van Gogh world. But I found a kindred spirit in Frank Bovenkerk, who has a preference for unconventional subjects. He gave me his unwavering support, commented on my manuscripts, and made sure that the expanded Dutch version of this book would be presented as a dissertation. Mariëtte Linders fully supported my research and writing, and mustered the patience to listen to my tales of the Van Gogh world over and over again. In a recently published collection of essays entitled Het gevecht met de engel, over verheffende en minder verheffende aspecten van het wetenschapsbedrijf (Wrestling with the angel: On the edifying and less edifying aspects of the

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academic enterprise; 2003), André J.F. Köbben further developed the theme of the researcher as bearer of unwelcome tidings. A Real Van Gogh is the expression of our common interest and would not have been written without his encouragement and support. For this reason I dedicate it to him.

Amsterdam/Leiden, December 2009

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Notes

Introduction  This account is based on G. Poulhain, “Dans le maquis des faux,” Comoedia, December , , and on J. Gérard, Le crime de Julien Leclerq, manuscript, no page numbers, undated. VGMA. Also see Van Kooten & Rijnders (eds.) , -.  See De la Faille a, ; and De la Faille , .  Compare Köbben and Tromp , .  Alexander .  Becker .  Alsop .  Kempers .  Gibson-Wood , Secrest .  Balk , De Ruiter .  Merton  (originally ). For criticism of his work, see Mitroff , Ziman    

, Krimsky , Köbben . Köbben and Tromp , -. Köbben and Tromp , . Köbben and Tromp , -; -. Art historical research concerning Vincent van Gogh has traditionally been dominated by a focus on his work and person: thousands of publications have been written on his paintings and drawings. There is no lack of serious biographies, either—at least fifty—in addition to the hundreds of biographical sketches included in catalogues. Vincent’s medical condition has also produced enough works to fill many bookshelves. No museum in the world has more documentation on any one artist than the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has on Vincent van Gogh. This production still continues, and it reflects art history’s hard core: research on works of art, artists, schools, and styles. In recent decades, however, more and more research has been conducted on others in the art world: collectors, dealers, museums, critics, the media, and the public. This extension of the research area has also enriched research on Van Gogh. The rest of this note comprises a brief and by no means representative summary. Carol D. Zemel () has written about the appreciation of art critics for Van Gogh’s work in the Netherlands, France, Germany, and England; Walter Feilchenfeldt () on the role of the Berlin art dealer Paul Cassirer in spreading Van Gogh’s fame in Germany; Hans Oversloot () on the first Russian collectors of Van Gogh. Kõdera Tsukasa (), editor of the book The mythology of Vincent van Gogh, has brought together a number of articles about the cultural significance of Van Gogh in the twentieth century and his influence on belles-lettres, films, and the visual arts. Gerald Bronkhorst () has written on the history of the Van Gogh Museum; Nathalie Heinich () on the Van Gogh cult. Cynthia Saltzman () discusses the lives of the Dutch, Danish, German, and Japanese owners of Van Gogh’s Portrait of Dr. Gachet to introduce the reader to  years of

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cultural change. Benoît Landais () has written about the relationship between Van Gogh and Paul Gachet, and so have Distel and Stein (). Vincent van Gogh is an important theme in both Peter de Ruiter’s biography () of A.M. Hammacher and Hildelies Balk’s biography () of H.P. Bremmer. The recent catalogue of Van Gogh paintings in the Kröller-Müller (Van Kooten & Rijnders, eds.; ) contains separate chapters on early collectors of Vincent van Gogh in addition to the usual descriptive and historical information on his works. The Van Gogh Museum publishes an annual Journal that frequently contains articles on dealers, collectors, and exhibitions. Roodenburg-Schadd () has written on the importance of putting works by Van Gogh out on loan for the collection policy of the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam between  and .  Leune , -.

Chapter 1    

  

         

  

J.B. de la Faille, “Aan een kind.” Vox studiosorum,  May . Letter of ATAG, dated  May . De la Faille declined ATAG’s offer but accepted that of the General National Party. “Mededeling,” De Telegraaf,  September ; and “Neutraliteit en kunsthandel,” De Telegraaf,  December . The Dutch section of the League was founded on  July . Also see J.B. de la Faille, “Het zeppelinbezoek,” De Telegraaf,  September ; J.B. de la Faille, “Open brief,” Vox studiosorum,  October ; J.B. de la Faille, “Het voorwoord van Prof. Mr. J. Baron d’Aulnis de Bourouill bij het boek ‘De voorgeschiedenis van den Oorlog’ door W. Graadt van Roggen,” Vox studiosorum,  December . J.B. de la Faille, “De zeevisserij,” Nieuws van de dag,  August . In  the sculpture was moved to Porte Saint-Paul in Verdun. Political repression in the Netherlands was relatively mild during those years, but not entirely absent. The editor-in-chief of De Telegraaf ended up in jail in  for publishing anti-German articles, so fearful were the Dutch authorities of offending Prussian sensibilities. Moeyes , -. Haffner , -. Saltzman , xxiii. Koldehoff ,  and Dorn & Feilchenfeldt , . (J.B. de la Faille), “Kunsthandelaar of museumdirecteur,” Nieuwe Rotterdamsche Courant,  September ;  October . (J.B. de la Faille), “Kunsthandelaar of museumdirecteur,” NRC,  September . “Museumdirecteur, geen kunsthandelaar,” NRC,  October . “Le monde nouveau,” NRC,  January  and J.B. de la Faille, “Les faux Rembrandts,” Le monde nouveau,  January . J.B. de la Faille, “Wedergevonden of nieuw-ontdekte Rembrandts,” NRC,  February . Letter of F. Schmid Degener,  January . J.B. de la Faille, Remembrances from  September  to  May . J.B. de la Faille, “Expertise van schilderijen en kunstvoorwerpen,” De veilingbode, December . pp. -. Among the publications that featured it were De Indische verlofganger. Officieel orgaan van de Vereniging van Indische verlofgangers,  March ; La gazette de Hollande,  March ; Präger Presse,  January ; Neue Zürcher Zeitung,  January ; Haarlems Dagblad,  January . Veth , . Ibid., . Ibid., .




notes

29-5-2010 15:24:05

 J.B. de la Faille, “Expertisebureaus,” De Veilingbode, March . Also see J.B. de la Faille, “De valse Frans Hals,” De Veilingbode, May .

 J.B. de la Faille, “De ste tentoonstelling der Secession te Berlijn III,” De Fakkel,  June .

 In the posthumous De la Faille catalogue of , the editorial committee put 

  

  

         

as the year the compiling began (De la Faille , ). De la Faille himself said it started in  (Anon., “Zes maal een persoonlijke kijk op Van Gogh en zijn invloed,” Het Vrije Volk,  March ). In February  his request for information from owners of Van Gogh’s work was published in De Telegraaf and Algemeen Handelsblad. In Formes, December , p. , he wrote that he had been working on the catalogue for five years. The initial idea and groundwork on the catalogue could date to around , however, because he had sold works by Van Gogh as auctioneer at Muller & Co. See Feilchenfeldt , . De la Faille knew Sternheim and had written the preface to his Van Gogh en Gauguin (). Stolwijk & Veenenbos , pp. -. De la Faille served as curator for several exhibitions, among them: Galerie Dru (Paris), “Aquarelles, dessins et pastels de Van Gogh (-) du  juin au  juillet : Avant-propos de J.-B. de la Faille”; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, “Tentoonstelling van Teekeningen en aquarellen door Vincent van Gogh” ( October –  November ); for the Rotterdamsche Kring, “Tentoonstelling van Teekeningen en aquarellen door Vincent van Gogh” ( December  –  January ). Lectures: SMA,  October , “De Teekenaar Vincent van Gogh”; Rotterdamse Kring,  December , Introduction to the drawing exhibition; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,  September , “Vincent van Gogh en zijn kunst”; Genootschap Nederland-Frankrijk,  October , Lecture with slides, “Vincent van Gogh en zijn werk”; Stedelijk Museum,  October , “Vincent van Gogh”; Arnhem, Mij tot nut v/h Algemeen,  December , “Vincent van Gogh.” In Germany: Hannover, Thursday,  April , Kestner-Gesellschaft E.V. In Austria: Vienna,  February , “Van Gogh als Zeichner”;  February , “Van Gogh als Maler.” De la Faille’s mediation in the sale of at least three paintings is recorded in correspondence between him and Engineer V.W. van Gogh. VGM, b V/. Text on a loose sheet of paper inserted in J.B. de la Faille , Library VGM. See: Gazette de l’hôtel Drouot,  October . De la Faille traced his ancestry to the Huguenots who fled France in the seventeenth century and found refuge in the Netherlands. It was an assumed identity; according to a statement from his nephew, J. Baart de la Faille, his ancestors almost certainly did not come from France. J. Zwartendijk, “Een zeldzame uitgave,” NRC,  February . Kasper Niehaus, “J.B. de la Faille, Het werk van Vincent van Gogh,” De Telegraaf,  January. The Burlington Magazine, no. , vol. LII, June , pp. -, and no. , vol. LIII, October , pp. -. Biermann, “J.B. de la Faille, L’œuvre de Vincent van Gogh,” Cicerone,  July , pp. -. R.B., “L’œuvre de Vincent van Gogh,” La revue de l’art, November , p. . Balk , -. Balk , . See Hilhorst  and Balk , . B. van der Leck, “In Memoriam dr. H.P. Bremmer,” Museumjournaal, part /, , pp. -. See De la Faille , vol. III, , . Stegeman , .

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 N. Eissenloeffels’s Kunsthandel, Betreffende kunstexpertises (no date), RKD, Archive of Eissenloeffel’s Kunsthandel. Also see Balk , -.

 Ten Berge , .  Balk , .  Not to be confused with the Society for the Formation of a Collection of Modern Art     

                     

  

in the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, formed in . Letter of H.P. Bremmer to De la Faille,  April . SMA Exhibition A’dam . Letter of H. Kröller-Müller to De la Faille,  May . SMA Exhibition A’dam . See Dirven & Wouters . I am following De la Faille’s account here, which speaks of four canvases being refused. According to Grete Ring there were three: see Ring , . See Ring , Faille . Anon. “Van Gogh-schilderijen vervalscht met fabelachtig meesterschap,” Het Volk,  November . The four canvases are F , F , F bis and F . See: A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. Anon. “Valsche Van Goghs?” De Telegraaf,  November . Copy of letter of V.W. van Gogh to J.B. de la Faille,  March . VGM b V/. “Mr. De la Faille dient van repliek,” De Telegraaf,  December . “Fünf Van Goghs echt? De la Faille überrascht das Gericht durch seine Zeugenaussage, ” Berliner Börsen-Courier,  April  Abends. “Van Gogh-schilderijen vervalst met fabelachtig meesterschap,” Het Volk,  November . “Dertig valse Van Goghs,” De Telegraaf,  November . “Vincent van Gogh,” Nieuwe Courant,  December . Letter of J.B. de la Faille to L. Justi,  May . ZMB I/NG , . “Dertig valse Van Goghs,” De Telegraaf,  November . “ Van Goghs bestimmt falsch,” Berliner Nachtausgabe,  November . Berliner Zeitung, Berliner illustrierte Nachtausgabe, Vossische Zeitung. “Nieuws over de Van Goghs,” De Telegraaf,  December . “Vincent van Gogh. De vervalsingen,” Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant,  December . On  December , Het Vaderland published photographs of six paintings under the headline “De zogenaamd Valse Van Goghs.” “De valsche Van Goghs,” Nieuwe Rotterdamse Courant,  December ; Anon. “De valsche Van Goghs,” De Standaard,  December . For the Netherlands Art Buyers’ Association, see Heijbroek & Wouthuysen , . “Nieuw stadium in de Van Gogh affaire,” De Telegraaf,  November . H.P. Bremmer, “De valsche Van Goghs,” De Nieuwe Courant,  December . “Afwijkende meningen over de Van Gogh-falsificaties,” De Telegraaf,  December . “Vincent van Gogh, de vervalsingen: Een beschouwing van H.P. Bremmer,” NRC,  December . J.B. de Faille, “Vincent van Gogh: De vervalsingen,” NRC,  December . “Vincent van Gogh,” NRC  January . Copy of bill from Kunstzaal d’Audretsch to A.G. Kröller,  December . JE. Letter of Galerie Matthiesen to H. Kröller-Müller,  April . KMM HA . For F , see Ten Berge et al., , -. Ten Berge assumed that Kröller-Müller had bought the canvas in  or later and had then sold or given it to her secretary, Van Deventer. However, the canvas was sold to Van Deventer in  by the Matthiesen gallery via the Huinck & Scherjon gallery. See Chapter . Copy of letter from H. Kröller-Müller to B. Hesse,  February . KMM, HA . Copy of letter from O. Wacker to H.P. Bremmer,  January . KMM, HA. “Zwendel met schilderijen,” De Avondpost,  April .




notes

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 H.P. Bremmer, “Afbeelding : Visschersbooten, bij St. Maries,” Beeldende Kunst, no. , March , pp. -.

 See Beeldende Kunst, July , figure : Landscape (= F , Two Poplars); March , figure : Fishing Boats at St. Maries (= F , Seascape).

Chapter 2             

            

See Koldehoff a, . Correspondence of O. Wacker with the Nationalgalerie, see ZMB, I/NG , -. The drawing is F , Enclosed wheat field with reaper. See the provenance in De la Faille , . Wacker would have bought it from F.M. Wibaut in Amsterdam. See Stern’s classical study of . For the reception of Van Gogh’s work in Germany, see Eckhardt , Zemel , Bridgewater , Feilchenfeldt , Manheim , Kõdera (ed.) , Heinich , and Koldehoff . Krockow , -. See Paul , - and Paret a, . J. Meier-Graefe, “Die Zeichnung Van Goghs,” Frankfurter Zeitung,  October . This is the most frequently mentioned figure. Other newspaper reports claimed there were fewer (De Maasbode of  April  put it at eleven). On Meier-Graefe, see Moffett , Koldehoff , and Meier-Graefe . J. Meier-Graefe, “Der Maler mit den schwachen Stunden,” Berliner Tageblatt,  February . Ring , . Also see “Van Goghs vervalst?” De Telegraaf,  April . Letter of J. Meier-Graefe to V.W. van Gogh,  November . VGM, bV/; letter of V.W. van Gogh to J. Meier-Graefe,  December . VGM, bV/; and letter of J. Meier-Graefe to V.W. van Gogh,  December . VGM, bV/. Meier-Graefe, “Die Van Gogh Frage,” Berliner Tageblatt,  December . Anonymous [=A.M. de Wild] “In en om het proces Van Gogh,” Het Vaderland,  April . “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  April . Also see the manuscript of Bremmer’s wife: Bremmer-Beekhuis [-], . Here reference is made to the transcription of M. Straasheijm () in the library of the Kunsthistorisch Instituut of the University of Amsterdam. “Otto Wacker aan het woord,” De Telegraaf,  November . Letter of O. Wacker to W. Scherjon,  July . VGM, Archives of Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon -. “Vreemde houding van dr. Wacker,” Het Volk,  December . I. Goldschmidt, “Der Fall Wacker,” Frankfurter Zeitung,  January . “Frau Kröller kauft einen zweifelhaften Van Gogh,” Vossische Zeitung,  January . “De valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  January . For Russian collectors of Van Gogh, see Oversloot . Zimmermann , . On Liebermann, see Meissner  and Schütz . On the Berliner Secession, see Paret b. On the other hand, Ludwig Thormaehlen, sculptor and curator of the Nationalgalerie from  to , was a confirmed anti-Semite until his death in . See Blume , . Scheffler . Hentzen , . Letter of L. Thormaehlen to O. Kramer,  December . ZMB, I/NG , . In December  identical letters were written to A. Lewin, B.E. Wolff, and C. Sternheim. The letters were drafted on Justi’s orders. Matthiesen had taken back all the Wacker paintings on consignment after the publication of De la Faille’s Supplément, subject to repayment of the purchase price (approxi-

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 

                    



mately , reichsmarks). “De valsche Van Goghs: Een aanklacht tegen Wacker ingediend,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  December ; and “Vincent van Gogh: Een aanklacht tegen Wacker,” NRC,  December . Copy of letter from L. Justi to Barth,  January . The letter is erroneously dated . At the end of January, the following works were in the Nationalgalerie: Self-Portrait (F ), Basket with Rolls (F ), Cypresses (F ), Cypresses (F ), Seascape (F ), Houses at Saintes-Maries (F ), Peasant after Millet (F ), Sower after Millet (F ), and Landscape with Olive Trees (F ). The painting seized from Leonhard Wacker’s studio, The Mower, is not in De la Faille’s Van Gogh catalogue, but it is included in De la Faille’s Les faux Van Gogh of  and has since been designated F(aille)F(aux) . L. Justi, “Van Gogh, die Kenner und Schriftsteller,” Vossische Zeitung,  January . Also see Justi , -. “Nasporingen in de Van Gogh-kwestie,” De Telegraaf,  January . J. Meier-Graefe, “Der Maler mit den Schwachen Stunden,” Berliner Tageblatt,  February . Ring , . Letter of H. Kröller-Müller to L. Justi,  February . ZMB, I/NG . Letter of L. Justi to H. Kröller-Müller,  February . KMM, HA . For this incident, also see Van der Wolk , - and Balk , . Letter from the Matthiesen gallery to the Nationalgalerie,  January , as well as a copy of the answer from the Nationalgalerie on the same sheet of paper, dated  January . ZMB, I/NG Ausstellung . Letter from the Matthiesen gallery to H. Kröller-Müller,  April . KMM, HA . See the facsimile of Bremmer’s list of fake and genuine Wacker-Van Goghs in Veth , -. He mentions Bowl with potatoes (F ), also known as Still Life with Rolls. In March , four months after the court ruling on Otto Wacker’s appeal, the seizure was withdrawn. Letter from the Matthiesen gallery to H. Kröller-Müller,  April . KMM, HA . W. Bondy, “Die Van Gogh-Bilder: Technisches über die Fälschungen,” Die Kunstauktion,  February , -. “De Van Gogh-falsificaties slecht uitgevoerd,” De Telegraaf,  February . The newspaper erroneously referred to Die Kunstantiquitäten, a non-existent periodical. “De vervalste Van Goghs: Nieuwe aanwijzingen tegen de familie Wacker,” De Telegraaf,  January . Roepers , . “Houdt Wacker zich weg?” De Haagsche Post,  February . “Otto Wacker,” De Maasbode,  March . “Verergerde toestand van Otto Wacker,” De Telegraaf,  July . Copy of a letter from the Nationalgalerie to H. Kröller-Müller,  October . ZMB, I/NG , . Scheffler , . Copy of a letter from L. Justi to R. Möring,  March . ZMB, I/NG -. Justi also wanted to buy three Picassos from Rosenberg. These were sent to Berlin along with Daubigny’s Garden in March, but Justi kept this information from the acquisitions commission because he knew the commission saw nothing in Picasso. He hoped to purchase the Picassos with funds from the Verein der Freunde der Nationalgalerie. On  June , the Nationalgalerie obtained F  from the Bernheim Jeune art gallery in Paris in exchange for three paintings by Vuillard (valued at , francs) and a payment of , francs. Copy of a letter from L. Justi to P. Ebstein,  June . ZMB, I/NG , .




notes

29-5-2010 15:24:05

 Letter of J.A. Thomas to the directors of the Nationalgalerie,  May . ZMB, I/ NG , 

 No author, no title (in manuscript “Letzte Fassung”), no date,  pp. ZMB, I/NG . The author was almost certainly Ludwig Thormaehlen.

 “Een nieuwe Affaire Wacker?” De Telegraaf,  July . “De Van Gogh-affaire,” De Telegraaf,  September . “De Van Gogh-kwestie: Hoe staat het met de beweerde vervalsingen?” De Telegraaf,  November .

Chapter 3                     

    

Van den Brandhof , -. Hofstede de Groot , . Froentjes and De Wild . Letter from J. Walker to A.M. de Wild,  March . RKD, A.M. de Wild Archive. Letter from J.R.J. Asperen de Boer to A.M. de Wild,  December . RKD, A.M. de Wild Archive. Invoices of D. de Wild, dated  January ,  May ,  January ,  February . KMM, booking position KMS //. “Afwijkende meningen over de Van Gogh-falsificaties,” De Telegraaf,  December . “De valse Van Goghs. De advocaat van Otto Wacker spreekt,” De Oprechte Haarlemmer Courant,  January . J.B. de la Faille, “Repliek van dr. De la Faille,” De Telegraaf,  December . Koldehoff , . See also Dorn and Feilchenfeldt , . On Maud Dale, see Garraty -, -. “Dale Art’s Value over  Million,” New York Times,  May . “For the people,” Newsweek,  May . Walker , . Letter from J. Stransky (on Wildenstein & Co, NY, letterhead) to C. Dale,  May . NGAW, RG. Donor Files - Dale, Chester, Van Gogh Material Regarding Authenticity [c. -, , ]. Loan exhibition of Modern French Art from the Chester Dale Collection, for the Benefit of the French Hospital of New York. October, . Wildenstein Galleries,  Fifth Avenue, New York. E.A. Jewell, “Goya and Modern Art,” New York Times,  October, . “The Art Galleries,” New Yorker,  October . H. McBride, cited in “French Art of Today,” Literary Digest,  November . “Miljoenen vervalsingen,” De Telegraaf,  December . “De dertig valse Van Gogh’s,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  December . “Expert Now Holds Thirty ‘Van Gogh’ Fakes, Sold in Berlin at Prices up to , Each,” New York Times,  November . “N.Y. Art ‘Gem’ called Fake by Authority,” New York American,  December . “Chester Dale Van Gogh is Attacked,” Art News,  December . Bremmer’s magazines Moderne Kunstwerken and Beeldende Kunst from  onwards by Willem Versluys (-) in Amsterdam. From  Beeldende Kunst appeared under the names of Bremmer and Scherjon. See Balk , . Scherjon wrote in the NRC of  January : ‘[...] I [...] set great store by my almost thirty-five years of friendship with Mr. Bremmer, from whom I have learned so much and who was also the one to kindle my enormous enthusiasm for Van Gogh.” De Ruiter , -. Minutes of the board meeting of the association “Voor de kunst” on  October . -. UA. Ebbink et al. , .

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 Letter from W. Scherjon to C. Dale,  February . Transcript of a letter from M.        

    

         

Dale to W. Scherjon,  March . NGAW, RG. Donor Files -. Dale, Chester, Van Gogh Material Regarding Authenticity [c. -, , ]. F , like Chester Dale’s F , is now in the possession of the National Gallery of Art in Washington. “Vincent van Gogh. Tentoonstelling ‘Voor de kunst’ te Utrecht,” NRC,  June . “Vincent van Gogh. Een echt en een ‘valsch’ zelfportret op de Van Gogh-tentoonstelling te Utrecht,” De Maasbode,  May . Just Havelaar, “Een Van Gogh vervalsing?” Het Vaderland,  May . “Zelfportretten Vincent van Gogh. Een der twee zou valsch zijn!” Utrechtsche Courant,  May . W. Jos de Gruyter, “Waar is het tweede zelfportret?” Utrechtsch Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad,  June . “Vincent van Gogh. Een echt en een ‘valsch’ zelfportret op de Van Gogh-tentoonstelling te Utrecht,’ De Maasbode,  May . J.B. de la Faille, “Het zelfportret van Chester Dale,” Utrechtsch Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad,  June . J.B. de la Faille, “De z.g. valse Van Goghs,” Het Vaderland,  September . J.B. de la Faille, “De Van Gogh zaak,” De Telegraaf,  September . Declaration signed: W. Scherjon. Place: ’s-Gravenhage. Date:  June . RKD, A.M. de Wild Archive, file , Vincent van Gogh. Transcription of a letter from M. Dale to P. Rosenberg,  March . NGAW. RG Donor Files - Dale, Chester, Van Gogh Material Regarding Authenticity [c. -, , ]. Letter from W. Scherjon to C. Dale,  February . Transcription of a letter from C. Dale to W. Scherjon,  March . NGAW, RG Donor Files - Dale, Chester, Van Gogh Material Regarding Authenticity [c. -, , ]. W. Scherjon, “Het ‘valse Van Gogh’ drama. Het schilderij ‘Twee populieren’ in het Centraal Museum,” Utrechtsch Provinciaals en Stedelijk Dagblad,  July . Namely Wheatfield with Sower (F ), in  in the collection of V.W. van Gogh; The Harvest (F ) acquired in  by the Nationalgalerie in Berlin); and The Sower, not given an F number by De la Faille, but listed and illustrated in his Les faux Van Gogh (, , Pl. XVIII). See also Koldehoff , . See Scherjon b. Transcription of a letter from H. Kröller-Müller to J.A. Thomas,  July . KMM, HA . Transcription of a letter from H. Kröller-Müller to W. Scherjon,  July . KMM, HA  Letter from W. Scherjon to H. Kröller-Müller,  July . KMM, HA . “Concerning the Wacker Pictures,” n.p., n.d.  pp. In: Chester Dale Scrapbooks. NGAW Library. The exception is Hugo Perls, who does mention the Wacker affair in his memoirs, although without discussing his own role. See Perls , -. Secrest , -. H. Lester Cooke, “A Plunger in the Market, Chester Dale and his Collection,” . From an unidentified magazine kept in AAA, Chester Dale papers, -, reel , no. . F.W. Coburn, “In the world of art,” Boston Herald,  November . Cited in Sandler and Newman , -. More than twenty years later, in , De Wild shared his knowledge with the secretary of the Expertise Instituut, M. de Sablonière. She wrote to Van Gogh expert Tralbaut: “More or less in confidence: I spoke to Dr. De Wild, who was a witness at the Wacker




notes

29-5-2010 15:24:05



 

   

trial. At the time he had examined all the forgeries – and the authentic picture as well, I think – and they turned out to be all of the same ‘workmanship.’ I believe it was Scherjon who asked him to examine the Chester Dale portrait in the same way. According to him [De Wild] it was a fake, the same technique.” Letter from M. de Sablonière to M.E. Tralbaut,  May . VGM. According to the statements of W. Froentjes and the inscription on the box, the samples from the Wacker Van Goghs were all taken in -. (The box, as well as Froentjes’ archive, has been in the possession of the Nederlands Forensisch Instituut in The Hague since July .) We are certain only that F  was examined in early June  in The Hague. There is no other documentation of the place or dates of the analyses of the other samples. F  and F  were probably examined in November . F bis was brought to The Hague at the end of January  and was probably examined shortly thereafter. I was unable to trace a date in - for F , F  and F . Letter from M.H.G. Renkewitz to M. Dale,  December . NGAW, .. (), Vincent van Gogh, Self-Portrait. Chester Dale Collection. Letter from M.H.G. Renkewitz to H. Kröller-Müller,  December . KMM. Sale list of the exhibition J. Lodeizen, KA, File , Pricelists. The archive of d’Audretsch contains an expertise by Bremmer on the Haystacks, dated  May . W. Jos. de Gruyter discusses it in Het Vaderland,  September . A.M. Hammacher in the NRC,  September . Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon, Catalogus tentoonstelling van schilderijen door Vincent van Gogh, J.B. Jongkind, Floris Verster. Amsterdam  May -  June . Letter from H.P. Bremmer to S. van Deventer,  October . KMM, HA . There are no indications that d’Audretsch knew anything about De Wild’s examinations. Van Deventer , . Quoted in ibid., .

Chapter 4 

“Dertig valse Van Goghs?” De Telegraaf,  November . The anonymous art dealer quoted in the article is probably J. Siedenburg of the Buffa gallery.  De la Faille , .  De la Faille , .  Duret was not always so lucky. In  the Bernheim-Jeune gallery issued a recall to the owners of Duret’s Van Gogh, which they had published in . The reason: the Van Gogh drawing on the cover was a fake, as were eight of the drawings and paintings pictured in the book. Source: “L’affaire des faux Van Gogh,” Aux écoutes,  December .  De la Faille , -.  Ibid., .  Letter of F. Schmidt Degener to J.B. de la Faille,  January . BF.  J. Zwartendijk, “Les faux Van Gogh,” NRC,  February .  C.J.H., “Les faux Van Gogh: Par J.B. de la Faille,” Burlington Magazine, August , ; F. Rutter, “Van Gogh and his forgers,” Sunday Times,  September ; Frank Davis, “A page for collectors: A modern picture scandal: the Van Gogh ‘Fakes,’” Illustrated London News,  June , ; J.H. de Bois, “De valsche Van Gogh’s,” Haarlems Dagblad,  January ; “Van Gogh-vervalsing,” De Telegraaf,  November .  K. Grant Sterne, “The Van Gogh Controversy,” International Studio, November , pp. -.  P. Fierens, “Les faux Van Gogh,” Feuilleton du Journal des débats,  April .

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 Letter of W. J. de Gruyter to J. Zwartendijk,  February . MBB, Dossier Vervalsingen V.v.Gogh.

 W.J. de Gruyter, “Echt of valsch? Van Goghs ‘Twee populieren’ bij den Kunsthandel  

            

        

Huinck en Scherjon te Amsterdam,” Elsevier’s Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, July , pp. -. W.J. de Gruyter, “De valsche Van Gogh’s,” NRC,  February . Ibid. W.J. de Gruyter, “Hollandsche en Fransche kunst in den Kunsthandel Huinck en Scherjon te Amsterdam,” De Nieuwe Courant,  June . Also see his defence in Het Vaderland,  April , “Nederlandsche en Fransche Schilderkunst: Bij Huinck en Scherjon, Amsterdam.” In  he also reproduced Two Poplars as an example of Van Gogh’s artistry in his Wezen en ontwikkeling der Europeesche schilderkunst na . E. Faure, “À propos des Faux van Gogh,” L’Art vivant,  April , pp. -. J.B. de la Faille, “Réponse à l’article de M. Elie Faure,” L’Art vivant,  June , pp. -. Fasseur , . See Moeyes , -, -. Fasseur , -. Letter of H. Kröller-Müller to S. van Deventer,  September , quoted in Van Deventer , . Van Deventer . See Elseviers Geïllustreerd Maandschrift, , . Begemann , . Letter from H. Kröller-Müller to S. van Deventer,  April , quoted in Van Deventer , . Quoted by Wennekes . For A. Kröller also see Haak & Hofman . The first written plans for the transfer of the collection to the Dutch state date to ; the definitive transfer took place in . (Ten Berge, c, .) De la Faille probably wanted to include the contemporaries in the exhibition in order to encourage museums and private individuals to buy their works. At the opening of the exhibition of drawings and watercolors by Van Gogh, organized at the end of  by the Friends of Vincent van Gogh and His Time, he said that museums in Germany, England, and the US were buying their work, but not in the Netherlands: “Almost no one here owns works by Manet, Toulouse Lautrec, Gauguin or Cézanne, while Monet, Raphaelli, Sisley and Pissarro are not represented at all.” See “Tekeningen en aquarellen van Vincent van Gogh: In het Stedelijk Museum,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  October . Minutes of Friends of Vincent van Gogh and his Time,  February . SMA, Amsterdam exhibition, . Letter of A. Hahnloser to the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,  June . SMA, Amsterdam exhibition, . Letter of D.C. Röell to De la Faille,  June . SMA, Amsterdam exhibition, . Letter of Polak to Van Dam van Isselt,  July . GAA, Department of Art Affairs no. , Van Gogh Exhibition. W. Scherjon, “De vermeende vervalsingen van Van Gogh,” NRC,  May . Also see J.C.M. Garnier, (Report concerning fingerprints), Utrecht,  May . MBB, Dossier Forgeries V.v. Gogh. “Vincent van Gogh,” NRC,  June . “Bertillonage en expertise van kunstwerken,” NRC,  June . W.J. de Gruyter, “Hollandsche en Fransche kunst in den Kunsthandel Huinck en Scherjon te Amsterdam,” De Nieuwe Courant,  June . Also see De Gruyter . Verver, “Hollandsche en Fransche kunst bij Huinck & Scherjon, Amsterdam,” De Haagsche Post,  June . H.P. Bremmer, Beeldende Kunst, July , “Landschap,” .




notes

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 Letter of C. Baard to the Alderman for Art Affairs,  November . GAA. Department of Art Affairs no. , Van Gogh Exhibition.

 Huinck & Scherjon had a different reading of the events. According to Baard and Röell,          

a “tentative” selection was made from the gallery’s holdings, and they never would have considered asking for Two Poplars for the exhibition. Editorial, “Vincent van Gogh,” De Gids, , IV, -. Oprechte Haarlemsche Courant,  September . “Vincent van Gogh,” NRC,  September . J.H. de Bois, “De Van Gogh Tentoonstelling,” Het Volk,  September . Letter of De la Faille,  October, no year []. RKD. Albert Plasschaert, “Van Gogh,” De Groene Amsterdammer,  December . (Italics in the original) G. Knuttel Wzn, “Vincent van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoten: Tentoonstelling in het Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam,  september- november ,” De kunst der Nederlanden, November , . (Italics in the original) “Veiling van valse schilderijen,” Het Vaderland,  November . Letter of S.J. Mak van Waay to J. Zwartendijk,  November . MBB, Dossier Forgeries V.v. Gogh. Letters of S.J. Mak van Waay to J. Zwartendijk,  November  and  September . MBB, Dossier Forgeries V.v. Gogh.

Chapter 5                

J.B. de la Faille, “Vincent van Gogh en zijn tijdgenoten te Amsterdam,” NRC,  November , evening edition. “Wegen der gefälschten Van Goghs: Anklage gegen Kunsthändler Wacker Anfang November zu erwarten,” Lokalanzeiger,  October . P. Westheim, “Um die Van Gogh-Fälschungen: Staatsanwalt erhebt Anklage gegen Wacker,” Börsen Zeitung,  August . Veth a, . Ibid., . Ibid., . “Valsche Van Gogh’s?” NRC,  April . Koomen, “Schoon schip,” Weekblad van Rotterdam,  April . “Schoon schip!” Algemeen Handelsblad,  February . “De zaak van de valse Van Goghs,” De Maasbode,  February . “Schoon schip!” De Telegraaf,  March . “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  February . J. Zwartendijk, “Cornelis Veth: Schoon schip!” NRC,  March . Max Osborn, “Neuer Van Gogh-Lärm,” Vossische Zeitung,  March . Letter of Thomas to H. Kröller-Müller,  May . KMM, HA . “Echte Van Goghs bei Wacker? Eine Brochure von Cornelis Veth,” Deutsche Algemeine Zeitung,  April . J.B. de la Faille, “Veth’s Schoon schip,” NRC,  April . Max Liebermann, “Justi und seine Sachverständigen-Kommission,” in: Kunst und Künstler, vol. XXXI, no. III, March . The dossiers of the lawyer, the prosecuting attorney, and the judges, the report of the sessions, the attorney’s plea, and the judgment have all been lost. A.M. de Wild wrote a personal account of the trial in April . The most important sources for the reconstruction of the two trials are the more than  articles in the Dutch and German press. For the Wacker trial, also see: Arnau , -; Schüller , -; Jeppson , -; Hentzen , -; Feilchenfeldt ; Dorn & Feilchenfeldt ; -, Koldehoff , - and -.

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 This formulation of the charge was taken from “Der Prozeß um die Wackerschen ‘Van Goghs,’” Berliner Börsen-Courier,  April .

 “Der Tänzer Wacker: Erster Tag des Van Gogh-Prozesses,” Vossische Zeitung,  April         

  

 

         

. A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. “Valsche Van Gogh’s? Het proces te Berlijn,” NRC,  April . “Getuigenverhoor in het proces-Wacker,” De Telegraaf,  April . “Kriminalisten im Van Gogh-Prozess,” Berliner Tageblatt,  April . “Valse Van Goghs? Het proces te Berlijn,” NRC,  April . Mitteilung De la Faille,  April . RKD. Doos Van Gogh Knipsels Tentoonstelling Nederland tot . Feilchenfeldt , . Otto Wacker told the court on  April  that Haystacks (F ) would be sent back to the Russian. See A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date. () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. Letters of De la Faille to Scherjon,  May  and  September , respectively. Letter of Scherjon to De la Faille of  September . VGM, Archief Kunsthandel Huinck & Scherjon. Thanks to Tomoko Murayama for reports on the content of the Japanese text of Kodera . Also see Koldehoff , -. Justi, L. , -. Compare Justi ,  and Hentzen . (=A.M. de Wild), “Het proces over de Van Goghs: Mr. Baart de la Faille als getuige,” Het Vaderland,  April . According to De Wild, Bremmer said the following were genuine: “F , F bis, F , F , F , F , F , F  and one more Reaper.” Bremmer said the fake paintings were: “F bis, F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F .” See A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () pp. , . RKD, De Wild Archive. A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. For an illustration, see De la Faille  Pl. XVIII and XIX. De la Faille called this unnumbered version of The Reaper a fake, and compared it with F  and F . According to De la Faille (, -), F  The Reaper of the Nationalgalerie was the model on which the fake Wacker Van Gogh was based. In , F  was also deemed a fake: in other words, the forger may have used a forgery as his model. According to De la Faille, Bremmer issued a certificate of authenticity for this Wacker Van Gogh. (=De Wild) “In en om het proces Van Gogh,” Het Vaderland, Saturday,  April . “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s: ‘Welke waarde heeft deskundigheid überhaupt eigenlijk nog?’ vraagt de verdediger,” De Maasbode,  April . “Het proces over de werken van Van Gogh: Een opzienbarende verklaring van mr. Baart de la Faille,” NRC,  April . According to a few newspapers, Scherjon mentioned eight, but De Wild noted that Scherjon, like Bremmer, named a ninth painting, “Het maaiertje” – the little reaper. See A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () pp. -. RKD, De Wild Archive. “Het proces over de werken van Van Gogh,” NRC,  April . A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. “Valse of echte Van Goghs?” Het Volk,  April . “Sachverständigengutachten über Wackers Bilder,” Frankfurter Zeitung,  April . (v.B.), “Valsche Van Goghs,” De Amstelbode,  April . “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s: ‘Welke waarde heeft deskundigheid überhaupt eigenlijk nog?’ vraagt de verdediger,” De Maasbode,  April . According to De Wild, Rosenhagen said the following were fakes: F , F , F bis, F bis, F , F bis, bis. See A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. .




notes

29-5-2010 15:24:05

 “Het proces over de werken van Van Gogh te Berlijn,” NRC,  April .  A.M. de Wild, Het Van Gogh proces. No date () p. . Underlining in the original. RKD, De Wild Archive. Also see note .

 According to De Wild’s notes, he mentioned a ninth: “Het maaiertje” – the little reaper.   

                        

Also see note . A.M. de Wild, “Het Van Gogh process,”, pp. -. RKD, De Wild Archive. “Justis Gutachten,” Berliner Tageblatt,  April . “Geheimrat Justy (sic) erklärt zu den Van Gogh-Bildern: ‘So falsch wie nur möglich,’” Berliner Börsen-Courier,  April . A.M. de Wild, “Het Van Gogh process,” p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. According to De la Faille (, ), the following sixteen Wacker Van Goghs were assembled in the Nationalgalerie in February : F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F , F bis, F , F , F , F , F  and The Reaper (Champ de blé avec le faucheur). Also see: L. Justi, “Van Gogh, die Kenner und Schriftsteller,” Vossische Zeitung,  January . The “approximately six paintings” mentioned by the Berliner Börsen-Courier of  April were probably F , F , F , F bis, F  and F . Justi’s assessment of Two Poplars (F ) is unclear. “Hat Van Gogh sich selbst kopiert?” Acht Uhr Abendblatt,  April . “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  April . “Vingerafdrukken op de Van Goghs,” De Telegraaf, Thursday,  April . “Van Gogh vervalsingen: Het proces Wacker,” De Telegraaf,  April . (=De Wild) “In en om het proces Van Gogh,” Het Vaderland, Saturday,  April . Announcement by W. Froentjes,  May . A.M. de Wild, “Het Van Gogh process,” p. . RKD, De Wild Archive. “Sensation im Wackerprozeß,” Berliner Börsen-Courier,  April . “Het proces over de werken van Van Gogh te Berlijn,” NRC,  April . “De valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  April . “Vingerafdrukken op de Van Goghs,” De Telegraaf,  April . (=De Wild), “In en om het proces van Van Gogh,” Het Vaderland,  April . “Van-Gogh-Prozess vor dem Ende,” Berliner Tageblatt,  April . “Wacker-Plädoyers am Sonnabend,” Berliner Börsen-Courier, Friday,  April . E. Täubner, Gutachten, no date ( April ), Berlin.  pp. ZSM, I/NG , -. As well as the accompanying letter of E. Täubner to L. Thormaehlen,  April . ZSM, I/NG , . “Das Ende des Van Gogh-Prozesses,” Berliner Börsen-Courier,  April . “Het proces over de werken van Van Gogh te Berlijn,” NRC,  April . Also see Koldehoff , . Redaktion: “Wie beurteilen Juristen Bilderfälschungen? Urteilsgründe der Berufungsinstanz im Wacker-Prozeß,” Kunst und Künstler, Vol. XXXII, no. III, March , pp. -. “De zaak van de valsche Van Gogh’s,” De Maasbode,  April . S.J. Mak van Waay and A. Mak van Waay S.J.Zn, May . RKD, Van Gogh Forgeries box. “Van Gogh-vervalsingen,” De Telegraaf,  April . See Möller , -. Kunst und Wirtschaft. Offizielles Organ des Reichsverbandes bildender Künstler Deutschlands, May , pp.  ff. De Groene Amsterdammer,  November . F  was not pictured but was mentioned as “a doubtful work.” See Scherjon c, . Four versions of The Reaper – F , F , F  and the Wacker Van Gogh without an F number – are shown. See Scherjon , pp.  - .

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

 Justi , .  W. Jos. de Gruyter, “De zaak Van Gogh,” Het Vaderland,  November .  J. Zwartendijk, “Boekaankondiging. W. Scherjon: Catalogue des Tableaux par Vincent van Gogh décrits dans ses lettres,” NRC,  November .

 “Demasqué: Een schotschrift van ‘Geheimrat’ Justi,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  Novem         

    

ber . Walram , . Ibid., . Kasper Hauser, “Expertise,” Die Weltbühne,  April , no. , p. . “Was wird aus den falschen Van Goghs?” Die Kunstauktion,  April . “Verhoren in het proces Wacker,” Het Algemeen Handelsblad,  November . Ibid. André Warnod, “Un nouveau scandale, Le truquage des toiles pratiqué à Amsterdam est pure escroquerie,” Comoedia,  November . “De ‘valsche’ schilderijen,” De Telegraaf,  November . Ibid. “Een nieuwe zaak van verdachte schilderijen,” De Maasbode,  November . “Wie is Chanterou?” De Maasbode,  November . “De verdachte schilderijen uit de veiling-Mak,” De Maasbode,  November . “De Chanterou-affaire,” De Maasbode,  November . “De zaak van de valsche schilderijen,” De Maasbode,  November . “De Amsterdamsche schilderijen-affaire,” De Maasbode,  November . “De veiling van Franse schilderijen,” Het Algemeen Handelsblad,  January . “Chanterou- mysterie,” De Telegraaf,  November . “Onze naam op kunstgebied in gevaar?” Het Volk,  November . “Na onze veilings-enquête,” De Telegraaf,  January . The Friends society was dissolved in , never having realized its goal to enrich the collection of the Stedelijk Museum with donated works by Vincent van Gogh. For the Chanterou case, also see G. de Miré, “Faux tableaux,” Art Vivant, January , p. .

Chapter 6 

A. Plasschaert, “De gehavenden van het Van Gogh-proces,” De Groene Amsterdammer,  April .  Roepers , .  Koldehoff , .  KMM, Map Boekposten KMS // Managed by G.J. van de Berg.  Balk , -.  Bremmer-Beekhuis n.d., , . Annotation M. Straasheijm p. .  The restorer C.B. van Bohemen calls Bremmer’s appeal to feelings in the question of authenticity misleading, but he does not deal with other aspects of his performance in the Wacker case. C.B. van Bohemen, “Het Wacker-proces in Berlijn of een harlequinade op groote schaal,” De Tooneelspiegel, May , -.  “Vincent van Gogh. De graven te Auvers: Herinnering aan het vervalschingsproces,” De Tijd,  July . Eight years after the trial, De Tijd was the first newspaper to write that Bremmer judged nine Wacker Van Goghs as genuine, seventeen as absolute forgeries, and the rest as doubtful.  “In een valsch paradijs van de Haagsche School,” De Telegraaf,  December . See the documents on the case in the archives of the Kröller-Müller Museum: HA , HA  and HA .  Letter of A. Anthack to the Nationalgalerie,  March . Justi followed the transaction like a hawk. He wrote to a colleague that Matthiesen had succeeded in selling the painting “[...] an den merkwürdigen holländischen Sachverständigen Scherjon [...].




notes

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                            

Herr Scherjon hat es verstanden, zwei der Wackerstücke, die er zu verschiedene Zeiten, jedenfalls nach Bekanntwerden der Verdächte erworben hat, an Frau Kröller-Müller zu verkaufen.” Copy of a letter from L. Justi to Dr. Koetschau,  Augustus . There is no sales receipt in the archives of the Kröller-Müller Museum, however. The purchase was intended for -, but it never took place because the Kröllers could no longer afford to purchase art after . Exportvaluta-Erklärung. Signed by I.A. Perlwitz (Nationalgalerie),  March . ZMB, I/NG , . W.J. de Gruyter, “Twee z.g. valsche Van Goghs: In particulier bezit en bij Huinck en Scherjon te Amsterdam,” Het Vaderland,  June . An abridged version: “Vincent van Gogh: Twee z.g. valsche schilderijen,” NRC,  June . W. J. de Gruyter, “Twee z.g. valsche Van Goghs: In particulier bezit en bij Huinck en Scherjon te Amsterdam,” Het Vaderland,  June . Balk , . Marquis , -. Scherjon & De Gruyter : F , p. ; F bis, p. ; The Reaper (FF ), p. ; F , p. ; F , p. ; F , p. ; F , p. ; F , p. . Scherjon & De Gruyter , . Two other paintings for which Scherjon and De Gruyter provided stylistic analysis are (F ) Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe and the Wacker Van Gogh Cypresses (F ), but this was to emphasize their authenticity. Scherjon & De Gruyter , . The catalogue was printed in March . The first review known to me is “Baart de la Failles Van Goghcatalogus: Geheel herziene en verbeterde druk,” De Telegraaf,  July . Ibid., . Ibid., . Ibid., . Cited in Balk , . W.J. de Gruyter, “Een tentoonstelling van drie generaties: Jan Toorop, Charley Toorop, Edgar Fernhout bij Nieuwenhuizen Segaar,” Het Vaderland,  April . W.J. de Gruyter, “De tentoonstelling de drie generaties: De invloed van Bremmer,” Het Vaderland,  April . Jan Engelman, “De Gruyter contra Bremmer,” De Groene Amsterdammer,  June . For this affair, see Vink  and Balk , -. H.P. Bremmer, “Afbeelding , Visschersbooten, bij St. Maries,” Beeldende Kunst, March , pp. -. Balk , -. Bremmer Archives, no. . GAD. Letters from De la Faille to Scherjon dated  May , and  September . Letter from Scherjon to De la Faille,  September . VGM. One document file is in the archives of the RKD in The Hague, the second is in the archives of the VGM. Auping , . The catalogue was a revised edition of the Kröller-Müller Museum’s pre-war Van Gogh catalogue, also issued by Auping. Catalogus [...] , -. Van Dantzig , -. Catalogus van  werken [...] , . Ten Berge b, . Letter of S. van Deventer to J.M. Joosten,  March . KMM.

notes




29-5-2010 15:24:05

Chapter 7       







      

Advertisement for Simon & Schuster, New York Times,  June . See also Craven , -. Illustration of F  between p.  and . Walker ,  (original italics). Simpson , -. Walker , -. “Dale’s Dilemma,” Time,  December . E.A. Jewell, “New Art Display by Chester Dale,” New York Times,  April . The documentation regarding F  compiled by Chester Dale includes all the literature in favor of the picture’s authenticity, while all the publications calling it into question are excluded, including De la Faille’s Les faux Van Gogh. (AAA, Chester Dale Papers, reel ) Letter from V.W. van Gogh to the director of the National Gallery of Art,  March . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (); Memorandum for the files, J. Walker,  April . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (); Letter from V.W. van Gogh to J. Walker,  April ; Memorandum, E. Ferber,  October . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (); letter from V.W. van Gogh to C. Parkhurst,  October . VGM, b/. Letter from J. Walker to D. Finley,  June . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (). In , around a year after the discussion with De Wild, Walker wrote that the restorer must have examined the painting shortly after the Wacker trial. As evidenced in Chapter , however, the examination had actually already taken place, in June . See: Aide Memoir in re Chester Dale Van Gogh Self-Portrait, J. Walker,  May . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (). Aide Memoir in re Chester Dale Van Gogh Self-Portrait, J. Walker,  May  and Memorandum, J. Walker,  October . Memorandum from J. Walker to D. Finley,  October . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (). J. Rewald, Report on the Van Gogh ‘Self-portrait’ from the Chester Dale Collection,  September , . NGAW: Curatorial files. Imitator of Van Gogh, .. (). Bromic-Kollerantz von Novisancz , ,  and -, and F. Erpel , -. Letter from J. Walker to S. Segui,  April . NGAW, .. (), Vincent van Gogh. Self-Portrait, Chester Dale Collection. Transcript of a letter from D.E. Rust to P. Nimcheck,  April . NGAW .. (), Vincent van Gogh. Self-Portrait, Chester Dale Collection. Keisch . NGAW, Oral history program. Interview with John Walker. Interview -. Conducted by Anne G. Ritchie.  October . Amberley, England. See also Walker , - and -. Letter from J. Kennedy to J. Walker, n.d. []. NGAW.

Chapter 8     

“L’Enigme Van Gogh,” Connaissance des Arts,  April , p. . For the Van Meegeren case, see: Van den Brandhof , Van Wijnen  and Van Wijnen . See Van Wijnen ,  and Secrest , -. Van Wijnen , . “Strijd tegen valse Van Goghs,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  May .




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      

                            



For W.A. Bonger, see Van Heerikhuizen . Conversation with J. van Gogh, dated  April . See V.W. van Gogh , vi. V.W. van Gogh, “Iets over de museums en hun betekenis,” De Socialistische Gids: Maandschrift der Sociaal-Democratische Arbeiderspartij, February , pp. -. For V.W. van Gogh as organizational advisor, see Hellema & Marsman . See Stolwijk & Veenenbos , . Cf. Stolwijk & Veenenbos , . They estimate that between  and  at least  works from the collection were sold or given away by the Engineer. The exact ratio of sales to gifts is unknown. Most of these works were drawings and they were most likely given away. Conversation with J. van Gogh, dated  April . On Sandberg, see Petersen & Brattinga  and Roodenburg-Schadd . J.B. de la Faille, “Een merkwaardig zelfportret van Vincent van Gogh,” Phoenix, maandschrift voor beeldende kunst, September , . “Vincent by candlelight,” Time,  February . “New Van Gogh find owned in America,” New York Times,  February . “Ir. van Gogh over schilderijenvervalsingen: Klacht van Jhr. Sandberg kan preventief werken,” Het Parool,  May, . “Jhr. Sandberg dient klacht in over  valse Van Goghs,” Het Parool,  May . Letter of W. Sandberg to B. Kist,  January . SMA, letter no. . “Ir. van Gogh over schilderijenvervalsingen: ‘Klacht van Jhr. Sandberg kan preventief werken,’” Het Parool,  May . On  May  in Goudse Courant, Maas- en Roerbode en De Stem. “Fake Van Goghs flood the market,” Daily Telegraph,  May . Letter of Van Dantzig to H.L.C. Jaffé,  December . CDA. “Valse van Goghs,” Overijsselse en Zwolse Courant,  July . “Rumoer over Van Gogh-vervalsingen,” De Tijd,  May . Copy of telegram from A.M. Grant to B. Kist,  June . SMA, ... Letter of D.K.G. de Jong to the Mayor of Amsterdam, dated  June . SMA, ... Letter of Sandberg to the mayor and aldermen, dated  November . SMA, letter no. . “Schrijver Irving Stone verklaart: Van Goghs Zelfportret bij Kaarslicht is authentiek,” Het Vrije Volk,  July . Leeuw Marcar , . “Stedelijke Arena,” Elseviers Weekblad,  November . Letter of H.J. Reinink to W. Cnoop Koopmans,  July . BZ, . Letter of J.P. Bourdrez to W. Sandberg,  June . SMA, Incoming mail,  June , letter no. . Letter of T.J.H. Gusten to W. Sandberg,  July . BZ, . Letter of H.J. Reinink to W. Cnoop Koopmans,  July , BZ, . Telegram of F.H. Taylor to V.W. van Gogh,  August , VGM, bV/-. Conversation with A.M. Hammacher, dated  October . Letter of V.W. van Gogh to A.M. Hammacher,  January . VGM, Correspondence of A.M. Hammacher. “Suspected Van Gogh studied by experts,” New York Times,  October . According to Hammacher’s biographer, P. de Ruiter, the painting was exhibited (De Ruiter , ). But both the American catalogue (Van Gogh Painting and drawings -), where the painting is not mentioned nor the owner thanked, and press reports of the exhibitions in New York and Chicago rule out such a possibility. Barr et al. , .

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

29-5-2010 15:24:05

 W.J. de Gruyter, “Echte of valse Van Gogh? Enig scepticisme gewettigd,” De Nieuwe Courant,  October .

 Other catalogues, such as those by Scherjon & De Gruyter (), concerned only certain periods from the life of Van Gogh and relied heavily on De la Faille.

 “Valse Van Gogh is vals, zeggen Amerikaanse experts,” De Volkskrant,  December .

              

One exception was Art Digest,  December , which provided arguments for and against the painting and said the results of the Metropolitan commission’s investigation were not decisive. L. Dyons, “The Lyons den,” New York Post,  December . “Commissies in Amerika zijn het oneens over Van Gogh,” Het Parool,  November . Letter of D. Serton to V.W. van Gogh,  December . VGM. “Dr. Baert handhaaft echtheid van Van Gogh’s ‘Studie bij kaarslicht,’” Algemeen Dagblad,  December . J.B. de la Faille, “Een nieuw licht op ‘Studie bij kaarslicht,’” Elsevier,  November . “Goetz’s  , Van Gogh ruled genuine in U.S. customs inquiry,” New York Herald Tribune,  October . “The Van Gogh Mystery,” New York Times,  November . Letter from the art editors of Het Vrije Volk to the directors of the Stedelijk Museum,  February , SMA, Incoming mail,  February , letter . Van Dantzig , -, -. Compare the comments by Phillips , -. De la Faille was referring to W , now dated as Arles,  and  September . De la Faille , . RKD, Box -, . Letter of Prof. E.A. Nieuwenhoven Helbach to Mr. Van Hasselt,  May . RKD, Box -, . Letter of L.A.E. Baert de la Faille-Fransen van de Putte to A.M. Hammacher,  August . VGM, Correspondence of A.M. Hammacher. An exception is Denvir (, -), who writes that experts are in disagreement as to its authenticity. See Keyes et al. . Petersen & Brattinga , .

Chapter 9   

See Oosterbaan Martinius , -. Alexander , -; Savage , - and von Bode , -. “Die falschen Van Gogh-Bilder,” Kunst und Künstler, March , p. . According to the reviewer this sentence comes from Les Faux Van Gogh, but it cannot be found there.  Op de Coul .  See Wouters .  Van den Brandhof , .  Copy of letter from Sandberg to the mayor and aldermen of Amsterdam,  June . SMA, Correspondence of  (no. ).  Copy of letter from Sandberg to the mayor and alderman of Amsterdam,  July . SMA, .. EI (no. ).  Copy of letter from A.J. d’Ailly to the Minister of Education, Arts, and Science,  August . SMA, .. EI.  Copy of letter from the Minister of Education, Arts, and Science to the mayor and alderman of Amsterdam,  September . SMA, .. EI (no. II).  Letter of M. de Sablonière to W. Sandberg,  January . SMA, .. EI.  Letter of M. de Sablonière to V.W. van Gogh,  April . VGM. “I think it would be unfortunate for it to fall into the hands of art historians, i.e. into the hands of one of the museum directors, who have opposed an institute en bloc when they became afraid




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    

       



             

that people whom they were in the habit of approaching for donations would not approve.” (Underlining in the original) M. de Sablonière, “Over echte en valse Van Goghs,” Vrij Nederland,  December . Letter of V.W. van Gogh to H.L.C. Jaffé,  April . SMA, .. EI. Annual report of the Expertise Institute -,  June . SMA, .. EI. Ibid. Estimate made after comparing documents from and about the Expertise Institute in the archives of the Netherlands Institute for Art History (RKD), the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, and the Van Gogh Museum. The number of requests for assessment, the actual assessments carried out, the number and identity of the experts per assessment, etc., could not be precisely determined from the documents in these archives. Letter of M. de Sablonière to H.L.C. Jaffé,  December . SMA, .. EI. During the Frans Hals exhibition held in Haarlem in ,  of the  paintings classified as forgeries by Van Dantzig were dismissed. See Van Dantzig  and , x. According to information received by telephone from J. Storm van Leeuwen. Van Dantzig’s wife had a different reading; see Van Dantzig , xii. Also see the criticism by Van Wijnen , -. On Van Dantzig, see Van Dantzig , xi-xii, Storm van Leeuwen . Additional oral information from D.A. van Dantzig. For a criticism of pictology, see Phillips , -. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  February . VGM. (Underlining in the original) Letter of W. Sandberg to M. de Sablonière,  July . VGM. “Onechte Van Gogh op expositie in Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam.” Het Vrije Volk,  August . Eeuwfeest Vincent van Gogh zomer  [], no. . Compare the Engineer’s annotation for the same painting on page  in his copy of De la Faille’s Van Gogh Catalogue of . To the right of the photo: “fake,” and at the bottom of the page: “Not a Van Gogh painting. Why should this be regarded as one?” VGM. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  August . VGM, bV/. (Underlining in the original) Compare V.W. van Gogh to Wijsenbeek,  March . VGM, b V/-: “Of course I have no objection to painting F , which has got you so bogged down.” Letter of Altarriba to Van Dantzig,  May . CDA. Copy of letter of Van Dantzig to Altarriba,  June . CDA. Letter of Altarriba to Van Dantzig,  November . CDA. Copy of letter of Van Dantzig to Altarriba,  December . CDA. Copy of letter of Van Dantzig to Altarriba,  November . CDA. Letter of M.M. van Dantzig to the board of the Expertise Institute,  December . VGM, EI. See Van Dantzig . “Duel ontbrand in Frans tijdschrift: Is ‘het Koollaantje’ een echte Van Gogh?” Het Vrije Volk,  December . Letter of V.W. van Gogh to the board of the Expertise Institute,  March . SMA, .. EI. Report of A. Petersen “Brioche et Fleur,”  September . SMA, .. EI. Letter of W. Sandberg to the Ambassador of Sweden,  March . SMA, .. EI. Report of August , J.L.C. Jaffé to the Expertise Institute, SMA, .. EI. Letter of A. van Schendel to J.L.C. Jaffé,  August . SMA, Jaffé, private. Letter of A.M. Hammacher to the Expertise Institute,  October . SMA, .. EI.

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

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 Letter of the Expertise Institute to J.L.C. Jaffé,  January . SMA, .. EI.  L:etter of A. Loeb to the Expertise Institute,  February . GL.  Letter of M. de Sablonière to the board of the Expertise Institute,  February . VGMA, EI.

 Letter of M. de Sablonière to the board of the Expertise Institute,  February . SMA, .. EI.

 Letter of M. de Sablonière to E. de Wilde,  February . (Underlining in the original) SM, .. EI.

 Letter of J. Slagter to the board of the Expertise Institute,  February . SMA, .. EI.

 Letter of J. Slagter to the board of the Expertise Institute,  March . SMA, .. EI.

 Letter of V.W. van Gogh to the board of the Expertise Institute,  March . SMA, .. EI.

 Letter of J. Slagter to the board of the Expertise Institute,  April . SMA, .. EI.

 Expertise Instituut Jaarverslag /,  July . SMA, .. EI.  Many years later, when the Stedelijk Museum was asked if and when the Institute had been discontinued, it used the date the Institute closed its bank account for the sake of convenience. It did not know whether or when the Institute had formally been terminated.  Copy of letter of V.W. van Gogh to O. Sirianen,  June . VGM, Correspondence of V.W. van Gogh, EI.  Cf. Rewald , ,  and Jaffé, Storm van Leeuwen & Van der Tweel .

Chapter 10     

       

See Mauss . Also see the essays in Komter (ed.)  and . Letter of J. van Gogh-Bonger to J.B. de la Faille,  August . VGM. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  September . VGM, Tralbaut correspondence and Notes on Paul Gachet,  February . VGM, Memoranda of Engineer Van Gogh, -. Gachet Junior attended agricultural college, but this biographical detail is not mentioned in any newspaper article or catalogue from the s or s. This support was financed by the Theo van Gogh Foundation, “which purchases works by living artists and already has a number of pieces that can be found in various museums,” letter of V.W. van Gogh to the mayor and alderman of Breda,  September . VGM, Correspondence of M.E. Tralbaut and V.W. van Gogh. In the  annual report of the Theo van Gogh Foundation, eleven drawings and paintings are listed in the foundation’s holdings, including works by Ger Lataster, Jan Voerman, Jr., Graham Sutherland, Paul Citroen, and Henry Moore. VGM, Memoranda of V.W. van Gogh, no date. On the Engineer and the Museumjournaal, see Schumacher . Letter of V.W. van Gogh to P. Gachet,  May . VGM. De la Faille  says the first exhibition of The Church at Auvers (F ) was “The Hague, Otterlo.” According to De Waarheid of  February , the painting was first shown at Jeu de Paume in Paris in February . For the history of the donations, see Distel & Stein . “Van Gogh Tentoonstelling te Parijs,” De Waarheid,  February . W.J. de Gruyter, “Schenking Gachet aan het Louvre,” Het Vaderland,  February . “Vier nieuwe aanwinsten voor het Louvre,” De Telegraaf,  November . See letter of V.W. van Gogh to P. Gachet,  April . VGM. Letter of P. Gachet to V.W. van Gogh,  April . VGM.




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 Ibid.  “Museum kreeg Van Gogh cadeau,” De Volkskrant,  June .  The Algemeen Dagblad wrote that it was a gift of Dr. Paul Gachet, “who as a -year-

                    

old boy nursed Vincent van Gogh during the last two days of his life.” “The Stedelijk Museum,” Algemeen Dagblad,  June . The tendency to present Gachet Junior as the physician is understandable, since he used his father’s stationery for correspondence until he reached an advanced age. The editors of Arts printed a correction from Gachet fils that was signed “Doctor Gachet,” probably also a result of his habit of using his father’s stationery. The comment that Gachet fils nursed Vincent was a fabrication of his own making, however. Hendriks & Van Tilborgh , . Letter of J.C. Traas to V.W. van Gogh,  August . VGM, bV/. For the attempts made by the Engineer to win experts over to his side, see Hendriks & Van Tilborgh , -. Letter of H.R. Graetz to W. Sandberg,  August . Telegram of H.R. Graetz to W. Sandberg,  August . SMA, Van Gogh Algemeen. Memorandum (no date). VGM, Memoranda of V.W. Van Gogh, -. Memorandum, “Bezoek bij Tralbaut in Antwerpen,” V.W. van Gogh,  August . VGM, Memoranda of V.W. Van Gogh, -. Memorandum,  December . VGM, Memoranda of V.W. Van Gogh, -. Personal note concerning the new Baert de la Faille catalogue on Vincent van Gogh,  March . VGM, Memorandum of V.W. Van Gogh, -. Memorandum, “Bezoek bij Tralbaut in Antwerpen,” V.W. van Gogh,  August . VGM, Memoranda of V.W. Van Gogh, -. Tralbaut b, . Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  December . (Underlining in the original) VGM, b V/. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to A.M. Hammacher,  January . VGM, Hammacher correspondence. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to A.M. Hammacher,  January . VGM, Hammacher correspondence. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to A.M. Hammacher, (no date) . VGM, Hammacher correspondence. Letter of A.M. Hammacher to V.W. Van Gogh, (no date) . VGM. De la Faille , . De la Faille , -. The Dutch state also paid . million guilders to cover the inheritance tax that would be levied on the total amount and gave a million guilders to the foundation as operating capital. See J. van Gogh . Conversation with J. van der Wolk,  July . See Landais , Distel & Stein  and Hendriks & Van Tilborgh .

Chapter 11      

Letter of Librex N.V. to W. Sandberg,  October . Letter of Sandberg to Librex N.V.,  November . SMA, Box .., Van Gogh General. Prospectus Martinus Nijhoff . VGM. In  her name was A. Hoogendoorn. In this chapter I am using her married name. See Roodenburg-Schadd . Conversation with A. Tellegen, dated  October . Conversation with J.M. Joosten, dated  March .

notes




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                                     

Conversation with A.M. Hammacher, dated  October . “Van Gogh Symposion met belangrijk initiatief gesloten: Plannen voor Van Goghseminarie,” Algemeen Handelsblad,  March . M.E. Tralbaut, In de schaduw van de raven: Spel in vier bedrijven. Manuscript,  pp. No place or date of publication. [], -. VGM library, TS. Letter of N. van Gogh-Van der Goot to M.E. Tralbaut,  December ; letter of M.E. Tralbaut to N. van Gogh-Van der Goot,  December ; and letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  December . VGM. M.E. Tralbaut, “Verantwoording van de auteur,” Koninklijke Nederlandse Schouwburg/Nationaal Toneel van België, -, th performance year, program no. . In de schaduw van de raven. [No place or date of publication], pp. -. Tralbaut assessment,  January . SMA, .. Expertise Institute. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut, (no date) , VGM. Letter of J.B. de la Faille to M.E. Tralbaut,  June , VGM. Conversation with A.M. Hammacher, dated  October . Ibid. Ibid. Hammacher , . On Hammacher, see De Ruiter . On Van Gelder, see Stolwijk . Conversation with E. van Uitert,  April . His first articles on the subject were published in Maatstaf in , , and . Minutes of the editorial committee,  August , RKD, -, . Minutes of the editorial committee,  March . RKD, -, . Telephone conversation with E.L. de Wilde,  September . Van Gelder , . Press release of the Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences,  December . RKD, -, . Letter of Y. Scholten to M.E. Tralbaut,  December . Minutes of the editorial committee,  August . RKD, -, . Minutes of the editorial committee,  September . RKD, -, . Minutes of the editorial committee,  September . RKD, -, . Letter of J. Hulsker to H. Gerson and A. Hammacher,  March . RKD, , . Conversation with J.M. Joosten,  March . Letter of A. Hoogendoorn to A.M. Hammacher,  August . RKD, De la Faille Archives, File F . Minutes of the editorial committee,  November . RKD, -, . Letter of W. Froentjes to H. Gerson,  December . RKD, De la Faille Archives, File F . Letter of H. Gerson to the editorial committee,  February . RKD, De la Faille Archives, File F . The text in the catalogue does not say whether or not the copy is a fake (De la Faille , ). The present owner of the copy is unknown. Job description of A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn. RKD, -, . Minutes of the editorial committee, (no date) . RKD, -, . Letter of H. Gerson to the editorial committee, . RKD, -, . Letter of J.G. van Gelder to H. Gerson,  June . RKD, -, . Letter of A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn and J.M. Joosten to F.P.T. Roling (Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences),  July . RKD, -, . Letter of H. Gerson to the editorial committee,  July . RKD, -, . Letter of J.G. van Gelder to H. Gerson,  July . RKD, -, . Letter of the editorial committee to A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn,  March . RKD, -, .




notes

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 Conversation with A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn,  September .  De la Faille , .  “Memoire présenté à Messieurs les Membres du Comité de l’Expertise Institut,” Paris, no date. Author P. Crochet-Damais. GL.

 Letter of H.L.C. Jaffé to A. Loeb. GL.  Letter of M.E. Tralbaut to A. Loeb,  October . GL.  Ibid. In  when the editorial committee asked Tralbaut if the painting was the

      

             

property of A. Loeb, Tralbaut categorically denied it. He said it was the property of someone “who would like to remain completely anonymous because his painting left the country without the necessary formalities having been observed.” Tralbaut could say nothing about the owner: “For the time being I am bound by my professional confidentiality.” He did say that any potential buyers could report to Loeb, who was acting as the agent. Letter of M.E. Tralbaut to S.J. Gudlaugsson,  April . RKD, -, . Respectively, letters of A. van Schendel to M.E. Tralbaut,  November . GL. Letter of S. Nystad to M.E. Tralbaut,  November . GL. Letter of V.W. van Gogh to M.E. Tralbaut,  November . VGM. Copy of a letter from J.G. van Gelder to M.E. Tralbaut,  December . VGM, Correspondence of A.M. Hammacher. In endnote  Tralbaut wrote, “When we showed Récolte de blé dans la plaine des Alpilles to our friend, Doctor-Engineer V.W. van Gogh, he immediately declared ‘it is a painting of the Arles period!’ He was not mistaken.” Tralbaut , . Tralbaut , . See Tralbaut , , , and . “Preface by the nephew of Vincent van Gogh,” Tralbaut , . Letter of M.E. Tralbaut to B.F. Anthon,  September . VGM. Engineer Van Gogh did not respond to Tralbaut’s rhetorical question in writing as far as I can tell, and it is not known whether they discussed it between themselves. An indication of the Engineer’s views can be seen in the marginal comment “Angrand” written in his handwriting beside the entry on Les environs de Paris on p.  of his copy of Tralbaut’s Van Gogh, le mal aimé. (VGM library, BV, ) It is not known when this comment was made, however, or whether it was his final opinion. Copy of letter from S.J. Gudlaugsson to M.E. Tralbaut,  April . RKD, . . Minutes of the editorial committee, (no date) . RKD, -, . Letter of S. Gudlaugsson to M.E. Tralbaut, January . RKD, -. . Letter of M.E. Tralbaut to S. Gudlaugsson,  January . RKD, -. . Letter of J.G. van Gelder to A.M. Hammacher,  February . VGM. Letter of M.E. Tralbaut to B.F. Anthon,  September . VGM. Conversation with B. Welsh-Ovcharov,  March . The catalogue is based on the revised De la Faille. It is not a fully documented catalogue, however, because it does not include the works’ provenance, owners, exhibition history, or literary references. Statement of A.M. Hammacher and E. Joosten, Brussels/Amsterdam, November .  pp. GL. For Jaffé: letter of the RKD; letter of M.M. Op de Coul to G. Bernheim,  November  and letter of M.M. Op de Coul to A. Loeb,  January , respectively. GL. Welsh-Ovcharov , . “Transaction entre les hoirs Loeb et O. Chevrillon,” (no date) February . GL. Letter of C. Korman to G. Girard-Loeb,  January . GL. Declaration by De la Faille,  October . RKD. Cf. letter of A.M. Hammacher to R. Hauert,  February . VGM, Hammacher correspondence.

notes




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 Letter of A. Tooth to A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn,  December . Letter of S.J. Gudlaugsson to A. Tellegen-Hoogendoorn,  December . RKD, -, .

 Copy of letter from A.M. Hammacher to R. Hauert,  February . VGM, Hammacher correspondence.

 Conversation with A.M. Hammacher,  October .  De la Faille , .




notes

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Archives

AAA

Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. AF Archives of W. Froentjes in The Hague from the Netherlands Forensic Institute in The Hague BF Archives of J. Baart de la Faille from the J. Baart de la Faille Collection in Arnhem BZ Ministry of Foreign Affairs (Ministerie van Buitenlandse Zaken) DA D.A. van Dantzig Collection in Amsterdam GAA City Archives of Amsterdam GAD City Archives of The Hague GL G. Girard-Loeb Collection in Paris KA Archives of Kunsthandel d’ Audretsch from the J. van Es Collection in Rotterdam KMM Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterloo NGW National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. OKW Ministry of Education, Arts, and Sciences (Ministerie van Onderwijs, Kunsten en Wetenschappen) RKD Netherlands Institute for Art History (Rijksbureau voor Kunsthistorische Documentatie) in The Hague RKDAW Netherlands Institute for Art History, Archives of Dr.ir. A.M. De Wild RM Rijksmuseum, depot Rijksarchief North-Holland SM Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam UA Utrecht Archives VGM Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam ZSM Zentralarchiv Staatliche Museen in Berlijn




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Illustrations

Aart Klein/Nederlands Fotoarchief; Algemeen Dagblad, 28 May 1949; Algemeen Handelsblad, 8 April 1932; Amsterdam City Archives; Atlas van Stolk; Berenson Archive, Harvard College; Bildarchiv Preußischer Kulturbesitz, Berlin; Brooklyn Times, 4 June 1926; Bührle Collection Zürich; Chicago Herald Tribune, 1 February 1950; Christian Gahl; Citizen News, 8 February 1949; De Amsterdammer, 25 October 1914; De Haagsche Post, 16 April 1932; De Haagsche Post, 8 December 1928; Harvard University, Fogg Art Museum, Bequest-Collection of Maurice Wertheim; Het Parool, 27 March 1953; Hiroshima, Japan, Art Museum; Kröller-Müller Museum; Kunst & Künstler, December 1928; Kurashiki, Japan, Ohara Museum of Art; Los Angeles Times, 8 February 1970; National Gallery of Art in Washington; Netherlands Institute for Art History; New York Herald Tribune, 29 October 1949; Nieuwe Amsterdamsche Courant, 8 April 1932;




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Paris Match; Private collection D. van Dantzig (now at the Netherlands Institute for Art History in The Hague); Private collection J. van Es; Private collection W. Froentjes † (now at the Netherlands Forensic Institute in The Hague); Ullstein Bild; Van Gogh Museum.




illustrations

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Bibliography

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Index of names

A Abdy, Sir R. 102 Ailly, A.J. d’ 218, 235, 322 Alexander, E.P. 322 Alexander, V. 16, 322 Alsop, J. 16, 305 Altarriba, C. 241-244, 323 Anfray, L. 260 Angrand, C. 248,290, 295, 296 297, 327 Angrand, P. 295 Arnau, F. 333 Artaud, A. 260 Audretsch, art gallery d’ 55, 104, 179, 302, 308, 313, 329 Aulnis de Bourouill, J. d’ 306 Auping, W. 188, 319, 333 Avercamp, H. 116

B Baard, C.W.H. 123, 125, 315 Baart de la Faille, J., see Faille, J.B. de la Bakker-Hefting, V. 117, 245, 333 Baldung Grien, H. 116, 188 Balk, H. 17, 39-45, 172, 176, 243, 301, 304-308, 310, 311, 318, 319, 333 Barr Jr, A.H. 177, 209, 225, 321, 333 Bauer, M. 207 Becker, C.H. 72 Becker, S. 16, 305, 333 Beckmann, M. 68 Begemann, N. 314, 333

Berenson, B. 17, 192, 193, 195 Berge, J. ten 307, 308, 314, 319, 333 Berlage, H.P. 115, 117 Bernard, E. 241 Bernheim-Jeune, art gallery 30, 37, 310, 313 Beuningen, D.G. van 205 Beuningen, W. van 175, 180 Bicker Caarten-Stigter, M.A., zie Sablonière, M.A. de Blume, E. 309, 334 Böcklin, A. 66, 322, 334 Bode, W. 33, 231, 322, 334 Bois, J.H. de 43, 111, 169, 313, 315 Bonger, W.A. 208, 211, 321 Botticelli, S. 193, 235 Boudin, E. 235 Brandhof, M. van den 311, 320, 322,334 Brattinga, P. 321, 322, 340 Bredius, A. 31, 204 Breitner, G.H. 187 Bremmer, H.P. 9, 17, 19, 23, 39-45, 54-56, 58, 64-66, 73, 75, 77, 78, 84, 87, 91-93, 95, 98, 99, 101-104, 110, 112, 116-118, 122, 127 129 131-133, 135-142, 144, 145, 147, 149-151, 153-162, 164-166, 169, 171189, 203, 204, 206, 207, 215-28, 227, 232, 237, 238, 273, 306-311, 313, 314, 316, 318, 319, 333, 334 Bridgewater, P. 309, 334 Brittner, K. 135, 155, 156 Bromic-Kollerantz von Novisancz, K. 320, 334

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Bronkhorst, G. 305, 334 Bruin, K. 33, 334 Buffa & Zonen, art gallery 48,313

C Carré, L. 217 Cassirer, art gallery Paul 43, 46, 47, 54, 57, 60, 62, 63, 75, 109, 136, 137, 139, 305 Cézanne, P. 37, 60, 79, 100, 214, 256, 260, 314 Chagall, M. 166 Chanterou, R. 166, 167, 169, 176 Chirico, G. de 166 Churchill, W. 220 Cohen Gosschalk, J. 207, 337 Colijn, H. 117 Cordovado, N. 246 Corot, J-B.C. 235 Coul, M. Op de 289, 322, 334 Cranach, L. 116, 188 Craven, T. 191, 320, 334

D Daalhoff, H. 41, 173 Dale, C. 10, 20, 48, 88-90, 92-95, 97-104, 110, 111, 131, 132, 141, 153, 154, 163, 178, 179, 191, 192, 196, 199, 201, 202, 256, 302, 311, 313, 318, 320, 336, 343 Dale, M. 88, 90, 95, 101, 103, 302, 311 Dam van Isselt, H. van 120 Dantzig, M.M. van 11, 111, 187, 218, 228, 233, 238-245, 248, 250, 252, 253, 302, 319, 321-323, 329, 332, 334, 342 Daubigny, C.F. 92 Daumier, H. 235 David, C. 88 Degas, E. 60, 68, 80, 81 Delarof 32 Denvir, B. 322, 335 Derkinderen, A. 116 Deventer, S. van 101, 104, 117, 132, 175,

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179, 180, 187, 188, 189, 308, 313, 314, 319, 335 Deyssel, L. van 208 Dirven, R. 308, 335, 344 Distel, A. 308, 335, 344 Dobbenburg, A. van de 183, 184 Doesburg, Th. Van 116 Donath 135, 152 Dongen, K. van 166 Dorn, R. 130, 306, 311, 315, 335 Druet, E. 13 Dubois, G. 167 Dufy, R. 166 Duret, Th. 109, 313 Dutuit, E. 33 Duveen, J. 100, 195, 205, 206

E Ebbink, H. 301, 311, 335 Eckhardt, W. 309, 335 Eeden, F. van 176, 208 Eekman, N. 215, 216 Eisenloeffel, art gallery N. 43 Engelman, J. 184, 204, 319 Erpel, F. 320, 335 Eyck, J. van 193

F Fabiani, art gallery 241, 242 Faille, J.B. de la 9, 10, 14, 17, 19, 23, 2529, 31-39, 44-51, 54-56, 58, 61-66, 7176, 81, 87, 90, 91, 93, 94, 97, 99-103, 107-113, 118-133, 135, 136, 139-144, 146, 147, 151, 152, 157-163, 165-172, 174, 176178, 180-188, 197-200, 203, 204, 206, 207, 210, 213-216, 218, 219, 225-229, 237, 240, 241, 244, 251, 257, 260, 262, 263, 266, 268, 273-275, 278-280, 283286, 290, 298, 305-317, 319-329, 335 Fantin-Latour, H. 92, 187, 237 Fasseur, C. 314, 336 Faure, E. 112, 314, 335

index of names

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Feilchenfeldt, W. 46, 63, 109, 135, 139 Feilchenfeldt jr., W. 30, 102, 301, 305, 306, 307, 309, 311, 315, 316, 335, 336 Feltkamp, W.C. 227 Finley, D.E. 194, 198, 199, 200, 336 Francesca, P. della 89 Froentjes, W. 86, 95, 96, 248, 287, 301, 311, 313, 317, 326, 329, 336

G Gabriël, P. 116 Gachet père, P. 11, 81, 212, 256-260, 303, 306, 325 Gachet fils, P. 11, 212, 214, 225, 228, 256, 260, 262-271, 283, 303, 324, 325, 336 Gachet, M. 256, 259 Garnier, J.C.M. 122, 123, 133, 135, 140, 152, 164, 314 Gauguin, P. 13, 15, 37, 123, 314 Gelder, J.G. van 292, 294, 326, 336 Gérard, J. 13-15, 24, 305 Gerson, H. 275, 279, 281, 282, 286, 288, 289 Goetz, W. 11, 214, 216, 218-20, 222-229, 242, 273 Gogh, Engineer V.W. van 9, 17, 19, 35, 36, 45, 46, 48, 51, 63, 108, 109, 119, 120, 124, 126, 127, 129, 132, 137, 138, 146, 161, 164, 177, 203, 207-220, 222-225, 228, 229, 231-236, 240-243, 245, 246, 249-253, 256-271, 275-278, 283, 291-294, 299, 302, 307, 321, 323, 324, 325, 327 Gogh, J. van 208, 211 Gogh, T. van 25, 35, 119, 198, 207, 209, 212, 233, 257, 264, 277, 281 Gogh, V.W. van 7, 9-18, 20, 24, 25, 29, 30, 35-39, 41, 42, 44-46, 48-50, 54, 55, 57, 59, 61, 62, 65, 73, 75, 79, 82, 90, 93-97, 102, 108-110, 112, 116, 118, 120, 122-128, 130, 131, 134, 138, 145, 147, 151, 153, 162, 164, 166, 169, 176, 178, 181, 187, 188, 198, 199, 202, 206-209, 211-217, 223, 225, 227-229, 232-234, 236, 237, 239-

index of names


242, 245-247, 251, 255-262, 264, 266, 268,-271, 273-277, 280-283, 285, 287, 289, 291-295, 297, 303, 305, 306 Gogh-Bonger, J. Van 35, 43, 45, 46, 109, 138, 146, 198, 199, 207, 232, 257, 262, 324 Goldschmidt, I. 66, 141 Goldschmidt, art gallery M. 58, 140 Göring, H. 177, 188, 204 Goudstikker, J. 169 Goyen, J. van 116 Graadt van Roggen, W. 306 Gradkowsky, J. 135, 140 Graetz, H. 263, 264 Greco, El 88 Grosz, G. 68 Gruyter, W.Jos. de 11, 39, 92, 94, 97, 101, 112, 122, 127, 151, 163, 169, 175-181, 183-187, 199, 226, 260, 281-283, 286, 337, 342 Guillaumin, A. 126, 260 Gutmann 140, 141

H Haak, A.C. 337 Haffner, S. 337 Hahnloser, A. 119, 241 Hals, F. 34, 83, 85, 111, 208, 234, 238, 239, 323, 336 Hammacher, A.M. 9, 17, 19, 23, 39, 151, 188, 203, 204, 212, 223, 224, 237, 243-248, 266-270, 276, 278-284, 286, 286, 291, 292, 295, 296, 298, 299, 301, 306, 337 Hannema, D. 204 Hauert, R. 297, 298 Hauser, K. 165 Havelaar, J. 39, 94, 151 Heerikhuizen, B. van 337 Hefting, V. see V. Bakker-Hefting Heinich, N. 305, 337 Hellema, H.J.P. 337 Hem, P. van der 50, 142, 174 Hendriks, E. 263, 337

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Hentzen, A. 315, 337, 338 Hettinga Tromp, T. 41 Heydt, E. von der 82 Hijmans, E. 209 Hilhorst, C. 337 Hindenburg, P. Von 114, 162 Hitler, A. 162, 176, 220 Hofman, P.B. 337 Hofstede de Groot, C. 31, 33, 38, 85, 311, 337 Hoogh, P. De 86, 204 Huinck & Scherjon, art gallery 104, 122, 123, 143, 169, 175, 178, 180, 185-187, 226 Huinck, C.W. 92, 226, 227 Hulsker, J. 279, 281, 282, 295-297, 299, 301

J Jaffé, H.L.C. 11, 215, 218, 233, 237, 238, 243-248, 264, 291, 292, 296, 338 Jankowsky, Th. 135, 140 Jeppson, L. 338. Jongkind, P. 123, 187 Joosten, E. 282, 295, 301 Joosten, J. 275, 285, 287, 288 Joux, L. 167, 168 Justi, L. 10, 59, 67-77, 79-83, 93, 103, 120, 132-136, 143-146, 149-152, 154, 156-158, 160-164, 175, 179, 181, 184, 185, 195, 283, 309, 338

K Karnebeek, H.A. van 114 Keck, S. 225 Kennedy, J. 201 Keyes, G.S. 338 Kirchner, E.L. 68 Kisling, M. 166 Kist, B. 207, 216 Klimt, G. 26 Klompé, M. 268 Kloos, W. 207




Knuttel Wzn, G. 126,127, 204, 338 Köbben, A.J.F. 14, 304, 338 Kōdera, T. 301, 305, 338 Koldehoff, S. 30, 102, 301, 339 Komter, A. 339 König, L. von 135, 154 Kooten, T. van 339 Kramarsky, S. 260 Kress, S. 194, 195 Kreuzfeld, J. 135, 140 Krimsky, S. 339 Krockow, C. Von 339 Kröller, A.G. 9, 10, 35, 14, 43, 45, 92, 113118, 120, 172, 173 Kröller-Müller, H. 9, 10, 35, 41, 43, 55, 56, 65, 70-72, 74-77, 92, 98, 101-104, 108, 109, 113-125, 131-133, 138, 141, 151, 152, 169, 172, 173, 175-177, 187

L Landais, B. 297, 303, 306, 339 Latour, J. 263, 264, 267 Leck, B. van der 41, 92, 116 Leeuw Marcar, A. 339 Leeuw, A. van der 282 Leune, J.M.G. 23, 339 Lewenthal, R. 214, 219 Liebermann, M. 68, 69, 82, 134, 138, 148 Lindeman, C.M.A.A. 205 Lippi, Fra Filippo 89 Loeb, A. 246-248, 290, 292, 294-296, 302 Lovaël, O., see Otto Wacker Ludendorff, E. von 114 Lugt, F. 111

M Macke, E. 68, 83 Mak van Waay, S.J. 126, 127, 159 Mak, A., auction house 29, 126, 127, 166, 168 Manet, É. 37, 60, 68, 126, 235

index of names

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Manheim, R. 339 Mann, T. 214 Marijnissen, A. 232, 233, 240 Maris, M. 116, 174 Marquis, A.G. 340 Matisse, H. 89, 166 Matthiesen, art gallery 72, 75, 76, 102, 110, 139, 151, 153, 154, 175 Mauss, M. 255, 324 McBride, H. 90 Mecklenburg-Schwerin, Prince Hendrik van 114 Meegeren, H. van 86, 204, 205, 222, 226, 232, 320 Meier-Graefe, J. 10, 51, 58, 59, 61-64, 68, 74, 76, 112, 127, 129, 135, 139, 143, 144, 147, 148, 151, 152, 157, 163, 174, 340 Meissner, G. 340 Mellon, A. 193-195 Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, P. von 13, 286, 287 Mendes Da Costa, J. 116 Merton, R.K. 18, 19, 115, 305, 340 Mies van der Rohe, L. 115 Modigliani, A. 89 Moeyes, P. 340 Moffett, K. 340 Mondriaan, P. 41, 116, 275 Monet, C. 116, 187, 194, 235, 256, 314 Müller, F. 135, 152 Murray, M. see M. Dale Mussolini, B. 184

N Nauen, H. 83 Nieuwenhuizen Segaar, art gallery 183, 185 Nieweg, J. 237

O Ohara, M. 91, 142, 186 Oldenzeel, art gallery 232

index of names


Oosterbaan Martinius, W. 322, 340 Osborn, M. 132, 133 Osthaus, K. 262 Oversloot, J. 303, 305, 340

P Panofsky, E. 22 Paret, P. 340 Pascin, J. 166 Paul, B. 340 Perls, art gallery Hugo 51, 102, 340 Perugino, P. 193 Petersen, A. 340 Petit, art gallery Georges 89 Phillips, D. 340 Picasso, P. 89, 116, 196 Pickvance, R. 297 Pissarro, C. 214, 256, 260 Plasschaert, A.C.A. 39, 125, 171, 172, 174, 177 Plaut, J. 225 Polak, E. 118, 120, 121, 123, 124 Prud’hon, P.P. 235

R Raphael da Urbino 193 Redon, O. 43, Regteren Altena, J.Q. van 206 Reichan, W. 135, 140 Renkewitz, M. 103, 140 Renoir, P.-A. 60, 68, 79, 126, 256 Rewald, J. 201, 296, 340 Richardson, J. 17 Rijn, Rembrandt Hzn van 21, 33, 34, 107, 111, 193, 208, 237, 244, 282 Ring, G. 46, 63, 75, 108, 135, 139 Rockefeller, J.D. 89 Rodin, A. 27 Röell, D.C. 120, 121, 123, 205 Roepers, N. 78, 341 Roland Holst, R.N. 39, 43, 207, Roodenburg-Schadd, C. 341

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Rosenberg, P. 80, 81, 172, 173 Rosenhagen, H. 64, 129, 135, 145, 146, 148, 149, 151, 152, 163, 180 Rousseau le Douanier, H. 235 Rousseau, T. 92 Rubens, P.P. 88, 235, 237, 244, Ruhemann, H. 135, 146, 155, 158, 341 Ruiter, P. de 17, 341 Ryssel, Paul van (see Gachet père)

S Sablonière, M. de 11, 235, 236, 245, 248, 250, 251, 253, 278, 341 Saltzman, C. 30, 305, 341 Sandberg, W. 11, 203, 211, 212, 215-222, 228, 229, 232-236, 239-243, 245, 246, 248-250, 263, 264, 266, 273, 275, 283, 291, 299 Sandler, I., 341 Savage, G. 341 Schaper, J.H.A. 168 Scheffler, K. 69, 79, 341 Schendel, A.F.E. 205, 292 Scherjon, W. 10, 11,39, 55, 56, 65, 73, 87, 90-95, 97, 98, 101, 102, 104, 108, 110, 112, 113, 122, 123, 125, 127, 128, 131, 132, 135, 140-143, 146, 147, 150-152, 154, 155, 157, 159, 161-169, 171, 175-188, 199, 282, 341, 342 Schinasi, M. 89 Schmidt Degener, F. 33, 111 Schoeller, A. 227 Schuch, C. 145 Schuffenecker, A. 13 Schuffenecker, C-É. 81, 143, 264 Schüller, S. 342 Schumacher, R. 301, 342 Schütz, C.C. 342 Schweitzer, G. 102 Secrest, M. 342 Seurat, G. 235 Severini, G. 187 Siedenburg, J.H.H. 313

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Signac, P. 123, 247, 248, Simpson, C. 342 Sjollema, J. 342 Slagter, J. 236, 248-250, 253 Smith, J. 33 Spiro, E. 135, 151, 152, 154 Staechelin, R. 163 Stalin, J. 184, 221 Stegeman, E. 42, 342 Stein, S.A. 335 Steinmetz, S.R. 39, 70 Stern, F. 342 Sternheim, C. 35 Steurs, C.H. de 227, Steyn, M.T. 114 Stolwijk, C. 302, 342 Stone, I. 219 Stoperan, T. 135, 342 Storm van Leeuwen, J. 342 Stout, G. 225 Stransky, art gallery J. 48, 64, 99 Stuck, F. von 66

T Täubner, E. 77, 145, 146, Taylor, F.W. 209 Tellegen, A. 274, 275, 279, 285-289, 301 Temple, S. 214 Teniers, A. 34 Terpstra, J. 124, 168 Thannhauser, art gallery 62, 138 Thomas, J.A. 98, 135, 139, 145 Thomson, C. 342 Thorbecke, R. 231, 299, Thormaehlen, L. 83, 135, 154, 155 Tilborgh, L. van 263, 302, 337, Tintoretto, J. 88, 116 Toorop, C. 41, 92, 116, 183 Traas, J.C. 151, 160, 164, 175, 263 Tralbaut, M.E. 11, 203, 265-270, 275-280, 284, 290-296, 342, 343 Trübner, H.W. 66 Truman, H. 222

index of names

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Tschudi, H. von 60, 61, 67-69, 81 Tucholsky, K. 165 Tutein Nolthenius, H. 93

U Uelzen, H. 135, 139 Uhde, F. von 145 Uitert, E. van 281, 301, 343 Utrillo, M. 166, 237, 240

V Valentiner, W.R. 33, 343 Vecht, A. 169 Veen, G. van der 211 Velásquez, D. 193 Velde, H. van de 115, 117 Vermeer, J. 34, 86, 111, 204, 205, 208, 234, 239 Veronese, P. 235 Verster, F. 92, 116, 187 Verweij, K. 274 Veth, C. 10, 34, 35, 42, 130, 131, 132, 133 144, 149, 154, 159, 162, 169, 179, 200, 204, 207, 343 Vinci, L. da 100, 221, 231, Vink, H.J. 343 Visser, P. 120 Vogelsang, W. 31 Vollard, art gallery A. 30 Vosmaer, C. 33 Vries, A. B. 204, 235, 275

W Wacker, H. 83, 84 Wacker, L. 57, 73, 76, 78, 83, 152, 180 Wacker, O. 10, 46-48, 50, 51, 54-59, 61-

index of names


67, 71-79, 83, 84, 87, 90, 93, 95, 96, 101-103, 107-110, 112, 120, 127-132, 134-141, 143-146, 152, 156, 157, 160, 161, 165, 169, 170, 172, 173, 176, 177, 184, 186, 188, 198, 203 Walker, J. 11, 192-196, 198-201, 256 Wehlte, K. 135, 154, 164 Welsh-Ovcharov, B. 294-297, 343 Wennekes, W. 117, 343 Westheim, P. 343 Wet, C.R. de 114 Wibaut, F.M. 121, 124, 208, 209 Wibaut, J. 208 Wijnen, H. van 344 Wijsenbeek, L.J.F. 241 Wild, A.M. de 10, 85-88, 95-104, 109, 112, 122, 131-133, 135, 137, 141, 142, 146, 148151, 153-156, 159, 160, 163, 172, 175, 178, 179, 182, 183, 186, 197, 199, 205, 248, 343 Wild, D. de 85 Wilde, E.L. de 283, 301 Wildenstein, D. 264 Wildenstein, art gallery 99 Wilhelm II, emperor 30, 60, 61, 67, 69, 70, 231 Willink, A.C. 227 Wisselingh, art gallery van 238 Wolff, E. 72 Wolk, J. van der 271, 301, 343 Wolowsky, G. 102 Wouters, K. 335

Z Zandleven, J. 41 Zatzenstein, F. 139 Zemel, C.M. 305, 344 Zimmermann, M.F. 344 Zwartendijk, J. 38, 111, 112, 127, 132, 163



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