Behind locked doors on an upper floor of the Art Institute of Chicago, Kristin Lister sits hunched over a microscope, looking deep into a painting worth, oh, $50 million.
While the longer-term goal of her sleuthing on Vincent van Gogh’s “The Poet’s Garden” is to prepare for the institute’s first major exhibit of the 21st Century–on the volatile collaboration of van Gogh and Paul Gauguin in the South of France in 1888–it has turned out to have a very current purpose as well:
The Art Institute has become one of the key players in efforts to reveal which van Gogh paintings are genuine and which are fakes, a controversy that increasingly has swirled around many of the master’s works and become the subject of intense dispute over one very high-priced van Gogh painting in Japan.
That painting, known as the Yasuda “Sunflowers,” has perplexed some experts–and raised questions about its authenticity–because it is on a heavier canvas than other versions that van Gogh painted. It was bought by Japan’s Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Co. for $40 million in 1987, at the time a world-record price for a work of art.
One byproduct of the Art Institute’s current research on the two artists might be to prove critics of “Sunflowers” wrong and Yasuda right, said Douglas Druick, the institute’s curator of the departments of European paintings and prints and drawings.
It’s a matter of fabric.
“We know, from a letter from van Gogh, that they (van Gogh and Gauguin) went out and bought, instead of the normal canvas that you’d buy at an art supply store, some other fabric which was coarser, cheaper, more economical,” Druick said.
He was speaking of the days when van Gogh and Gauguin were stocking up for their sojourn in Arles, the subject of the blockbuster exhibit “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South,” to open Sept. 28, 2001.
If researchers can link Yasuda’s “Sunflowers” to that fabric– jute–and anchor it to “Studio of the South” days, Druick said, the painting’s distinctive attributes– far from proving it a fake–“might well become an argument that it is very much by van Gogh.”
In fact, the Art Institute would love to secure the controversial work for its show and is engaged in negotiations to have it travel.
In recent years, art experts have argued over the authenticity of several dozen van Gogh paintings, many hanging in prestigious museums, among them New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Musee d’Orsay in Paris and the Fogg Art Museum at Harvard University.
In the meantime, the Art Institute’s own Miss Marples and Hercule Poirots are peering at fibers, paint specks, underdrawings and other physical traces in the paintings. The work comes in preparation for what promises to be an international event in the art world, a joint exhibit with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam that will feature perhaps 120 masterpieces, depending on the success of negotiations with museums and art collectors around the world.
Lister’s current object of scrutiny, “The Poet’s Garden,” is van Gogh’s take on a park in the south of France. He painted it for a room he was preparing for Gauguin, whom he had lured south from Paris.
Socially, the venture was a fiasco. Van Gogh cut off an ear to cap off an argument. Gauguin split for Tahiti.
But their two months together changed the course of the artists’ careers as well as art history, one of the themes to be explored in the van Gogh-Gauguin show. It will open about 1,000 days from now, and research for the the catalog is due in a year–a tight deadline by the art world’s clock.
The two months the post-Impressionist masters were together helped them “find their personal style and move into a position of pre-eminence,” noted Druick.
Understanding just what went on between van Gogh and Gauguin in the lovely town of Arles, part of “the invention of what we call modernism,” is the challenge facing organizers of the show, he added.
“What we are attempting to do in the exhibition,” said Druick, beginning an interview with some broad brush strokes, “is to come to these pictures, which are well-known but oddly understudied, from new points of view.”
One major mission will be to place the outpouring of works by both van Gogh and Gauguin, during the period of the “Studio of the South,” in better chronological order.
“If we see technically how they painted before they came together, then we can trace how things changed when they were together and, afterwards, what they continued to use or discarded,” said Lister. Along with Cornelia Peres, a colleague at the Amsterdam museum, she plans to be “doing a lot of traveling, looking at paintings, starting in September.”
It is exacting, scholarly work, complicated by cumbersome logistics, not the least of which is persuading skittish owners to make valuable paintings available to researchers.
“If you could bring all the paintings into one room, with unlimited equipment and time, you could find unbelievable amounts of information,” said Frank Zuccari, the Art Institute’s head of conservation.
Also useful, other researchers noted, will be an attempt to set out a timeline for the creation of each work in the show, to show how the two artists worked as friends and rivals.
One series of van Gogh paintings that Art Institute researchers would like to know more about is five known renderings of “La Berceuse,” depicting an elderly woman singing lullabies and rocking an off-canvas cradle. One version, now in an Art Institute gallery, will shortly “go up to lab for perhaps a month,” said Lister.
She plans to study it under a microscope, use an infrared camera to look beneath the paint level, examine any underdrawings, then take a microscopic pigment sample.
Other “Berceuse” owners will be asked to do the same, in an effort to date the versions to study the development of van Gogh’s image of maternal nurture and nature.
Druick said there have been many individual shows of works by van Gogh or Gauguin, but none that “brings them together and looks at their response to each other.” It is a prospect that already has excited other professionals in the art world.
“We know the large outlines of their relationship, their ambitions for themselves, culture and society,” noted Stephen Eisenman, chairman of Northwestern University’s art history department and author of “Gauguin’s Skirt,” a study of Gauguin in Tahiti. “The technical examination of these works will let us see who influenced whom and in which order. We’ll enter more into the minds of these artists.”
The adventure in the South, Eisenman said, came at a time when both artists were seeking to break free from what they felt were the confines of Paris society and artistic life.
“For Gauguin, the `Studio of the South’ was a kind of practice run for his work in Tahiti,” he said.
As for van Gogh, after the ear healed, he struggled on for 18 months but increasingly became oppressed by loneliness and mental disarray. On July 27, 1890, in despair, he shot himself in the stomach. He died two days later.
He had created some 800 oil paintings and 700 drawings.
