According to an article by Martin Bailey in the July issue of London’s The Art Newspaper, as many as 100 van Goghs may be no Goghs. Bailey, author of three books on van Gogh, reports that the leading authority on the artist, Jan Hulsker - whose ““The New Complete Van Gogh’’ was published last August - questions 45 paintings. The team of dealer Walter Feilchenfeldt and scholar Dr. Roland Dorn have serious doubts about 19 more. Dr. Liesbeth Heenk, who curated a van Gogh drawing show in the Netherlands, isn’t sure about 11 drawings. Among the questionable art works are several in the United States, including still lifes in the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Conn., and Harvard’s Fogg Art Museum, and a self-portrait and one version of ““L’Arlesienne’’ in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. In Paris, the Musee d’Orsay is re-examining its ““St. Paul’s Asylum Garden.’’ The Hague’s Gemeentemuseum is taking a second look at its van Gogh self-portrait, and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has been prodded to research eight of its 206 paintings.
Now that the impasto has hit the fan, the high end of the art world is closing ranks. A Christie’s spokesman says with a sniff, ““Stories like this surface from time to time about major artists.’’ The Musee d’Orsay’s publicist says, ““Of course the paintings we have are true.’’ Even the debunkers are hedging. Feilchenfeldt says, ““We don’t like this controversy at all. And the press is not tackling it in a way we would like.’’ And what would suit the scholars? The 90-year-old Hulsker says from his home in British Columbia, ““I’m not interested to give interviews. Bye-bye.’’ The next day, in a more talkative mood, he explained, ““I never said that 45 paintings were not authentic, [just] that the authenticity has to be checked carefully. It isn’t easy.’’ But, as UCLA art historian Albert Boime says, ““How did they think that this would remain private? Van Gogh belongs to the public domain.''
You can’t get more public than the Met. Hulsker questions its ““L’Arlesienne’’ because there’s a second version in the Musee d’Orsay, and only one is documented in van Gogh’s letters. Also, the Met’s picture may have been owned by Emile Schuffenecker, who was implicated in a van Gogh faking scandal. It would be simple if van Gogh disputes could be resolved by X-rays or other exotic curatorial forensics. Unfortunately, they can’t. Because van Gogh painted relatively recently, techniques that work on old masters usually don’t reveal much. So the only way to authenticate a van Gogh is through stylistic analysis, which is always a bit subjective. Take the Met’s self-portrait. (As with many of the questioned paintings, there is no record of its existence until the 1920s - a boom time for art forgery.) Feilchenfeldt and Dorn argue that haphazard brushstrokes and strange color handling underneath the straw hat make it unclear whether the section depicts shadow or hair. Boime replies: ““This is not what I would call serious scientific analysis.''
Van Gogh has been successfully faked in the past, and there are most likely some bogus van Goghs still out there. Yet surprisingly few works have actually been downgraded by scholars since a definitive catalog was published in 1970. (The Van Gogh Museum removed two suspect paintings from view.) The risks of de-authentification are huge: paintings that perhaps cost millions may be made worthless and academic reputations imperiled. But Bailey does see a funny little bright side: ““The fakes which are being discussed now are very good fakes. They’ve convinced people for 50 to 80 years.’’ If it all weren’t so serious, we might be entertained by the brouhaha. Wait a minute. As a matter of fact, we are.
