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This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin's Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake
This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin’s Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake
The new allegations come from Fabrice Fourmanoir, who previously identified a fraudulent Gauguin sculpture that the Getty Museum had purchased for million
The authenticity of Paul Gauguin's 1903 self-portrait has long been the subject of debate.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
According to naval records, Paul Gauguin’s eyes were brown. In early self-portraits, the French artist painted himself with a crooked nose, and he scrawled a signature and date in the corners.
Why, then, does Gauguin’s last self-portrait have blue eyes, a squat nose and no signature or date? According to Fabrice Fourmanoir, an art dealer and amateur art sleuth, these aesthetic oddities are just the most obvious evidence that the 1903 self-portrait housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland was not the work of Gauguin.
Fourmanoir alleges that the work was instead painted by Gauguin’s friend Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Cam in the 1910s, years after the artist’s death in 1903. After that, he says it was passed off as a real Gauguin and eventually bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1945.
So far, the Kunstmuseum has been willing to check Fourmanoir’s claims. It announced that it will conduct X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet scans to help determine the provenance of the painting.
“We take this matter very seriously, but these analyses will take some time,” a spokesperson for the Kunstmuseum tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. Results are not expected until June or July.
A Gauguin self-portrait from 1888
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The painting’s official origin story begins on the island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia in 1903. Gauguin’s health was declining. Although in February of that year, he wrote to a friend explaining that he had “hardly touched a brush for three months,” he somehow found the motivation to make one last self-portrait, per the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. On the morning of May 8, he died, likely of a heart attack.
His poor health is evident in the self-portrait. His face is grim, lacking the exuberance and devil-may-care attitude visible in earlier paintings. Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, once described it as “a portrait of eternity,” akin to the Fayum funerary portraits of ancient Egypt, according to the Art Newspaper.
But Fourmanoir doesn’t believe this story. He claims that after Gauguin befriended Ky-Dong, who was exiled from his native Vietnam for anti-colonial activities, he taught him to paint. After Gauguin’s death, Ky-Dong painted the portrait of his deceased friend and teacher based on a black-and-white photograph, which goes some way in explaining the discrepancy in eye color and nose shape.
Fourmanoir’s principal source is Ky-Dong’s son, whom he met in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in the 1980s. “We had long conversations about Gauguin and his father, Ky-Dong. He told me his father had said that he had painted the portrait of Gauguin,” says Fourmanoir, per the Art Newspaper.
The portrait surfaced in 1923 in the possession of Louis Grélet, a Swiss liquor merchant and photographer who knew Gauguin. Fourmanoir alleges that Grélet knew the painting was not a real Gauguin but passed it off as authentic with the help of Jean-Louis Ormond, the nephew of painter John Singer Sargent. They put the work up for auction at Sotheby’s in London and split the earnings.
Paul Gauguin around 1891
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Fourmanoir’s allegations aren’t without precedent. In the late 1920s, the portrait hung at the Kunsthalle Basel, an art gallery in Switzerland, where records described it as a “presumed self-portrait,” according to Le Quotidien de l’Art’s Jade Pillaudin.
“The hypothesis that the work is not a Gauguin was already expressed in the first documents that we attained on the subject,” Eva Reifert, a curator at the Kunstmuseum, tells Le Quotidien de l’Art. “Admittedly, we also see documented expert opinion that the work is undoubtedly authentic, but with the new information shared by Fabrice Fourmanoir, there is a chance to study this question again.”
Fourmanoir, after all, has a knack for spotting fakes. In 2020, he claimed that a rare sandalwood sculpture attributed to Gauguin was a forgery. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which had purchased it for a reported million, later reattributed the piece.
While the results of the analyses will help determine the truth of Fourmanoir’s claims, one other possibility remains: The portrait could be a collaborative work by both Gauguin and Ky-Dong.
In the 1960s, Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish anthropologist and the author of Gauguin in the South Seas, recalled a story that Grélet once told him, per the Art Newspaper: One day, Ky-Dong was in Gauguin’s studio and began painting the artist’s portrait, Danielsson wrote. “Without a word, Gauguin picked up a mirror and, thrusting his friend aside, took the brush and finished the portrait himself.”
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#this #amateur #art #detective #thinks
This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin's Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake
This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin’s Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake
The new allegations come from Fabrice Fourmanoir, who previously identified a fraudulent Gauguin sculpture that the Getty Museum had purchased for million
The authenticity of Paul Gauguin's 1903 self-portrait has long been the subject of debate.
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
According to naval records, Paul Gauguin’s eyes were brown. In early self-portraits, the French artist painted himself with a crooked nose, and he scrawled a signature and date in the corners.
Why, then, does Gauguin’s last self-portrait have blue eyes, a squat nose and no signature or date? According to Fabrice Fourmanoir, an art dealer and amateur art sleuth, these aesthetic oddities are just the most obvious evidence that the 1903 self-portrait housed at the Kunstmuseum Basel in Switzerland was not the work of Gauguin.
Fourmanoir alleges that the work was instead painted by Gauguin’s friend Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Cam in the 1910s, years after the artist’s death in 1903. After that, he says it was passed off as a real Gauguin and eventually bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1945.
So far, the Kunstmuseum has been willing to check Fourmanoir’s claims. It announced that it will conduct X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet scans to help determine the provenance of the painting.
“We take this matter very seriously, but these analyses will take some time,” a spokesperson for the Kunstmuseum tells Artnet’s Jo Lawson-Tancred. Results are not expected until June or July.
A Gauguin self-portrait from 1888
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
The painting’s official origin story begins on the island of Hiva Oa in French Polynesia in 1903. Gauguin’s health was declining. Although in February of that year, he wrote to a friend explaining that he had “hardly touched a brush for three months,” he somehow found the motivation to make one last self-portrait, per the Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey. On the morning of May 8, he died, likely of a heart attack.
His poor health is evident in the self-portrait. His face is grim, lacking the exuberance and devil-may-care attitude visible in earlier paintings. Henri Loyrette, a former director of the Musée d’Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, once described it as “a portrait of eternity,” akin to the Fayum funerary portraits of ancient Egypt, according to the Art Newspaper.
But Fourmanoir doesn’t believe this story. He claims that after Gauguin befriended Ky-Dong, who was exiled from his native Vietnam for anti-colonial activities, he taught him to paint. After Gauguin’s death, Ky-Dong painted the portrait of his deceased friend and teacher based on a black-and-white photograph, which goes some way in explaining the discrepancy in eye color and nose shape.
Fourmanoir’s principal source is Ky-Dong’s son, whom he met in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in the 1980s. “We had long conversations about Gauguin and his father, Ky-Dong. He told me his father had said that he had painted the portrait of Gauguin,” says Fourmanoir, per the Art Newspaper.
The portrait surfaced in 1923 in the possession of Louis Grélet, a Swiss liquor merchant and photographer who knew Gauguin. Fourmanoir alleges that Grélet knew the painting was not a real Gauguin but passed it off as authentic with the help of Jean-Louis Ormond, the nephew of painter John Singer Sargent. They put the work up for auction at Sotheby’s in London and split the earnings.
Paul Gauguin around 1891
Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Fourmanoir’s allegations aren’t without precedent. In the late 1920s, the portrait hung at the Kunsthalle Basel, an art gallery in Switzerland, where records described it as a “presumed self-portrait,” according to Le Quotidien de l’Art’s Jade Pillaudin.
“The hypothesis that the work is not a Gauguin was already expressed in the first documents that we attained on the subject,” Eva Reifert, a curator at the Kunstmuseum, tells Le Quotidien de l’Art. “Admittedly, we also see documented expert opinion that the work is undoubtedly authentic, but with the new information shared by Fabrice Fourmanoir, there is a chance to study this question again.”
Fourmanoir, after all, has a knack for spotting fakes. In 2020, he claimed that a rare sandalwood sculpture attributed to Gauguin was a forgery. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which had purchased it for a reported million, later reattributed the piece.
While the results of the analyses will help determine the truth of Fourmanoir’s claims, one other possibility remains: The portrait could be a collaborative work by both Gauguin and Ky-Dong.
In the 1960s, Bengt Danielsson, a Swedish anthropologist and the author of Gauguin in the South Seas, recalled a story that Grélet once told him, per the Art Newspaper: One day, Ky-Dong was in Gauguin’s studio and began painting the artist’s portrait, Danielsson wrote. “Without a word, Gauguin picked up a mirror and, thrusting his friend aside, took the brush and finished the portrait himself.”
Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.
#this #amateur #art #detective #thinks
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