The Current Sensation of Van Gogh, The Soon Forgotten Scam of the Beltracchi’s, and The Future Success of Hilma af Klint
Paper at the Third Meeting in the Research Network What Images Do, Düsseldorf, 11—13 November 2013.
When I decided to make the newly resurfaced Van Gogh the starting point of my talk here, I though, naively it turned out, to be on the same wave length as the present one could get. With the recent case of the Gurlitt discovery in an apartment in Munich, I have to admit that I am as much in delay as most artists are according to the ultracontemporary artist Thierry Geoffroy a.k.a. Colonel.
ART = RETARD Colonel producing canvas for the Delay Museum PS1 / MOMA, 2007.
For a moment I thought about shifting my point of departure to this “Der Fall Gurlitt” on the basis of it being a “sensation” more “current” than the already delayed news of a rediscovered Van Gogh painting, but I will stick to my original design, as the argument about the current sensation of the Van Gogh rediscovery, as the even more current and even more sensational Gurlitt rediscovery, in both cases is that it is neither current, nor sensational, but on the opposite: that these rediscoveries, resurfaces and re-attributions are systemic intrinsic in the way images becomes visible as art, and maybe even as images.The Current Sensation of Van Gogh
In september 2013 the director of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam could proudly present for the press a “once in a lifetime experience”: the rediscovery of a Van Gogh from his greatest period when he lived in Arles and painted works such as The Yellow House or The Sunflowers.
The director of the Van Gogh Museum Axel Rüger and the art historian Louis van Tilborgh in the process of revealing the 'rediscovered' Van Gogh and baptising it “Sunset at Montmajour,” painted the 4th of July 1888.
The unsigned painting turned up in 1970 with the estate of the Norwegian industrialist Christian Nicolai Mustad (1878--1970). The family knew about the painting and Mustad had bought it early in his collecting career, maybe as early as 1908. They also knew that it was a fake. The painting had initially been bough with the help of and advice of the director of the National Gallery in Oslo, Jens Thiis (1870--1942).
Vincent van Gogh: Sunset at Montmajour. 4.VII.1888.
Vincent van Gogh: Solnedgång vid Montmajour. 4.VII.1888.
According to the family story, the French ambassador to Sweden had visited Mustad not long after the picture was bought and suggested that it was a fake. Mustad reacted promptly and banished his painting to the basement. He never wanted to see it again, and probably didn’t either. Now we know that it probably wasn’t the French ambassador to Sweden who disappointed the nascent collector, but the entrepreneur and avid collector Auguste Pellerin (1853--1929), who was an authority of late nineteenth-century art and a industrial competitor to Mustad as well.When the family should sell the art collection after Mustad’s death, they appointed the art dealer Daniel Wildenstein, who also looked at the rejected painting and, according to the family, believed it was wrong, maybe produced by a German painter. Later owners contacted in 1991 the Van Gogh Museum to pursue the question, but the museum declined any further investigation with the motivation that “we think that the picture in question is not an authentic Van Gogh”.
Detail of the upper left corner.
This was the situation until 2011, when an artists friend of the present owner, who had grown up in Arles, noticed a similarity of the ruin at the upper left corner of the painting with a description in one of Vincent van Gogh’s letters to his brother, identifying the location (Montmajour Abbey) where the work was done. This observation made the Van Gogh Museum to revise their rejection twenty years earlier and agreed to carry out an investigation of the painting. After two years of analysis of the samples “in cross-section and examined with the light microscope and Scanning Electron Microscope with Energy Dispersive X-ray Analysis (SEM-EDX) by Muriel Geldof. The indication of pigments with handheld X-ray Fluorescence Spectrometry (XRF) was performed by Luc Megens, and analyses with High Performance Liquid Chromatography (HPLC) by Maarten van Bommel. Don H. Johnson and Robert G. Erdmann were instrumental in analysing the types of canvas used for Sunset at Montmajour and The rocks in the framework of the Thread Count Automation Project (TCAP),” the museum’s two senior researchers Louis van Tilborgh and Teio Meedendorp said in a statement: “Stylistically and technically speaking, there are a plenty of parallels with other paintings by Van Gogh from the summer of 1888. By means of research into literature and records, we were also capable of tracing the earliest history of the provenance of the painting.”Indeed they were. In their recent \emph{Burlington Magazine}-publication of the painting, the art historians led by Louis van Tilborgh, succeeds in presenting an thoroughly convincing provenance of the painting. It belonged first to Vincent’s brother Theo, and then passed on to Theo’s widow, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, who, in her turn, sold it on to Maurice Fabre, probably in 1901 together with five or six other paintings. Maurice Fabre gradually disposed himself of his Van Goghs, the last one probably around 1908, when it directly or indirectly was bought by Mustad. Due to the vague nature of the contemporary sources, this reconstruction of the painting’s provenance would not have been possible without the presence of the painting itself.
Vincent van Gogh: Solnedgång vid Montmajour. Verso.
The number thirty refers to the format “Portrait”, i.e. 92 × 73 cm. “The subject and size of the picture match that description, but the clinching piece of evidence is simply that the number 180 is written on the back of the canvas.” “The handwriting,” the authors continues, “resembles that on Wheatfield with setting sun, now in the Kunstmuseum, Winterthur, which is also marked with a Bonger number.” ”It is numbered 100 on the list and given the tile ‘Arles (Soleil couchant) 30, which makes it likely that both numbers, which were probably written by packers, were added to prevent confusion between the two works when they were sent off to exhibitions.” (p. 700)
Detail in transmitted light of the number ‘100’ from the Bonger list inscribed on the reverse of Sunset: wheatfield near Arles, by Vincent van Gogh, 1888. Canvas, 74 by 93 cm. (Kunstmuseum, Winterthur).
Apart from that the handwriting is rather dissimilar -- the number 1 in “100” being executed with a prominent top left stroke and considerably larger than the zeros, whereas the number 1 in “180” is just a considerably smaller simple vertical line -- the difference of the placement and scale of the two numbers couldn’t be more different, making it hard to see how they could be written by the same hand for the same purpose.Now, due to my research interest, you might think that I wish to suggest that the discovered painting is indeed a fake. But this is not the case. It is impossible to argue against Scanning Electron Microscopy with Dispersive X-ray Analysis, and very difficult against analyses with High Performance Liquid Chromatography, not to speak about any Thread Count Automation Project. Against such forensics we have to concede. With this paranthetical note, I just wanted to keep up at least a minimum of critical alertness and self-respect.
Christian Nicolai Mustad’s home in Oslo in the 1960s.
What interests me with this case is the series of observations, which I prefer to call measurements, performed in front of this physical object. Firstly, Christian Nicolai Mustad was never interested in “an image” or even “a picture”; Mustad was interested in “a Van Gogh”, not necessarily a landscape, and definitively not one depicting any specific location or painted in any specific way, but just that: a canvas with oil, attributed to van Gogh, preferably framed. With this specifications, the expert, Jens Thiis, went out to identify an object corresponding to these attributes, that is: performed a series of measurements until an observation yielded the correct answer. The second known observation took place when Auguste Pellerin saw the painting at Mustad’s and performed his own measurement and came out with the opposite result: “no”, the measured object does not correspond to the attribute “van Gogh”. Mustad, himself without any measuring device, choosed to believe in the last measuring and decided not to exhibit the object, which he probably would, had it been, for instance, an image of his mother.
Christian Nicolai Mustad’s home in Oslo in the 1960s.
Because measurements behave like grooves in phonographic records, the results tend to get stronger and stronger the more the object is observed, Daniel Wildenstein could confirm this last measurement, adding his own alternative attribution as “maybe made by a German painter”, but as it didn’t exist a “German” way of painting during the turn of the century, he must be alluding to the Wacker-affair without attributing it to Otto Wacker specifically (Wacker worked in the late 1920s). This measurement was twenty years later confirmed by the Van Gogh Museum. Because of the now very heavy observational gravity around the object – the deep grooves earlier measurements had inflicted on the probability density for any future measurement – it took this enormous effort with regard to apparatuses for the Van Gogh Museum in 2011 to be able to escape this observational gravity and present a new measurement.As you must have noted: there is no talk about “image”, likeness or representation here. There are only indices: during the first part of the century indices of styles and manners, during the second part indices of pigments, thread patterns, and electro-microscopy. But this history about the rediscovered Van Gogh nevertheless contains an observation of an image, which \emph{is not} a function of an index. It is when the present owner’s artist friend notes that the “ruin” in the upper left corner resembles the Montmajour Abbey in the vicinity of Arles, where he had grown up. Here we note the two central concepts, intrinsically linked with the problem of images: likeness and remembrance, and it is evident that this identification of a vision with a material object through likeness and remembrance, was paramount for annihilating the observational gravity induced upon the object.
Vincent van Gogh: Solnedgång vid Montmajour. Detaljbilder.
How is this possible? How do images do to produce this annihilation of the probability density in the observation of an object to produce a new measurement? (Paranthetically speaking, I was tempted to write: “to produce a new reality”, but I believe it is safer to stick to measurements.) I believe the answer lies precisely in the quote from envelope N8.1 of Benjamin’s Passagenarbeit I quoted in our last meeting: “Das Korrektiv dieser Gedankengänge liegt in der Überlegung, dass die Geschichte nicht allein eine Wissenschaft, sonder nicht minder eine Form des Eingedenkens ist. Was die Wissenschaft, ‘festgestellt’ hat, kann das Eingedenken modifizieren. Das Eingedenken kann das Unabgeschlossene (das Glück) zu einem Abgeschlossenen und das Abgeschlossene (das Leid) zu einem Unabgeschlossenen machen.” If the remembrance (das Eingedenken) is to understand – which I believe – as an ästhetische Bildhaftigkeit (an aesthetic pictoriality), then it is this compound of remembrance and likeness which can make the completed, the perfected, or the closed open, incomplete and imperfect, which is a condition for to annihilate the probability density of an observation.
The re-discovered Van Gogh observed anew in september 2013.
On the other hand, even though the measurements are not visual in themselves – they are composed of a cluster of algebraic relations between attributes and indices – they are nevertheless the source for an proliferating numbers of new images directing future observations to the gravitational groove of the measurement. That is, in the same way an image made the measurement of the Van Gogh imperfect for the present owner’s artist friend, images are also responsible for the perfecting the imperfect, that is making the incompleted complete.
Mona Lisa being observed.
This proliferation probably stems from observations themselves in the way that indices, precisely “pointing fingers,” reproduces images through captures or frames, which again, through a new indexification reproduces the reproduced images and so on in an accelerating proces similar to how a needle strengthen the grooves in a phonographic disc or similar to the effect when someone starting to look up in the sky inducing other to stop up and look up in the sky. This is a proces of remembrance – or Eingedenken – as well, just working in the other direction, closing the open or perfecting the imperfect, or, with other words, making the continuous discontinuous.
Thomas Struth: Museum of Modern Art I, New York, 1994.
As I started to say, this rediscovery is not at all any “once in a lifetime experience”, but rather an intrinsic and systemic feature of art. This iconoclastic indexification is the stuff art history is made of.
Pressvisning för den ‘nyupptäckta’ van Gogh, september 2013.
In 2011 Spengler Museum reveals their recent acquisition, Heinrich von Campendonck’s Cat in a Landscape from 1914.
This is not, and has never been, a visual judgement or observation; it is solely based on physical indexical evidence, superseeding the primitive method of connoisseurship. That is: the image as such is not connected to any specific time-space, it is only when it is materialised, and with the signs (indices) of its materialisation, that it can be localised in time and space. There is even no terminus post quem of images. An image of Jesus is perfectly possible before Christ, which the Old Testament proves, as is an image of a future assistant to the secretary of the state of the Kingdom of Tlön.I think it is this paradox (this atopos) that bothers Plato, the symploké – or entanglement – of likeness and being. When The Stranger asks “Then what we call a likeness (εἰκόνα), though not really existing, really does exist?” and Theaithetos concludes, that non-being have gone into some entanglement with being, I will interpret this as an superposition of image with index, image as non-existing, index as material; image as transcendental, index as historical and from this experimental design discuss this entanglement (συμπλοκὴν).
The Soon Forgotten Scam of the Beltracchi’s
In 2009 I visited the Max Ernst retrospective in Louisiana, and in spite of my limited interest in Max Ernst, I spent a couple of hours at the exhibition, looking at each exhibit more than usual attentive, as I was there together with my students. Had I then known that at least three, but probably a couple more, were modern forgeries, I would definitively have looked upon each of them with quite different eyes, activated a totally different modus observandi. When I now observe the reproductions of the known fakes, I cannot even remembering having seen them. The images are drowned in an undifferentiated and continuous sea of Max Ernst’ness. But of course, I wouldn’t be able to use this information to anything, as the paintings had passed the hands and eyes of some of the world’s most notable Max Ernst-experts, who have succeeded in placing each singular and differentiated picture within the fine discontinuous co-ordinates in the cartography of Max Ernst.“Der Fall Jägers” – as it initially was called – broke the headlines in German newspapers during September 2010, when the Maltese company of unknown purpose, Trasteco Co., Ltd. filed a lawsuit against the Cologne auction house Lempertz. The company had in November 2003 acquired a Heninrich Campendock, Red Picture with Horses for 2.9 million euros, and, for some reason, wanted to make a scientific investigation of the picture. This investigation unfortunately showed traces of titanium white, a pigment not available in Campendock’s time. The auction house refused to reimburse the company, and thus the whole affair became a public matter. It soon turned out that the labels on the back of the Campendock painting, documenting that the painting had been Alfred Flechteims gallery, in the gallery “Der Sturm” and “Kunstsalon Emil Richter” were all faked, especially the Flechtheim-label, we are told, aroused suspicion, but obviously first when the chemical analysis of the pigments were done.
The Flechtheim-label on the back of Rotes Pferde ….
Likewise it soon became clear that the provenance of the picture, from a certain “Collection Werner Jägers” was altogether fictitious and had never existed. It didn’t take long for the investigators and journalists to trace a number of pictures which also stemmed from this “Collection Jägers” and a contemporary, equally fictitious “Collection Wilhelm Knops”. During this time the number of faked pictures rose from some 28 pictures to more than 50. Subsequently it became clear that the forger’s activities had begun already in 1985, which means that the cumulative output at least must amount to a number well above hundreds of paintings. Which they are, and where they are, we will probably never be known for sure, as the court settled for 14 of the paintings.The forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi, is in many way a typical forger, and the case bears many resemblances with the case of John Myatt and John Drewe from 1995, with its emphasis of producing convincing provenances as much as convincing pictures. When Drewe went to art libraries to replace pages from exhibition catalogues with his own printed pages, featuring reproductions or physical descriptions of John Myatt’s production, Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Helene constructed a plausible art collection of her grandfather’s, Werner Jägers, who had died in 1996, but never collected art. The other fictitious collection was constructed from the grandfather of the long-time accomplice of Wolfgang, Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, whose grandfather was Wilhelm Knops. They should both have bought pictures from the Alfred Flechtheim gallery which we know the existence of through documentary evidence, but which have disappeared since. In hindsight not a very clever construction, as both Werner Jägers and Wilhelm Knops were teenagers at the time of Alfred Flechtheim. Beltracchi thus re-created images that evidently had existed – on or through indices – but since has disappeared.
Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi: ”Jägers Collection”. Photograph with old camera on old photographic paper of framed black and white photocopies on a wall.
Another typical aspect is the biographical sketch Beltracchi makes of himself. In the court he stated that he already as a fourteen year old child was able to perfectly imitate a Picasso, a well known commonplace in art historical narratives from Vasari onwards, and Beltracchi over and over again emphasises how easily it is for him to go into other artists’ styles: “I think that the most important requirement is to capture the essence of a piece of art”, Beltracchi said in an interview, ”You look at it, essentially absorb it, and you have to be able to understand it visually without having to think about how it was done. I was already able to do that as a child.”Jan Bäcklund