Not familiar with this Van Gogh

The exhibition focuses on the creation of the “legend of Van Gogh” around 1900 as well as his significance to modern art in Germany. It unites more than 120 paintings and works on paper. At the heart of the exhibition are 50 key works by Vincent van Gogh from all phases of his artistic work. It is the most comprehensive presentation in Germany to include works by the painter for nearly 20 years.

Leading experts on Vincent Van Gogh have concluded that a strange portrait belonging to a Norwegian museum is actually an authentic work by the Dutch master. Extensive research conducted by the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam has shown that the artist executed the unusual self-portrait while he was suffering from psychosis.

The painting, from 1889, has been in the collection of Oslo’s Nasjonalmuseet since 1910, but its attribution to Van Gogh has been openly disputed since 1970. Over the years, some scholars took issue with crucial missing provenance details, while others deemed its style and dreary color palette out of key with the rest of the artist’s oeuvre.

While provenance research carried out at the Najonalmuseet in 2006 showed that the work had belonged to two friends of Van Gogh, Joseph and Marie Gioux, who lived in Arles, it was still unclear when the couple received the work. And, for a long time, experts couldn’t agree on a date of execution, or whether it was done in Arles, Saint-Rémy-de-Provence, or Auvers-sur-Oise.

In a bid to settle the matter once and for all, the museum invited the experts in Amsterdam to study the portrait in 2014. Now, after comprehensive inspection of its style, technique, material, and provenance, researchers have concluded that it is “unmistakeably” by Van Gogh’s hand.

The work turns out to be the only one that can be tied to a letter Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo on September 20, 1889. What’s more, the letter proves that the work is actually a significant one, executed while the artist was having his first major psychotic episode at an asylum in Saint-Rémy. In his letter, Van Gogh describes it as “an attempt from when I was ill.” It is the only known work painted by the artist when he was in the throes of psychosis.

“Although Van Gogh was frightened to admit at that point that he was in a similar state to his fellow residents at the asylum, he probably painted this portrait to reconcile himself with what he saw in the mirror: a person he did not wish to be, yet was,” Louis van Tilborgh, a senior researcher at the Van Gogh Museum and an art historian at the University of Amsterdam, says in a statement. “This is part of what makes the painting so remarkable and even therapeutic.”

In mid-July of that year, Van Gogh entered a state of psychosis that lasted until September. At the end of the summer, in a letter dated August 22, he wrote that he was still “disturbed” but was well enough to experiment with painting again. This led experts to conclude that the work was done after August 22 but before September, and it therefore predates both of his famous 1889 self portraits in Washington’s National Gallery of Art and the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.

The work shows Van Gogh looking defeated, head slightly bowed and gazing sideways at the viewer with a lifeless expression. While the brownish-green pigments and somber palette seemed unusual for the artist who is known for his bright blues and yellows, the palette and brushwork are actually consistent with other works dating from the summer and autumn of 1889, which make sense within the context of the work’s execution.

The work is currently on view on the third floor of the Van Gogh Museum, and will be included in the museum’s upcoming exhibition of artists’s portraits, “In the Picture,” beginning February 21. After the exhibition closes in May, the work will return to Oslo where the Nasjonalmuseet is slated to reopen after renovations in 2021.

Painting part of 60 masterpieces on tour that have been affected as Japan’s museums temporarily close

It’s lucky they don’t need watering – for Van Gogh’s Sunflowers have become the latest casualty of the coronavirus outbreak. And they’re currently being forced into a period of self-isolation.

The painting was on its way from London’s National Gallery to Tokyo’s National Museum of Western Art as part of a travelling show of 60 lauded artworks. It was the first time Van Gogh’s masterpiece had left Europe. However, following the Covid-19 outbreak in Japan, the country’s culture ministry has ordered the two-week closure of all national art museums.

The show – Masterpieces from the National Gallery, London – was due to open on 3 March but will now remain closed until 16 March. In the meantime, some of Europe’s most prized art will remain in the Japanese museum’s quarantine section – experiencing a brief respite from being stared at, day in, day out, for decades on end.
... ... ...

Octave Durham, who went to prison for stealing two paintings by the artist, explains the difficulties encountered in this line of work.

By Nina Siegal
May 27, 2020

AMSTERDAM — The televised security footage clearly showed the man smashing glass doors at the Singer Laren Museum, then walking out moments later with a painting by Vincent van Gogh under his arm.

“Look at that,” Octave Durham said as he watched. “His gear is not even professional. If you’re a professional you’re fully in black. He’s got jeans and Nike sneakers on.”

Mr. Durham’s exasperation is not that of some couch potato who has seen one too many crime shows. He’s a thief who 18 years ago stole not one, but two van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam’s famous Van Gogh Museum.

One of two burglars convicted of the crime in 2004, he served just over 25 months in prison. In 2016, Italian police found the two paintings he stole in the kitchen wall of a house in the town of Castellammare di Stabia, near Naples, belonging to Raffaele Imperiale, a member of an Italian drug trafficking gang. They were returned to the museum.

“This is the easiest art heist I’ve ever seen,” Mr. Durham, 47, concluded of the Singer Laren theft, which took place in the early morning hours of March 30.

Police in the Netherlands declined to comment on their investigation. But Arthur Brand, a private art crime detective who has helped recover many stolen artworks, said he is working with the police on the case and that he sees some similarities in this theft and Mr. Durham’s crime.



Both were very quick break-ins, committed in under five minutes by men with a sledgehammer. Both the painting stolen from Laren, “The Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring,” and one of those taken by Mr. Durham, “Congregation Leaving the Reformed Church in Nuenen” depict the church where van Gogh’s father served as pastor.

“My strong suspicion is that this is a copycat,” Mr. Brand said. (By the way, he has verified that Mr. Durham was in the hospital at the time of the theft.)

Mr. Durham, who goes by the nickname Okkie, doesn’t like the copycat theory. “People say he’s an ‘Okkie wannabe,’ but I don’t know,” he said in an interview. “I wouldn’t do it this way.”

Now the thief is in very much the same situation as Mr. Durham was decades ago. What to do with a stolen van Gogh? Who buys a painting widely publicized as stolen?

“I just did it because I saw the opportunity,” Mr. Durham said. He noticed a window at the museum that he thought would be easy to smash. “I didn’t have a buyer before I did it,” he said. “I just thought I can either sell them, or if I have a problem I can negotiate with the paintings.”

By “negotiate with the paintings,” Mr. Durham meant using the paintings as a bargaining chip with law enforcement officials, in case he got into trouble for something else.

Mr. Durham has been charged several times with thefts and break-ins, including a bank job for which he was acquitted, but he now admits he committed. He has in recent years spoken a good bit about his past, agreeing to participate in a 2017 documentary about his life.

In a 2018 biography, “Master Thief,” by Wilson Boldewijn, he confessed to committing other thefts as well, but insisted that he never committed any violence against people to commit his robberies. (Under Dutch law, criminal prosecution records are sealed.)

“My number one rule is talk smooth, be cool, have a fast car and never touch anyone,” he said.

Mr. Durham said that, growing up, a neighbor of his had been a Dutch criminal: Kees Houtman, who had returned two stolen van Goghs in his possession to the Dutch judiciary in 2005, hoping to get a lighter prison sentence in a drug smuggling case. The early van Gogh works had been stolen from another small museum in the Netherlands, in 1990. Mr. Durham said, “That always stayed in my mind.”

Mr. Durham said he first offered the Van Gogh paintings he had stolen to two criminals, but both of them were murdered before the deal could go down.

“I’m religious, and I’m superstitious,” Mr. Durham said. “I thought that these two paintings were cursed. I said, I don’t want to do anything with these paintings.”

Ultimately, he and his co-conspirator, Henk Bieslijn, sold the paintings to Mr. Imperiale, who owned an Amsterdam coffee shop and was a leader of the Camorra drug ring in Naples. He took the paintings to Italy and hid them in his mother’s kitchen, apparently for safe keeping, according to Willem Nijkerk, a prosecutor with the Amsterdam public prosecutors office.

Meanwhile, Mr. Durham ran from Amsterdam to Spain, where the police arrested him in 2003 in Marbella, a southern resort town. Dutch forensic investigators were able to match DNA from a baseball cap he left behind at the Van Gogh Museum to convict him, but he refused to reveal the location of the paintings.



More than a decade later, when Italian police were investigating the Camorra Mafia family, Mr. Imperiale confessed by letter to having the paintings, in apparent hopes of negotiating a more lenient sentence for himself.

At least 34 van Goghs have been stolen worldwide since 1975, said Nienke Bakker, a senior curator of Van Gogh paintings for the Van Gogh Museum. That number includes 20 paintings that were robbed in 1991 from the museum where she works; they were recovered within a few hours, from an abandoned car.

Ursula Weitzel, the lead public prosecutor on art crimes for the Netherlands Public Prosecution Service, said that in general, art is stolen for the same reasons people steal cars.

“Unless it’s a crime of passion, usually the motive is to make money,” she said. “It’s as simple as that. People don’t steal it because they want to hang it on the wall. That kind of theft for pride or status, I haven’t seen that. It’s usually for money. Or, for safekeeping, in the event that it may be necessary.”

Mr. Brand said many thieves think they will be able to sell paintings on the open market, and then quickly find out that there aren’t legal buyers.

“More than half of my cases have been like that,” he said. “You have thieves who think there are buyers who would really like to have stolen art on their wall. That doesn’t exist, that is only from the movie ‘Dr. No.’ But some thieves think these people exist, and then they have a rude awakening when they can’t sell the work.”

That’s when they offer them to other criminals, he said, often for much less than their real value.

Mr. Brand estimates that a work of art in the criminal underworld is worth about 10 percent of its value in the legitimate art market — so if a painting might sell for $10 million at auction, it can be traded among criminals for a value of about $1 million. Mr. Durham said the value is even lower than that — about 2.5 to 5 percent of market value.

Ms. Weitzel, who handles about 10 cases of stolen art a year in Amsterdam alone, said some times, a criminal might hold onto a work in hopes of using it as collateral or a bargaining chip with law enforcement authorities.

“In the end, it’s an investment, even if it’s an illegal investment,” Ms. Weitzel added.

It often take decades before stolen paintings resurface and very few works, less than 10 percent of those stolen are returned, Mr. Brand said. In cases where paintings are worth millions, the chance that the works will finally be returned is significantly improved. “It’s still not very much,” he said. “My guess is that people destroy less valuable art because they can’t do anything with it.”

The Singer Laren painting, an oil on paper work from 1884, was on loan from the Groninger Museum in the northern Netherlands.

Mr. Durham said he would not steal another van Gogh, and described the theft 18 years ago as the act of a younger man.

“It’s not like doing a bank job,” he said. “I understand now that people really like art and if you steal it people are going to get mad and get hurt. I understand that now, even if I still don’t have that feeling myself.”

A joint letter penned by world-famous painters Vincent Van Gogh and Paul Gauguin, in which they described their brothel visits and discussed their art, sold for €210,600 ($236,000) at auction in Paris on Tuesday.

Both artists, whose post-impressionist paintings are known worldwide, signed the letter that is dated November 1/2, 1888. It was addressed to their painter friend Emile Bernard.

The letter is "exceptional" because the artists described their certainty that their paintings would revolutionize art in the future, stated Drouot auction house — where the letter was sold.

"This document reflects the immense lucidity of these artists in terms of the change taking place around them: they are fully aware that their art marks a turning point and that only future generations will understand it," Drouot adds in the statement.

Addressed to fellow painter Émile Bernard, another key figure in the Post-Impressionist movement, the letter was handwritten by the two artists across four pages. It was composed in November 1888, shortly after Van Gogh produced some of his best-known works, including "Bedroom in Arles," "Van Gogh's Chair" and much of his celebrated "Sunflowers" series.
The correspondence was penned in the French city of Arles, where the Dutch painter had been staying since February of that year. At the time of writing, he had recently been joined by Gauguin, who he had first met in Paris two years earlier.

Their message begins with Van Gogh's impressions of Gauguin, in which he describes his friend as an "unspoiled creature with the instincts of a wild beast."

"With Gauguin, blood and sex have the edge over ambition," he wrote, before recounting some of the pair's recent painting trips.

"We've made some excursions in the brothels, and it's likely that we'll eventually go there often to work," he continued. "At the moment Gauguin has a canvas in progress of the same night cafe that I also painted, but with figures seen in the brothels. It promises to become a beautiful thing."

Van Gogh also discusses his intention to create a new artists' association, as well as referencing pictorial studies he was exchanging with the recipient, Bernard. Gauguin then continues with a shorter message on the third and fourth pages. "Don't listen to Vincent," he wrote, "as you know, he's prone to admire and ditto to be indulgent."

There are over 900 surviving letters written by, or to, Van Gogh, though the majority are between the artist and his brother Theo. Art historians have used this correspondence to better understand the painter's troubled life, as he often used the medium to discuss personal matters, from financial troubles to literary influences.