Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece - Review

Portrait of Dr Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece, by means of Cynthia Saltzman, New York, Viking, 1998; 336 pages, $2495

In the early 1980 during a weekly seminar about the art world, which I assisted dealer Harold Re in organizing for NYU critic Dore Ashton, a visitant speaker, advised students to ignore the market. "Forget about the prices of art works," she said emphatically, responding to a student's question about the then novel boom in sales of present and contemporary works. "The take away from of a painting or statuary has nothing to do with art." The make notess echoed in my mind over the so-called "crazy years" of the 1980 when, for many, the boundaries between art and trade blurred to an alarming degree

Cynthia Saltzman, in her lively work Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece, touches on a similar notion: that art and business can be antithetical. at the same time she goes to great extents to prove that the interaction of these sum of two units separate worlds is often vital as well as volatile. Early in the volume Saltzman says of the van Gogh portrait:

As a record of the human spirit and also a commodity, it owned both sacred and profane aspects, seemingly at not divisible by 2s but inextricably and complexly linked--aspects not not to be found on its creator, perhaps the greatest in quantity spiritually driven of late-nineteenth-century artists, on the contrary also one who had worked for Europe's leading gallery for more than six years before devoting himself to painting.

As the centerpiece of her story, van Gogh's morose image of his doctor plays, for the greatest in quantity part, the role of a commodity fetish. Saltzman traces the painting's provenance from the time Gachet pos for the portrait in 1890 until a hundred later, when it was bought at auction by the agency of Japanese businessman Ryoei Saito for the staggering aggregate amount of $82.5 million, the highest price at any time paid for a publicly sold work of art. on the contrary Saltzman's story of the work's odyssey end the hands of 13 successive holders is more tragedy than triumph. locate against a tumultuous background of war, intrigue, graft, gre sickness and death, the account is, in the extremity a tale as profoundly sad as the expression upon Dr. Gachet's face.

Saltzman--formerly a reporter for Forbes and the Wall highway Journal, with training in art history as well as business--does not completely sidestep scholarly and esthetic interests related to the work itself. She discusses, for instance, new research that sheds new light upon van Gogh's sources for the portrait's composition. Dr Gachet's attitude it seems, is related not alone to works by Durer, Delacroix and Japanese printmakers, on the contrary also to images by Puvis de Chavannes, a painter van Gogh profoundly admired. But the book's focus is the game of global economics and politics in which the van Gogh canvas is barely a pawn. She might just as well have tackled a 6th-century BC vase painted through Exekias, or a Faberge ovum Her choice of van Gogh however, highlights the dramatic evolution of the 20th-century art market.

In our time, van Gogh has become synonymous with art market brawn, and he continues to reign as the auction house champ, as evidenced this past fall, when his 1890 Self-Portrait of the Artist without a Beard sold for $715 million, the third highest price at any time garnered by a work sold at auction [see "Front Page," Jan. '99] Saltzman argues that his popular market success is in part the arise of an entrepreneurial process that supported his work as pretty soon as it started to display promise. Contesting the received view that the artist was a misunderstood "outsider," she emphasizes his connection with the professional art world. Attuned to the avant-garde show van Gogh personally knew many of the influential artists and writers of the day. Having worked for six years at Goupil's, an international gallery whose fresh York branch became known as Knoedler, he maintained hardy ties to powerful Amsterdam, London and Paris dealers, including his brother Theo, who was highly regarded in Parisian art circles. Moreover, he considered his subsidy from Theo to be the equivalent of purchases of his paintings. A considerable sum total at the time, the stipend was, for example, 50 percent higher than the salary with which single of his portrait subjects, the postman Joseph Roulin, supported a family of five. on the other hand sales of the work were not many because Theo, and later his wife, Johanna Gesina van Gogh-Bonger deliberately kept prices high. Their asking price for a painting by the agency of van Gogh was similar to that for a Monet for instance, level though van Gogh had almost no track record at the time. sole one painting and several drawings were sold while Vincent was alive, on the contrary Theo, almost from the start of his brother's career, squeeze outed the belief that his support of the work was a long-term investment.

Saltzman provides a vivid account of the 37-year-old artist working upon the Dr. Gachet portrait. Begun at Auvers and complet just weeks before van Gogh fatally discharge himself, the picture is individual of two similar images he painted of the physician and amateur artist who specialized in cases of acute melancholia, a malady for which he was treating van Gogh and from which the doctor also feeled Soon after the artist's death, Theo gave single version of the portrait to the doctor in lieu of pay s (this canvas now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay) and sent the other to Paris along with greatest in quantity of the 70-odd paintings van Gogh produc at Auvers.