Almost a decade ago someone in Minnetonka, MN, bought a painting at a garage sale. I’ve never been to Minnetonka, but I have been to my share of garage sales, jumble sales, tag sales, brocantes, puces, whatever word you use in French or English to describe selling stuff on the street or in the driveway on folding tables. I am drawn in by the possibility of finding a treasure. And I do find treasures: a 1960s red coat made in Paris, a never-used Italian barrel cheese grater, metal Jell-O molds and Pyrex prep bowls.
But whoever this was in Minnetonka went home that day with an oil painting of a fisherman smoking a pipe as he mends his net on a beach. Word is that the painting sold for $50. And, according to a new report, it was a treasure worth millions.
It was an orphaned painting by Vincent Van Gogh.
Unless it isn't.
A journalist friend first alerted me to this story last week, with an article from CNN: “Painting found at garage sale is a van Gogh, experts say.” The garage sale collector kept the painting for two years before asking the Van Gogh Museum if they knew about it. The Van Gogh Museum responded that the “work [could not] be attributed to Vincent van Gogh.”
The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam grew out of the van Gogh family’s collection. The artist’s sister in law, Jo van Gogh-Bonger, stewarded his oeuvre for decades. She passed that duty along to her son, Vincent Willem van Gogh. He, in turn, established the Vincent van Gogh Foundation and contracted with the Netherlands to build a museum. Since it opened in 1973, the Van Gogh Museum has collected, preserved, researched, and exhibited work by van Gogh and his contemporaries. It is a museum and a center for research. The specialists there are steeped in van Gogh’s work, and have, for fifty years, determined the authenticity of newly discovered works. Their judgments do not come with a justification. A work of art simply is or isn’t authentic.
The Minnetonka van Gogh did not pass muster in Amsterdam.
In 2019, the 2016 purchaser transferred title to the painting to the LMI Group. They published their report a few weeks ago under the title: Vincent van Gogh’s Elimar. The report is clear. This is “a previously unknown oil on canvas by van Gogh.” Here it is:
Recently Martin Bailey wrote about the painting. Bailey has published nine books on the artist, and his Adventures with Van Gogh blog appears regularly in The Art Newspaper. Bailey knows his stuff and writes well. His books are bestsellers. He does not think that Elimar is an authentic van Gogh. He draws on his finely grained knowledge of van Gogh’s life to argue that LMI’s evidence is “unconvincing.” Bailey notes that it’s not unusual for a newly discovered van Gogh to turn up; he hears, he says, of new ones “almost every week.”
I looked up the LMI Group International out of curiosity shading into suspicion. I, too, have heard from my share of people who have found Gauguins in their attics. And I had never heard of the LMI Group before now. But: it is a serious, and well-funded, company. It promises “Truth through data.” The website lists the company’s values:
Apparently LMI is unmoved by the cultural legacy of punctuation.
My husband, who spends a fair amount of time these days scraping me off the ceiling, suggested that this was all marketing speak and that perhaps, just perhaps, it did not represent the downfall of critical thinking. I’m not convinced.
It may, though, represent the next stage of the art market.
LMI’s report on the mystery painting recounts a three-pronged approach to authentication: connoisseurship, provenance, and scientific analysis. The tools they used are the same tools as I used in The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin – extensive research, contextualization, forensic examination – but they had a bigger budget and larger team. The report overwhelms with information. From studying van Gogh’s reading of Hans Christian Andersen to x-radiography imaging, it reveals hours and hours of expertise. It’s a compelling document. It sets out to make the painting’s authenticity appear obvious: “it is well-known” that van Gogh lost or gave away many of his works; this painting is similar to other works he painted; “a team of art historians, literary historians, provenance experts, and materials scientists” have spent four years studying it and concluded that it is authentic.
The Van Gogh Museum responded to this barrage of expertise with a brief statement:
“We have considered the new information mentioned in the LMI's Elimar report. Based on our previous opinion on the painting in 2019, we maintain our view that this is not an authentic painting by Vincent van Gogh.”
Which is it, real or fake? One way to test the report’s argument would be to put the painting up for auction. Will wealthy collectors bid on it as a previously unknown van Gogh, or as a late nineteenth century oil painting of uncertain origin? The difference between $50,000,000 and $50 is more than decimal places. It could tell us what, and who, we trust to determine authenticity.
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