Summer 2000The So-Called van Goghs

Eight years ago, when Vincent van Gogh's Garden at Auvers went up for auction in Paris, the late-period work—painted just weeks before the artist's suicide in July 1890—was valued at more than 200 million francs, nearly $30 million. Given the buoyant international market for van Goghs at the time, it was not an unrealistic estimate. But the French government had removed the work from international bidding by declaring it a monument historique—the first time a painting had ever received this designation—and forbade its export from the country. Hobbled by the cultural embargo, the painting's market value collapsed. It was purchased by the French banker Jean-Marc Vernes for 55 million francs, a quarter of the anticipated price. In response, the original owner, Jacques Walter, took the French government to court and collected 145 million francs in damages, nearly double the annual acquisition budget for the entire French museum system.

Following Vernes's death, in April 1996, his widow decided to sell the painting, but once again, complications developed. Three months before the auction, reports appeared in the French media suggesting that Garden at Auvers was a fake. Aside from its stylistic inconsistencies, it was noted that the canvas had once belonged to Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, a turn-of-the-century painter and art collector known to have forged works by Cézanne and possibly van Gogh. The provenance prepared for the auction failed to mention Schuffenecker as a previous owner. In response to these allegations, several prominent van Gogh authorities, including Louis van Tilborgh, curator of paintings and sculpture at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, publicly attested to the work's authenticity. A laboratory of the French National Museums, which conducted a technical analysis, also declared the work authentic. Nevertheless, when the bidding opened on December 10, 1996, Garden at Auvers failed to find a buyer. The canvas was, in auction-house parlance, brûlé—"burned."

Subsequently, Vernes's heirs sued the auctioneer of the 1992 sale, Jean-Claude Binoche, accusing him of concealing the painting's suspect provenance. Last month a Paris court rejected the Vernes claim, upholding the validity of the sale. Expressing little surprise at the decision, Binoche noted that "every expert in the world," as well as the laboratories of the French National Museums, had confirmed the work's authenticity.

In the last decade, according to an ARTnews survey of scholars, museum curators, and art dealers in Europe and the United States, suspicions about fake van Goghs have tainted some of the most expensive paintings in the world, including the Yasuda Sunflowers, purchased in 1987 by the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company of Japan for $39.9 million, at the time the highest sum ever paid for a work of art. Jan Hulsker, who compiled the most recent catalogue raisonné of van Gogh's works, questions the date and in some cases the authenticity of no fewer than 45 van Goghs. In his 1996 catalogue, Hulsker said it would be a "miracle" if a number of "so-called Van Goghs" had not found their way into the oeuvre in the early part of the 20th century. "It is a well-known fact that for instance in the Auvers period," Hulsker writes, "the number of paintings attributed to Van Gogh far exceeds the amount of work he could have done in the seventy days he stayed there before his death."

Though the number of possible fakes, based on the catalogues of Hulsker and of J.-B. de la Faille, has been estimated as high as 100, Johannes van der Wolk, curator of the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, home to one of the world's most extensive van Gogh collections, places the total even higher. "I would not be surprised if the number would grow in the future to some 200," he says, noting that the current state of research on van Gogh is uncoordinated and incomplete. "Only serious research can produce a number that is based on good arguments." Furthermore, adds van der Wolk, if one counts alleged van Goghs not included in the major catalogues—works primarily in private collections—one would need to add several hundred more potential fakes to this list. Given that Hulsker's catalogue lists only 2,125 works by the artist, there are an exceptional number of possible forgeries and misattributions.

The growing concern about van Gogh fakes has spawned a cottage industry of van Gogh authenticators. They engage in public debates in national newspapers, make documentary films, produce highly detailed technical analyses, and regularly confront museum curators and auction houses with their findings. Some of these individuals are world-renowned authorities. Hulsker is an expert on van Gogh's correspondence and has written the most reliable van Gogh catalogue raisonné for dating the works. Roland Dorn is a prolific German scholar living in Zurich who advises the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam ("Whenever I have a question or doubt about something," says curator van Tilborgh, "I simply call him on the phone"). Walter Feilchenfeldt, the son of the second owner of the legendary Cassirer Gallery in Berlin who exposed the notorious van Gogh forger Otto Wacker in the 1930s, is a Zurich-based art dealer who regularly provides expert opinion to museums and auction houses. Feilchenfeldt's possession of the Cassirer archives, which he inherited from his father, gives him unparalleled access to primary-source information on the provenance of many van Gogh works. Ronald Pickvance is a scholar who curated two important exhibitions at New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art on van Gogh's years in Arles and in Saint-Rémy and Auvers.

Alongside this phalanx of scholars is a cadre of individuals who bring more passion than formal training to the field. Antonio de Robertis, a Milan-based van Gogh enthusiast who won a lot of money on an Italian game show—he chose the artist as his subject—has invested his windfall in van Gogh research. It is Benoit Landais, however, the son of a former director of the French National Museums, who has emerged as the enfant terrible of this group. Landais, who has no formal training in art history, has spent the last decade researching and writing on van Gogh fakes. Working from his home outside Amsterdam, and drawing extensively on the archives of the Van Gogh Museum, Landais has repeatedly unsettled museums and auction houses with his exposés of van Gogh pictures he thinks are forgeries. In his book L'Affaire Gachet, Landais asserts that the Portrait of Dr. Gachet in the Musée d'Orsay in Paris is a fake. He has also identified numerous works in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, as well as in the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller Museum, as potential forgeries. Some scholars consider Landais an amateur whose greatest skill is his ability to manipulate the media; others, including Hulsker, have come to regard him as a fresh and important new force in van Gogh scholarship.

Van Tilborgh considers this intense scrutiny of van Gogh's oeuvre by experts and amateurs alike a "healthy" exercise. "By researching the paintings in such detail," he says, "we are gaining a much deeper understanding of van Gogh's work as a whole."

Collectively, the community of experts and amateur art sleuths has brought scores of van Goghs into question. In some cases, no one seems to agree on which are the originals and which the fakes. An example is the controversy surrounding L'Arlésienne, painted in 1888, while van Gogh was living in Arles. It is known that he made one original, which is thought to be in the Musée d'Orsay, and it has traditionally been assumed that he made a copy, which he gave to Madame Ginoux, the woman who sat for the portrait. This copy is in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Noting that van Gogh mentioned only one version of the painting in his letters, Landais charges that the one in the Metropolitan is a forgery. The late Mark Roskill, a van Gogh scholar formerly at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, also claimed that one of the versions was a fake, but he thought it was the Musée d'Orsay's. Hulsker originally argued that both versions were authentic, but after considering the evidence presented by Landais, he changed his mind and became convinced that the Metropolitan's painting is a fake.

Both museums—and most scholars—insist that both versions are authentic. Metropolitan curator Susan Alyson Stein, who cocurated the exhibition "Cézanne to van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet," says that Landais may have been misled by a mistake in de la Faille's 1928 catalogue raisonné. De la Faille traces the Met's version back to Schuffenecker, but, Stein says, it is the Musée d'Orsay's picture that belonged to Schuffenecker. Roland Dorn believes that the earlier version of the picture is in the Musée d'Orsay and van Gogh's copy in the Metropolitan. "One has to make the distinction between a first version, which is the one done in three quarters of an hour, and a second version, which is certainly a more elaborated, a more complete painting," he says.

Observing that some of the fiercer debates surrounding works by van Gogh can assume the tenor of "religious wars," Douglas Druick, Searle Curator of European Paintings at the Art Institute of Chicago, says, "Van Gogh is almost a religion, and there are a lot of high priests."

In response to these burgeoning doubts, many museums have either withdrawn suspect van Goghs from public view or have indicated their questionable authenticity. The Van Gogh Museum has removed four works from exhibition and has subjected its entire paintings collection to radiography tests. After intensive analysis, the Austrian Gallery Belvedere in Vienna has declared a van Gogh portrait acquired in 1964 a fake. The Detroit Institute of Arts has sent a suspected forgery to Amsterdam for stylistic analysis. "There is more public interest in van Gogh fakes than there is in the works he really painted," observes Hulsker.

The interest in van Gogh forgeries is hardly new. In 1930, just two years after J.-B. de la Faille published the first catalogue raisonné of the artist's works—it included more than 2,000 paintings, drawings, and sketches—he felt compelled to issue a second work, Les Faux van Gogh. This sequel was provoked by the trial of Otto Wacker, a Berlin art dealer who was fined and sentenced to 19 months in prison for forging van Gogh canvases, 33 of which de la Faille had listed as original in his 1928 catalogue. In the 173-page sequel, he not only corrected errors that had appeared in his first catalogue, but also added a list of 143 known fakes. De la Faille died in 1959, but a committee established by the Dutch state updated his catalogue in 1970, adding an additional 49 suspects to the list of forged paintings and drawings. "Der tote Vincent malt und malt," the German satirist Alfred Kerr wrote at the height of the Wacker scandal. "The dead Vincent keeps painting and painting."

Van Gogh (1853–90) is partly responsible for creating the current confusion surrounding his oeuvre. Though he painted for less than a decade, from the age of 29 until his suicide at age 37, he experimented with a diverse range of styles, dabbling in traditional Flemish painting, Impressionism, and pointillism; copying works by other artists, ranging from paintings by Rembrandt and Jean-François Millet to Japanese prints; and eventually pioneering his own distinctive, emotion-laden portraits and landscapes. Van Gogh would do one version of a painting and, if he didn't like it, make another version. Occasionally, he would make a copy of a portrait as a gift for the model. He sometimes paid for services with paintings or gave them away to friends.

The approximately 200 works ascribed to van Gogh during his two years in Paris, from February 1886 to February 1888, have been especially susceptible to charges of misattribution or forgery. According to Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, professor of fine arts at the University of Toronto, who has established herself as an expert on van Gogh's Paris years and has done extensive research on early van Gogh collectors, not only did the artist experiment with styles, but he also began making copies of his own works during this period. Further, since he was living with his brother, Theo, an art dealer, there is little personal correspondence or other documentary evidence to confirm a work's authenticity. Though Welsh-Ovcharov believes that amateurs have exaggerated the number of fakes, she does agree that works from the Paris period, especially still lifes, can be problematic. While she insists that some works were introduced into van Gogh's oeuvre through the "well-meaning ignorance" rather than the "criminal intent" of early collectors and dealers, she does concede that the complexity of van Gogh's Paris years—his experimentation combined with the dearth of documentation—has presented "a temptation for a dealer to push a few more in."

It is much easier to document van Gogh's work during his Dutch years, before 1886, and after the spring of 1888, when he moved to southern France. In exchange for a regular stipend and a consistent supply of canvases and paints, Vincent assigned to Theo complete rights to his works. They made this agreement in 1881, and the artist regularly wrote to his brother, telling him of his progress and often providing detailed descriptions of individual paintings. "In my picture The Night Café I have tried to express the idea that the café is a place where one can ruin oneself, go mad or commit a crime," he wrote in September 1888. "So I have tried to express, as it were, the powers of darkness in a low public place, by soft Louis XV green and malachite, contrasting with yellow-green and harsh blue-greens, and all this in an atmosphere like a devil's furnace, of pale sulphur."

In other letters, he provided exact inventories of sketches, drawings, and paintings he was sending to Theo. But even these inventories can be confounding for scholars; sometimes he fails to mention works that scholars know are authentic. For example, there is no reference in his letters to his famous Wheatfield with Crows, a work of undisputed authenticity. At other times, van Gogh refers to works that have not been found, and sometimes he provides vague or contradictory information that is subject to various interpretations. In terms of authentification, Welsh-Ovcharov calls the van Gogh letters a "double-edged sword."

Adding to van Gogh's stylistic inconsistencies are variations in the quality of his works. While he produced masterpieces, he also painted quick studies and replicas of middling quality. This situation, together with the inconsistencies in his correspondence, created openings for forgers to copy some of his masterpieces. At the same time, doubt was cast on some of his lesser efforts. Given the artist's high public profile and the high market value of his work, you have the makings of a curatorial nightmare. "It is easy to say something is a fake; it is hard to prove it is not," says Anne Distel, chief curator at the Musée d'Orsay. "When the subject is van Gogh, it is even more complicated."

It is neither fair nor accurate to identify every "faux van Gogh" as a fake. Some works are indeed forgeries, works created with the intent to deceive. Some, however, are merely imitations, produced by van Gogh followers who were inspired by him and adopted his style or even copied his works, with the intent of paying homage to or learning from him. And then there are the misattributions, works mistakenly thought to have been created by van Gogh and unintentionally absorbed into the body of his work.

Particularly problematic are several paintings found in Theo's Paris apartment and assumed to be original van Goghs. Theo died less than a year after Vincent, leaving his young widow, Johanna van Gogh–Bonger, to deal with the nearly 400 oil paintings, 1,300 drawings, and hundreds of letters he had meticulously tied in bundles. Until recently, it was assumed that all the paintings in the apartment were by van Gogh, but five of those works, now in the Van Gogh Museum, have been identified as misattributions. "The work that is currently being done for the collection catalogue of van Gogh's paintings will shed more light on these—and possibly other—works that might have been painted by other artists," says Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections at the Van Gogh Museum.

What makes it especially difficult to detect many "faux van Goghs" is that some of these works were painted during the artist's lifetime, or immediately following his death, and thus entered the market simultaneously with many originals. The general assumption that van Gogh's genius wasn't recognized until at least 15 years after his death isn't true. In fact, after Vincent's suicide, in 1890, Theo was deluged with letters of condolence from the likes of Monet, Seurat, Pissarro, Gauguin, Armand Guillaumin, Paul Signac, and Toulouse-Lautrec. "Un grand artiste est mort," the Belgian artist Eugène Boch wrote. "A great artist is dead." Within a decade, collectors and the general public began to appreciate van Gogh. In 1901 Johanna van Gogh–Bonger lent several of Vincent's paintings for an exhibition in Paris, the first major showing of his works. Word spread quickly.

According to an early biographer, Benno Stokvis, by the early 1900s "a veritable van Gogh rage" had broken out in the Dutch province of Brabant, where van Gogh first devoted himself to painting. "People everywhere thought they had discovered new works by the painter," Stokvis wrote. In Breda, where the artist had rented a studio in the house of the Catholic sexton between 1884 and 1885, he left a voluminous collection of early work. After his death, the collection of oils, watercolors, and sketches was packed into wooden crates and entrusted to a local carpenter named Schauder. He eventually sold them to two brothers named Couvreur, who ran a secondhand shop. They reportedly paid the equivalent of a dollar for the whole lot. Immediately, 100 drawings were torn up and thrown away; some larger canvases were sold to a rag shop or sent to a processing plant at Tilburg to be destroyed. The wife of one of the Couvreur brothers, a prudish woman, had all the drawings of nudes destroyed as well. After this purge, the remaining works—60 paintings on stretchers, 150 loose canvases, two portfolios with approximately 90 pen drawings, and between 100 and 200 crayon drawings—were piled onto a pushcart and taken to a local flea market, where they were sold according to size and "prettiness" for a penny or two each.

When van Gogh began receiving attention in the Dutch press, the Couvreur brothers went from house to house trying to buy back his works. They found that one woman had nailed 13 canvases to the walls of her summer home to block the holes. They bought these weather-damaged works for 100 guilders and passed them on to a dealer for 300 guilders. A few weeks later, the dealer resold a single canvas at auction for 4,000 guilders.

The brisk commerce in early van Goghs quickly brought a flood of "faux van Goghs" onto the Dutch market. "I may state that in this connection I heard the name of a rather well known painter whose work strongly resembled Vincent's paintings in this period," Stokvis recalled, following a visit to Brabant in the early 1920s, "that some dealers snapped up everything he produced, obliterated his signature without his knowledge, or altered it, and presented the pictures to the world in this way." For their part, the Couvreur brothers reportedly possessed a distinctive form of connoisseurship: they could always detect a fake van Gogh by its odor, insisting that the "majority of Vincent's works were characterized by a peculiar smell."

Even today, alleged van Gogh works still surface in Brabant. In 1994 a painting that had turned up at a flea market in Breda was bought at a local auction by a Dutch art dealer, Bouwe Jans, for 9,000 guilders (about $4,000). "Too much for a not van Gogh perhaps, but a pittance for a genuine one," says Jans. "But I liked the painting and considered it to be worth the price, whoever was the author." Since then, Jans has attempted to authenticate the work, Two Diggers in the Afternoon Sun, submitting it for technical and chemical analysis and presenting the findings to van Gogh experts. Hulsker and Landais have declared the work authentic, but curators at the Van Gogh Museum and the Kröller-Müller, as well as Roland Dorn, have refused to recognize it as a van Gogh.

Unlike the early paintings, which were crammed into attics or scattered across the Dutch countryside, most of van Gogh's works from Arles and Saint-Rémy, his most productive and valuable period, were in Theo's hands when Vincent left the South of France.

On May 20, 1890, he arrived in Auvers-sur-Oise and immediately called on Paul Gachet, a widowed physician who had been a friend of such Impressionist artists as Renoir, Monet, Guillaumin, and Cézanne. On Pissarro's recommendation, van Gogh moved to Gachet's house in Auvers after his release from the asylum in Saint-Rémy.

In Gachet, van Gogh discovered a man even more psychologically unstable than himself. "I have seen Dr. Gachet, who gives me the impression of being rather eccentric," Vincent wrote Theo, "but his experience as a doctor must keep him balanced enough to combat the nervous trouble from which he certainly seems to me to be suffering at least as seriously as I am."

Van Gogh and Gachet became fast friends. The artist painted in the Gachet garden, took meals with the family, and spent time with the doctor's 16-year-old son, Paul, and his 21-year-old daughter, Marguerite. Gachet had a large collection of paintings and many sketches by artist friends, including Cézanne's A Modern Olympia. As a gesture of appreciation to Gachet, who had attended to van Gogh in his final hours and even sketched the dead artist, Theo let Gachet have a number of works by his brother: at least 10 and possibly as many as 23, depending on the source. All of these were eventually inherited by his son, Paul, who, between 1949 and 1954, donated much of the family collection to French museums.

The eccentric behavior of the reclusive Gachet fils, coupled with the fact that, like his father, he was an aspiring painter, raised questions about the authenticity of a number of the works. The Musée d'Orsay's recent exhibition "Cézanne to van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet" was intended, in part, to rehabilitate the Gachet image, which has been tarnished, according to Anne Distel, by unkind and biased critics. She points out that the senior Gachet assembled a remarkable collection of Impressionist art and that the son preserved the collection and ultimately donated much of it to the French state.

Some scholars, however, concur that the Gachets forged some of the works in the collection, but they do not agree on which ones or on the motivation. Walter Feilchenfeldt claims that while some of the Cézannes are clearly forgeries, the van Goghs are all original, though he does note that there are two still lifes from the Paris period "where it would be helpful to know how and from whom Dr. Gachet acquired them." In his book on the Gachets, Landais claims that both father and son, driven by "the dragons of vanity and jealousy," forged a number of van Goghs, not least among them the Portrait of Dr. Gachet in the Musée d'Orsay. The French scholar Robert Denise claims that Gachet imitated the works out of admiration.

Without doubt, the most controversial van Gogh is the painting known as the Yasuda Sunflowers, one of three more-or-less identical studies of 14 sunflowers in a vase. One version is in the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam; a second is in the National Gallery in London. The third version, which had been on loan to the National Gallery, was put up for auction at Christie's London in 1987 and purchased by the Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Company for $39.9 million. The painting is displayed behind glass in the entrance to the company's Tokyo headquarters.

All of the sunflower paintings are from a series van Gogh painted in 1888 and 1889 to decorate the Yellow House in Arles, where he hoped to establish a studio with Paul Gauguin. In a letter to Theo, he described the planned series as "a symphony in blue and yellow." Others from the group are in the Neue Pinakothek in Munich and the Philadelphia Museum of Art.

As with the Musée d'Orsay's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, the Yasuda Sunflowers has raised suspicions not only because the painting is not mentioned in van Gogh's letters or in an inventory of his paintings that was drawn up shortly after his death, but also because its provenance can be traced back to Schuffenecker. Known to his friends as "le bon Schuff," Schuffenecker was a painter who met Gauguin when they were both working in the stock market in Paris; Gauguin is reported to have had an affair with Schuffenecker's wife. Like Gauguin, Schuffenecker abandoned the money trade and devoted himself to art. He completed between 800 and 900 drawings, pastels, and oils, as well as a few lithographs, and also became an early collector of van Gogh and other painters. Following a divorce settlement, Schuffenecker's collection was transferred to his brother Amédée, a wine and cider merchant who became involved in the art and antiques market. In 1906 both brothers paid a visit to Johanna van Gogh–Bonger to purchase more van Goghs. Emile is known to have made copies or studies of van Gogh works. The Van Gogh Museum has a Schuffenecker copy, in pastel, of Vincent's legendary Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear. Schuffenecker also made a sketch of L'Arlésienne, which was recently discovered in the Frick Art Reference Library in New York. When Amédée died, in 1936, a neighbor observed that his collection included several "newly made van Goghs."

In the spring of 1900, Theo's widow, Johanna, loaned eight van Gogh paintings, including a canvas with 14 sunflowers, to the art dealer and critic Julien Leclercq, who wanted to display them in his Paris apartment during the Exposition Universelle. Because the picture needed restoration, Leclercq decided to have it touched up. A neighbor and friend of Leclercq, the painter Judith Gerard, notes in her memoirs that he "called in Schuffenecker, who taught drawing in one of the city's schools and came each day, in return for a small payment, armed with a large box of colours to cover up the holes and glue back flakes of paint." Gerard observes that Schuffenecker became so enthusiastic about his work that he decided to "improve" on several other van Goghs that he felt were unfinished.

In 1901 Schuffenecker helped Leclercq organize a van Gogh exhibition, assembling 71 works for the Bernheim-Jeune Gallery in Paris. It was here that van Gogh first came to broad public attention, establishing a reputation that has only grown in subsequent decades. After the Bernheim-Jeune exhibition, the sunflower painting passed through a series of owners, including the art dealer Eugène Druet, the Berlin collector Paul von Mendelssohn-Bartholdy, and the heirs of Helen G. Beatty, widow of the English collector Chester Beatty, who had loaned it to the National Gallery. For years it had been displayed there beside another version of the Sunflowers—of undisputed provenance—without any doubts arising about its authenticity. It was only after the painting was sold that questions arose.

At the time, little was known publicly about Schuffenecker's reputation, and, in fact, Christie's boasted of the Schuffenecker label on the frame as proof of the painting's authenticity. After a lively round of bidding, Yasuda acquired the painting. Immediately after the hammer fell, the auctioneer was asked, "Is there any doubt about its authenticity?" "What a time to ask," he responded with a smile, before adding, "No, I don't think there is."

But some thought otherwise. Some of the first public doubts about the authenticity of the Yasuda Sunflowers were raised by the Milan enthusiast Antonio de Robertis, who noted not only stylistic inconsistencies in the painting but also the fact that van Gogh had mentioned his sunflower series 27 times in his correspondence without ever once referring to the Yasuda version. In October 1997 the BBC broadcast an exposé, produced by Third Eye Productions, in which journalist Geraldine Norman, who had also written about the controversy, presented what she called "overwhelming" evidence that the Yasuda Sunflowers was a fake.

In the program, Alain Tarica, a well-known Paris art dealer, compares full-size reproductions of the London, Amsterdam, and Yasuda versions. Tarica first notes the consistencies between the London original, which van Gogh is known to have painted in August 1888, and the Amsterdam copy, which he described in a letter as "absolutely equivalent and similar" to the original. In contrast, Tarica lists a number of stylistic flaws in the Yasuda version that are alien to van Gogh's carefully rendered depictions of flowers. A stem in the painting's lower left-hand side penetrates a leaf rather than being attached to it; the stem of one flower is bent in an obvious attempt to make it balance between two other flowers; and the petals of one are not attached to the center portion of the flower. Tarica argues that the forger could not handle the thick impasto with the same skill as van Gogh.

In response to these public challenges, several eminent scholars resolutely defend the authenticity of the Yasuda Sunflowers. "It is just nonsense to try and suggest that Schuffenecker painted the Japanese version, absolute nonsense," says Ronald Pickvance, who calls the persistent media attention "nauseating." Walter Feilchenfeldt, who examined the Yasuda Sunflowers in Tokyo last spring, expresses complete satisfaction with its authenticity. "It is probably the weakest of the five paintings," he says, "but it is genuine." Feilchenfeldt, who has studied Schuffenecker copies, also argues that Schuffenecker lacked the artistic skill to produce a convincing van Gogh forgery.

Jill-Elyse Grossvogel, who has curated several Schuffenecker exhibitions and written extensively about him, has a better opinion of his talents as a forger. In her Schuffenecker catalogue raisonné, which was published this spring by Alan Wofsy Fine Arts, Grossvogel claims, "We firmly believe that reluctance to view Claude-Emile Schuffenecker as the author of forgeries, copies or composites, which were intentionally sold under Vincent's name, obstructed and continues to obstruct a clear vision of the situation." While Grossvogel says she has yet to produce a "smoking gun" to prove which van Gogh works are Schuffenecker fakes, she believes that it wouldn't be surprising—given his talent as a painter, his access to van Gogh's works, and the fact that the provenance of many van Gogh works begins with Schuffenecker—if as many as half of the 60 so-called van Goghs that passed through Schuffenecker's hands were forgeries. As for the Yasuda Sunflowers, Grossvogel states categorically, "I see no way that they can be Vincent's."

"Schuffenecker's own paintings revealed sufficient skill in the styles of Monet, Pissarro, Seurat, Fantin-Latour, and, surprisingly, Cézanne, to impress the viewer by sheer range of technique," insists Grossvogel. "He won prizes for academic drawing talent at an early age, and the production of copies, or 'versions,' of Vincent's paintings was accomplished enough to persuade his brother Amédée, as well as Julien Leclercq, Count Antoine de La Rochefoucauld [an artist, collector, and patron], Eugène Druet, and perhaps Cassirer and Fayet [an important collector], that they could be sold as authentic van Goghs. In fact, some of these works seem to have deceived museum directors, auction houses, and experts for the last 100 years."

The Metropolitan's Susan Alyson Stein cautions that before we can pass judgment on Schuffenecker, we must "take a look at precisely what he owned and when he acquired it and from whom." Stein believes that he bought at least a dozen works from Johanna van Gogh–Bonger. "To say that a provenance starts with Schuffenecker is very misleading," Stein says. "It may start with him only because the research is incomplete. The works haven't been traced definitively to Johanna, but if you look at the correspondence and the sales books, there are a sizable number of works Schuffenecker owned, and whether they can be named or distinguished from works that may or may not be by Vincent—that needs to be looked at further. But I don't think you can bring your suspicions and ideas about personalities to the table without subjecting them to factual rigor."

Roland Dorn, who has had an opportunity to study all three paintings, maintains, like Feilchenfeldt, that the Yasuda Sunflowers is authentic. In the most recent issue of the Van Gogh Museum's Journal, Dorn discounts the fact that van Gogh never described the Yasuda Sunflowers in his correspondence. Instead, Dorn notes, van Gogh wrote to Theo expressing his intention to paint a half dozen sunflower still lifes, and another letter to his friend Emile Bernard placing the number of planned canvases at a dozen. Further, Dorn observes that there were two brief periods in early 1890 when scholars know van Gogh was busy painting but for which there is no record and no correspondence relating to what he produced. Dorn believes that the Yasuda Sunflowers was painted during one of these periods and that a close study of the canvas will confirm his assertion that it is authentic.

"Sooner or later, when the opportunity arises for a thorough technical examination," Dorn claimed in the Journal article, "it will become clear that the support of the Yasuda Sunflowers is cut from the same 20 metres of burlap Gauguin purchased soon after arriving in Arles, and which he generously shared with Vincent." Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov, who has seen radiographs of the Yasuda Sunflowers, says that the weave of the burlap appears to be consistent with the burlaps from other paintings made by van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles.

While Welsh-Ovcharov disagrees with Dorn on some specific points of his argument, she, too, is completely convinced of the authenticity of the Yasuda Sunflowers, based on both her archival research and her study of the painting itself. Citing correspondence between Schuffenecker and Johanna van Gogh–Bonger, as well as sales records from the account books of the Paris art dealer Ambroise Vollard, she insists that there can be no doubt about the painting's authenticity. In a further twist in the Sunflowers saga, Welsh-Ovcharov claims that the Philadelphia Sunflowers originally belonged to Gauguin, not Johanna van Gogh–Bonger, as is generally believed. According to Welsh-Ovcharov, van Gogh gave the painting to Gauguin as a gift, just as he had given Gauguin two earlier paintings of sunflowers from his Paris period. When Gauguin left for Tahiti, all three sunflower paintings were consigned to Vollard, who then put them on the market.

Like Feilchenfeldt, Welsh-Ovcharov concedes that the Yasuda Sunflowers does not appear as "strong" as other van Goghs, but she attributes this to subsequent owners who "mucked it up" with restoration work. "That there has been restoration, there is no doubt," she says. "The side portions of the canvas have been enlarged; in other words, the tucked-in parts of the jute at one point became part of the painting, and they have been retouched." These changes, she says, have weakened the painting both "physically and stylistically."

In May 1998, amid rampant media speculation about the authenticity of the Yasuda Sunflowers, John Leighton, a curator at the National Gallery in London—he has since become director of the Van Gogh Museum—organized a symposium on van Gogh. Although it was known informally as the "sunflower symposium," a debate about the Yasuda Sunflowers was reserved for a closing panel discussion, which included Feilchenfeldt, Welsh-Ovcharov, Tilborgh, and Landais. Landais claimed that it lasted only 20 minutes. The debate was postponed until the upcoming joint exhibition on van Gogh and Gauguin.

At the time, plans for this show were already being made by the Art Institute of Chicago and the Van Gogh Museum. Although it was intended to consider the relationship between the two artists—its title is "Van Gogh and Gauguin: The 'Studio of the South'"—an additional motive was to provide a neutral setting for exploring the sunflower controversy. The museums concede as much. "Recently van Gogh's paintings of sunflowers have been the subject of much attention," the initial press release stated. "The exhibition will focus on the sunflower pictures by both artists in an effort to clarify the role and significance of these works in their respective oeuvres." The show will open in Chicago in September 2001 and move to Amsterdam in February 2002.

Douglas Druick, the Chicago curator responsible for the exhibition, notes that while scholars have traditionally sought to understand "van Gogh within van Gogh," the 2001 exhibition will consider the sunflowers in the context not only of van Gogh's work but also of his relationship with Gauguin. "The big series pictures—the Sunflowers, the Berceuses, and the Arlésiennes—are all intimately connected to the artist's relationship with Gauguin," observes Druick, "and so that is also what we are trying to bring out." This approach may shed important light on the Yasuda Sunflowers in particular. "If the Yasuda picture is on the jute that van Gogh bought together with Gauguin, what do we make of that?" Druick asks. "In other words, people have said, 'It's on jute, and the other Sunflowers aren't on jute.' But one can say, 'Jute is associated with Gauguin, and he was painting one of them for Gauguin, so would he have chosen the jute that was symbolic of their joint enterprise, which they bought days after Gauguin's arrival?'"

The organizers hope to reassemble many of the works van Gogh and Gauguin created in the Yellow House in Arles. Since they painted standing side by side, Druick hopes to find "dialogue" and "patterns" between their pictures. The Van Gogh Museum is in discussion with all the Sunflowers owners. "We would like to have as many versions of the Sunflowers as is humanly possible," says Druick, who will not comment specifically on which museums or individuals are being approached. Though some paintings, like the London Sunflowers, are considered too fragile to travel, the organizers hope that exceptions will be made for this exhibition.

The Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo is home not only to one of the largest collections of van Gogh originals, but also to an extensive collection of "faux van Goghs." In an air-conditioned vault in the basement of the museum, the curators have assembled a collection of forgeries, imitations, and misattributions, gleaned from the permanent collection over the last two decades. "When I came here in 1984," says curator Johannes van der Wolk, "I spotted a couple of paintings which I had doubted before, that I did not feel at ease with." Van der Wolk asked himself why he felt so uncomfortable with these particular works and wondered if he should remove them. In the course of the last 15 years, he has removed "five to ten works," based on a gut instinct. "My stomach tells me this can't be a van Gogh." However, van der Wolk is hesitant to label a work a fake: In the museum database such works are identified as "Anonymous. Formerly ascribed to Vincent van Gogh."

The only work van der Wolk describes as an outright fake is a seascape, The Sea at Saintes-Maries, acquired by Mrs. Kröller-Müller for her collection in the late 1920s from the Berlin art dealer Otto Wacker, shortly before Wacker was arrested and imprisoned for forging dozens of van Gogh paintings. Although there were doubts about the picture at the time, Mrs. Kröller-Müller insisted that it was authentic, and de la Faille even included it in his catalogue, though he later declared it a fake. Around 1930, in an attempt to demonstrate the painting's authenticity, a police investigator from Utrecht, C. M. Garnier, claimed to have identified a fingerprint on the painting that matched those found on several genuine van Goghs. Though this same fingerprint has been detected on another Kröller-Müller holding, Interior of a Restaurant, painted by van Gogh in the summer of 1887, the museum catalogue identifies The Sea at Saintes-Maries as a forgery, noting that it has "the same crisp quality, probably produced by quick drying mediums," which de la Faille signaled as typical of all the Wacker fakes.

But van der Wolk withholds categorical decisions on other questionable works in his collection and, like many museum directors, defers judgment on contested works in private collections or other museums. In determining the authenticity of a painting, curators seek a complex of factors and data. There is the stylistic approach, often referred to as connoisseurship—a painting either looks like a van Gogh or it does not. Then there is technical analysis, ranging from radiography and spectrography to the chemical composition of pigments and the distinctive qualities of the canvas. And finally, there is the pedigree approach, tracing the provenance of a work, not only through its previous owners—ideally, all the way back to the Bonger collection—but also as revealed through van Gogh's extensive correspondence.

Authenticating van Gogh's drawings is similar to but not as complex as authenticating paintings. "It is not possible, as it is with paintings, to take samples and analyze chemically the drawing material," says Marije Vellekoop, curator of prints and drawings at the Van Gogh Museum. "Another difference is the fact that you can say of a drawing, what you see is what is there. It is not, like in paintings, that there are several layers of paint, a ground layer, and usually a covered support—that is, a canvas. In drawings there are one or more drawing materials, which in most cases you can identify by looking closely, sometimes with the aid of a microscope." Otherwise, curators rely, as with the authentication of paintings, on connoisseurship and provenance. Of the approximately 250 works submitted to the Van Gogh Museum for authentication in 1999, notes Vellekoop, only 10 percent were drawings.

According to van der Wolk, specialists need to create a matrix of information that confirms the authenticity of a work, whether it is a painting or a drawing. This would include both technical and documentary material. "Until the moment that we have all the facts and data updated to the present requirements, it is difficult to reach final conclusions," he says. Van der Wolk estimates that it will take at least two decades of coordinated research by leading museums and scholars to create a reliable database of information on the artist's work. "At present, it is a mess," he says.

In specific instances, however, museums are able to bring an impressive array of expertise to bear on a single work of art. Last year the Van Gogh Museum wielded its full curatorial might to quash assertions that The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital in Autumn was a forgery. The museum claims that the work is an authentic van Gogh copy of the original painting, which is currently at the Folkwang Museum in Essen. But while the Essen version can be traced back to the Bonger collection, and is thus impeccable in its provenance, the Amsterdam version was not seen in public until 1954, when Paul Gachet fils donated the work to the Van Gogh Foundation. Although de la Faille lists the painting in his 1928 catalogue, van Gogh's nephew, Vincent, who was already aware that the Gachet collection might contain suspect works, dismissed the painting as a fake, noting that his uncle made reference to only one version of the painting in his letters.

"Because the engineer thought it was a fake, he never allowed it to be exhibited," says curator Louis van Tilborgh of van Gogh's nephew. "Only after he died did we show it." Nevertheless, doubts have persisted. Jan Hulsker placed a question mark beside the painting in his 1996 catalogue raisonné, and Benoit Landais has maintained a withering barrage in the media, questioning various aspects of the painting, not least of which was how a van Gogh canvas painted in Saint-Rémy in the autumn of 1889 found its way north to the Gachet household in Auvers in the summer of 1891.

In response to the public critique, and parallel to the Gachet exhibition organized by Anne Distel and Susan Alyson Stein, the painting was subjected to a battery of sophisticated tests. It was determined that from a technical and chemical perspective The Garden of Saint Paul's Hospital in Autumn was completely consistent with other van Gogh works. The weave of the canvas was identical to that of others used by van Gogh in Saint-Rémy—an open asymmetrical weave with 12 by 17 threads per square centimeter—and differed from the canvases he had previously used in Arles. Further, the impasto surface on the painting showed the impression of a canvas that had been laid on top of it, and the back of the canvas revealed green and red paint fragments transferred from another canvas on which it had been laid, which was consistent with van Gogh's practice of stacking and rolling his paintings together for shipment.

Van Tilborgh saw additional corroborating evidence in the artist's correspondence. In a letter to Theo, van Gogh mentioned that he had painted two canvases simultaneously: "I am working on a rain effect and an evening effect with large pine trees." Observing that a weather report from October 31, 1889, indicated a downpour of 22 centimeters in Saint-Rémy, van Tilborgh argues that the first canvas was Rain, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, and the second was The Park at Saint-Rémy, in which puddles of water left from the storm are indicated with splashes of yellow paint, reflecting the "evening effect" of a setting sun.

Van Tilborgh believes that this second painting is now in Essen and that a copy made by van Gogh before early December is the one in Amsterdam. As evidence, he cites a letter from December 7, 1889, in which van Gogh mentions that he is sending Theo "l'étude de la maison & du parc dont il y a deux variantes"—a study of the house and park of which there are two versions. Van Tilborgh concludes, "Van Gogh uses the word 'variantes' always for pictures of exactly the same motif, and for that reason, it is logical to conclude that he refers here to the paintings now in Essen and Amsterdam."

The Musée d'Orsay has also launched an aggressive campaign to counter claims that some of its works may be forgeries. At the height of the 1998 controversy over Garden at Auvers, when the press, led by Landais, began raising questions about the Gachet collection, the Musée d'Orsay deliberated on an appropriate response. Initially, museum officials decided not to respond at all. "Someone comes along out of the blue and says, 'I don't like this painting of Dr. Gachet,' and 'I don't like his son,' and 'I think they were crooks and they made fakes and these fakes are in your museum,'" observes Anne Distel. "You can't respond every time someone criticizes a work of art."

With an increasing amount of misinformation appearing in public, the museum changed its mind. Distel was asked to organize an exhibition focusing on the Gachet family as art collectors and to address the issue of possible copies in their collection. "I wanted a simple, straightforward exhibition that presented the evidence we had," Distel says. Soon she heard from the Metropolitan in New York and the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam. Both museums were having similar problems and asked if they could show the exhibition as well. Says Distel, "When you mention the name van Gogh—and I don't mean this as a joke—you have the public's ear."

The exhibition, "Cézanne to van Gogh: The Collection of Dr. Gachet," included not only the key works by van Gogh and Cézanne from the Gachet collection but also known copies of these works. There were, in particular, a number of copies by Blanche Derousse, a Gachet acquaintance who intended them to serve not as forgeries but as accurate renderings of the originals. By placing copies given by Gachet to the Louvre beside the unquestionably authentic van Gogh originals, the exhibition allowed visitors to make their own judgments. Distel included tubes of paint and a palette, donated by Gachet, that had belonged to van Gogh. The Paris exhibition also presented the results of a detailed technical analysis of six van Goghs conducted by the Louvre laboratories. Though Jean-Pierre Mohen, who oversaw the tests, concedes that they were not "exhaustive," everything they found was consistent both technically and stylistically with van Gogh's work. "As scientists, they have to be cautious," says Distel. "They don't have a hundred percent answer to any question. Their job is to be prudent." Still, she adds, the lab reports provided no evidence suggesting that any of the van Gogh works in the museum's Gachet collection had been forged.

Nevertheless, Landais continues his assault on the Musée d'Orsay's Gachet collection. His current target is van Gogh's Two Children. This double portrait, thought to have been painted by van Gogh in June 1890, shows the daughters of the signalman at the railway crossing in Auvers, wearing blue dresses and white hats. When the painting was donated by Paul Gachet fils to the Louvre in 1954, it raised considerable suspicion because it is known that a version of the portrait—now in a private collection—was listed among the approximately 400 paintings in Theo's apartment, and because van Gogh makes no reference to a copy or an original of this work in his letters

For the exhibition, Distel and the technicians of the Louvre laboratory mustered an impressive array of historical and scientific information to confirm the authenticity of the Gachet version. As early as 1894, a painter had seen the work in the Gachet household, and in April 1900 the art critic Théodore Duret, by his own admission, offered Gachet 2,000 francs for this painting and another by van Gogh. The following year, Blanche Derousse made a watercolor copy of the work, as well as a drypoint version. Three years later, the critic and van Gogh collector Julius Meier-Graefe also saw the painting during his visit to the Gachets and accepted it as original.

Technical analysis further attests to the work's authenticity, according to a report released by the laboratory. When the painting was removed from its frame, the darker colors along the edges of the canvas suggested that the exposed areas had faded considerably. In comparing this discovery with a 1991 restoration report on the other version of the painting—the one from Theo's collection—it was determined that both works had experienced similar fading.

"As with the painting in the Musée d'Orsay, these seemed to be remnants of a faded red pigment that elsewhere had been exposed to sunlight," the report noted. Furthermore, a similar pattern of fading was found in the red pigments in The Church at Auvers, a work of unquestioned authenticity. "From the study of six van Goghs from the Gachet collection and the examination of the palette and tube of geranium lake paint used in Auvers," Jean-Paul Rioux, who conducted the chemical analysis, reported, "two types of organic red were identified in van Gogh's paintings from this time: an aluminum-and-tin carmine lake and an aluminum eosin lake mixed with lead." Despite the consistencies, Rioux noted that technical assessments alone, especially when based on a small sampling of works, could not provide definitive answers. "Laboratory studies do not claim in themselves to directly resolve problems of attribution, or to constitute irrefutable proof, but they can highlight technical characteristics shared by several works, and such similarities are worth considering."

In response, Landais claims that a comparison of the two versions of Two Children delivers definitive proof that the Gachet work is a fake. Beyond the technical information, which Landais insists supports the argument that the Gachet version is a forgery, he points in particular to the differences between the two unframed canvases. When the Bonger version—from Theo's collection—was placed on a stretcher, half-inch-wide strips on the right and left sides of the painted canvas were covered by the frame. Landais finds it suspicious that the Gachet version represents only those portions of the Bonger version that are visible to the eye. "If van Gogh had made a copy of this work, he would have done so immediately after he had completed the double portrait, and certainly before it was framed," observes Landais. "It is obvious that Gachet copied the work only after it was framed and did not even know he was missing part of the original." Landais asserts that Gachet based his version on a black-and-white photograph, which still exists, and shows the identical "reduced view" of the d'Orsay version.

For her part, Distel says she is "comfortable" with the assertion that all the van Goghs in the Musée d'Orsay collection are genuine. Echoing a sentiment expressed by numerous curators and directors, Distel says, "We are not like the art market, where you have financial concerns. We have lots of beautiful paintings. If we did not think a painting was genuine, we would say so."

Van der Wolk agrees. "The market needs answers. The need for conclusions is strong," he says. "From a scholarly point of view, we should be reluctant to give conclusions but should concentrate on data sets to reach conclusions." While a museum has the luxury of identifying a suspect painting as a potential fake, even removing it from the collection and leaving it in a basement vault for years, possibly decades, until enough information has been assembled to reach a conclusion, the art market does not have this option.

"An owner wants to know," says van der Wolk. "The painting is either worth a lot of money or it is worth nothing. If it sells for 125 million guilders and it turns out to be a fake, you have a problem. Or at least someone has a problem."

Timothy W. Ryback is director of the Salzburg Seminar and author of The Last Survivor: Legacies of Dachau, which will appear in Vintage paperback this fall.