The National Gallery of Victoria will call on international experts on
Vincent van Gogh to help determine the authenticity of a portrait it bought in
1940 for less than ¡ê2200 and now estimated to be worth $25 million.
NGV director Gerard Vaughan said yesterday that despite suggestions in
Britain at the weekend that the painting, Head of a Man or Portrait of a Man,
might be a fake, the gallery had no reason to change its view.
The 1886 painting had appeared since 1928 in an authoritative catalogue by
the expert J. B. de la Faille. It was in another scholarly work in 1990 and no
one had questioned it when it was on a touring exhibition of the US in 2000-01.
"We're very, very open to debate," Dr Vaughan said of the painting, now on
loan in Edinburgh.
The gallery bought it for ¡ê2196 from the French and British Contemporary Art
Exhibition that toured Australia in 1939-40.
Dr Vaughan was responding at a media conference to coverage in Britain's
Sunday Times that included claims by art historian Tim Hilton that it "isn't
convincing as a work by van Gogh's brush at that date".
Dr Vaughan said the NGV would contact the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam to
compare a 1989 X-ray of the painting with others. He was more confident of its
authenticity than that of a self-portrait by Rembrandt, one of three the NGV
bought in the 1970s, that he believed might have been completed by a pupil about
1660. Scholars claimed 10 years ago that it was an 18th-century forgery.
Dr Vaughan said the controversy was part of the curatorial cut and thrust.
Works were regularly questioned and Venetian painter Titian's Portrait of a Monk
was reinstated in the past two years. It had been questioned by a scholar in
1971.
Melbourne van Gogh scholar, Vincent Alessi, managing curator at La Trobe
University Art Museum, said he had long suspected the van Gogh-attributed
painting was a forgery.
Mr Alessi, who has done extensive research at the Van Gogh Museum, said his
suspicions were raised because it was the only known horizontal portrait by van
Gogh and although painted in Paris when he had already been influenced by the
Impressionists, it was still in dark, Dutch tones.
"It's just not consistent with the other portraits and it's definitely not
consistent with the portraits from his Paris period," he said.
Dr Vaughan said the painting would return to Melbourne in about three months.
A seminar was likely to be held about its authenticity.
The portrait was a transitional, slightly offbeat picture. "It doesn't fit
into the natural progression of van Gogh's work at that time," he said. "In many
ways this is slipping back into his earlier realist style of the mid-1880s.
"I'd be very surprised if it were proved to be a forgery," Dr Vaughan said.
"I have to say, I think if ¡ª and this is a very big if and I'm not saying I
agree with this ¡ª but if after a period of long inquiry and investigation the
status of the picture was felt to be compromised, it's much more likely, I
believe, that the picture would be by some other artist."
FAKING IT
¡ö In 1984, NGV director Patrick McCaughey announced that a $3
million Rembrandt self-portrait had been painted a century later "in the style
of Rembrandt". Thousands flocked to see it.
¡ö Francisco Goya's Portrait of a Lady was bought in 1925. Forty years later
it was described as "attributed to Goya".
¡ö Jan van Eyck's Madonna and Child bought in the 1930s was later re-assigned
as a copy.
¡ö Bought in 1946, a portrait attributed to Paolo Uccello was re-rated in 1980
as the work of an "anonymous Renaissance artist".
¡ö A landscape by Claude Lorraine, bought in 1947, was moved in the early
1980s from the European collection to the decorative arts section and relabelled
"after Claude Lorraine".
¡ö In 1997, the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, declared that one of the NGV's
finest works ¡ª Tintoretto's portrait of Doge Pietro Loredan ¡ª was a copy.
Kimbell has an almost identical Tintoretto. When NGV conservators took X-ray
pictures of their work, they could see clearly how Tintoretto had worked on the
Melbourne painting, changing his original drawing as he started to build up the
paint. The Texas version showed none of these stages so it must have been copied
later.
