‘Gauguin’ sculpture bought by J. Paul Getty Museum for $3m is revealed to be a fake
A SCULPTURE long thought to be an “exceedingly rare” artwork by the French artist Paul Gauguin – one which had been shown in the Tate Modern – is not genuine, according to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which paid a record sum for it.
Head with Horns, a wooden sculpture of a devil’s head mounted on a pedestal, had previously been dated to circa 1895–7.
After more than a decade of internal research by the Getty, however, it was quietly removed from display last month. The institution now attributes the work to “Unknown”.
The sculpture had been purchased by the Getty in 2002 for a sum believed to be in excess of $3million (£2.3m), the highest ever for a Gauguin piece.
The sale raised eyebrows after it was suggested that the vendor was also the body confirming the artwork’s provenance. It was later lent to a number of high-profile exhibitions, including Gauguin: Maker of Myth, which came to Tate Modern in London in late 2010.
The sculpture had been lost for much of the 20th century. It appears in two photographs pasted into a sketch book from Gauguin’s late years, and in drawings from the same period. All of these are known to be authentic. Moreover, Gauguin was known to have made several similar wooden pieces.
Head with Horns reappeared when Wildenstein & Co, a New York gallery, bought it in 1993 from a private Swiss collector who remains anonymous.
When the Getty purchased it in 2002, Deborah Gribbon, then the director of the gallery, said: “Sculpture by Gauguin is exceedingly rare and this intriguing work stands out as a superb example.”
A spokesman for the Getty told Martin Bailey at The Art Newspaper that the withdrawal of attribution to Gauguin “was based on scholarly research over recent years by Getty professionals and other experts in the field, including significant new evidence that was not available at the time of its acquisition”.