Van Gogh takes the stage
Paintings from the beginning and the end of the Dutch artist’s life do well, as Man Ray rides the Underground to New York
Vincent van Gogh is certainly having a moment. his museum in amsterdam, which i have yet to revisit after its revamp, has been highly praised, and its current show ‘van Gogh and Japan’ (until June 24) is equally well reviewed. he never actually visited the east, but, like many of his generation, he was fascinated by Japanese art as the country emerged from centuries of cultural isolation and the evidence is very clear in his work.
then, last week, one of his final landscapes sold at Christie’s in new York for a low-estimate but still remarkable price, $39,687,500 (£29,332,946). it was the 17¾in by 23¾in Vue de l’asile et de la Chapelle St Paul de Mausole (Saint-rémy) (Fig 1), showing the asylum where the artist was a self-admitted patient for a year from May 1889. to begin with, he was not allowed to paint and then, for some time, only indoors. During this time, he produced a masterwork, The Starry Night with its swirling sky, as well as copies of, or rather variations on, themes by artists he admired, such as the Realists Breton and Courbet. eventually, in the autumn, he was allowed out for supervised walks and painting sessions and it was then that he painted the asylum and chapel. he was discharged in May 1890, but shot himself in July, just as he was attracting critical acclaim and the championship of his peers.
this painting was last on the market in 2012, when it sold for just over £10 million as part of the collection of elizabeth taylor. it had been bought for the film star by her father, the art dealer Francis taylor, who paid £92,000 for it in 1963. Francis was the nephew and only partner of howard Young, at that time the richest art dealer in the world and, during the 1930s, he ran the firm’s Bond Street gallery. Coincidentally, Young recalled that his own greatest mistake had been to buy a van
‘Van Gogh would manage to polychrome both himself and the passers-by
Gogh—a different one—for $5,000 in Rotterdam in the early 1930s and sell it soon after for $10,000. The same painting was auctioned for $850,000 shortly before his death in 1972.
Two other van Gogh paintings had already been sold this year—one at, and the other the result of, Maastricht. The first was a 10¾in by 14in study of pink and white lilac blossoms
(Fig 3), painted in 1887, when the artist was in Paris. There he met the Impressionists and other artists, such as Signac, who recalled: ‘We painted together on the riverbanks, we lunched at roadside cafes and we returned by foot to Paris via the Avenues of Saint-ouen and Clichy. Van Gogh, wearing the blue overalls of a zinc worker, would have little dots of color painted on his shirtsleeves. Striding quite close to me, he would be yelling, gesticulating and brandishing a large sizethirty, freshly painted canvas; in this fashion he would manage to polychrome both himself and the passers-by.’ Lilacs, with an asking price of $9.5 million (£7 million), was sold to a new client at Maastricht by the Hammer Galleries of New York.
It often takes months to conclude sales begun at the world’s greatest art fair. This is especially the case with museums, where trustees, committees and patrons may have to be consulted, so the announcement by London dealer Connaught Brown that its van Gogh has now gone to the Noordbrabants Museum in the Netherlands follows relatively quickly on the heels of the March fair.
The 12in by 15¾in canvas, Bottles and a Cowrie Shell (Fig 2), priced in the region of €3.5 million (£3 million), is one of 13 still lifes painted in the autumn of 1884, which was during van Gogh’s two-year stay with his parents at Nuenen, and now all but two of them are in museums. During the stay, van Gogh was helping to teach an artist called Charles Hermans and, as he wrote to his brother Theo: ‘Hermans possesses so many beautiful things, old pitchers and other antiques… just today Hermans told me that if I wanted to paint for myself a picture of things that were still too difficult for him, I could take them with me to the studio… I shall make one for you, and will pick out the best things.’
Van Gogh left the picture with his mother when he departed for Antwerp in the following year and the provenance goes through Theo, from whom it was acquired in 1904 by Henricus Petrus Bremmer, an early admirer and a collaborator in the first catalogue raisonné. It joins several other early van Goghs in Noordbrabant.
Man Ray (1890–1976)— Dadaist, Surrealist, painter, photographer and all-round experimenter—is principally associated with Paris, where he lived from 1921 to 1940, and again from 1951 until his death. Although he had little to do with London, his avant-garde connections were good and among his friends was a fellow American, the graphic designer Edward Mcknight Kauffer.
When Ray decided to return to New York City ahead of the coming war, he passed through London and it was probably Kauffer who introduced him to Frank Pick, chief executive of London Transport and the patron who commissioned so many of its outstanding posters. For him, Ray produced two of the greatest, the 39½in by 24¾in matching pair, London Underground and Keeps London Going (Fig 4), each showing the Underground logo (designed by Edward Johnson in 1913) and Saturn against the blackness of Space. They were created using Ray’s rayograph process, which involved placing objects directly on photographic paper and exposing it to light.
At the beginning of this month, an example of the second was offered by Swann Auction Galleries in New York, and it sold for $149,000 (£110,000). Next week Frieze New York