Word: goghs
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...time-honored way of deciding the authenticity of a work of art is to call in a few experts to pass on it. But experts may disagree, as Cinemagnate William Goetz knows all too well. Last week Goetz was the proud possessor of a Van Gogh painting which had been certified not by experts but by detectives-T-men of the U.S. Treasury...
Goetz's Van Gogh, entitled Sluay by Candlelight (TIME, June 6, 1949 et seq.), had been bitterly debated by top art experts of both the U.S. and Europe. Some declared it was genuine, others were convinced that it was forged. A jury of specialists appointed by Manhattan's Metropolitan Museum reported that the picture was suspiciously "strident in color, weak in drawing and uncertain in the modeling of the head" (TIME...
...paint was at least 60 years old. That was a major point for Goetz since it dated the painting from the days when the artist was alive, unknown, and of no interest to fakers or collectors either. Moreover, graphology experts ruled that the writing on the canvas was Van Gogh's-he formed his Vs, Ts and eights in peculiar ways that forgers could easily not have noticed. Finally, the T-men traced a mark of ownership on the back of the picture to an Arles pastor named Salles, who is known to have befriended Van Gogh...
Although the picture, of two high-wheeled Tarascon Coaches, has been catalogued as an authentic Van Gogh and was mentioned by the artist in a letter to his brother, few art lovers have ever had a chance to see even so much as a photograph of it. Bought by an Italian sculptor who gave it to a friend from Montevideo, it had been kept most of the time since 1906 in a family vault in Uruguay...
...those who were not content to see a Van Gogh in smudgy black & white, there was testimony from the artist that the subject was one after his own color-hungry heart. Wrote Van Gogh in one of his last letters: "I have just painted that red and green vehicle in the courtyard of the inn ... a simple foreground of grey gravel, a background very very simple too, pink and yellow walls, with windows with green shutters and a patch of blue sky. The two carriages very brightly colored, green and red, the wheels -yellow, black, blue and orange...