Vincent Van gogh, Peasant woman against background of wheat

Starry-Eyed Innkeeper Hopes to Bring van Gogh’s ‘Fields’ Home

The New York Times, October 18, 2007

By MARLISE SIMONS

AUVERS-SUR-OISE, France, Oct. 14 — The painting by Vincent van Gogh nearest to this village, where he lies in a modest grave, probably hangs some 20 miles away at the Musée d’Orsay in Paris. But Dominique-Charles Janssens, who owns the country inn here that was van Gogh’s final abode, has a bold plan to change that.

Plan, though, may be too optimistic a word. It is Mr. Janssens’ dream to see an authentic van Gogh hanging on the wall of the tiny attic room where he died on July 29, 1890. Two days earlier he had shot himself in the stomach while working at his easel in a nearby field.

Mr. Janssens, an affable 59-year-old Belgian, knows exactly which painting he wants, and he says he has a rare opportunity to get it. “The Fields” (also known as “Wheat Fields”), one of the last works van Gogh painted, is to be auctioned at Sotheby’s in New York on Nov. 7.

“People have called me a megalomaniac, yet this plan is not my dream, it was the dream of van Gogh,” said Mr. Janssens, quoting from the painter’s correspondence. Just seven weeks before his death van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo in Paris: “Some day or other I believe I shall find a way of having an exhibition of my own in a cafe.”

Sotheby’s estimates the painting’s value at $28 million to $35 million, and bidders may drive the price higher, so Mr. Janssens is trying to raise money through private donations and an appeal to van Gogh lovers online via vangoghsdream.org.

If the foundation he has created, Institut Van Gogh, can buy “The Fields,” he said, all donors will receive a personal access code to view the painting at any time through a Webcam in the attic room. The fund-raising effort began on Oct. 8, but he declined to say how much has been raised so far. The plan is dismissed as a mad fantasy by some curators and art dealers. “Sure, it’s heroic and wonderful, but unrealistic,” said Neal Fiertag, a Paris art dealer specializing in the 19th century. “Besides, van Gogh’s images have already been turned into a mass commodity. You wonder if this will create more of a commercial circus.”

Walter Feilchenfeldt, a Swiss dealer and van Gogh scholar, who sold “The Fields” to its current owner (whom he will not name), said he saw no problem with its return to the little village inn. He knows the building well, he said, describing it as “very respectfully and tastefully restored.”

“I have a certain sympathy for Mr. Janssen,” Mr. Feilchenfeldt added. “He lives for this dream. If he has the right money, yes, he should have it.”

There has been much debate about which work was the last by this self-taught painter, an enigmatic and often troubled man who nonetheless wrote hundreds of thoughtful and lucid letters.

In his final 70 days at Auvers van Gogh worked nonstop, producing oils and drawings of its residents, rough farmhouses and fields of wheat and potatoes, much like those he knew during his youth in the Netherlands.

Mr. Feilchenfeldt, like other specialists, said he did not consider the “Fields” on sale at Sotheby’s to be van Gogh’s final canvas; that, he said, is probably the unfinished “House in Auvers.” But he is confident, he added, that “The Fields” is among van Gogh’s last works.

Wouter van der Veen, a Dutch specialist in van Gogh’s writing, noted that in a letter, probably written on July 10, 1890, he tells Theo that he has just finished three wheat field paintings. “They are vast fields of wheat under troubled skies, and I did not need to go out of my way to express sadness and extreme loneliness. I hope you see them soon.” He painted about a dozen images of the Auvers wheat fields.

Over Sunday lunch at the inn, Mr. Janssens said he wanted to return “The Fields” to van Gogh’s room precisely because it speaks to his mood at the end of his life. “It was in his room when he died,” he said.

The garret is already something of a shrine, thanks to Mr. Janssens’ crusade to rescue the inn. It began accidentally when, a sales manager at the time, he was injured in a car crash in 1985 in front of the inn, Auberge Ravoux. While recovering he was given a book of van Gogh’s letters and decided it was his destiny to buy and restore the inn. “I was very moved,” he recalled. “I was 37, just like van Gogh,” who died at 37.

The process took six years and included jousting with creditor banks and with local officials who objected to a foreigner taking over such a symbolic property. As the new owner he set out to recreate the atmosphere as van Gogh might have known it. The downstairs room that had been serving as a wine shop and cafe is again a restaurant, with rustic tables, a pewter-covered bar and glasses and decanters copied from van Gogh paintings.

A narrow staircase leads to the small attic room with its bare walls, skylight and a single chair. “It was left empty, so visitors can furnish it with their thoughts,” Mr. Janssens said. “It often has a strong impact on people. Some cry, some have fainted.”

One wall now has a bulletproof glass case where he hopes to install an authentic van Gogh canvas. He said he had taken steps to secure the room and the house. Admission to the attic is about $7.

Village authorities concede that Mr. Janssens has become an unofficial guardian of van Gogh’s memory. He has restored adjacent buildings and organized the display of placards with reproductions of village scenes painted not only by van Gogh but also by Cézanne, Corot and Pissarro, who spent time here. One stands by the village’s 11th-century church, a famous van Gogh subject, and others are in the wheat fields and by the cemetery where Vincent and Theo are buried under a thick blanket of ivy.

Before Mr. Janssens’ efforts to put the village back on the map, it might have seen a few thousand visitors a year, mostly art students, painters and historians. Last year some 400,000 people came, drawn by the artist’s mystique.

If the Institut Van Gogh foundation falls short in the effort to buy “The Fields” at Sotheby’s, it is legally allowed to continue raising funds for another three years. Mr. Janssens said he would not stop until he has brought a van Gogh painting back to Auvers and installed it in the little room with no view.

Van Gogh: Expressive With a Brush, or a Pen

The New York Times, October 11, 2005

By CAROL VOGEL

Vincent van Gogh considered drawing to be "the root of everything." He once confided to his brother, Theo, that he could not stop drawing because "I really have a draftsman's fist, and I ask you, have I ever doubted or hesitated or wavered since the day I began to draw? I think you know quite well that I pushed on, and of course I gradually grew stronger in the battle."

Although his career lasted only a decade, van Gogh created about 1,100 known drawings, capturing everything around him, from peasants and postmen to landscapes and interiors. Drawing was as important a way to record his thoughts as the letters he wrote to his family and friends.

Yet the public is far more familiar with his 800 paintings. Images like "A Corridor in the Asylum" at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, "The Starry Night" at the Museum of Modern Art and "Irises" at the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles are among the most famous images in the history of art.

That situation may change next week, when the Met unveils "Vincent van Gogh: The Drawings," the first major exhibition of the artist's drawings ever held in the United States. (A version of the show was on view at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam this summer.) The exhibition, which opens next Tuesday, includes 113 works from public and private collections around the world, 20 of which were not shown in Amsterdam.

"Drawings have always been the P.S. part of van Gogh's work," said Colta Ives, a curator of drawings and prints at the Met. "Yet he was a letter writer, a guy with a pen in his hand."

Ms. Ives and Susan Alyson Stein, a curator of 19th-century, modern and contemporary art at the Met, teamed up with two of their colleagues from the Van Gogh Museum - Sjraar van Heugten, head of collections there, and Marije Vellekoop, curator of drawings - to put the show together. Their mission was to tell the story of van Gogh's work through his drawings and watercolors.

Sitting in the Met's galleries, surrounded by packing crates and work tables, as the exhibition was being installed, Ms. Stein said she had been thinking about a show like this for 20 years. As coordinator first of the Met's blockbuster 1984 show "Van Gogh in Arles" and "Van Gogh in Saint-Rémy and Auvers" two years later, she was introduced to the artist's drawings. "As exciting as the paintings are," she said, "the drawings were a revelation."

For three years she and Ms. Ives have immersed themselves in van Gogh's world, traveling extensively throughout the United States and Europe. "People opened their collections to us," Ms. Stein said. So did the Van Gogh Museum, which has the largest number of the artist's works on paper in the world.

"We borrowed judiciously," Ms. Stein said. Deciding what not to show was as difficult as what the curators chose. For every drawing on view, at least 20 were reluctantly rejected.

The exhibition also includes eight paintings: three from the Met's own collection, two from the Van Gogh Museum, and three loans, from the Rodin Museum in Paris, the Pushkin State Museum of Fine Arts in Moscow and a private collection. Each was chosen for its relationship to his drawings.

Rather than tackle the subject strictly chronologically, as most curators have done, Ms. Stein and Ms. Ives decided to underscore relationship between drawing and painting in van Gogh's work and how he reinvented certain recurring themes in different ways.

When they began conceiving the show, Ms. Stein said, one of the first things she did was to put together 86 pages of excerpts about drawing from all three volumes of van Gogh's letters. "We wanted to hear his discussion," she said, "to know what mattered to him as an artist."

Throughout his life van Gogh embraced drawing for many different reasons. At first he felt it necessary to master black-and-white before tackling color. Sometimes it was a question of economics: paper and ink was far cheaper than canvas and paint. He also used drawing as a way of working on subjects that interested him, like wintry trees or tree-lined roads or expansive views of wheat fields.

Drawing didn't always come easy. "He struggled with black and white," Ms. Ives said. "But when he got to Arles in 1888, he discovered the reed pen, and it was then he developed a more comfortable relationship with his tool. As reed wears down, it becomes softer, more flexible and responsive to his gestures on paper."

It is generally assumed that most artists make drawings as studies for larger, more complete paintings. But sometimes van Gogh did just the opposite. He would reproduce some of his paintings in pen and ink; he would then send them to his artist friends Émile Bernard and John Russell, and to his brother, Theo, as a way of letting them know what he was up to. None of these drawings were exact copies; each contained spontaneous details.

Often even scholars haven't been sure which came first, a painting or a drawing. Three images of a Zouave solider - a watercolor from the Met's collection, a painting from the Van Gogh Museum and a pen-and-ink drawing that belongs to the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum - have been the subject of scholarly debate. "It's been long accepted that the watercolor came after the painting," Ms. Stein said. "But when we looked at it, it seemed there were hesitant passages. The background, for example, is unresolved."

First the curators looked at the Met's watercolor next to the Guggenheim's pen-and-ink drawing, which they knew came after the painting.

"It's harvest time; it's raining," Ms. Stein said. "He has a model, he spends five days and writes his brother and his friends that he's finally painting portraits. He doesn't mention the watercolor. Six weeks later he sends the pen-and-ink rendition of the portrait to John Russell. But because the watercolor isn't mentioned in the letters, it's one of the many riddles we addressed."

Marjorie Shelley, a Met paper conservator, subjected the works to technical analysis, including infrared reflectography that revealed the artist's graphite sketch underneath the finished work, showing how he was struggling with his subject, something he did not do with either the painting or the later pen-and-ink drawing.

Ms. Ives was curious about "Street in Saintes-Maries-de-la-Mer," an 1888 series of drawings and one painting of a dirt path with a row of thatched cottages on one side and tangled vegetation. From his letters it is known that a pen-and-ink drawing was made before a painting of the same subject. He did the drawing in Saintes-Maries, in the Camargue region of Provence, then returned to nearby Arles and made the painting.

"Noticing the similarity in size between the drawing and the painting, I wondered if there might be a still closer link between them," Ms. Ives said. "Perhaps it wasn't a free-handed interpretation in oil." Or, she said, he may have been so happy with his drawing that he traced it onto the canvas, which is unusual, because he generally painted freehand.

So Ms. Ives made copies of both the painting and the drawing to scale, then superimposed the drawing on the painting. She deduced that van Gogh had indeed traced the drawing's outline onto the canvas as the structure of the composition, then added more sky at the top and more pathway at the bottom to fill the squarer canvas. But drawings and paintings were never exactly the same. In a drawing he made for Bernard, he added a tiny boat in the horizon. "There is no boat in the painting," Ms. Ives said.

The way van Gogh grabbed onto a theme, composed it in his mind and then tried it out in different variations fascinated the curators. "Very few artists do that," Ms. Ives said. "Often we tried to get into van Gogh's shoes and walk with him to see what was catching his eye." A series of watercolors van Gogh created of the plains of La Crau, three miles northwest of Arles, is one example. The curators persuaded the Van Gogh museum to lend them "Harvest in Provence" (1888), a rarely lent painting, because they were able to borrow a watercolor that preceded it and a pen-and-ink drawing from the National Gallery of Art in Washington that the artist did after it.

"Each has a distinctive character," Ms. Ives said. "During the harvest he was out there every day, tromping through the fields, and certain motifs like fences, haystacks, clumps of reeds and rushes he keeps repeating in all different media and scales."

As an art form, however, works on paper are extremely delicate and cannot be subject to light or to changes in temperature. As a result, many of the drawings and watercolors in the show have rarely been exhibited, and it may be some time before the public will see them again.

"The problem with drawings is they have to have a rest," Ms. Ives said. "The next generation won't be able to play in this garden for quite a long while."

Van Gogh in Moods, Both Dark and Light

The New York Times, July 13, 2008

By BENJAMIN GENOCCHIO

The cypresses stand tall and unbudgeable in the blustery wind as, perhaps, a symbol of strength and fortitude.

The sky, by contrast, is speckled and swirling. Clouds spiral and whorl, or twist into tight knots, rising up from behind a mountain range that slopes gently downward to where it joins the land. Foul weather is on the way.

An explosion of wheat grass, golden and yellow, carpets the foreground of the painting. The grass leaps high into the air like flames, mimicking the elegant, vertical, slender shape of the cypresses.

This work, “Cypresses,” by Vincent van Gogh, was painted in June 1889 during his confinement at the asylum in Saint-Rémy in the south of France. Until September it will be hanging at the Yale University Art Gallery, on loan from the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City as part of a two-work show organized by Jennifer Gross, the museum’s curator of modern and contemporary art.

The other painting is van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” on loan from the Museum of Modern Art in New York City. Also painted in June 1889, it provides a very different view of the southern French countryside.

Perspective is the most obvious difference between them. The cropping and closeness of “Cypresses” convey an immediacy and almost tactile relationship to nature, immersing you there in the grasses beneath the grinding sun. “The Starry Night,” by contrast, is painted from up high, the town off in the distance and possibly observed from the artist’s window at the asylum. You get a feeling of detachment.

It is tempting to see these pictures (one at daytime, the other night) as a reflection of the artist’s lighter and darker moods. “Cypresses” suggests joy and an attachment to the world. “The Starry Night” tends to reinforce a sense of the artist’s isolation. Whereas “Cypresses” is a painting about living life in the moment, “The Starry Night” seems to say that, for the artist, life is elsewhere.

Then there is that incredible sky in “The Starry Night.” The moon and stars are balls of orange-yellow light verging on the radioactive. Meanwhile, the clouds have begun to coil, twist or whirl into atmospheric surf. An unearthly glow confers a further intensity to the picture. It is manic and tripped-out.

All this neatly equates with the madman of legend. But the idea that van Gogh’s paintings are the expression of his illness and thus somehow “mad” is so wrong-headed that it requires immediate refutation. It was van Gogh’s illness that stopped him from painting. His paintings are the product of his moments of lucidity, his efforts to stay in touch with reality. They couldn’t be saner.

In both paintings there is ample evidence of the artist’s concision, exactness of judgment and remarkable powers of visual analysis. And how brilliantly he assimilates color opposites, mixing together hot colors like orange, yellow and red with cold whites and blues to give the paintings added zing.

He is also looking closely at nature. Although some of van Gogh’s paintings were spontaneous outpourings of creative energy, in many cases he plotted out his pictures. He made countless drawings, impassioned sketches in which he worked out compositional elements. His paintings are mindful and premeditated.

Perhaps the museum could have assembled some of these drawings to illustrate the sequence of the painting’s evolution? It also might have been useful to have seen here “Nuit Étoilée (Starry Night)” ( circa 1850-1865) by Jean-François Millet, housed at Yale but currently on loan to the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston. Ms. Gross said in an e-mail message that van Gogh might have been able to see the Millet painting in Paris between 1873 and 1875, and it may even have inspired him to paint his own version.

But these historical add-ons are in no way essential to the exhibition. The logic behind putting two paintings together in an intimate setting is to invite viewers to slow down, to look closely and have a concentrated experience with an artwork. And when the paintings are as good as the two that are showing here you don’t need anything else.

“Van Gogh’s Cypresses and The Starry Night: Visions of Saint-Rémy,” Yale University Art Gallery, 1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, through Sept. 7. Information: (203) 432-0600 or artgallery.yale.edu.

Computer imaging detecting art forgeries

Tuesday, August 12, 2008
The Washington Times
Genaro C. Armas

STATE COLLEGE, Pa. (AP) — Vincent van Gogh's master pieces have inspired both young artists and prospective forgers seeking to re-create his vivid landscapes and portraits.

Those forgeries are inspirations, too. Yet in an ironic twist, scientists are turning to modern technology to give art experts better tools to answer an expensive and age-old question: Is it an original van Gogh painting or a fake?

A unique collaboration of artists and scientists forged by Cornell University professor C. Richard Johnson uses computer screens as canvases. Though the project focuses on van Gogh's classics, the outcome could have an impact throughout the art world.

"It's something we would all like to be using a lot more, but it's really just starting," said Ella Hendricks, head of conservation at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, in a recent telephone interview.

Talk of computer programs and algorithms typically isn't the forte of artists more comfortable speaking about brush strokes and light. Mr. Johnson sought to bridge the divide. His background afforded him credibility in both fields: He's a Cornell electrical engineering professor who has a minor in art history.


Mr. Johnson got curious during a sabbatical three years ago about projects that might finally marry his two interests. He found other researchers around the world working on similar projects, then approached the Van Gogh Museum with a unique proposal.

Would the museum allow the researchers access to their digitized collection so the scientists could experiment with ways to use technology to help art historians, conservators and connoisseurs?

"I felt like maybe I could talk to both sides," Mr. Johnson says. "Certainly, in a museum, you'd like to be on the forefront of new activity, and computer imaging would be at the forefront of what to do."

The museum agreed. Mrs. Hendricks and other experts there had just recently started scanning its work and dabbling in digital techniques, which in recent years has gained in popularity across the industry.

A May 2007 workshop on computer image processing at the Amsterdam museum yielded promising results, according to Mr. Johnson, with teams from Penn State, Princeton University and Maastricht University in the Netherlands each taking different approaches.

Scientists studied 101 high-resolution scans of van Gogh paintings provided by the Van Gogh and Kroller-Muller museums in the Netherlands, of which 23 had been identified by art historians as authentic works by van Gogh.

A release from Penn State promoting results of the work published in the July issue of IEEE Signal Processing outlined the rest of the process:

mThe 23 authentic van Gogh paintings were used by a computer system as a training database for van Gogh's brush-stroke styles. Statistical models were created to capture the unique style, or "handwriting" that became the artist's signature in those scans. Detailed images could be blown up in size, enabling researchers to analyze intricacies of brush strokes.

mThe other 78 paintings - which comprised works of van Gogh or van Gogh's peers and paintings at one time attributed to him but later deemed inauthentic - were compared with the statistical models generated by the 23 authentic paintings.

Penn State information sciences professor James Wang and statistics professor Jia Li compiled the findings into an online system that can be used to help sort out discrepancies between authentic and forged paintings. They found that copies tend to have more brush strokes.

"Now I come along as a copyist. I can't do [the original] in one motion because I'm not [van Gogh]," Mr. Johnson says. "So I strike the brush multiple times to mimic the art."

It's a painstaking process that could go unnoticed to the naked eye.

However, Mr. Johnson sees the project as an added tool - rather than a replacement - for art experts.

"I guess the easiest way to think about it is you're a detective at a murder scene. You got to collect a lot of evidence, but you don't really know which piece of evidence is the one that cracks it open for you," Mr. Johnson says. "That's the job, so to speak, of the conservators of the museum."

"They try to add a whole bunch of other evidence and try to make a decision about authentication."

Many experts in the field already view the technology as more than just a tool for detecting forgeries. A second round of analysis involving more researchers is under way looking at techniques such as analyzing the thread count on a painting's canvas.

Dave Coddington, chief conservator for the Museum of Modern Art in New York, hopes digital imaging analysis helps with conservation efforts and gives students a better understanding of a painter's style.

"We're trying to understand the kind of creative process that the artist engaged in," Mr. Coddington says. "We're in the early days of what I'm expecting to be an important area for researchers."