Cast off by the Nazis, but heralded by curators, the artist’s painting of his doctor, made just before van Gogh’s suicide, has not been seen in 34 years.
When the hammer fell at Christie’s in Manhattan on May 15, 1990, a Vincent van Gogh painting, Portrait of Dr Gachet, set the record at the time for the most expensive work of art ever sold at auction, going to a Japanese paper magnate for US$82.5 million ($146.5m).
Painted in the garden of the artist’s physician in June 1890, it was completed just weeks before Van Gogh’s suicide. The sense of melancholy radiating from the doctor conveys, Van Gogh wrote to his friend Paul Gauguin, the “heartbroken expression of our time”. Considered to be among his masterpieces, it may now be worth US$300m, or more, experts say.
For much of the 20th century, Portrait of Dr Gachet was prominently displayed at the Städel Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, to which it was lent by a private collector before the 1990 sale.
But it has all but disappeared since that day at Christie’s, and its whereabouts have become one of the art world’s greatest mysteries.
Curators putting together van Gogh shows have thrown up their hands at finding it. The Städel Museum, where it once hung, commissioned an entire podcast designed to ferret out its location.
Art sleuths over the years have confirmed this much: that the Japanese buyer from 1990 was soon undone by scandal, criminally sanctioned and died. His collection was sold by a bank and the Gachet was acquired by an Austrian financier who soon found that he too could not afford to keep it.
In 1998, the van Gogh was sold privately to an undisclosed party. Since then the trail has run cold.
At least publicly.
While the art market thrives on secrecy and protects privacy as a matter of honour, it also employs people whose mission is to collect reliable information on who owns what. Some are auction house representatives, others art advisers or dealers who have made a specific genre their special niche.
For months, reporters for The New York Times have sought out the small group of people involved in the 1998 sale and the larger corps of experts who track such purchases. Their effort to find the Gachet – a journey taken over the years by many others – stretched from the auction houses and galleries of New York to a storybook Swiss villa alongside Lake Lugano.
Many experts encountered along the way had no clue what had happened to the painting. Four art world insiders said they suspect the painting is held by a private, very rich European family. All parties had an opinion on the core question that drives such a quest: do collecting families have any responsibility to share iconic works of art with the broader public?
The question has grown more relevant as it becomes clearer that most museums can no longer outbid billionaire collectors for the greatest works of art. Few paintings make that point plainer than Gachet’s portrait, a piece long on public display that has now vanished into someone’s private home or a climate-controlled warehouse.
For many in the art world, such a work is not just a creative expression, but part of a trade that survives because of the interest and deep pockets of collectors who may, or may not, choose to share their work.
“People are allowed to own things privately,” said Michael Findlay, who was involved as a specialist for Christie’s in the 1990 auction sale of the Gachet. “Does it belong to everybody? No, it does not.”
But the loss is palpable to people like Cynthia Saltzman, the author of the 1998 book Portrait of Dr Gachet.
She regularly viewed the painting at the Met. She had expected, even after it was sold privately, that the picture would surface here and there, at an exhibition or an auction.
“I wasn’t aware that it was going to disappear,” she said. “I think back on those times, and it reminds me of when somebody you know dies, and you didn’t expect it and you think back on the last time you saw them, and you wish you had known it was going to happen because you would have paid a lot more attention and looked more carefully.”
A portrait of a doctor and of melancholia
Anyone looking to track the history, and whereabouts, of the Gachet would do well to start in Auvers-sur-Oise, a village outside Paris. When Van Gogh stepped off the train there, on May 20, 1890, the rustic landscape and thatched-roof houses had already become a magnet for artists of the day. The deeply troubled artist, 37, would kill himself only weeks later. But he was about to enter one of his most productive periods during which he painted Wheat Field With Crows and The Church at Auvers.
That same day, he met with Paul-Ferdinand Gachet, a doctor who had studied nervous disorders. The two shared a love of art. Van Gogh was soon painting still lifes in the doctor’s garden – and the doctor’s portrait.
Van Gogh didn’t seek to make an accurate rendering. Cameras could perform that task by then; instead he depicted what he saw in the doctor, and in himself.
“I’ve done the portrait of M. Gachet with a melancholy expression, which might well seem like a grimace to those who see it,” van Gogh wrote in June 1890. “And yet I had to paint it like that to convey how much expression and passion there is in our present-day heads in comparison with the old calm portraits, and how much longing and crying out.”
Van Gogh gave a second version of the painting to Gachet. It is on display at the Musee d’Orsay in Paris.
“To me it reveals Vincent’s strong humanistic impulse and his capacity for love,” said Gary Tinterow, the director of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. He was the Met’s curator of 19th-century European paintings in 1990 when the portrait was taken off the wall to be auctioned.
After van Gogh’s suicide, the painting passed to his brother Theo, then to Theo’s wife, Johanna, who sold it in 1897 for 300 francs (about US$58 at the time). By 1904, it was in the hands of a German count, who had paid roughly US$400 for it.
Van Gogh’s fame grew after his death, perhaps nowhere more than Germany. In 1911, the Städel acquired the portrait and placed it alongside greats like Albrecht Durer, elevating van Gogh to their level. The Gachet soon ranked among the museum’s most prized works.
When the Nazis took power in the 1930s, though, they fuelled a conservative pushback that disdained modern art’s bold break from straightforward pictorial representation. Works by van Gogh and other artists were labelled “degenerate,” so the museum tried to protect them by keeping them in a locked room under its roof.
When the Nazis began confiscating the art they despised, the Gachet escaped the first seizure in 1937. But by the end of the year it had been taken and sent to Berlin.
Months later, an art agent for Reichsmarschall Hermann Goering sold the Gachet to Franz Koenigs, a German banker living in Amsterdam. Its next owner, a German-Jewish banker, Siegfried Kramarsky, brought the portrait to New York when he emigrated, and for decades, on and off, the painting was displayed at the Met, typically in the summers when the Kramarskys were away, Tinterow recalled. In 1984, it was sent to the Met on full-time “indefinite loan”.
When the Kramarskys sold the Gachet in 1990, the winning bidder was Ryoei Saito, the honorary chair of Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co. His criminal troubles would include a charge that he had paid a bribe to redistrict forestry land for, among other things, the “Vincent Golf Club”. When those troubles escalated, his Gachet and other art passed to a creditor, the Fuji Bank.
It sold the painting in 1997 to Wolfgang Flöttl, an Austrian financier who had moved to New York, married Anne Eisenhower, a granddaughter of the President, and began his own art buying spree.
When Flottl’s own finances suffered, the Gachet was sold again, privately, in a transaction arranged through Sotheby’s. Neither the price nor the buyer was publicly disclosed, and the Gachet simply vanished from the art world – the cultural equivalent of the Amelia Earhart plane.
“It is part of history, but it is also part of our lives now, and not knowing where it is is unbearable,” said Wouter van der Veen, a van Gogh scholar who is working to restore Gachet’s home in France.
The portrait was conspicuously absent last year at exhibitions in Amsterdam and Paris that featured van Goghs created in Auvers-sur-Oise. More than half of the 74 paintings van Gogh made there were displayed, including a portrait of Adeline Ravoux, the daughter of his innkeeper, which, like the Gachet, had not been seen in public for decades.
“Sometimes you have to be patient for these things,” said Teio Meedendorp, a researcher at the Van Gogh Museum. “I hope within my lifetime the Gachet portrait might pop up again.”
The keepers of secrets
There has been, over the years, all sorts of speculation about who holds the Gachet.
Guido Barilla, the chair of the eponymous pasta company, was identified as a likely candidate. But a German journalist, Johannes Nichelmann, disputed that in a 2019 podcast on the painting commissioned by the Städel. In the podcast, David Nash, who was Flöttl’s art dealer and former head of impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, told Nichelmann that the buyer of the Gachet was an Italian who lived in Switzerland. He did not name him.
A German art reporter, Stefan Koldehoff, in 2019 wrote that at Sotheby’s the current owner was known as “The Lugano Man”.
It’s no surprise that people at Sotheby’s would know, or think they know, who holds the Gachet. For one thing, the auction house sold the work. For another, it’s in a business that relies on tracking, and keeping secret, the identity of owners so that when death, divorce or other events lead to a sale, your company has the inside track.
Auction house specialists build relationships with owners, check in regularly and track masterwork whereabouts religiously, and over decades. Sometimes they just keep the information in their heads or scribbled on sales catalogues or index cards (old school) or in digital databases (new school) that record the buying and selling of important customers.
To foster such relationships, owners of important artworks are offered all manner of perks, from tickets and restaurant reservations, to insurance or loan appraisals, a courtship that can lead to inventory checks and house visits that help to confirm what an owner might own.
Sellers of masterworks like the Gachet might also be offered lucrative inducements, maybe a marketing campaign or a portion of the auction house’s own earnings – the so-called “buyer’s premium” – or even a guaranteed minimum price, regardless of what happens in the bidding.
Melissa Chiu, the director of the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, said museums also seek to build relationships and track who owns what. “You are searching out specific dream pieces,” she said.
The people who say they think they know who owns the Gachet are this sort of art world insider – not infallible but exceptionally well-informed. Four of them said they believe it was bought by an Italian family, the Invernizzis, who have taken to living in Switzerland.
One person who does not have to guess is Diana D. Brooks, the former Sotheby’s CEO, who organised the 1998 sale. Reached by phone, she declined to discuss the transaction, citing her long-standing professional pledge to secrecy.
Another person who seems to know is Alexander Eiling, the head of modern art at the Städel, where the Gachet once hung.
He was interviewed for the museum’s Gachet podcast, created by Nichelmann and a colleague, Jakob Schmidt. After many interviews around the world, they had returned to the museum with nothing too firm on the current owner.
They decided to check in with Eiling, who sought, unsuccessfully, to borrow the Gachet for an exhibition called Making van Gogh: A German Love Story. Instead of the painting, the exhibition featured the empty frame that had held the portrait until the Nazis arrived.
When Nichelmann, who had searched high and low for the Gachet, asked Eiling whether he had ever located the work, he was surprised to hear the answer.
“Yes,” Eiling replied.
“Where is it?” Nichelmann asked.
“In Switzerland,” Eiling replied. He baulked at saying more.
“I’m not allowed to say,” he said. “It wasn’t Barilla.”
Eiling declined to be interviewed by the Times, but he did take note when told that a reporter was headed to look for the painting in Switzerland.
“If he is going to be in Lugano,” Eiling said through a spokesperson, “he already knows where the painting is.”
On the lakefront, beauty and silence
If asked to track an art world mystery, one could do worse than to end up outside the imposing Villa Favorita. Built in 1687 and once home to a Prussian prince, its considerable grounds stretch alongside Lake Lugano, a sumptuous setting that has long attracted wealth and great art.
Decades ago, the villa’s former owner, Baron Hans Heinrich Thyssen-Bornemisza, drew long lines of visitors to the villa to exhibits of world-class art culled from his private collection.
The jewels of that collection are now in Madrid at the Thyssen-Bornemisza National Museum. The baron died in 2002, and his fifth wife, Baroness Carmen Thyssen-Bornemisza, a former Miss Spain, sold the villa for US$90.4 million in 2014 to the Invernizzi family, which now operates it under the tutelage of a foundation.
The Italian family is also wealthy, and owns significant works of art, experts say, but so far family members, unlike the baron, have displayed no interest in showing it off.
The city is hoping the family might, like the baron, allow some exhibitions on the grounds, but the negotiations are ongoing. “They are very, very discreet,” said Filippo Lombardi, head of development and planning for Lugano.
Local residents describe the family as very private, but down-to-earth.
“They are simple, not snobby,” said Gabriele Elsener, a real estate agent whose office is only a few hundred yards from Villa Favorita.
The Invernizzi money is a legacy of their involvement in the production and sale of cheese – mozzarella, Gorgonzola and the mild all-purpose Bel Paese – that is manufactured by Galbani, a company that three Invernizzi brothers – Ermenegildo, Achille and Rinaldo – took over in the 1920s.
The Invernizzi stake in Galbani was obscured by holding companies in 1989, when the cheese manufacturer was sold for US$1.6 billion. At that time, Antonio Invernizzi, a son to Rinaldo, was on the company’s board.
Antonio Invernizzi, who died some years ago, was still the patriarch in 1998 when the art world insiders say they believe the family purchased the van Gogh masterpiece. Neither he nor the Invernizzi name is mentioned in a new documentary about the painting by Nichelmann, who created the 2019 podcast. But the film shows the lake and refers to the rumoured owner of the Gachet as being a Lugano family who made billions in the food industry. It also says the family denied owning it.
A spokesperson for the family, Mara Hofmann, said she could not confirm any denial and declined further comment. Other members of the family, such as Rinaldo Invernizzi, Antonio’s son, and Minjung Kim, an artist who was married to Antonio when he died, also declined to comment.
Gardo Petrini, a lawyer in Lugano who represents the Invernizzi family, declined to discuss their artworks. “The family I represent is very surprised by such a request – for which it does not feel it should enter into the merits – and also by the ways in which you are trying to contact them,” he wrote in an email.
A message left at the villa, where another son of Antonio Invernizzi, Marco, receives mail was also not returned.
Findlay, the gallerist involved in the 1990 auction sale, said he does not know who bought the Gachet in 1998. But he offered a note of caution about deciding that the mystery had been solved.
“Several people have come and sat here over the years,” he said, during an interview in the New York gallery where he is a director, “and told me they know where it is, and I believe they were wrong”.
Findlay said that, actually, he had heard that the Gachet had likely moved on to another owner since 1998. Asked to elaborate, he declined.
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
Written by: Michael Forsythe, Graham Bowley and Elisabetta Povoledo
Photographs by: Amir Hamja and Maurizio Fiorino
©2024 THE NEW YORK TIMES