Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

By Cynthia Saltzman. New York: Viking. 408 pp. $25.95.

Peter Watson

I remember the first time I saw Van Gogh's Dr. Gachet in the flesh. In April 1990, about three weeks before it was sold at Christie's New York, fetching a sum which is still a record for any work of art sold at auction, I was given a preview by Christopher Burge, president of the firm in the United States. If you follow the art market, you get used to being disappointed by paintings. A lot of them look so much better in the catalogues - on shiny paper and much reduced in size - than they do in real life. This was not the case with Dr. Gachet. The room where the good doctor was displayed had no natural light, but the picture scarcely needed any. It had plenty of its own, seemingly coming from somewhere inside.

I wish I could say that Cynthia Saltzman's "biography" of the painting has an equivalent sort of luminosity, but instead I confess that this book almost defeated me. After reading it, I felt I had gone fifteen rounds with Mike Tyson, or relived my second divorce. It is not easy to say why. Saltzman has covered a great deal of ground here, and she is superbly qualified to tell this story - she has two art history degrees, from Harvard and Berkeley, an MBA from Stanford, and is a former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal.

That, I think, may be where the problem lies. Her sentences read well, and as she barrages us with facts, we don't doubt her word for a moment. But this rapid-fire technique conceals, rather than reveals, the painting. There is no "air" in the book: Saltzman includes everything, and gives it all more or less the same weight. At one point Dr. Gachet was in an exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum - cue a small grainy shot of the Met, which, if you don't look too carefully, could be Machu Picchu or Disneyworld. She writes that the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941 and describes, at length, the Nazi's confiscation of art during the Second World War. Yes, the Kramarskys, who owned Dr. Gachet at the time, were European Jews, so the Nazi art confiscations merit a walk-on part, but I cannot believe that potential readers will not know a lot of this material already. They will certainly know that the United States entered the war in 1941 after . . . well, you know the rest.

Meanwhile, certain interesting questions raised by the material go begging. For example: Why is the provenance of this painting not more interesting? I don't mean that it should be more interesting, merely that, as revealed in this book, twentieth-century collectors, Harry Kessler apart, are a more boring bunch than those who trafficked in art in earlier centuries. Second, and in my view by far the more fascinating question, what is an art collection and what is its point? Is it simply a matter of buying works of art, or is it something more - and, if so, what? Saltzman offers few insights on this score. She tells us what people do, but rarely what they think, what moves them, what their loves and hates are, what role art plays in their lives.

Provenance is an important issue, especially at the moment, given the concerns over Nazi loot and the large amounts of unprovenanced (and almost certainly illegally excavated) antiquities passing through the salesrooms. But beyond the question of ownership, which is not trivial, provenance highlights an even more crucial matter, which is what I would have thought art history is about: the link between knowledge and pleasure. There are all sorts of practical reasons for having an education, but the most important - and this is why educated people know in their hearts that they are better off than uneducated people, whatever their "level of remuneration" - is that they have a better time. Anyone who has grown to love opera by learning more about it will be familiar with this truth.

A painting can be interesting because of its author, its genesis, its iconography, or its history. Dr. Gachet was painted in early June 1890, barely six weeks before Van Gogh committed suicide. The subject was an eccentric doctor, an early collector of Impressionists, who in addition to being portrayed twice by Van Gogh (the other, slightly later picture, now hangs in the Musee d'Orsay, Paris), sat for Cezanne, Norbert Goeneutte, and Charles Leandre. Van Gogh said in a letter to Gauguin that he had painted Gachet "with the heartbroken expression of our time." Ms. Saltzman accepts this statement at face value. Gachet's expression is interesting, though whether it is heartbroken I have my doubts. The second version is sadder but also coarser in expression and execution.

Saltzman never steps back from the painting, unable or unwilling to abandon her assembly line of facts. She gives us pages on Goring, who only "owned" the painting in the sense that he owned the Heinkels of the Luftwaffe (Christie's 1990 catalogue was more honest, omitting the Reichsmarschall from the provenance); pages on the Stadel Gallery in Frankfurt in 1817, decades before Van Gogh was so much as a glimmer in his father's eye; pages on Picasso. I realize that she is trying to set the scene, but people who don't already know all this aren't going to buy this book. At the same time, she says little about Lola Kramarsky, who sold the painting in 1990, after spending fifty years with it. Half a century is a mighty long time to spend with anything or anyone, but Saltzman says little about what the painting meant to Kramarsky, whether her views changed, what she thought of the other version, or even whether she preferred blue or yellow.

The idea behind this book, you see, is a bit of a fudge. Dr. Gachet was never stolen or forged. In fact, the only "interesting" thing that ever happened to Dr. Gachet was that it was bought for a record sum in 1990. Until then, it had just hung on this or that wall, the property of this or that person, who was mildly, or less mildly, compelling. Saltzman tries to write up a storm to make it interesting - and who can blame her? - but she doesn't succeed. A biography of a painting is an excellent idea in principle, but an author needs the right "victim" - which Dr. Gachet is not.

Peter Watson's expose, Sotheby's: The Inside Story, was published in January. His novel Capo was published in March.