Portrait of Dr. Gachet.

The Story of a van Gogh Masterpiece: Modernism, Money, Politics, Collectors, Dealers, Taste, Greed, and Loss

Cynthia Saltzman

Viking, $25.95, 406 pp.

Known to many simply as "Vincent" (as he signed his letters and paintings), van Gogh is perhaps the most famous artist in the world. He is revered as a painter, his life and tragic death have been the subject of a best-selling biography and a popular movie, and his mysterious psychiatric disorder (probably epilepsy exacerbated by poor diet and absinthe) has inspired reams of posthumous diagnosis. The popular reading of Vincent van Gogh, the poor, mad genius who cut off his ear, was already gaining currency when he committed suicide in 1890 at age thirty-seven. The real story of van Gogh's life is, of course, much more complex, and as Cynthia Saltzman engagingly narrates, so are the circumstances that led to the historic sale of his Portrait of Dr. Gachet to a Japanese paper magnate at Christie's in May 1990 for $82.5 million - still the highest price paid for a work of art at public auction.

How a legend is constructed, what defines a masterpiece, and how art acquires multimillion-dollar value are the questions that Saltzman tackles. Although it is probably impossible to explain satisfactorily to many people why any painting is worth $82.5 million, the author does a remarkably thorough job of describing the complex dynamics of the art market and the roles that the experts - the artists, dealers, critics, historians, curators, and collectors - play in keeping up the supply and demand that fuel its operation. Saltzman's account is built on her own investigations as well as on recently published research. For readers familiar with current trends in the discipline of art history, this book will not provoke radically new insights; for others, however, Saltzman will reveal how paintings acquire value as they are exhibited, written about, and in other ways validated as unique and irreplaceable objects that provide pleasure or status to those who traffic in art.

Van Gogh was born into a bourgeois Dutch family and worked for Goupil and Co., one of the most prestigious international art galleries of the time. As Saltzman rightly points out, van Gogh took advantage of an unparalleled opportunity to gain a wealth of information about current and past art and an insider's view of the marketplace. Still, after an ambitious start, he lost interest in the art trade and spent several years as an apprentice preacher in the desperately poor mining districts in the south of Belgium. When his apprenticeship was not renewed, and he began to draw and paint in earnest, van Gogh returned to Paris where his younger brother, Theo, was making a name for himself as a dealer in contemporary French art. With Theo's generous financial and emotional support, Vincent became a professional painter, producing in the ten remaining years of his life a substantial and sophisticated body of work.

Far from an isolated and misunderstood genius, van Gogh was an acknowledged member of an avant-garde circle of painters with high ambitions for their art. Following the innovative steps of the Impressionist artists, the group organized their own exhibitions, courted the avant-garde press, and worked with dealers to establish a clientele. Saltzman astutely notes the importance of the new breed of dealers, among them Paul Durand-Ruel, George Petit, Theo van Gogh, and Ambrose Vollard in Paris, and Paul Cassirer in Germany, who created a market for contemporary art and nurtured the first collectors of modernism. It was the dealers' shift in focus from individual paintings toward artists' careers and personalities that contributed to the cult of the artist that still leads to mythmaking in the art world. Van Gogh's myth began even before his death with a laudatory article by the symbolist poet and art critic Georges-Albert Aurier titled, "The Isolated Ones: Vincent van Gogh." His reading of van Gogh as a "dreamer" who "would never be understood except by his brothers, the true artists," was only the first of a long series of discussions of the artist in this vein. Subsequent authors credited van Gogh with influencing trends in twentieth-century art, thus validating his work by proving its true avant-garde status and its significance to later generations. The publications of his letters to Theo further extended Vincent's fame. Before long he had attained the status of a master and the details of his life were lost in the larger facts of his disease and suicide.

Having established a more accurate picture of van Gogh, Saltzman follows the Portrait of Dr. Gachet from its origins to the dramatic 1990 sale. She describes the lives of the fourteen successive individuals who bought, sold, traded, and even stole a painting whose value increased with each exchange. Because these individuals were themselves more or less significant in the art world, Saltzman is able to piece together their life histories. Inherited by the widow of Theo van Gogh, the painting subsequently moved from private collection to private collection, traveling from Amsterdam to Paris, Copenhagen, Berlin, Weimar, Paris, and Frankfurt, where it entered the collection of the Stadelsches Kunstinstitut. Portrait of Dr. Gachet was eventually confiscated by the Nazis, along with thousands of paintings deemed "degenerate." While many of the so-called degenerate artworks were destroyed or auctioned off, van Gogh's portrait was secretly sold by Hermann Goring for his own personal gain. Purchased by an Amsterdam banker and then by a German-Jewish family on the eve of their departure from Europe, the painting came to New York, where it was exhibited for years in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Market forces and financial considerations of the family finally brought the painting to auction in 1990. By that time, late nineteenth-century French paintings had long been the most coveted items in a seller's market, and the unusual case of an acknowledged masterpiece being offered at auction insured great interest among buyers and the press. As Saltzman so dramatically relates, the painting is more than a portrait of the ineffectual provincial doctor who treated Vincent. It encapsulates much of van Gogh's ambitions for his art and the twentieth century's vision of modernism. Saltzman's formal analysis of the painting will help convince those who aren't already sure of its aesthetic value.

Given the ambitions of the book, it is disappointing that footnotes have been tossed aside in favor of nearly useless endnotes. The book also suffers from insufficient editing; on occasion repetitions, confusing time sequences, and awkward phrases detract from the narrative. On the whole, however, Portrait of Dr. Gachet is a refreshing reminder for those of us who experience art in the sanctified public spaces of museums that art inspires not only spiritual, emotional, and intellectual pleasures, but also avarice and personal aggrandizement. Not the least of Saltzman's merits is her ability to maintain a balance between art's exalted contemporary status and its frank value as a commodity. Let's hope that the story of the painting's next hundred years will be told as well.

Donna Gustafson is curator of exhibitions at the American Federation of Arts. She is a frequent reviewer of modern and contemporary art for Artnews.