Volume 45, Number 2 · February 5, 1998
Fakes?
By Geraldine Norman
Vincent van Gogh was thirty-seven on July 27, 1890, when he shot himself in the chest on a quiet country footpath and dragged himself home to die in the attic room of a small auberge in Auvers-sur-Oise. It was only in the last two years of his life that he had found himself as an artist, first in the picturesque Provençal town of Arles, then in nearby St.-Rémy-de-Provence, and finally in the northern village of Auvers just outside Paris. It was in these years that he worked with passionate speed, using the thick impasto we now associate with his name. But his entire working life as an artist had only spanned nine years. In that time, according to the complete catalog of his work published in 1970, he ex-ecuted 879 paintings, 1,245 drawings, and one etching. It has now been suggested that several dozen of the paintings, as well as the only known etching, are fakes executed by various of his contemporaries. That Van Gogh's paintings are currently more expensive than those of any other artist gives the situation a special piquancy.
Feature, 4972 words
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