E10 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST. SUNDAY, AUGUST 2, 2020 EZ EE E11
creative ideas from cultures he
barely knew. These critics also see
a man who abandoned his wife
and family to father children with
teenage girls in the South Seas,
relationships that he got away
with due to his colonial prestige
but that can clearly be seen as
more sinister today.
When he decided to travel to
Tahiti, Gauguin had imagined
himself living “free at last, with no
money troubles” and able “to love,
to sing, and to die.” But in French
Polynesia, the artist was not so
free.
After painting his masterpiece
“Where Do We Come From? What
Are We? Where Are We Going?” in
1897, Gauguin tried to commit
suicide. Four years later, he relo-
cated to the Marquesas, a remote
section of French Polynesia, where
he built a two-story hut he dubbed
the “Maison du Jouir” (House of
Pleasure). There he was embroiled
in squabbles with local authorities
and ravaged by injury and illness.
In his final months, after Vaeo-
ho, his pregnant, 14-year-old Mar-
quesan companion, had left him
to await the baby’s birth with her
grandmother, Gauguin had seri-
ous eye problems, and the “Mai-
son du Jouir” reeked so badly from
the rot of his ulcerated leg that few
could stand to be near him. Most
scholars agree that by his death at
54, in May 1903, the artist was not
in any state to be turning out
masterpieces.
His end was “truly pitiable,”
according to George Shackelford,
who organized a 2003-2004 exhi-
bition about Gauguin in Tahiti. “I
mean, he was really, really, really
in extremis.... That he was paint-
ing at all in the first months of
1903 is almost miraculous.”
And that’s just it: Fourmanoir
thinks Gauguin wasn’t painting,
which is why he believes all of the
canvases attributed to him in 1903
are forgeries. He claims — sensa-
tionally — that the forgeries were
commissioned by Gauguin’s art
dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who
wanted to profit from a sudden
surge in demand for Gauguin’s
work.“T
he Invocation” was ac-
cepted by the National
Gallery of Art as a gift
from John and Louise Booth of
Michigan in 1976. When The
Washington Post’s art critic, Paul
Richard, saw it displayed in the
gallery in the company of other
Gauguins, he described it as “the
weakest picture in the room.”
“Its brushwork is clumsy, its
colors muddy, its South Sea maid-
ens crudely drawn,” he wrote.
Remarking on the painting’s
connection with other Gauguins,
including “Women and a White
Horse” and “Where Do We Come
From?” (also at the MFA Boston),
Richard noted that “uninventive
forgers often assemble fakes from
such half-familiar images.” “Were
‘Invocation’ by another painter,”
he wrote, “its authenticity might
be questioned.”
Fourmanoir has taken up
where Richard left off.
Of course, it is easier to cast
doubt on the authenticity of paint-
ings that are already weak. Art
scholarship has traditionally been
built on a model of mastery (on the
artist’s part) and connoisseurship
(on the scholar’s). You could tell
something was by Jan Van Eyck or
Leonardo da Vinci because it was
demonstrably better than work by
their imitators. But in the modern
era, this model broke down as
such artists as van Gogh, Matisse
and Picasso tried to “unlearn” con-
ventional ideas of virtuosity and
skill, embracing new ways of
painting that were often deliber-
ately awkward or clumsy.
Even in these new, mold-break-
ing modes, modern artists had
good days and bad. But admirers
of Gauguin don’t like to admit that
an artist capable of “Where Do We
Come From?” was also capable of
very ordinary paintings. So they
are left with a choice: They can
acknowledge that in 1903 Gau-
guin was sick, his powers waning.
Or they can reach for an explana-
tion that is both more dramatic
and less injurious to the artist’s
reputation: The weak pictures
must be fakes.
Shackelford, a former depart-
ment head at the MFA who is now
senior deputy director at the Kim-
bell Art Museum in Texas, knows
both “Invocation” and “Women
and a White Horse” well. He feels
positive about the latter painting:
Despite “moments of ineptitude,”
he says, “there’s a loveliness to the
overall patterning of the colors.”
The museum itself, according to
MFA spokeswoman Karen Frasco-
na, has “confidence in the attribu-
tion of ‘Women and a White Horse’
” — although she notes that “we
always remain open to new schol-
arly research about works in our
care.”
As for “The Invocation,” Shack-
elford says he once looked at it
“very closely” in the company of
NGA senior conservator Carol
Christensen. “I came away from
SEE GAUGUIN ON E12art
he’s gained some standing in this
forbidding world, after playing a
leading role in a blush-inducing
admission by the Getty Museum
in Los Angeles that a Gauguin
sculpture, purchased in 2002 for a
reported $3 million to $5 million,
is not actually by Gauguin. Now,
even as some of the most re-
nowned art scholars continue to
look with withering skepticism at
Fourmanoir’s motives and creden-
tials, he plans to make the most of
his newfound status.
He has his sights set on paint-
ings in several major museums.
But his latest proclamations pres-
ent another test of his credibility.
Fourmanoir is rattling the gates
not just of the most prestigious
museums in Boston and Washing-
ton, but also the greater world of
Gauguin scholarship, contending
that almost all of the celebrated
post-impressionist’s final works —
as many as 13 paintings displayed
at famous museums in such places
as Prague, Jerusalem and Zurich
— are clever fakes.
Is Fourmanoir a grand illusion-
ist or an art savant? A publicity
hound or an earnest truth-seeker?
Or is he a beguiling concoction of
all those things?F
ourmanoir has been think-
ing and dreaming about
Gauguin ever since he heard
a story told to his grandfather by
the French auctioneer Maurice
Rheims.
An elderly woman had stopped
Rheims on the street in Paris and
asked him to look at a painting
wrapped in newspaper. It was a
still life by Gauguin, which
Rheims subsequently sold for
what was then a record price.
As a child, Fourmanoir says,
“every time we saw Rheims, I
asked him to tell me again and
again this extraordinary” — and
possibly apocryphal — “story. He
did it every time with the same
emotion he had that 1956 day.”
It was this story, he says, that
gave him “the wish to be an art
treasure hunter and also a Gau-
guin connoisseur.”
Like Gauguin, who spent time
in the French navy and merchant
marines, Fourmanoir loves boats,
and literature. When he was 18,
inspired by the writings of Joseph
Conrad and Herman Melville,
Fourmanoir set off to sail the
world for the better part of three
decades.
“I start like the first sentences of
Melville in ‘Moby Dick,’ ” he says,
when asked to provide a short bio.
“Call me Fabrice (Ishmael). Some
years ago — never mind how long
precisely — I was a... young man
smuggling Chinese porcelains,
guns and cigarettes between com-
munist China and the Philippines
with the Sulu Islands pirates and
fascinated by the beauty of island
girls. One day I discovered Tahiti,
which I knew before only by the
paintings of Paul Gauguin and the
books of Melville, [Robert Louis]
Stevenson [and Jack] London.”
Fourmanoir liked Tahiti
enough to settle there, opening a
small gallery and marrying three
Polynesian women in succession.
Over the years, his Gauguin obses-
sion deepened. At a Paris auction
in 1992, he bought a trove of Gau-
guin letters, notes, drawings and
photographs. This led to collabo-
rations with a few Gauguin schol-
ars, including Elizabeth C. Childs,
who thanked Fourmanoir in her
book “Vanishing Paradise: Art and
Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti.”
Fourmanoir says he lost all of
his money during the financial
crisis of 2008-2009, after which he
divorced “my last Tahitian wife.”G
auguin, along with Vincent
van Gogh and Paul Cézanne,
is one of the three great
post-impressionists and one of the
best-known artists in history. On
the rare occasions when his paint-
ings come on the market, they can
fetch tens or even hundreds of
millions of dollars. And yet, today
more than ever, Gauguin is a high-
ly divisive figure.
To his admirers, he was one of
the last great romantic adventur-
ers, a former stockbroker who
sloughed off bourgeois conven-
tions and voyaged across the
world to live out a dream. He was,
they say, a visionary artist who
was determined to learn from oth-
er cultures and who used his ex-
panded awareness to make some
of the most ambitious, original
works of the modern era.
To others, however, he was a
scoundrel who traveled to French
Polynesia and shamelessly stoleGAUGUIN FROM E1Gauguin’s
mastery or
masters of
disguise?
CÉSAR RODRÍGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTGIFT FROM THE COLLECTION OF JOHN AND LOUISE BOOTH IN MEMORY OF THEIR DAUGHTER WINKIE/NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART, WASHINGTON D.C. TOMPKINS COLLECTION-ARTHUR GORDON TOMPKINS FUND/PHOTOGRAPH © MUSEUM OF FINE ARTS, BOSTONLEFT: D etail of “ The Invocation” (1903) by Paul Gauguin, pictured above.FAKE: The signature is very weak. The P and the G don’t have Gauguin’s characteristic “proud” style.
AUTHENTIC: If the signature is weak it may be because Gauguin was gravely ill.FAKE: The central nude figure is a poor imitation of the central figure wearing a loin cloth in Gauguin’s
1897 “Where Do We Come From?” Where that figure is reaching for fruit, here she is grabbing at air.
AUTHENTIC: The central reaching figure closely resembles a drawing once attributed to Rembrandt,
which Gauguin used as a source but which a forger at that time is unlikely to have known about.CLOCKWISE FROM TOP: Fabrice Fourmanoir played
a leading role in the admission by the Getty Museum
that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for
millions, is not actually by Gauguin. After the artist
painted “Where Do We Come From? What Are We?
Where Are We Going?” in 1897, he tried to commit
suicide. His final years were marked by squabbles and
health problems — and they were also when he painted
“The Invocation,” a work disputed by Fourmanoir.