E12 EZ EE THE WASHINGTON POST.SUNDAY, AUGUST 2 , 2020
that’s something the faker copied.’
And he could be right.... The
faker could be working from the
known pictures that had... come
from the Marquesas in the last
shipment and he could be saying,
‘I’m going to copy these in their
every detail, including the kind of
canvas they’re on and the way the
ground is prepared.’ He might
even have been able t o use the very
same pigments Gauguin u sed. B ut
to me, everything about the way
they’re made leads me to believe
they’re by Gauguin.”
The day after I spoke with
Shackelford, Fourmanoir gave me
a 90-minute online slide show ad-
dressing details in not only the
NGA and MFA works, but also
other Gauguin paintings, ostensi-
bly from 1903 , that he considers
problematic. He argued that the
leaf in a work supposedly made in
Ta hiti is not from any Tahitian
plant, that the thatching on a roof
in another painting is not Tahi-
tian-style and that the walls of a
hut in another work are higher
than they should be.W
hen you stand very close
to a painting by an im-
pressionist or post-im-
pressionist, it is thrilling to see the
individual brushstrokes, but you
tend to lose sight of the bigger
picture. In the same way, focusing
on the details of Fourmanoir’s
claims can blind you to the m agni-
tude of what he is claiming.
The idea t hat Ambroise Vollard,
the most important dealer in the
history of modern art, might have
commissioned forgeries is shock-
ing. Vollard was close to the im-
pressionists Degas, Renoir and
Cassatt, and played a leading role
in the careers of Cézanne, Gau-
guin, van Gogh, Picasso and Mat-
isse.
And yet no scholar I spoke to
seemed to think fraud was beyond
him.
Some artists felt Vollard ex-
ploited them. They used his name
as a pun connected to “voleur,”
meaning “thief.” (Matisse, who
profoundly distrusted him, called
him “Fifi voleur.” The artist Émile
Bernard called him “Vole-art.”)
Fourmanoir believes that when
Gauguin died and a potentially
lucrative romantic legend began
taking hold, Vollard added to his
dwindling stock by commission-
ing forgeries.
“Vollard knew what he was do-
ing,” Fourmanoir says. To deceive
people, he says, the dealer and his
forger based the faked paintings
on monotype drawings known to
be authentic, “so if you pick up
that the paintings correspond to
these drawings you think they are
authentic. So smart!”
The only way to try to settle the
issue, everyone agrees, is to sub-
ject the paintings to technical
analysis. It wouldn’t be difficult,
or even expensive, according to
Shackelford, and even though it
might not be conclusive, it could
produce information for or
against the attribution.
He explains: “Let’s look at the
canvas. Say there were an imper-
fect t hread in ‘Women a nd a White
Horse’ and with X-rays we could
see that the same thread runs
right across the middle of ‘Contes
Barbares’ [a 1902 painting recog-
nized as authentic]. That would
suggest that the two paintings
were painted from the same bolt
of cloth, which makes the chance
that it was painted in Paris com-
pletely invalid — unless a forger
got hold of some blank fabric that
came from the Marquesas, which
is unlikely.
“A lternatively, you c ould look at
the paint through XRF — X-ray
fluorescence. This would produce
a map of the elements — like
cobalt or lead — that are present
on the canvas.” If you compared
six paintings looking for anoma-
lies and “they all ended up con-
taining t he same i ngredients, with
nothing that shouts out as being
wrong, that would be pretty pow-
erful evidence.” If there were in-
consistencies, he pointed out, that
would raise a red flag.
In news that delights Fourman-
oir, Guthrie told me that the NGA
has discussed with the MFA Bos-
ton subjecting the paintings to
scientific analysis, believing it to
be “the most effective way for-
ward.” She said the museum plans
to resume those discussions
“when the Gallery curatorial and
conservation staff can come to-
gether again, in the near future.”
When I ask Fourmanoir wheth-
er he thinks he has embarrassed
experts like Brettell and Schaefer,
he says: “For sure.”
“I am free,” he adds. “I can say
what I like. The science will say I’m
right. It’s too bad for Rick because
all his credibility will collapse.”
But Fourmanoir’s own credibil-
ity — compromised by a penchant
for fabrication and evasion — also
is on the line.
“A ll of [Fourmanoir’s] idiosyn-
crasies don’t necessarily mean
that he is wrong,” Shackelford
says. “But they don’t fill you with
confidence that he is right, e ither.”
[email protected]that telling them, ‘Don’t worry
about this painting. It’s correct.’
And I also said, ‘But it’s not very
good.’ ”
In fact, he tells me, it’s “really
pathetic. But if you understand
where it comes from” — a refer-
ence to Gauguin’s circumstances
in the final months of his life —
“it’s literally pathetic. The fact
that the gallery doesn’t cherish it
[is one thing], but I hope that they
don’t doubt it.”
An emailed statement from the
NGA, however, implies that some
uncertainty persists: “We have
looked hard a t... ‘The Invocation,’
discussing it with scholars and
including it in research projects,”
spokeswoman Anabeth Guthrie
wrote. Gauguin’s late works, she
continued, “present particular
challenges — he was often ill, and
living in the Marquesas — and
there are few reliable documents
relating to his production there.”T
alking to Fourmanoir about
Gauguin, who was fond of
alter-egos and pseudonyms
and loved sowing confusion, can
give you an uncanny, hall-of-mir-
rors feeling: one unreliable narra-
tor telling a story about another.
The self-described “iconoclast”
and “adventurer” resides in S ayul-
ita, a s mall village in Mexico t hat is
popular with surfers. He lives off
savings and occasional sales of art
works. W hen we speak over What-
sApp, he wears no shirt and moves
about a large, open room with
sunlight pouring in. Other Gau-
guin scholars have more resourc-
es, but Fourmanoir likes being
unbeholden to museums or uni-
versities. It also helps, he believes,
to have certain things in common
with Gauguin, including his love
of Ta hitian women, which he says
allows him to get inside Gauguin’s
“skin and mind.”
He believes his biggest asset is
that — unlike almost every Gau-
guin specialist — he has lived in
Ta hiti and the Marquesas. “I know
Polynesian,” he says, “I know their
culture, legends, language, philos-
ophy, magic beliefs and their way
of living.”
Still, Fourmanoir gets overex-
cited, and he can be prone to
invention. Aspects of his own bi-
ography fall apart upon examina-
tion. He claims, for instance, to
have co-owned the f irst draft, writ-
ten in Gauguin’s hand, of “Noa
Noa,” the a rtist’s account of his life
in Tahiti. He says he and his part-
ner sold it to the Getty Research
Institute for $2 million, but the
manuscript was actually sold to
the Getty by the Boston-based
book dealer Ars Libri, for
$132,000, according to parties in-
volved with the sale. When chal-
lenged on this, he attempts alter-
native explanations and eventual-
ly shrugs it off.
Still, Fourmanoir’s role in the
Getty’s painful decision to down-
grade its sculpture — from Gau-
guin to “Unknown Maker” — has
made it harder to ignore him.N
o one had seen “Head With
Horns” until 1997 , when it
emerged in an exhibition in
Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the South
of France. Five years later, it was
displayed at New York’s Metropol-
itan Museum of Art, where Scott
Schaefer, then a senior curator at
the Getty, saw it and persuaded his
employer to buy it.
It was subsequently shown as a
genuine Gauguin in e xhibitions at
Ta te Modern in London, the Na-
tional Gallery of Art in Washing-
ton and the Museum of Modern
Art in New York. But a few people,
including Fourmanoir, had been
expressing doubts about i t as early
as 2003.
Several things troubled Four-
manoir: the absence of a signa-
ture, the unusual pedestal, the
sculpture’s smooth surface. There
was also a huge gap — almost a
hundred years — i n the sculpture’s
provenance.
The experts Schaefer consulted
before buying “Head With Horns”
all vouched for its attribution,
with good reason: Gauguin had
pasted two photographs of the
sculpture into his “Noa Noa” man-
uscript and made drawings and
prints featuring the work. So its
appearance in 1997 seemed like
finding the missing piece of a puz-
zle.
But in 2017, Fourmanoir drew
the Getty’s attention to a photo-
graph of “Head With Horns” in an
album at t he Musée du Quai Bran-
ly in Paris. The album’s owner,
Jules Agostini, had clearly photo-
graphed the sculpture in the Mar-
quesas Islands in 1894, a year be-
fore Gauguin and Agostini met.
The chance that Agostini owned a
photograph of a work by Gauguin
before they met seemed extremely
remote. So, after widespread con-
sultations, the Getty concluded
that “Head With Horns” could not
be by Gauguin.
The museum had purchased
the sculpture from New York’s
Wildenstein gallery, an art dealer
with a storied history that in-GAUGUIN FROM E10art
CÉSAR RODRÍGUEZ FOR THE WASHINGTON POSTTHE J. PAUL GETTY MUSEUMThere is no record of Gauguin
shipping the two paintings from
the Marquesas to his dealer in
Paris. And since they were not
listed in the inventory of his
home’s contents after he died,
Fourmanoir says that they must
be by someone else.
June Hargrove, an internation-
ally renowned expert in French
art, thinks he could be right: “It
may be just that straightforward,”
she says, adding that the lists
“don’t jibe, making it logical to
conclude that the mysterious ad-
ditions are fakes.”
But other scholars see holes.
Caroline Boyle Turner — a s pecial-
ist in Gauguin’s final years in the
Marquesas — speculates that the
paintings might have been taken
from Gauguin’s s tudio by l ocals, or
traded to other Europeans living
on the i slands, and m ade t heir way
back to France from there. Gau-
guin might also have consigned
them to sailors passing through.
He was not a good record keeper,
she notes, and his life was falling
to pieces.
“I think there are possibilities
for things getting left off lists,”
Shackelford says.A
rt historians and curators
tend to be wary of getting
tangled up in debates about
attributions. But it’s not always
easy to stay above the fray.
In 1997, the Art Institute of Chi-
cago bought a ceramic sculpture
called “The Faun” for an undis-
closed sum, said to have been
around $125,000. They believed it
was b y Gauguin, a nd its a uthentic-
ity was backed by the Wildenstein
Institute, among others. The Chi-
cago museum subsequently in-
cluded “The Faun” in “Van Gogh
and Gauguin: The Studio of the
South,” widely regarded as one of
the greatest shows of the past
half-century.
But six years later, a brilliant
forger named Shaun Greenhalgh
was convicted of money launder-
ing in connection with a forged
sculpture that had been acquired
by the British Museum. Allusions
were made in the trial to other,
untraced forgeries. The Art News-
paper’s Martin Bailey (who was
later one of the first to question
the Getty’s “Head With Horns”)
picked up on a reference to a
sculpture sounding like “The
Faun” and traced it to the Art
Institute. “The Faun” was soon
declared a forgery.
Such incidents leave a stain,
which is why many scholars are
reluctant to raise awkward ques-
tions that might embarrass the
institutions they depend on. Plus,
where there’s a suspected forgery,
there’s the potential of becoming
entangled with criminals.
Hargrove told me that years
ago, w hen she was starting t o raise
questions about the authenticity
of sculptures attributed to Au-
guste Rodin in a private collection,
a colleague warned her off: “I
don’t w ant to find you floating face
down in the Potomac,” he said.I
n April, in an hour-long dem-
onstration over Zoom, Shack-
elford used his expert eye to
show me similarities between the
two Gauguin paintings in ques-
tion and other paintings k nown to
be authentic. He f ocused on p hysi-
cal details: Gauguin’s distinctive
parallel brushstrokes and the way
he applied the ground layer of
paint, leaving areas of raw canvas
at the edges.
“Now, Fabrice would say, ‘Well,cludes many well-publicized law-
suits. Wildenstein’s independent
offshoot, the Wildenstein Plattner
Institute, is sponsoring the re-
search and upcoming publication
of the Gauguin catalogue raison-
né, the comprehensive, annotated
listing of all known paintings by
the a rtist. One o f the m ost authori-
tative voices supporting the attri-
bution of “Head With Horns” to
Gauguin was Rick Brettell, who
was heading the catalogue raison-
né project.
Several people I spoke with be-
lieve the W ildensteins had a finan-
cial interest in the sale of “Head
With Horns.” Wildenstein and Co.
would not confirm whether the
Wildenstein Institute (a forerun-
ner of the Wildenstein Plattner
Institute) had played a part in
supporting the attribution of
“Head With Horns” to Gauguin,
but wrote in an email that “we
have always strived to maintain a
firewall between Wildenstein and
Co. and t he Wildenstein Institute.”
Brettell, who died last week,
was a f ormer director of the D allas
Museum of Art and one of the
world’s foremost authorities on
impressionism and post-impres-
sionism. I n an email he sent me
before being admitted to hospice,
he said the revelations around the
Agostini album hadn’t altered his
opinion of the sculpture’s authen-
ticity. He wrote: “I am unpersuad-
ed by the arguments of M. Four-
manoir and his followers at the
Getty Museum that have allowed
that distinguished m useum to for-
mally downgrade their great late
sculpture. I am confident that, in
the fullness of time, this work will
be returned to Gauguin.”
In his email, Brettell, who had
three degrees from Yale Universi-
ty, described Fourmanoir as “a
very persuasive publicity seeker.”
Unfazed, Fourmanoir has
turned his attention to the much
broader claim that several great
museums — not just the NGA and
the MFA Boston, but also the Na-
tional G allery i n Prague, the Israel
Museum in Jerusalem and the
E.G. Bührle Foundation in Zurich
— are displaying forged Gauguins.
If he is right, he says, the credibili-
ty of Brettell and the Wildenstein
Plattner Institute’s catalogue rai-
sonné will “collapse.”M
any of Fourmanoir’s quib-
bles with the G auguins are
speculative, as he freely
admits. He believes that the fe-
male figures in “The Invocation,”
for instance, lack “the charisma”
of Polynesian women and that
Gauguin wouldn’t have painted
the central figure — who is based
on the most prominent figure in
“Where Do We Come From?” —
without a loin cloth and with pu-
bic hair.
He is certain, what’s more, that
Gauguin would not have painted
the white cross in the background
of both paintings, because he
loathed the local bishop who had
the cross erected and because,
from the paintings’ implied view-
point, the cross would have been
“hidden by big trees” in 1903.
Observation-based claims of
this kind often rest on question-
able assumptions. (What counts
as a “weak signature?” And was
Gauguin only painting what he
saw?) Yet they can be first steps in
the discovery of forgeries, and
Fourmanoir believes they rein-
force his main argument: that
both paintings have a suspicious,
unexplained gap in their prove-
nance.Art sleuth opens up a conversation
Source: Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST“Women and a White Horse,” 1903
Oil on canvas
Bequest of John T. Spaulding
Photograph copyright Museum of Fine Arts, Boston112 3FAKE: The vegetation on the mountain is not typical of the Marquesas Islands.FAKE: The area at the bottom of the work looks bland and badly painted.AUTHENTIC: In 1898, Gauguin signed two works painted within months of each
other as, respectively, “P. Gauguin” and “Paul Gauguin.”FAKE: The painting is signed “P. Gauguin,” instead of “Paul Gauguin.” It seems
unlikely he would have signed two contemporary works diff erently.23AUTHENTIC: Gauguin did not simply paint what he saw. He freely invented things,
and may have easily invented the cross at the top of the painting and the look of
the vegetation here.AUTHENTIC: In P olynesia, Gauguin made his own ground layer and “frosted” the
surface just short of the edge, leaving a margin of raw canvas all around the painting.TOP: Fabrice Fourmanoir lived in Tahiti
and the Marquesas, which he says allows
him to get inside Gauguin’s “skin and
mind.” ABOVE: “Head With Horns,” a
work purchased for millions as a Gauguin.