Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov

Van Gogh's lost drawings: unconvincing, but does anyone care in a post-truth art world?
Jonathan Jones
The Van Gogh museum says the 65 newly discovered drawings are fakes – these flaccid sketches certainly lack the spirit of the artist’s greatest period
“Post-truth” is on everyone’s lips when it comes to politics in the age of Trump and Brexit – it’s the word of the year, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Are we also entering the age of post-truth art?

Fakes are getting better and better. They are so good they may be entering the bloodstream of art. Sotheby’s recently had to recall a portrait supposedly by Frans Hals that had sold for £8.5m; the same forgery ring is suspected of creating fake paintings falsely attributed to Orazio Gentileschi and Cranach. It feels like the tip of an iceberg. As Dulwich Picture Gallery wittily demonstrated by deliberately placing one of its own paintings alongside a fake, the forger’s art is reaching new levels. Now the plague of fakes may be infecting one of the greatest oeuvres in art: the passionate and poignant work of Vincent van Gogh.

The Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam is so unhappy about a new Van Gogh “discovery” that it has issued a trenchant official statement outlining exactly how unconvinced it is by 65 previously unseen drawings that are to be published in a new book, Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook. The museum says its experts have looked seriously at high-quality photographs of the drawings and some of the originals and have concluded that they “could not be attributed to Vincent van Gogh”. For one thing, the museum insists, the drawings, supposedly made between 1888 and 1890, “do not in any way reflect Van Gogh’s development as a draughtsman in that time”. For another, says this sombre and serious institution whose scholarship on Van Gogh is second to none: “the drawing style of the maker of the drawings is, in the opinion of our experts, monotonous, clumsy and spiritless.”

Canadian art historian and Van Gogh specialist Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov at a press conference to present her book Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook.
Canadian art historian and Van Gogh specialist Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov at a press conference to present her book Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook. Photograph: Yoan Valat/EPA
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Wait, there’s more. Van Gogh used black ink that has faded to brown; these drawings have been done in brown ink, claims the museum. It’s surely a devastating clue that the drawings are not by Van Gogh but by someone trying to replicate his art. There are mistakes in the appearance of buildings that Van Gogh never made – as he was drawing them from direct observation – and as for the story being told of where these drawings came from, their historical provenance, the museum finds it “highly improbable”.

Ouch. Presumably the makers of this supposed Van Gogh discovery will now retract. But not so fast. Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook is a sumptuous art book from the respectable New York publisher Abrams. It has an enthusiastic foreword by the Van Gogh scholar and curator . The text is by , another noted Van Gogh expert at the University of Toronto, who tells in the book of her thrill and surprise when these drawings were shown to her on a trip to Provence and she recognised them as Van Gogh’s work.

If the Van Gogh Museum is right, some serious people have been fooled. But is the museum correct? Looking through reproductions of the drawings, I strongly agree that they are, as it says, “spiritless”. They use techniques that look “Van Gogh-y” and show the types of scenes he is famous for painting, but there’s something missing.

Consider when these drawings are meant to have been done: at the most creative and turbulent time in Van Gogh’s life when he fled the temptations of avant-garde Paris to discover the light of the south in Arles, painting ecstatic sunflowers, marvellous orchards, passionate portraits, expressive cafe scenes, then becoming ill and being confined in an asylum. Purportedly, he sent this lost album of drawings to the owners of the cafe neighbouring his Yellow House when he was in the asylum. But they are totally unemotional, unexpressive, disengaged exercises with none of the energy and vision that transfigured his art in these years.

Still, you can imagine being at least ready to give these flaccid sketches the benefit of the doubt, until you look at Van Gogh’s supposed “self-portrait” that the publisher, amazingly, has put on the book’s cover. This drawing does not look like Van Gogh, let alone the way Van Gogh portrayed Van Gogh. In fact, it lacks any kind of human touch. Suddenly, the nonsense is exposed. This is a very bad, soulless, characterless attempt at a human face. It cannot possibly be the work of Van Gogh or any real artist.

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Clearly, if the museum is correct, these drawings cannot have been made innocently. They deliberately pastiche Van Gogh. Someone did them on purpose to look like his art – and the expert who identified them as Van Gogh’s has written a whole book full of detailed commentaries, in good faith, that give them credence.

I agree with the museum, but some will be convinced by the book’s detailed scholarship. It is a beautifully produced and serious-looking publication. But why has the museum’s damning judgment, first issued in 2008, gone unheeded?

These drawings have entered the culture now. They will be reported as “controversial”, but the Van Gogh Museum does not have power to seize and destroy fakes. It can only make its case. And supporters of The Lost Arles Sketchbook will make their case, too. Welcome to the post-truth art world.

The original text about the book:

“"The most revolutionary discovery in the entire history of Van Gogh’s oeuvre. Not one drawing; not ten, not fifty, but sixty-five drawings.” —Ronald Pickvance, from the Foreword

Late in life, during his time living in Provence, Vincent van Gogh kept a sketchbook within a humble account ledger given to him by Joseph and Marie Ginoux, the owners of the Café de la Gare in Arles. This artifact of incalculable historical and aesthetic value remained hidden for more than one hundred and twenty years. It reappears today as a revelation and an extraordinary treasure.

Published in this volume for the first time, Van Gogh’s lost sketchbook tells a riveting story. Over two tumultuous years in the artist’s life, he drew sixty-five sketches, including landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and a self-portrait, within the ledger. These priceless drawings provide insight into the last years of Van Gogh’s life, just before his fatal stay in Auvers-sur-Oise, and a new understanding of his most famous paintings, such as The Yellow House, The Night Café, and The Starry Night.

With meticulous analysis of the sketchbook and the historical record, art historian Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov discusses each drawing in terms of Van Gogh’s career as a whole, and in particular during his time in Arles and Saint-Rémy-de-Provence between February 1888 and May 1890.

This groundbreaking book includes facsimile reproductions of all the sketches and is richly illustrated with dozens of drawings, photographs, and paintings that situate the sketchbook in the context of Van Gogh’s life’s work and the history of art. The result of a remarkable discovery, Vincent van Gogh: The Lost Arles Sketchbook offers fresh insight into the life and work of one of the world’s most beloved artists".… (meer)