Breaking van Gogh Read online

  The Passionate Eye exhibition headed north to Montreal, where large crowds would see it, before heading overseas to Japan. By spring 1991, the exhibit ended its international tour at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.

  9

  Letting Gogh

  Walter Annenberg ignored Michael Kimmelman’s piece in the New York Times. The octogenarian philanthropist didn’t let the noise get to him, even though Kimmelman claimed that the Annenberg Collection was less significant than that of the Bührle Foundation in both the quantity and quality of artwork.

  When the twin shows ended at the National Gallery of Art in mid-July 1990, J. Carter Brown faxed the numbers for both exhibits to Walter. Statistics don’t lie. In “ninety-two days the show was up, some 341,473 people had seen it.”54

  Annenberg saw that art exhibits made a lot of money. But he also saw that in drawing the masses, a major exhibit would be heavily trafficked—people pounding the grounds day and night, using the facilities, grabbing a meal. Those numbers gave Walter pause. He realized a draw of tens or hundreds of thousands of visitors a year would place a lot of stress on the Sunnylands property, on its beauty, as well as become a burden to the wealthy enclave of the nine-city district of Palm Springs.

  That kind of environmental impact made the ambassador reflect, deep down, on whether it was worth turning his and Lee’s home, even at its robust 20,000 square feet, into a satellite wing of a museum. He loved his paintings. He also loved the land, the fresh air and beauty of Rancho Mirage. But the artwork, he further reflected, deserved to be seen by hundreds of thousands of people. He knew that could only take place at a major museum in a major city, not at Sunnylands.

  So Walter focused on New York City and the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. Ever the negotiator, he gave Met Director Philippe de Montebello a strict list of conditions that the museum would have to meet or exceed in order to receive the donation of his art collection—if, in the end, he decided to give it to them. That list included the requirement that the more than fifty works of art be housed in one wing, his wing, with none of the paintings ever to be lent on tour, sold, or put in cellar storage.55

  Seeing there was stiff competition for the Annenberg Collection in 1990, the Metropolitan Museum of Art formulated a plan to win Walter and Lee over and separate the Met from the other institutions in the running. “The Met commissioned an eight-foot-square model of its nineteenth-century European painting galleries with scale.” The model was based on the “paintings the museum already owned. According to Christopher Ogden’s account, Lee Annenberg declared it brilliant. ‘I took one look and said, “Walter, this is it.”’ As a further inducement, the Met promised to create a thirty-minute film starring the Annenbergs at Sunnylands talking about their art.”56

  The film would be made a full two decades before reality TV shows (such as Keeping Up with the Kardashians) that made talentless but attractive people celebrities. The film, together with the scale model, exceeded Walter and Lee’s expectations and strict conditions. They were sold. They were thrilled. The deal with the Met had been sealed in sculptor marble.

  On March 12, 1991, New York Times art critic John Russell wrote a lengthy article, giving the major art donation—the largest private art collection gift in half a century—and the philanthropist behind it the coverage they deserved. In an era before YouTube, Twitter, Facebook, and viral videos, the gift to the Met gave Walter and Lee Annenberg center stage and blanketed coverage coast to coast on TV and in newspapers and magazines.

  Of the billion-dollar collection of more than fifty works of art, which would be turned over the Met after Walter Annenberg died, Russell wrote: “The installation of the Annenberg collection will be done in the context of a planned overhaul of the galleries devoted to Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings.”57

  The article also included an interview with Walter Annenberg: “‘It is my intention,’ Mr. Annenberg said yesterday in a phone interview, ‘that all of my paintings should go to the Metropolitan Museum. I love them with a passion, and I want them to stay together after I’m gone.’”58 Walter explained his reasoning for choosing the Met:

  Much as I respect the other institutions that have lately shown our collection—the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the National Gallery of Art in Washington—I happen to believe in strength going to strength, and I think that the Met is the proper repository for them. In making this announcement, I want to get the news out that the collection will be kept together and is not for sale.

  Russell concluded the article by profiling Walter’s business dealings as a publisher and mentioning his recent purchases of works by Picasso, Monet, and others. The art critic left out certain details from the ambassador’s past, like those of Moe Annenberg’s racketeering and providing mafia muscle, or Walter’s own tax evasion issues and an ongoing $3.36 million property tax battle with Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, that he wouldn’t settle for years.59

  Michael Kimmelman, chief art critic for the New York Times, didn’t remark on the huge donation when it was announced. That would come three months later, at the start of summer, on the eve of the opening of the exhibition—Masterpieces of Impressionism and Post-Impressionism: The Annenberg Collection—at the Metropolitan Museum. Instead of drilling down into Annenberg’s suspect moral past, the way he had attacked Emil and Dieter Bührle and the National Gallery of Art for hosting The Passionate Eye exhibit the year before, he left Walter unscathed. There was not a word of negative press to be found on such a massive donation.

  Kimmelman’s focus turned away from Annenberg’s past indiscretions, his questionable business practices, and personal morality run amok, and unearthed the gems in the art collection instead:

  Mr. Annenberg’s taste tends toward big statements by big artists. Rarely does he venture down art-historical byways. Conventionalism in this case translates into some major paintings. And if there are smaller works that may not represent every artist at top form, there are important Monets like “The Bench” and van Goghs like “La Berceuse,” for which this collection is understandably famous.60

  The Annenberg Collection show at the Met appealed to masses of art lovers and enthusiasts who had flooded the same exhibitions the year before at the National Gallery and other locations. When the show at the Met concluded later that summer, the Annenberg Collection returned home to Sunnylands to be enjoyed by Walter, Lee, their family, friends, and guests from Hollywood to the White House for the rest of the decade. One of the conditions the Met had to accommodate was to allow Walter to enjoy his paintings until his death in 2002. After that, the entire Annenberg collection was sent back to the Metropolitan Museum for permanent residence in New York City.

  In 1992, Walter Annenberg still searched for new Impressionist paintings to purchase for the Met. In part, the search must have been spurred by the fact that his art collection paled in size, scope, and top-tier paintings when compared to that of the Bührle Foundation, which was more than three times as large. Competition between billion-dollar art collections had to have stoked Annenberg’s passion and oversized ego. Walter was driven by the superior artwork in the Emil G. Bührle Collection. Among other works, he set his sights on van Gogh’s Shoes, painted in 1888 in Arles, and bought it at auction for $40 million from Siegfried Kramarsky family.61 Eventually, he turned his attention to Dieter Bührle’s van Gogh, Wheat Field with Cypresses. He knew that would make a huge splash in the media. So he hired New York art dealer Stephen Mazoh to broker the transaction (Mazoh would work together with the Met curator of Impressionist paintings, Gary Tinterow).

  Mazoh, who was born, raised, and educated in Baltimore, Maryland, fell in love with the art world coming out of college when he worked for Ferdinand Roten, a print dealer in the 1960s. By the end of the decade, Mazoh had exhausted both the print and art markets in Baltimore, and realized in order to take the next step in his career he would have to move to New York City. Prior to being h
ired by Annenberg to close the deal with Dieter’s painting, Mazoh had made deals on behalf of the Whitney Museum of American Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Baltimore Museum of Art.62

  The deal on Wheat Field with Cypresses would go against the claims that Frau Hortense Anda-Bührle had made to reporters in 1990 at the Emil G. Bührle Foundation art exhibition, when she insisted that the Bührles would never sell any of their paintings. She had emphasized that the Bührles were not in the business of selling artwork, and that they had no interest in ever breaking up their father’s art collection, as it was seen as an extension of their “family.” Moreover, Hortense stated that the only time they had ever sold artwork in the past was in 1960, and that was solely to secure seed money to fund and charter the Emil G. Bührle Foundation. This time they would sell a van Gogh, and, contrary to what one would expect, without going through an auction house, despite the possibility of a bidding war that could escalate the painting’s value. It is a decision that is difficult to understand on the surface.

  But then, one particular name, one odious but familiar name, had vanished from the pages of history, at least temporarily. It was a name that many van Gogh experts had long suspected of being linked to some likely van Gogh forgeries.

  The missing name was that of Emile Schuffenecker, a brief owner of Wheat Field with Cypresses after Jo van Gogh-Bonger sold it with seven others of her brother-in-law’s paintings in 1901.

  “Schuff,” as Vincent van Gogh referred to him, was a friend of Theo van Gogh and Paul Gauguin (according to Landais, Vincent himself had never met him). He was small in frame and stature, a lesser artist than either one of those masters. He also became a collector of van Gogh paintings by the late 1890s. Was it an accident that Schuffenecker’s name was left out of the Wheat Field with Cypresses description that would accompany the painting in four major museums on three continents for The Passionate Eye tour? It was left out of Charles Moffett’s essay on the painting in the Artemis book of the same name. Did the senior curator at the NGA and Impressionist art expert, who had broken into the industry at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, fail to double-check the painting’s provenance before sending his portion of the manuscript to the Swiss publisher?

  The omission remains an unanswered question, and the premature death of Charles Moffett—on December 12, 2015, from pancreatic cancer—makes the resolution of the mystery unlikely. But how does one account for the omission of Schuffenecker’s name from the provenance of a second van Gogh painting in the same catalogue entry that Moffett wrote? It makes no sense. It had to be a deliberate act, but why? What was his motivation in removing the suspected forger from history? Was he paid by the Bührles to do so? Or, more plausibly, could it be that Moffett didn’t want Emile Schuffenecker’s suspect name tainting his or van Gogh’s legacy? Stranger still, he left Nazi leader Hermann Göring’s name in, but removed Emile Schuffenecker’s name twice in the same book, meaning, as Landais wrote, that “for the art trade, a … Schufenecker is more dangerous than a … Göring.” Moffet must have known that Schuffenecker was a forger.

  When news emerged that Stephen Mazoh had brokered the final sale between Ambassador Annenberg and Dieter Bührle, three years to the month after Walter and Lee had first laid eyes on the masterpiece at the National Gallery of Art’s The Passionate Eye exhibit, the art world was abuzz. As had been the case with the van Gogh Shoes acquisition the year before, Walter Annenberg bought Wheat Field with Cypresses for $57 million in spring 1993. Instead of having the painting shipped to Sunnylands to be admired by Walter, Lee, and their friends for the rest of Walter’s life, the painting was immediately flipped to the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a “gift” that would join Shoes and, one day, the rest of the Annenberg art collection.

  For Walter and Lee to enjoy the painting, they would have to travel to New York City and view it on the wall of the Met’s Impressionist gallery dedicated to them.

  When news of the sale was confirmed, Michael Kimmelman was agog about yet another lofty gift donated to the Met by Annenberg. He wrote,

  In one of the most glittering additions in recent years to its outstanding collection of 19th-century European paintings, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has been given Vincent van Gogh’s “Wheat Field With Cypresses.” The 1889 scene of a windswept landscape beneath a roiling sky has been donated by Walter H. Annenberg, a former United States Ambassador to Britain and a longtime trustee of the museum, who has promised to bequeath his entire collection of paintings to the Metropolitan.63

  Kimmelman continued:

  Most important, “Wheat Field With Cypresses” will now be joined with “Cypresses,” another signal work from the same period in the artist’s career. Just as the van Gogh “Vase of Roses” in the Annenberg Collection complements the Metropolitan’s “Irises,” the horizontal composition of “Wheat Field” complements the upright “Cypresses.”64

  The art critic also loosely discussed the painting’s provenance. His limited view from 1993—a year before the World Wide Web went live with search engines and more than ten years before the Van Gogh Letters online database was launched—told him that “Prince of Wagram in Paris” owned Wheat Fields in and around 1906, and that “Franz von Mendelssohn, a Berlin collector, owned it from 1910 through at least 1921.”65

  In fact, Franz von Mendelssohn owned the Met’s version of Wheat Field with Cypresses until his death in 1935. By then the German-Jewish banking director had become an outcast in his homeland, scapegoated by Adolf Hitler and kicked out of the bank that his great-great-grandfather founded in 1795. With his money, prestige, and reputation stolen from him, he and his brother Paul died soon after the “Jude” measures were implemented and enforced. Like other Jews under the new regulations installed by the Third Reich, Franz and Paul had been driven out from their positions as executive managers and board members of their family bank in Germany.

  It would take the Met’s Gary Tinterow an additional five years, until 1998, to learn that the gap in the masterpiece’s official history from 1921 to 1951, when it was sold to Emil G. Bührle—a full thirty years—had been filled by the von Mendelssohn family, who hid their family art collection on a farm near the Swiss border during the war and then smuggled the paintings across the southern German border. They achieved that feat despite the voracious appetites of Emil Bührle and the Nazi Hermann Göring to steal, loot, and barter art while war swept through Europe, taking advantage of intimidated art dealers and scared, impoverished owners.

  Accounting for the gap in the provenance between 1921 and 1951 failed to confirm the darker years of Wheat Field’s ownership from the summer of 1889, when Vincent van Gogh created the landscape painting at the asylum, until the Prince of Wagram, a Paris art collector, had purchased it in 1906. Those seventeen years form the grounds of not just a suspicious audit trail of ownership, but a broken provenance that goes to the core of the question of the painting’s authenticity.

  I reached out to Lukas Gloor, the manager and historian of the Foundation of Emil G. Bührle Collection since 2002 (with limited reference to the Wheat Fields with Cypresses’ provenance, since it was sold a decade prior to his joining the Foundation). In a November 20, 2013, email, he wrote:

  The [1990] tour was planned to commemorate the collector Emil Bührle’s 100th birthday. The coincidence with the sharp rise in prices for Impressionist and Modern paintings in the 1980s was certainly accidental. However, that coincidence later should prove to be not without consequence, since one of the Van Gogh’s belonging not to the foundation, but then still to a family member, ended up in the collection of Walter H. Annenberg in 1993. Annenberg is said to have seen the painting for the first time when it was on show at the NGA in Washington, where his own collection was exhibited at the same time. The painting Wheat Field with Cypresses hangs now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art.66

  Certainly, “not without consequence” was a line not without irony. So was it a “coincidence” that a convicted felon of forged sales cer
tificates, seller of illegal arms in the black market to rogue regimes, had scouted the mark Walter Annenberg, the way a poker player tracks the tell of an eager player? Through his sister Hortense’s intelligence-gathering forays while heavily involved in The Passionate Eye exhibit in Washington, DC, Dieter came to understand the Annenberg Collection and the owner’s persona and psyche.

  Like Walter Annenberg, who further polished his philanthropist image and secured his status as generous gift giver and patron to the arts, the Met’s curator, Gary Tinterow, was equally proud to have played a major role in bringing the Impressionist masterpiece to the museum. He stated as much in his biography for the Houston Museum of Fine Art, where he is now the director.

  Wheat Field with Cypresses became the centerpiece of the Annenberg Collection at the Met long before the rest of the artwork would arrive after Walter’s death in 2002. Before arriving there, the painting had traveled a winding path: Hitler’s Nazis. Apartheid South Africa. The Iranian mullahs. Chicago mafia. These are the threads of its provenance—a good provenance, indeed.

  But there was one pair of hands that came before them, a copyist’s hands, a suspected forger’s hands, those of a friend to Theo and Vincent van Gogh, a lesser artist who left little impression with his own artwork—Emile Schuffenecker.

  II

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