Should we expect a new earthquake in the world of art ? In the month of January, Fabrice Fourmanoir, a passionate collector, revealed that The Idol marquesan, a work of Paul Gauguin, exhibited at the Getty Museum in Los Angeles was a fake. In an article in the Washington Post, spotted by The Figaro, he attacks two other pieces of the artist postimpressioniste : The Invocation and Women with a white horse. Respectively exposed at the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the museum of Fine Arts, Boston, they are attributed to Paul Gauguin. To wrong according to him.
According to the current knowledge, the two works would have been painted by Paul Gauguin in the Marquesas islands, in 1903, only a few months before his death. But Fabrice Fourmanoir flies in the face of this paternity. For him, these paintings would have been commissioned and sold by Ambroise Vollard, the art dealer who also worked with Paul Cézanne, Vincent van Gogh or Pablo Picasso. Seeing the success of the work of Paul Gauguin, he decided to take advantage of the opportunity. The collector believes that Paul Gauguin, who was suffering at the end of his life with vision problems and an ulcer in the leg, would have been unable to paint.
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critics are already known
It was in 1976 that The Invocation has joined the museum's collection of Washington, following a donation. The Washington Post points out that when his review has seen the painting exhibited with the other Gauguin, in 1977, he felt that it was " the lowest image of the room ", criticising in turn all the colours "muddy" and a brush " awkward ". A criticism which abounds Fabrice Fourmanoir, criticizing also the presence of a naked woman "ugly and vulgar", or even the presence of a cross that does not seem to match the style of Paul Gauguin. In the case of Women with a white horse,in particular it is the vegetation which poses a problem to the collector advised. For him, it would be more representative of Tahiti as Polynesia.
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What about the museums of the charges ? The previous of the beginning of the year urges caution while the Getty Museum was forced to decommission a work acquired for more than $ 3 million. Anabeth Guthrie, a spokeswoman for the museum in Washington says that new scientific analyses will be conducted, and the research continues. For his part, Fabrice Fourmanoir is still far from done. He does not hesitate to affirm that all the works attributed to Paul Gauguin in 1903 would be false. 13 paintings, exhibited in Prague, Jerusalem, or even Zurich...
