Presented to the Club by David T. Noyes in December 1988
I would like to ask you to think about the items on the
following list. Can you identify what they have in common?
- Two
F-16 fighter jets - The
Town of West Stockbridge, Mass. - 3,448
Williams College students - the
largest private estate in the United States — the 250 room Biltmore House
on 12,000 acres in Ashville, N.C. - The
City of Pittsfield - The
entire world’s mining production of mercury for one year
We’ll come back to this list in a moment.
A little over a year ago, on November 11, 1987, the art
auction house of Sotheby’s in New York City auctioned a painting depicting a
garden of blue irises painted in 1889 by Vincent Van Gogh. It was lot number
twenty-five in a ninety-four piece evening. A crowd of 2,300 people had
gathered in the cramped bidding room with intense anticipation; and at 7:55
p.m., Irises was brought on stage. The bidding started at fifteen million
dollars. At thirty million, only two bidders remained. The price then passed
forty million, the previous highest price paid for any painting. The bidding
finally concluded at forty-nine million dollars. The total elapsed time: three
minutes, thirty seconds! Including the
ten percent buyer’s commission, the total price came to fifty-three million
dollars, or in real money — eight billion yen!
Now, let’s get back to the list. That same fifty-four
million dollars could buy or support any one of those items. That is: the two
fighter planes; the appraised value of all the property for the town of West
Stockbridge; room, board and tuition for 3,448 Williams College students; the
Biltmore House; the municipal budget for the City of Pittsfield for one year;
or one year’s supply of mercury.
How did the painting come to be available? It was owned by
John Whitney Payson, who inherited it from his mother, Joan Payson. Mrs.
Payson, perhaps best known as the owner of the New York Mets, had purchased
Irises in 1947 for $84,000 — not a small sum in those days — and kept it in a
treasured place above the fireplace mantel in her New York apartment. When she
died in 1975, John Payson made it the centerpiece of the Joan Whitney Payson
Gallery of Art at Westbrook College in Maine. The appraised value at that time
was less than one million dollars. But, as the cost of insurance soared, he
felt he had less ability to support the college and other charities. In
addition, the change in the tax laws permitted only a deduction for the
original cost of the charitably donated property. Thus, he decided to sell
rather that donate the painting to Westbrook.
Not everyone was happy with the decision. Art critic Edgar
Beem had called Irises “the only world class painting in the entire state of
Maine.” He went on to say, “the rich are the custodians of culture, and we get
what they give us. I’m not sure how to change that, but they are not to be
applauded." Beem suggests that Payson’s choice to liquidate an asset already
provisionally installed in the public domain, represents a significant loss to
the public and is not recoverable. In fact, of the four Van Gogh paintings sold
at action last year, only one is currently accessible.
To prepare for the sale, Irises was exhibited in Tokyo, New
York, London, Geneva, and Zurich. The painting travelled seventeen thousand five
hundred miles in four weeks at an estimated cost of five hundred thousand
dollars. Advertising was used extensively. John Rewald, the reigning scholar on
Impressionism, was quoted as saying, “If a museum could have one painting by
Van Gogh, Irises is what it should get.” He described the coloration as “an
incredible tour de force”.
None of the experts was prepared for what happened that
evening. David Nash, Sotheby’s director of fine arts, expected Irises to bring
between twenty and forty million. He felt it was superior because of its unique
composition rather that being one of a series of canvasses. Philippe de
Montebello, the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, said: “I feel like
a fossil awakened in another era. The commission alone exceeds the Metropolitan’s
total art purchase funds. I feel so removed from the phenomenon, I can only
watch in amazement”.
The financial precedent had been set by the sale of three
Van Gogh paintings during the previous nine months. Portrait of Adeline Ravoux
sold for thirteen and three quarters million dollars; The Bridge at
Trinquetaille for twenty million; and the previous record holder, Sunflowers,
for thirty nine million, nine hundred thousand dollars. The price for the Sunflowers
painting, also completed in 1889, had been felt to be an aberration. It was one
of a series of seven Sunflower paintings and this particular one was not in
good condition. Its yellows had lost much of their original intensity. However,
Yasuda Fire and Marine Insurance Co., the eventual high bidder for Sunflowers,
had a special interest in purchasing the painting. Van Gogh had considered
Japan the site of Utopian culture and had admired Japanese wood-block prints. Furthermore,
Sunflowers had been painted in the same year that Yasuda was founded. Perhaps
they were trying to restore a sense of national heritage, since another
Sunflowers painting had been destroyed by the bombing of Yokohama during World
War II. The sale of Irises, however, proved the price to be no fluke.
Why do we have such fascination with Van Gogh? He was born
in Holland, the son of a minister. At age sixteen, he began working for his
uncle, who was an art dealer in Hague. Shortly after his transfer to the firm’s
London office at the age of twenty, he was fired. Two years later, he entered
missionary school but was expelled for sassing a teacher. At the age of
twenty-seven, he took up painting and began by depicting coal miners and
peasants in his native Holland. Vincent moved to Paris to live with his brother
Theo at the age of thirty-three in 1886. He frequented Julien-Francois Tanguy’s
paint shop, which had become a meeting place for a whole generation of young
artists. Van Gogh then moved to Arles in the south of France with the hope of
starting an artist’s colony. This dream was destroyed when, in 1888, Gauguin
left after only two months. They were both fiercely competitive men who drank,
whored, and argued. The final straw for Gauguin apparently occurred on
Christmas Eve, 1888, when Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear.
It was after this episode that Van Gogh was hospitalized off
and on. The final fifteen months of his life were the only ones spent in
asylums. First, in Saint-Remy, which still exists as a private mental hospital
and where descendants of these Irises still thrive! Finally, in Auvers-sur-Oise
where, on a beautiful summer day, he walked out into a wheat field, set his
easel against a haystack, and proceeded to shoot himself in the side. As you
might guess from his lifetime of failures, he missed any vital organ. He
dragged himself back to his attic room and lingered in pain for two days before
dying at the age of thirty-seven. He had sold only one of his paintings, and
that for a small sum which he immediately gave to a streetwalker for a meal. All
his support, even the money to buy his paints, had come from his brother, Theo.
Fortunately for posterity, Theo’s wife kept all Vincent’s letters (some twelve
hundred pages), paintings, and drawings.
Forget the notion that Van Gogh’s paintings were “mad.” Whatever
his illness may have been — and epilepsy seems to be the most probable, whether
exacerbated by absinthe, glaucoma, digitalis poisoning, or syphilis — the fact is
that it did not directly affect his work. A typical series of attacks lasted
from two weeks to a month. It must be emphasized that between these attacks he
had long periods of absolute lucidity where he was complete master of himself
and his art. He categorized his work describing handling, color, and design;
this allows us to understand his intentions more clearly that those of any
other impressionist.
It is generally acknowledged that Van Gogh changed the face
of art. Unlike impressionists who painted pretty pictures in delicate colors
with fine brush strokes, Van Gogh used violent strokes to lay on thick layers of
intense color. Quoting from one of his letters: “I am always in the hope of
making a discovery then, to express the love of two lovers by a wedding of two
complementary colors, their mingling and their opposition, the mysterious
vibrations of kindred tones. To express thought of a brow by the radiance of a
light tone against a somber background. To express hope by some star, the
eagerness of a soul by a sunset radiance.”
Monet once remarked: “How did a man who loved flowers and
light to such an extent and rendered them so well, how then did he still manage
to be so unhappy?” Picasso once wrote: “Why do the Dutch mourn Rembrandt, they
have Van Gogh?”
What, then, of the Van Gogh legend? His lack of success in
his own day, his high minded principles about art exhibitions and sales in the
face of today’s embarrassment of riches, his sympathy for the poor and working
class — these go largely unmentioned. What does surface is a fascination with
sensational prices and with the art market as theatre. The pictures are
eclipsed not by the terms of the Van Gogh legend but by the behaviors they inspire
in the international works of private fortune. Consider these comments Vincent
wrote to his brother Theo in June 1890, just one month before he died. “I think
that all the talk of high prices paid for Millets, etc., lately has made the
chances of merely getting back one’s painting expenses even worse. It is enough
to make you dizzy. So, why think about it? — it would only daze our minds. Better,
perhaps, to seek a little friendship and live from day to day.”
Epilogue [from Wikipedia]: About three years after the 1987 sale, Irises was sold for $53.9 million to Australian businessman Alan Bond, but Bond did not have enough money to pay for it. Irises was later re-sold in 1990 to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, where it remains. Irises is currently (as of 2012) tenth on the inflation-adjusted list of most expensive paintings ever sold and in 25th place if the effects of inflation are ignored.
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