The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin
The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin

Author: Stephanie A. Brown

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2024-07-23

Total Pages: 205

ISBN-13: 1538173115

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A globetrotting Gold Rush heiress. An awkward Paris schoolmaster. A celebrated French actor. And a museum of history and art in California’s Central Valley. What do they have in common? They are all connected by an oil painting, a still life called Flowers and Fruit, that may or may not have been painted by the post-Impressionist Paul Gauguin. In the decade that museums began to collect modern art, Flowers and Fruit traveled the art market in Paris and New York. Experts and connoisseurs hailed it as a signature work of Gauguin just as he came to be acknowledged as a master. When it joined the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, locals treasured it as “the Museum’s Gauguin.” But by 1964, Gauguin scholars and experts in Paris and New York had lost track of the painting and declared it lost. When it resurfaced in 2018, they questioned its authenticity. How could a genuine Gauguin have been hiding in plain sight in a provincial American museum? Is Flowers and Fruit a forgery or is it authentic? Follow along as historian, curator, and professor of museum studies Dr. Stephanie Brown traces the unlikely history of the painting. Using never-before-seen archives and making new connections, Brown writes the biography of a painting—and explores what we mean by authenticity and who gets to define it. Now undergoing technical examination as a result of Dr. Brown’s findings, Flowers and Fruit has embarked on a new chapter of its life. If the painting is authentic, it will be the most valuable painting in the Haggin’s collection—and one of the most important paintings in California. And if the painting is a forgery, who was the forger?

A Delicate Matter
A Delicate Matter

Author: Oliver Wunsch

Publisher: Penn State Press

Published: 2024-02-22

Total Pages: 191

ISBN-13: 0271096683

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Eighteenth-century France witnessed an unprecedented proliferation of materially unstable art, from oil paintings that cracked within years of their creation to enormous pastel portraits vulnerable to the slightest touch or vibration. In A Delicate Matter, Oliver Wunsch traces these artistic practices to the economic and social conditions that enabled them: an ascendant class of art collectors who embraced fragile objects as a means of showcasing their disposable wealth. While studies of Rococo art have traditionally focused on style and subject matter, this book reveals how the physical construction of paintings and sculptures was central to the period’s reconceptualization of art. Drawing on sources ranging from eighteenth-century artists’ writings to twenty-first-century laboratory analyses, Wunsch demonstrates how the technical practices of eighteenth-century painters and sculptors provoked a broad transformation in the relationship between art, time, and money. Delicacy, which began the eighteenth century as a commodified extension of courtly sociability, was by century’s end reimagined as the irreducible essence of art’s autonomous value. Innovative and original, A Delicate Matter is an important intervention in the growing body of scholarship on durability and conservation in eighteenth-century French art. It challenges the art historical tendency to see decay as little more than an impediment to research, instead showing how physical instability played a critical role in establishing art’s meaning and purpose.