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van gogh

By Vincent van Gogh - Google Arts & Culture — mwF3N6F_RfJ4_w, Public Domain, LMI Group

The owner of a painting found at a garage sale is convinced it's a van Gogh.

Van Gogh...ever heard of him? Cut off his own ear, painted a self-portrait with a bandage wrapped around his head, one of the most well-known painting masters of all time. Ring a bell?

He was born and lived in the late 1800s. Starry Night, arguably his most famous work and one of the most famous paintings of all time, was completed in 1889, just one year before he died. And though Van Gogh was incredibly prolific, creating well over 1,000 known works, there's something tragic about his art being finite. There will never be another van Gogh, and he will never have the opportunity to put brush to canvas again and give us more of his incredible work to admire, discuss, and debate.

Or...will he?

A painting discovered at a Minnesota garage sale and purchased for less than $50, is dividing the art community. The new owners are convinced it's an original, long lost van Gogh.

 vincent van gogh, van gogh, art, artists, painting, fine art, starry night, master painters, art history, museums Are there still undiscovered van Goghs out there?  Giphy  

An undisclosed buyer snagged the painting from the garage sale—imagine that!—several years ago and found similarities to the styles of Vincent van Gogh. The painting appears to show a fisherman standing by the sea with the letters "ELIMAR" scrawled in the corner. This person submitted a claim with the van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam in 2019, considered the absolute authority on the artist, which was quickly denied.

But the story didn't end there. The original buyer sold the painting of the fisherman to a New York company called LMI Group, who were convinced they had an authentic van Gogh on their hands. They set out to prove it with no expense spared.

After years of meticulous research and scientific evaluation, LMI Group released a more-than-400-page report outlining all the findings. In the estimation of their experts, Elimar was without a doubt, painted by van Gogh. Here's why:

  • An egg-white finish was found on the painting, a technique van Gogh was known to use in order to preserve his works when rolling the canvasses.
  • They believe "Elimar" is the name of the painting, and handwriting analysis matches the lettering to other samples from Van Gogh. "A precise mathematical comparison of the letters 'E L I M A R' to the block and free-form letters found in other autograph works by van Gogh, yielded significant similarities in the letters’ characteristics, including stroke length, counter, angle, stroke width, and bounding size," the press release reads.
  • The framing and pose of the subject mirrors van Gogh's later self-portraits.
  • The materials used are confirmed to match the time period in which van Gogh was actively painting.
  • Perhaps most fascinatingly, embedded right there into the painting was a human hair. "Methodical DNA analysis verified that the hair belonged to a human male, with the investigating scientists observing that the hair appeared to be red in color," according to the report.

If Elimar were truly a van Gogh, it would make the piece potentially worth over $15 million.

 vincent van gogh, van gogh, art, artists, painting, fine art, starry night, master painters, art history, museums The painting, "Elimar", was found at a garage sale in Minnesota several years ago.LMI Group

For all the rigorous scientific evidence outlined in the report, the art community collectively disagrees: They say there's no way the Elimar piece was done by van Gogh.

The Van Gogh Museum even officially rejected the attribution recently, casting massive doubts on the attribution to the Dutch master.

But how can people be so dismissive of all the rigorous evidence, all the forensics, materials dating, and even DNA analysis of the hair?! Easy: Elimar just doesn't look or feel right.

Lindsey Bourret, director of Signature Art Authentication put it perfectly: “One of the defining features of van Gogh’s paintings is the precision within his expressive brushwork—his strokes may be bold, but they are purposeful, creating movement and depth that feel both instinctive and masterful. Elimar, by contrast, lacks that balance...While scientific analysis can date materials, it cannot account for an artist’s touch—and in this case, the stylistic weaknesses strongly suggest that this is not a van Gogh.”

There's also common sense at play. Van Gogh was not typically known to sign most of his paintings or write titles on them. So writing "ELIMAR" in the corner would be very out of character for him to do. Far more likely, experts say, is that the painting belongs to Danish painter Henning Elimar. When you see another example of Henning Elimar's work, well, the case is pretty damning.

 

I think there's a part of all of us that really wants Elimar to be a van Gogh. How amazing is it to think that we could still discover new work by one of the greatest artists of all time?

What if there were new inventions and drawings from Leonardo da Vinci still out there, waiting for us to find them? Or a previously unread play written by William Shakespeare?

Sadly, there's a lot of money at stake in potential discoveries like this. Van Gogh is one of the most frequently forged artists because, if you were to convince the world that you had a van Gogh, it would be worth millions of dollars. Though Elimar is not a case of outright forgery, it's certainly possible that the potential riches and excitement have made experts squint a little too hard to try to make the case.

That's not to say Elimar still doesn't have its believers. Susan Brantly, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, helped work on the LMI report and remains convinced. “The first time you look at it, you could say: ‘What? That’s not a Van Gogh. Everybody knows what a Van Gogh looks like,’” Brantly said. But deep research of van Gogh's letters, life, and artistic style convinced her otherwise.

Elimar aside, new works by van Gogh and other masters are out there. In 2013, a painting called Sunset at Montmajour was authenticated. Before that, a new one was added to the collection in 1928. These events are rare and should be highly appreciated. In the meantime, it's OK to continue holding out hope for the next big discovery.

Dr. Who / YouTube

It's incredible to imagine that Vincent Van Gogh only sold one painting in his lifetime. "The Red Vineyard" sold in Brussels a few months before his death for just 400 Francs.


Now, he's celebrated as one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

In this incredible clip from "Dr. Who" we get to see what his reaction may have been if he saw his art today.

This article originally appeared on 02.21.20


AICP/Vimeo

Van Gogh and Kahlo might have had their critics, but nothing like this.

In a parody video titled “Museum-worthy,” renowned artists Vincent Van Gogh and Frida Kahlo must navigate the constant influx of “creative input” on their masterpieces from cheesy middlemen dressed in period garb and spouting marketing mumbo jumbo.

Even though the sketch was created to encourage professional creatives to enter a contest for the Association of Independent Commercial Producers (AICP), anyone who has had to deal with cringey corporate culture will get a kick out of it.


Van Gogh is informed that while “the client was super happy” with his “Starry Night” painting, they wanted it to make it a “sunny day” for a happier tone.

Also, his painting unfortunately failed a focus group since it did not make viewers “more comfortable about the plague.” So, of course, an influencer, aka Father Anton, is brought in “to break through and resonate with younger audiences.”

Meanwhile, Kahlo is told her unibrow is “too confrontational” and is politely asked to remove the monkey from her self portrait in favor of an animal that “scored higher on trust,” like a puppy.

Give it a watch below:

Triggered? You’re not alone. Just take a look at some of these comments gleaned from Youtube:

“The people who made this commercial really captured what its like to deal with these people. Especially the influencer part.”

“For me this really showed me how ridiculous corporate control and content-isation really is. We're so used to it that we don't think about it any more, but can be soul sucking.”

“Okay, I actually LOL'd at the end No lies detected, though.”

“This ad was BRILLIANT and so on POINT!”

“I love this…it also made me uncomfortable, as it’s just toooooooo relatable.”

Art is subjective, but it seems we can all agree that a) this ad hits the nail on the head, and b) we are ready for corporate cringe to be done, please and thank you.

By the way, if you want to see more of what happened during that focus group for “Starry Night,” you can check out an equally funny companion piece here.

The Scottish National Gallery.

The National Galleries of Scotland made an incredible announcement on July 14. Experts at the Edinburgh gallery discovered a self-portrait by Vincent Van Gogh after taking an X-ray of his 1885 painting "Head of a Peasant Woman."

To find another painting by Dutch master Vincent Van Gogh 132 years after his death is an incredible discovery not only for the art world, but humanity. It’s like digging up a hidden track by the Beatles, a secret notebook by Isaac Newton or unreleased poems by Langston Hughes.

"Hidden from view for over a century, the self-portrait is on the back of the canvas with Head of a Peasant Woman and is covered by layers of glue and cardboard," the museum said in a statement.


The discovery is historic but it makes sense given the fact that Van Gogh was known for using both sides of a canvas to save money. The artist only sold one painting in his lifetime and became famous after his death in 1890 at the age of 37. He would go on to become one of the most influential painters in Western art history.

Lesley Stevenson, the gallery’s senior conservator, says that she felt “shock” to “find the artist looking at us,” she told the BBC. "When we saw the X-ray for the first time, of course we were hugely excited."

The Edinburgh gallery describes the painting as "a bearded sitter in a brimmed hat with a neckerchief loosely tied at the throat. He fixes the viewer with an intense stare, the right side of his face in shadow and his left ear clearly visible."

Even though it will take countless hours of delicate restoration for the new painting to be separated from "Head of a Peasant Woman," the museum has a good idea of what it looks like thanks to the X-ray image.

Van Gogh famously cut off his ear in 1888, two years before his death, and in what is presumed to be a self-portrait, the artist’s ear is still attached to his head. He lopped off the lower part of his ear during a bout of depression while staying in Arles, France. He later documented the experience in a painting titled, “Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear.”

“Later in date than the Head of a Peasant Woman, the hidden painting is likely to have been made during a key moment in Van Gogh’s career, when he was exposed to the work of the French impressionists after moving to Paris,” the gallery wrote on its blog.

 

Museum visitors will be able to see an X-ray of the image in a lightbox at a new exhibition at the Scottish National Gallery entitled, “A Taste for Impressionism: Modern French Art from Millet to Matisse.”

"Moments like this are incredibly rare," Frances Fowle, a senior curator at the National Galleries of Scotland, said according to ABC News. "We have discovered an unknown work by Vincent Van Gogh, one of the most important and popular artists in the world."