How a museum founder helped turn van Gogh into an international icon
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Until a few weeks ago, when Picasso's 1905 "Boy with a Pipe" sold for $104 million, Vincent van Gogh's "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" held the record for the highest-priced painting sold at auction: $82.5 million at Sotheby's in 1990.
Adjusted for inflation, van Gogh still rules: The price of "Dr. Gachet" would be more than $116 million in 2003 dollars, according to The New York Times.
Yet, unlike Picasso, who enjoyed a long life of wealth and international celebrity, van Gogh had a tough time selling anything during his brief, troubled 37 years on earth. Dependent on the support of his brother, Theo, and immersed in spiraling despair, van Gogh shot himself in 1890.
So, how did a disdained Dutch artist turn into the hottest property in the international art market between 1890 and 1990?
An intriguing part of the answer lies behind the show "Van Gogh to Mondrian: Modern Art from the Kröller-Müller Museum," opening Saturday at Seattle Art Museum. The museum founder, Helene Kröller-Müller, developed such a passion for van Goghs that she and her husband drove up prices for his paintings in the early 1900s. They eventually amassed more than 90 van Gogh paintings and 185 drawings, one of the world's largest collections of the artist's work, second only to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Not all those paintings are coming to Seattle, of course. What we'll see is a cross-section of the Kröller-Müller collection, including 80 paintings and works on paper by such greats as Picasso, Fernand Léger, Diego Rivera, George Seurat, Juan Gris, and Piet Mondrian as well as other modernists, mostly Dutch and French, that Kröller-Müller admired. (She steered away from artists of her native Germany, whose work she found "insufficiently authoritative.")
The crowd-pleaser, of course, will be the van Goghs: 12 paintings and 10 drawings, ranging from the early 1880s to significant works of the artist's last years. Among them are familiar portraits of van Gogh's postman Joseph Roulin and his wife, a self-portrait, a few turbulent landscapes and the emblematic "Café Terrace at Night."
Also included in the show are several pieces of furniture, a stained-glass window, and building designs by architects favored by the Kröller-Müllers — H. P. Berlage, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Henry van de Velde — all of whom at various times drew plans for the couple's private museum.
The Kröller-Müllers had grand ideas about how their art collection would be housed and went to the unprecedented expense of having full-scale models of wood and canvas built on-site of the Berlage and Mies plans, before deciding against them. After the Kröller-Müller fortune dissolved in the economic crisis following World War I, a simplified design by van de Velde was built with government funding in Otterlo, The Netherlands in 1938.
The 'pied piper of painting'
German-born Helene and her husband, shipping and mining tycoon Anton Kröller, essentially bought their way into the uppercrust social milieu of The Hague, where they moved in 1900. One of the wealthiest couples in the Netherlands, they owned thousands of acres of land and several villas, but were hungry for culture.
In 1905, Helene changed the course of their lives when she began taking lessons from H.P. Bremmer, an artist turned "art apostle" who found his niche training society ladies in art appreciation. Bremmer must have been a charismatic figure, sort of a pied piper of painting. In his classes he recited poetry and passionately interpreted artworks, which he presented — and often sold — to his enthralled students. He was a special fan of van Gogh, whose paintings he lauded as "objectified emotion." Helene became Bremmer's most ardent disciple (not to mention the richest). She invited him to be her personal art adviser as she began her collection.
By 1912, Helene had become obsessed with acquiring van Goghs. On an April trip to Paris with her husband and Bremmer, the couple bought seven van Gogh paintings in a single day. They bought eight more that month. Word of the purchases spread among Paris dealers, and at a May auction in Amsterdam that included 12 van Goghs, the dealers descended en masse, bidding up the van Goghs. One drawing Bremmer managed to score for the Kröller-Müllers had been estimated to sell for 3,000 guilders and went for 16,000. The rush had begun.
Should we credit Bremmer for starting the van Gogh price frenzy that burgeoned over the next century? Not entirely. The Kröller-Müller collection does reflect his taste, but Helene bought more than 400 works by Dutch artist Bart van der Leck, and his popularity didn't take off like van Gogh's. Piet de Jonge, head of collections at the Kröller-Müller Museum, points out that Bremmer advised Helene not to buy "La Grande Jatte" by Seurat, which turned out to be an important icon of 20th century art.
Maybe it's part the tragic nature of van Gogh's story and the media attention it brings that makes that the artist so intriguing. Certainly the emotional force and originality of the paintings, their wildness and gorgeous color, attracts a wide range of people, some who aren't otherwise interested in modern art. There's no doubt the name van Gogh has come to represent a surefire investment and instant prestige to the ultra-rich.
Whatever fuels the desire, van Gogh's appeal, and the prices collectors are willing to pay for his work, has continued to rise. An American museum bought a van Gogh for $4,200 before 1930, when a newly published college art history text still had no mention of him, according to a 1959 Seattle Times report. By 1966, the Associated Press announced that a van Gogh portrait sold for $441,000 at Christie's in London, a record for the artist. In 1987, a van Gogh "Sunflowers" became the most expensive painting in the world, when it sold to a Japanese businessman for $39.9 million. Later that year, Van Gogh's "Irises" went for $53.9 million, setting another record.
'You will remember me'
If someone had told van Gogh he would some day be the most highly valued artist in the world, he probably wouldn't have believed it. Certainly he would have been comforted to know his work was finally appreciated.
An epileptic and estranged son of a minister, van Gogh led a lonely life, ruled by emotional instability and headlong intensity, a near-constant struggle with depression. He failed miserably at following in his father's career in the church and eventually found an outlet for his passions in art. In a letter to his brother, Theo, he wrote: "Try to grasp the essence of what the great artists, the serious masters, say in their masterpieces and you will find God in them."
Still, his failures in friendship and love, the hopelessness of not being recognized as an important artist, took a toll on his health and mental stability. The huge quantities of absinthe and coffee he consumed didn't help either. During the time fellow artist Paul Gauguin was sharing a house with him in Arles, van Gogh became more and more distraught. One night in December 1888, he sliced off his ear and took it to a prostitute named Rachel, telling her, according to Gauguin, "You will remember me, truly I tell you this." Rachel fainted. Van Gogh went home to bed, where the police found him unconscious the next morning.
He lived another year and a half, painting some of his most amazing pictures. Two late paintings in the Kröller-Müller collection give a window into the despair of those final months. One of them, "Sorrowing Old Man" (1890) portrays a seated man bent over, his face pressed hopelessly into his hands. The other, "Still Life with a Plate of Onions," is more subtle. Painted in January 1889, just after the artist was discharged from the hospital, it's one of his first attempts to begin painting again with a simple still life. It shows the artist's table with a wine or absinthe bottle, a coffee pot and a pipe along with a medical text, a letter and a few onions — the artist's daily sustenance.
A few months later he wrote, "Every day I take the remedy which the incomparable Dickens prescribes against suicide. It consists of a glass of wine, a piece of bread with cheese, and a pipe of tobacco." Three months later, those simple remedies failed him, and he ended his life.
Sheila Farr: sfarr@seattletimes.com
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