The Van Gogh Wars | Part 4: Schuffeneker’s Sunflowers Authors Insist The Mendelssohn-Bartholdy Painting Is A Fake

After Part 1, Part 2 and Part 3 were published, seasoned Swiss journalist Hanspeter Born reached out to share the extensive research in his book, co written with Benoit Landais. These scholars are convinced that the Sunflowers were painted by Emile Schuffeneker, not Vincent van Gogh, citing primary source correspondence and their own art critical eyes.

Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers: A van Gogh Forger Fooled the World was published in 2014 without much fanfare, but the 359 pages co-authored by Swiss German journalist Hanspeter Born and Francophone Van Gogh expert Benoit Landais are as thorough as they are conclusively incendiary.

No one would dispute the characterization of Schuffenecker as a far less famous artist than his counterparts in the Impressionist space, including his close friend Paul Gauguin and subsequent acquaintance Vincent van Gogh. Born and Landais go into much further detail, chronicling the origin story of Gauguin and his chum “Schuff,” (belovedly nicknamed because his Alsatian root was often misspelled and mispronounced in Francophone circles).

Gauguin and Schuffenecker first met as amateur painters working in the seemingly more-practical banking industry, only to be forced to pivot during a financial crash. Schuff was consistently considered the more cautious and scrupulous of the two, whereas Gauguin appeared impulsive and spontaneous. In their youth, the more didactic artist was praised for his attention to detail, while Gauguin urged him to take creative risks later. Schuffenecker resisted the more radical years of Impressionism, as the artists were scorned by the standards of prior tastes, but Born and Landais suggest he struggled to join the movement once the artists received increasing acclaim.

According to the authors, the didacticism of Schuffenecker’s early career failed to reveal groundbreaking creativity later in life, or to bring him the same appreciation as his peers. Critics documented having commented on his hard-earned Paris expos were not impressed, and the authors refer to him as “ever the eager copyist”.

The general consensus among those who believe the work is authentic has affirmed that the Yasuda Sunflowers are an indeed a copy of those at the National Gallery in London (recently the subject of an activist splatter). Thus, this iteration of Sunflowers is known not to have been painted from nature, and does not feature at all in Van Gogh’s correspondence from his yellow-soaked country jaunts. But the book authors cast a strong shadow of doubt on the greener, arguably duller painting: that it this is a lesser one by Schuffenecker, not by the artist’s hand.

They cite a number of art historians and scholars.

Paris dealer Alain Tarica and his friend, famous journalist and Schufenecker expert Geraldine Norman, had strong suspicions that the work was fake during the publicity tour before the Tokyo sale. They arranged a private viewing, where Tarcia cried, “These Sunflowers are unworthy of Vincent!”

10 years later, in 1997, Tarica and Norman were reportedly joined by Dr. Matthias Arnold, Dr. Jan Hulsker, Dr. Annet Tellegen, catalogue raisonné editor Arnold Hulsker, and Schuffenecker’s Sunflowers author Benoit Landais. They were pitted against Professor Ronald Pickvance, Dr. Roland Dorn and Van Gogh Museum curators Louis van Tilborgh and Sjraar van Heugten.

Hotly debated provenance disputes are not unusual, especially when a work is sold at such a high value as the record-breaking £24.75 million of this case in 1987. More recent examples include the $450 million Salvator Mundi by Leonardo da Vinci believed to be acquired by the Crown Prince of Saudi Arabia, which mysteriously disappeared from public view after its legitimacy was contested by the court of public opinion. Then there is the closed legal dispute between a Qatari sheikh and art dealer John Eskenazi, wherein millions of dollars worth of antiquities are now asserted to be replicas.

But this case is particularly interesting as it concerns general precedents around repatriation. If this Sunflowers painting were indeed determined to be massively overvalued, it would have ramifications for the Paul Mendelssohn-Bartholdy heirs’ case, predicated on the work’s priceless valuation and history as a coveted and allegedly an effectively looted object.

Insurance valuations have also been known to spike and dip depending on external forces or even motivations. With the climate change protests, the paintings in question have been valued higher due to the now newly perceived risks associated with their care at museums. Would a forgery confirmation be a malicious attempt at undermining a Holocaust case, or an essential kibosh on a painting that would have been found to be fake eventually?