{"id":250181,"date":"2025-05-21T08:20:38","date_gmt":"2025-05-21T08:20:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/peraltafinancing.com\/aerospace\/this-amateur-art-detective-thinks-paul-gauguins-last-self-portrait-is-a-fake\/"},"modified":"2025-05-21T08:20:38","modified_gmt":"2025-05-21T08:20:38","slug":"this-amateur-art-detective-thinks-paul-gauguins-last-self-portrait-is-a-fake","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fivemor.com\/?p=250181","title":{"rendered":"This Amateur Art Detective Thinks Paul Gauguin’s Last Self-Portrait Is a Fake"},"content":{"rendered":"


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The new allegations come from Fabrice Fourmanoir, who previously identified a fraudulent Gauguin sculpture that the Getty Museum had purchased for $5 million<\/h2>\n
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Eli Wizevich<\/a><\/p>\n

– History Correspondent<\/span><\/p>\n

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The authenticity of Paul Gauguin’s 1903 self-portrait has long been the subject of debate.
\n Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span>
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According to naval records,\u00a0Paul Gauguin<\/a>\u2019s eyes were brown. In early self-portraits, the French artist painted himself with a crooked nose, and he scrawled a signature and date in the corners.<\/p>\n

Why, then, does\u00a0Gauguin\u2019s last self-portrait<\/a> have blue eyes, a squat nose and no signature or date? According to Fabrice Fourmanoir<\/a>, an art dealer and amateur art sleuth, these aesthetic oddities are just the most obvious evidence that the 1903 self-portrait housed at the\u00a0Kunstmuseum Basel<\/a> in Switzerland was not the work of Gauguin.<\/p>\n

Fourmanoir alleges that the work was instead painted by Gauguin\u2019s friend Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Cam in the 1910s, years after the artist\u2019s death in 1903. After that, he says it was passed off as a real Gauguin and eventually bequeathed to the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1945.<\/p>\n

So far, the Kunstmuseum has been willing to check Fourmanoir\u2019s claims. It announced that it will conduct X-ray, infrared and ultraviolet scans to help determine the provenance of the painting.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe take this matter very seriously, but these analyses will take some time,\u201d a spokesperson for the Kunstmuseum tells\u00a0Artnet<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Jo Lawson-Tancred. Results are not expected until June or July.<\/p>\n

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A Gauguin self-portrait from 1888<\/p>\n

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The painting\u2019s official origin story begins on the island of\u00a0Hiva Oa<\/a> in French Polynesia in 1903. Gauguin\u2019s health was declining. Although in February of that year, he wrote to a friend explaining that he had \u201chardly touched a brush for three months,\u201d he somehow found the motivation to make one last self-portrait, per the\u00a0Art Newspaper<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Martin Bailey. On the morning of May 8, he died, likely of a heart attack.<\/p>\n

His poor health is evident in the self-portrait. His face is grim, lacking the exuberance and devil-may-care attitude visible in earlier paintings.\u00a0Henri Loyrette<\/a>, a former director of the Mus\u00e9e d\u2019Orsay and the Louvre in Paris, once described it as \u201ca portrait of eternity,\u201d akin to the\u00a0Fayum funerary portraits<\/a> of ancient Egypt, according to the Art Newspaper<\/em>.<\/p>\n

But Fourmanoir doesn\u2019t believe this story. He claims that after Gauguin befriended Ky-Dong, who was exiled from his native Vietnam for anti-colonial activities, he taught him to paint. After Gauguin\u2019s death, Ky-Dong painted the portrait of his deceased friend and teacher based on a black-and-white photograph, which goes some way in explaining the discrepancy in eye color and nose shape.<\/p>\n

Fourmanoir\u2019s principal source is Ky-Dong\u2019s son, whom he met in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in the 1980s. \u201cWe had long conversations about Gauguin and his father, Ky-Dong. He told me his father had said that he had painted the portrait of Gauguin,\u201d says Fourmanoir, per the Art Newspaper<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The portrait surfaced in 1923 in the possession of Louis Gr\u00e9let, a Swiss liquor merchant and photographer who knew Gauguin. Fourmanoir alleges that Gr\u00e9let knew the painting was not a real Gauguin but passed it off as authentic with the help of Jean-Louis Ormond, the nephew of painter John Singer Sargent<\/a>. They put the work up for auction at Sotheby\u2019s in London and split the earnings.<\/p>\n

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Paul Gauguin around 1891<\/p>\n

Public domain via Wikimedia Commons<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fourmanoir\u2019s allegations aren\u2019t without precedent. In the late 1920s, the portrait hung at the\u00a0Kunsthalle Basel<\/a>, an art gallery in Switzerland, where records described it as a \u201cpresumed self-portrait,\u201d according to\u00a0Le Quotidien de l\u2019Art<\/em><\/a>\u2019s Jade Pillaudin.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe hypothesis that the work is not a Gauguin was already expressed in the first documents that we attained on the subject,\u201d Eva Reifert, a curator at the Kunstmuseum, tells Le Quotidien de l\u2019Art<\/em>. \u201cAdmittedly, we also see documented expert opinion that the work is undoubtedly authentic, but with the new information shared by Fabrice Fourmanoir, there is a chance to study this question again.\u201d<\/p>\n

Fourmanoir, after all, has a knack for spotting fakes. In 2020, he claimed that a\u00a0rare sandalwood sculpture<\/a> attributed to Gauguin was a forgery. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which had purchased it for a reported $5 million, later reattributed the piece.<\/p>\n

While the results of the analyses will help determine the truth of Fourmanoir\u2019s claims, one other possibility remains: The portrait could be a collaborative work by both Gauguin and Ky-Dong.<\/p>\n

In the 1960s, Bengt Danielsson<\/a>, a Swedish anthropologist and the author of\u00a0Gauguin in the South Seas<\/em><\/a>, recalled a story that Gr\u00e9let once told him, per the Art Newspaper<\/em>: One day, Ky-Dong was in Gauguin\u2019s studio and began painting the artist\u2019s portrait, Danielsson wrote. \u201cWithout a word, Gauguin picked up a mirror and, thrusting his friend aside, took the brush and finished the portrait himself.\u201d<\/p>\n

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