Description:
Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Doctor Gachet sparked considerable and somewhat notorious debate when it was sold at auction in 1990 for the record-breaking sum of $82,500,000. In Cézanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet, readers find out how, if one painting could be worth so much money, this one might be it. Regarded by his contemporaries as "one of the liveliest and most sympathetically original of men," the physician, art collector, and amateur artist Paul Gachet (1828-1909) was a friend and patron to a number of struggling artists including Cézanne, Pissarro, Monet, Renoir, and van Gogh. He invited them to make use of his attic studio in Auvers, France, and in return was often rewarded with fine examples of their work. This arrangement eventually afforded him one of the most legendary collections of impressionist and postimpressionist art in the world. And although scholarship on the artists he knew is enormous, it is rare to be made privy to the complex set of circumstances that go into the nascence of such an important collection. Van Gogh completed the portrait that would immortalize Gachet, who had treated him for depression, only weeks before ending his short and tumultuous career by committing suicide in 1890. He wrote, "I painted a portrait of Dr. Gachet with an expression of melancholy, which would seem to look like a grimace to many who saw the canvas. And yet it is necessary to paint it like this, for otherwise one could not get an idea of the extent to which ... there is expression in our modern heads, and passion--like a waiting for things as well as a growth. Sad and yet gentle, but clear and intelligent--this is how one ought to paint many portraits." Cézanne to Van Gogh is published in conjunction with an exhibition of the same name at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, during the summer of 1999. For the first time, the collection amassed by Gachet, originally unveiled in 1954, is being exhibited outside of France, and in this catalog it is published in its entirety. The collection contains paintings, drawings, prints, copies, and such souvenirs as the palettes of Cézanne and van Gogh, as well as the actual still-life objects seen in many of their paintings. This volume includes informative essays by both French and American curators as well as a wealth of new information, including the detailed results of new technical studies using macrophotography and x-radiography. A 328-page hardcover overflowing with 500 illustrations, 117 in color, Cézanne to Van Gogh is both the fascinating story of a unique collection and a major contribution to the study of postimpressionist art in late-19th-century France. --A.C. Smith
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