The Lost Gauguin with Dr. Stephanie Brown

Today’s special episode is an interview with Dr. Stephanie Brown. Brown is Assistant Program Director for the Johns Hopkins University’s MA in Museum Studies. Dr. Brown earned her BA from Williams College and her PhD in French history from Stanford University.

 Today we’re talking about her new book The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market. This exciting work is all about a little-known painting by renowned French artist Paul Gauguin, how it was lost, rediscovered in a small museum in California & the incredible journey it took to get there.

Thank you so much for being on the show, Doctor Brown. Your book, The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: A Study of Authenticity and the Art Market, is a truly fascinating read. Before we begin, can you tell our listeners how you came upon this topic and your personal connection with it?

Stephanie: Hi, Gary. Thanks so much. And it's really a pleasure to be here. How I found this painting. In 2016, the Haggin Museum in Stockton, California, hired me to help them with the reinstallation of their collection. So, let's take another step back from that.  My doctorate is in French history, and we're recording this on July 12th, two days before Bastille Day. So it is incumbent upon me to say that my dissertation covered women's experience of justice during the terror in 1793-94. So I am a French revolutionist at heart and part of the contract that I signed when I got my PhD in the French Revolution was said I would always remember to mention, just before Bastille Day.  So having done that, I got this degree in French history, and then I went to work in museums, and I was a curator. I was an archivist, I was a director. Eventually I became a professor of museum studies, and I was teaching museum studies in San Francisco when the Haggin Museum decided to reinstall their art collection, and they needed somebody who could work in French because they had a lot of French stuff. And somehow they found me. And so January of 2016, I drove up to Stockton. It's about 90 miles east of the San Francisco Bay area where I live. Rainy day. You know, that's a stormy time of year for us. I'd never been to Stockton before. Stockton is the county seat of San Joaquin County, which is a huge agricultural county in the middle of California, and the Haggin Museum sits in the middle of a sort of 1930s era city park, beautiful trees and and geese and ducks and a water feature and playground. And so I go into the museum to see the collection for the first time. Lots of Hudson River school paintings, lots of, really big landscape paintings like landscape paintings measured in feet by people like Albert Bierstadt, some French paintings, a fair amount of French paintings by French 19th century academic painters. So to give you a sense of what that is, they're sort of orientalist paintings. Oh, Moroccan horse dealers, that are sort of have this romantic, otherness thing to them that if you remember, um, reading Edward Said's Orientalism years and years ago, that's what he's talking about.

Gary: I was just thinking of that.

Stephanie: Exactly, exactly. Well, this is where it started, well, not where it started, but where it really flourished. So they have a bunch of those. They have a big painting by, Bouguereau, which, if you're not a art history person and I'm not, I should be clear.  Think about like sort of voluptuous nude women, in slightly suggestive settings, but not so suggestive that you couldn't hang it in your dining room. And then  I'm walking around, I'm seeing, I'm talking to everybody. I'm seeing the collection. And then, here's this painting by Gauguin. The Gauguin that I've seen and known about were mostly his Tahitian paintings.  And that may be what people picture when they, if they picture anything, when they hear Gauguin. Now, when I was in college London Auckland's book about, great women artists had come out. It had come out considerably before I was in college. But, one of the things that came up in a lot of art history classes was her discussion of the painting by Gauguin of a Tahitian woman nude from the waist up, holding in front of her, a tray with either two oranges or two bananas. And that matters. It's two oranges. So it's this incredibly sensual, sensual painting. It's super objectifying. It's super distressing in every possible way for our contemporary sensibilities. So that's what comes to my head when I think about Gauguin or did in 2016. This painting is a still life, which means it's a painting of an arrangement of objects on a table inside, and it's a painting of two vases filled with roses, surrounded at their feet by a half a dozen really super knobby, gnarly looking apples. These are apples that were grown well before GMO, right? These are like really vintage, heritage kinds of apples and, a nasturtium blossom.  And then in the background, there's something, there what appears to be a, patterned floral wallpaper.  The vases are sitting on a table covered in a sort of, yellowy orange. Maybe that's the color of the wood. Maybe that's the tablecloth. Nothing in the painting tells us. And in the lower right hand corner of the painting, there's an inscription that says, À l’ami Roy PG, ‘to the friend Roy.’ And I thought, well, this is a really strange thing to come across in the middle of California. And it's such an unlikely, it's not like Gauguin that I've seen before or heard about before. And I wonder how it got here.  That's how I met the painting. That's how I met it.  From there I did a little bit of research and then I did a little bit more research and I did a little bit more. And here we are.

Gary: Here we are. I'm sure most of our listeners are familiar with big names like Monet and Manet. Paul Gauguin is nowadays listed among those greats, though it's taken a while for him to become popular as he was largely disregarded during his life. Can you tell us a bit about the artist and his life's journey?

Stephanie: Yes, absolutely. So Gauguin was born in 1848, in Paris, and he died in 1903, in the Marquesa Islands in the South Pacific. He was born into a fairly intellectual, middle class family. His dad was a journalist and his mom, for those of you who remember this particular class in French history, his mom was the granddaughter of Flora Tristan, the French feminist. The French feminist Saint-Simonian. When Paul was a little boy the regime changed in Paris, as it did regularly in the 19th century. And his family felt it was the right thing to do to get out of town for a while. And they went to live in Peru because he had, his mother's family had relatives there. On the way to Peru, his dad died. I mean, of course, they traveled by ship. And it was a long, long, long, long journey. And his dad had a heart attack, and that was that.  Paul and his sister grew up in Peru until they were in their mid-teens.  They came back an  I'm going to start doing the, the day by day of Paul Gauguin's life. Don't be afraid. Came back to Paris. His mom died. Family friend was he and his sisters guardian. He served in the merchant marine. Traveled the world with the merchant marine, which is kind of an odd thing for somebody who later became an important painter to have done. Settled down in Paris working at the Stock Exchange, and got married to a woman who was from Denmark, who was Danish and was doing pretty well for himself.  Pretty comfortable bourgeois existence.  Decided, and this was by now, in the 1870s, decided that he was really interested in this new kind of painting. He had seen the first Impressionist exhibition that was held in 1874,  where Monet exhibited, Pissarro. And I'm not going to remember exactly all of the first Impressionists, but that gives you a sense. And that's the moment that the art world begins to undergo this really fundamental change in which instead of painting these sort of photo realist, historical or ecclesiastical or domestic scenes, these artists start to paint what T.J. Clarke has called the scenes of modern life. So they start to paint ordinary interiors. Not the interiors of palaces, not the interiors of hovels, but like middle class interiors with some pretty ordinary furniture and some gas lamps and some books and the kitty cat by the fire and somebody reading in the chair. Or they go out on the weekends and they paint out of doors. Painting out of doors is an immensely huge deal at this point, because painting has generally been done inside a studio and done for models who were, you know, dressed up to look like the Crusaders or the local baker or whoever was in the painting. Gauguin goes and he sees these paintings and he's really intrigued, and he starts taking lessons from the artist Pissarro. Pissarro. I don't know why it helps me to think about spelling things. Pissarro, he takes him out into the country. They paint together, he learns from him, and he starts to be sort of a Sunday afternoon painter,  like your grandparents maybe world, maybe like you are, you know, imagine somebody who's taking lessons at the community center or taking lessons with a local artist, and he's he likes it. And he thinks he's pretty good. Well, usually that's the end of that story, right? Maybe the exhibit in the local community center in August for their special annual exhibit. But that's not what Gauguin does. Instead, Gauguin quits his job and decides he's going to be a full time artist. Now, remember, he's married, and at this point he has four children. His wife, It's 1881, in Paris. His wife does not have a career that is bringing in a second income. So their lifestyle changes radically and almost overnight. And that begins the rest of Gauguin's life is really turned upside down.  Not only the rest of his contextual life, his wife, his kids, his family, but the rest of his chronological life. He's moving around a lot. He's changing addresses. He's not settling down anywhere. He is trying to sell his paintings. Most of the time he's failing.  He's trying to beat the bushes to get supporters, to get funders, to get somebody to pay for his paint. The rest of his existence is really about him trying to create this life as an artist for himself.  Ultimately, in 1893, he goes to Tahiti. He stays there for the rest of his life. 1894 excuse me. He goes to Haiti. He stays there for the rest of his life. His idea is that he wants to be in a place that's been uncorrupted by civilization.  A place of great beauty where an artist can exist and and make his creations without having a very high cost of living and and without the strictures of French bourgeois society. So he dies in 1903. There are lots of stories that he died of syphilis, that he died of blood poisoning. Nobody really nobody knows. He was by that point, he was 55. He had lived pretty hard life. And, the life expectancy at that point, you know, 55 was not so bad, especially for a Frenchman living in the middle of the Pacific. So that's the Gauguin story. He began, his work started to sell, of course, after he died. French dealers back in Paris who knew about his work, who had been buying his work and putting it in their back room.  They recognized a good sales story when they heard it, and they started to put the works out on view and hype them up. And, it took about 20 years. And then his work began to enter major museum collections around the world.

Gary: So you've touched on this a little bit, but can you further explain why it is so hard to determine if a work of art is Gauguin in comparison to, say, some other artists where we definitely know all their works?

Stephanie: Right, right, right. No, that's a great question. And one that I didn't go into this thinking would be a hard question to answer.  Or would be a question that you even really needed to answer. But I was completely wrong. So let's, before we talk about Gauguin, let's talk about a case where an artist works are pretty easy to trace and to identify. Okay. And the case that the case that I always use is, is Renoir and you if you think about Renoir paintings, they tend to be a lot of sort of apple cheeked,  redheaded women in sort of filmy gowns. They're also the paintings from the end of his life, but, very sweet, very super impressionist paintings. Like, if you buy a box of notecards with Impressionist paintings in them, they're going to say Renoir. So Renoir was in the first Impressionist exhibition, was in a number of the succeeding Impressionist exhibitions, stayed married to the same woman for decades, knew his children, brought them up in his household, stayed in touch with his family members.  In about, I think 1900. Maybe before that, he moved with his family to the south of France, to Cagnes-sur-Mer somewhere which is outside of Nice. Lived in that house with a studio in it until he died in the late 19 teens.  Left his two sons as his executors. His sons also worked in the arts. His son Jean, was Jean Renoir, the filmmaker. His family is pretty plugged into the art world, so they immediately started working with a dealer in Paris to put the paintings out there. So what we have there is one person, one place creating all of these, creating his body of work of art. Everybody knows where he is. Everybody knows who he is. He's in touch with people for long periods of time. It's stable. Right? It's a stable environment. All right, so now let's talk about Gauguin. So in the early 1880s, he quits his job. He's going to live for another 20 years. Right after he quits his job in Paris. They moved to rural for a little while, maybe a year, maybe eight months.  They live in a rented house. Then they think, okay, we're going to go back and live next to Madame Gauguin's family in Copenhagen. Okay? So they go to Copenhagen.  Gauguin gets a job in Copenhagen selling fabric for sails, selling sailcloth for boats.  It does not go well, as you might imagine. It might not go well. He decides, okay, I'm going to go back to France. He goes back to France, he stays with friends here. He stays with friends there. He goes and stays somewhere else for a while. He comes back. All of this moving around, right? He's still making paintings, but he has no income. So why does it matter? He doesn't have any income. Sometimes he's paying people in paintings. Sometimes he's saying, oh, if you let me stay with you for six weeks you can have these paintings that I make. And those people think, oh, you know, he's not a bad guy to hang around.  Will take his paintings, even though God only knows what he's doing on the canvas. That's such weird stuff. Or he goes somewhere, he makes friends with somebody. Then they fall out. They turn out not to be friends anymore. Any paintings that were exchanged, probably the person throws them out. Right? Because the guy made a mad and he didn't like the paintings to begin with. So what's more satisfying than to destroy them?  Finally, he goes to Tahiti in the early 1890s. And he's got this huge body of work. He does this huge body of work in Tahiti. A lot of the paintings he sends back to France by boat.  Some of them go to his dealer in Paris. Some of them go to a friend who lives near Perpignan Others, well, we don't know where they went because their the records are super spotty.  And so that is why it opens up that lack of stability in Gauguin's career opens up this area where there are many more questions about which paintings are the real deal, and which paintings aren't. Then there would be about someone whose family,  was in the dining room and watched their dad paint the portrait. Does that make sense?

Gary: Your book is framed around the painting of flowers and fruit. Can you describe this painting and how it fits into the artist's life story?

Stephanie: Yes, I have a print of the painting here in my study that, my husband had made for me to celebrate the painting's centennial anniversary of being presented at auction for the first time. So, that gives you a sense of the kind of family that I live in that we have parties for paintings. The painting is, I'd say it's about 30in wide by about 24in tall. It's a still life. It shows on the left side of the painting, there's a sort of deep Burgundy, pinkish column shaped vase. On the right side of the painting, there's a curvy deep blue vase. Both of them are filled with these really blousy French pink roses. They're both filled with these very blousy pink roses. The kind of roses that it looks like they probably have, maybe another day before they turn brown. At the foot of the vases there are some misshapen apples. Maybe there's a quince, maybe there's a, maybe there's a even a squash. The colors are really interesting. They're light green and red and yellow and a dark, dark green.  If you are familiar with, Cézanne still life, they tend to show some fruit arranged on a rumpled tablecloth. That might bring up some visual memories for you. These are very seasonal kind of apples. These are apples that if they were cartoon characters, they would have really funny accents. They would have a real personality. The table that the objects are sitting on is this sort of ochre color, sort of a yellowy orange tan color. The background is different shades of blues and periwinkles and lavenders.  A patterned floral wallpaper that's very reminiscent of any sort of bourgeois French wallpaper interior design at in the late 1880s 1890s.  In fact, there was a time when I was doing my research for the book where  I spent some time looking at French wallpaper books, trying, thinking, well, maybe this is a this is a path that I could go down, that I could identify something more about this wallpaper and that would tell me something more about where the painting was painted. You know, the kinds of questions that you go through when you're when you're doing research and you're just trying to knock on every door you can think of to see where the answers are going to be. Painting is, there are paintings that you see like oh, you know, let's say like Norman Rockwell or I mean we're all Frenchies here. So let's think about, let's think about David's coronation of Napoleon.  I think that's a painting that gets reproduced a lot and. Right. So it's this ginormous painting with all of these people, and they're wearing all of their fancy duds. Right. And and I think it's set in Notre-Dame and the, the background, sort of falls away. You get these successive darker shades, but you can see Napoleon's mother overlooking the whole thing. And Napoleon, of course, is in the middle. He's about to put the crown on his own head. Josephine is kneeling in front of him with her ermine robes all spread out. Right. So that's the kind of painting that you see and you think, oh my gosh, that is a painting, man, right? I must be in the Louvre if I'm looking at this painting. Right. This is a painting that really occupies some cultural space. That is not what flowers and fruit is. Flowers and fruit is a very nice painting, but there is nothing about it that is shocking. There is nothing about it that sets it apart enormously from a thousand other still lives. If you look at it long enough and you think about Gauguin long enough, then you see a little bit of an odd perspective in the painting. It doesn't have that sort of straight on photographic sense that still life’s often have. It has the perspective, there is just something that's a little off about it. Is it off because somebody's made a mistake, or is it off because it's on purpose? I don't know, maybe that gives you a sense of how to imagine the painting.

Gary: Your book deals with authenticity in art, a word which clearly has multiple meanings. Can you tell us a bit about how authenticity is measured in the art world?

Stephanie: Yes. It's a really fascinating thing.  It's also what I have learned as a historian. Working with this material is that most art historians and most curators are very, very hesitant to talk deeply about authenticity in artworks. For some really good reasons. Let's say that in your grandmother's attic you find an old painting, and maybe it's a still life and you think, hey, this is a really great painting, and it's really old. It was in the attic, and I'm going to take it to the local museum and see if they can tell me anything about it. Well, the people at the local museum are going to look at your painting and they're going to, if they agree to look at your painting, they're going to look at it and they're think, okay, nothing I say can be used to authenticate this painting. You cannot take my read of this painting to an art dealer and say, oh, Stephanie over at this museum says that this painting is worth $50,000, right? And you should give me $50,000 for it, because, of course, when the dealer says, yeah, no, maybe $50, then you don't want to go back to the museum, and the museum doesn't want you to come back in and say, you gave me the wrong information, right.  So, there's that level of concern and authenticity that you don't want to get sucked in inadvertently to a conversation about the economic value of a painting. Then there's a question of thinking about authenticity, as in something that's been for want of a better phrase, touched by the master. Right. And that becomes a conversation that's also about the art market is also about art dealers. It's also about the economic value of painting, but it's also about where a painting fits in the cultural life of the art world, of the museum world.  So let me let me unpack that. You can go into just about, well,  many, many museums in America and find one of Monet's water lily paintings. They're all Monet’s. Because we know where Monet was. We know what he was doing. We know these are they're all legit, authentic Monet’s. Are they all as good as the Monet’s in the Jeu de Paume? They're not going to be the grandest set of Monet’s anywhere. But they're going to be perfectly reasonable Monet’s that you're going to find in Denver that you might find in Seattle, that you're going to find in Houston.  And no disrespect to any of those paintings, but being able to trace exactly how a painting got to wherever its current resting places is a huge part of determining its authenticity. The way that many, most European paintings came to America, and landed in museums, was by the wealthy Americans traveling abroad in the 1900s, 1800s, early 1900s and buying paintings the way that they were buying tapestries and stained glass and statues from churches and everything else that you find in a great big museum in America. Now being able to know when any given robber baron,  bought any given work by an important European or minor European artist, where they bought it, what they paid for it, who owned it before them, all those things, that's how a work of art gets its provenance, its sort of biography. And that is an important piece of talking about authenticity. It's being able to know where a painting has been, who has owned it, how it's traveled, where it's been exhibited.  Who's written about it? Those are the things that make a painting more or less likely to be considered authentic.

Gary: So your book centers on one figure, but it has many important characters in the turn of the century art world. Who were these figures and how did they impact the artist? Also, what does each tell us about the world and art scene during this time?

Stephanie: That is just such a great question. I'm really happy to get to talk about that. I think the character that remains one of the most compelling for me is the artist and schoolteacher Louie Roy, who was born in 1862, so he was about half a generation younger than Gauguin. He was born in eastern France, in the foothills of the Alps, and his parents were shopkeepers. They had a grocery store on the main street of their town. And Louis was their only child. They got married late, but he did really well in school, so that meant he kept getting to go to school.  He graduated with his teaching degree, essentially, when he was in his late teens and was able to leave his home region and get a job teaching at a school in Paris, a boys school in Paris. That was pretty prestigious, it's in Vanve which is in the south west of Paris. It's now known as the Lycée Michelet named after the French historian Michelet. So Louis, who went there as a very young man to be a drawing master.  His duties were less about drawing and more about being the master.  His role was really to be the disciplinarian, to mind the students, to be the hall monitor, as it were. But he kept doing that and he moved up. A couple of years after he'd been there, he met a new teacher at the school who was a little bit older than he was called Émile Schuffenecker. Now, he was a painter, and he was a close friend of Paul Gauguin. They had worked together on the stock market. Schuffenecker came from a little bit more money than Gauguin did. And so, he also left the stock market, but he decided to be a little bit more conservative and go ahead and get his teaching certificate and not just be an artist. Maybe having come from a little bit more money made him a little bit more conservative that way. Schuffenecker or as Gauguin called him and all of Gauguin’s circle called him ‘Chouffe,’ which I think is pretty fun. Chouffe and Louis Roy became friends, and that's how Louis Roy met Gauguin, sometime in the 1880s.  They met probably in a cafe, maybe over a Sunday lunch at Schuffenecker house. And there are sketches in the Louvre that Roy and Gauguin worked on together.  You can see Roy making part of the sketch, and then you can see Gauguin's handwriting on it making a little joke. He was he was sort of a trickster. His personality was sort of a trickster, Gauguin. Louis Roy, on the other hand, he was a straight up kind of guy. In the archives, in the Museum and Pont Aven in Brittany, which has an important collection of Gauguin's works. There's a sort of a CV for himself that he wrote in probably about 1900, 1901, and he walks through all of his education, all of his exam scores. Every time that he was promoted a level in the French national teaching system, the birth and death of his children. One child survived. Two died early. His marriage, his wife's conversion from Protestantism to Catholicism. It just incredibly straight ahead. This is not a man who is gonna run off to Tahiti and leave his wife and kid, right? This is a man who knows exactly how many days it is until he's eligible for the next promotion, which will get him the next small salary raise. Okay. And in this document, he never mentions his art. Never mentions it. But he's painting all the time. And he's exhibiting in these small shows with Gauguin, with Schuffenecker, with Van Goghs. Van Gogh's dead by now, but with works of Van Gogh, with a whole assortment of other painters whose work is now in museums. Louis Roy who worked with Gauguin in 1894 or so, on a series of woodcuts. Now one of Gauguin's most famous, most written about works is called Noah Noah.  And it is about his first trip to Tahiti and his discovery of the sensuality and yada, yada, yada, yada, yada. So he made a series of woodcuts, and he was going to print them with the story that he wrote and have them published in a limited series. Well, of course, like with a lot of Gauguin's plans, that didn't work out because he got distracted, because he moved on. He asked Louis Roy to make some prints from his woodcuts for a separate edition. And those prints, many of them are in museums now.  They are more brightly colored than the prints that Gauguin made. They speak to a different personality, a different sensibility. I was able to handle some of them at the National Gallery of Art in D.C. One of the most fun things about doing that was that I found who what I believed to have been was Roy’s fingerprints on them.  It's this strange ghost of this person who's been gone for over a hundred years.  You can imagine when you're working hard at making something and of course, you're going to get ink on your hands, right? And of course you're going to no matter how hard you try, you're going to leave a little fingerprint on the margin somewhere, right? So it just feels very human. He is, Louis Roy is the man to whom flowers and fruit is inscribed. Now, the big question is, did Gauguin make this painting and inscribe it to Louis Roy or did Roy make this painting and try to pass it off as a Gauguin. That's the question. That's the historical question is at the center of the book. And it's a question that I still can't answer.

Gary: So how then, did this work of art move from France to California?

Stephanie: It's so fascinating. When I first was working with the Haggin Museum in 2016, I could not get over the idea that there could be connections between this market town in the middle of California and world capitals of art, New York and Paris. But it's right there. It's right there. It's all true. This painting, Flowers of Fruit, appeared for the first time in Paris that we know about in April of 1923, when an avant garde art dealer named Léon Marseille, consigned the painting for auction at the national auction house, the Hôtel Drouot which is still there, still functioning. You can go see things auctioned, I highly recommend. So Leon Marcel consigned this painting and another handful of other works by Gauguin to be sold in Paris in April of 1923. The painting went up for auction. There was a bidding war, and the man who won the bidding war was Sacha Guitry. Now when I found this out, I had a really distant bell in my head.  My paternal grandfather was a huge Francophile. And I remember as a child hearing him talk about this French celebrity, Sacha Guitry. Well, Guitry was a producer, an actor, a singer, a writer, a very big deal. This is the kind of man who, very big man. He was like six feet tall, walked around in full length furs and evening slippers. He was married 4 or 5 times. His wives kept getting younger while he kept getting older. Huge collector. He is the one who buys this painting. And he takes it home and he hangs it next to his Monet. That Monet, who's a family friend, has given him.  So we have a photograph of the Flowers and Fruit hanging on the wall. And Sacha Guitry surrounded by other paintings that we can identify.  Sasha is sitting there at his enormous desk with a Rogan bust of Victor Hugo. Guitry is wearing this luxurious velvet smoking jacket, and it's all just completely over the top, right?  You can just about smell the dinner that's being prepared in some kitchen somewhere, and taste the red wine that they're going to all drink. The brandy and absolutely the cigarette smoke. You have to think about the cigarette smoke because everybody's smoking all the time. And the painting even today has got this layer of cigarette smoke burned into it. Guitry keeps the painting for six years and then he puts it back on the market. It sells again for a great price and it sold to a man called Max Kaganovitch Now, Kaganovitch is this, 27, 28 year old immigrant refugee from Russia, and he has escaped Russia, along with a family friend whose name is Marc Chagall.  Chagall became Marc Chagall, the famous painter. If you think about really brightly colored, abstract paintings showing people kind of floating in the air and violins and Russian Jewish villagers, look him up. Easy to find. So Kaganovitch buys this painting. I think that Kaganovitch is working for an important French dealer when he buys this painting. Why wouldn't the dealer buy the painting himself? Because that would drive the price up. So Kaganovitch is able to get it at a slightly lower price. The dealer's name is Etienne Bignou. Lots of great names in this story. Bignou is at the center of this international network of art dealers? And the painting finds its way in 1929, from Paris to New York. In New York, it is part of an exhibition held on Fifth Avenue and a gallery called the Reinhart Galleries in the fall of 1929. Now, two other things happened in the fall of 1929.  One of them, of course, everybody knows stock market crash. The second fewer people know the Museum of Modern Art had its first exhibition. The Museum of Modern Art had its first exhibition in the same building as Flowers and Fruit was on exhibit in the Reinhart Gallery's. Museum of modern Art borrows a Gauguin still life from a collector in Boston that they call Flowers and Fruit. And they hang it in (MoMA's) first loan exhibition in the fall of 1929. And that painting is now in the collection of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Downstairs on the first floor, the Reinhart Galleries hangs our painting. in there show of Picasso, Vidal, Gauguin, Vollard.  Leading avant garde painters of the day. They put our painting in that exhibit exhibition. They call it fruit and flowers. How do I know this? I know this because in the course of looking for something else. Right. Which is how you find everything when you're doing research, just look for the thing that you're not looking for. I found an advertisement for the Reinhart Galleries saying that they were selling a Gauguin painting. So I went to New York. I went to the Metropolitan Museum's Watson Library, and I found the catalogue from that exhibition, and the measurements match. So I know that this was the painting that they, um, that they had on view the end of that year. Um, December of December 31st, 1929. Isla Hagen McKee walks into the gallery and she pays $4,000 for this painting. Isla's grandparents had come to California just before 1848, and been land speculators. They were very successful. They made a I believe the technical term is a gazillion dollars.  Her father inherited everything.  went on to make, you know, another few gazillion dollars in.  Copper mining, mercury mining, all sorts of things that are now kind of horrific for us to think aboutwas the inheritor of all of this. And, um, so, you know, even though the stock market crashed, she could go into this gallery on Fifth Avenue and get herself a New Year's present. And her New Year's present was Flowers and Fruit. She kept it for the rest of her life. She died in 1936. In 1939, her her widower, her husband, Robert McKee, packed it up and sent it to Stockton.  Stockton McKee's hometown. And when Stockton had tried to put together a history museum ten years earlier, they couldn't come up with the funds. So Robert McKee. Bob McKee said, well, you know, my wife, has a lot of money. What if we gave you the money and we gave you some of our art collection, and you named the museum after her family. And that's what happened. And so the Hagggin Museum inherited all of these paintings from the Haggin family. And in 1931, the Flowers and Fruit joined them. And it's been there ever since. Another important element of determining authenticity is checking the catalogue resume. A catalogue resume is a critical catalogue, and it lists everything that the artist has done has made. It's sort of like,  like an IMDb for artist, right? In 1964, the first catalogue resume of Gauguin's work came out. This painting was in it with an image with a photograph, but it said that the painting had disappeared. It had disappeared because nobody in Paris knew where it was, but it had been in Stockton, California, for the last 25 years. When I found the painting in 2016, I, did a lot of work on it. And I sent that work to the Gauguin committee. And the Gauguin Committee said, well, hey, let's look at let us look at the painting. And so we shipped it across the country and they looked at the painting and they said, hmm, I don't think this is a real good, good. Well, they didn't quite say that. They said they would not put it into their catalogue of Gauguin paintings, so they don't say it's not a real Gauguin. They just say we're not going to put it into the catalogue with the paintings that we think are Gauguin. That goes back to that authenticity question again. Right, of how much do you say, when do you say it and what context do you say it? And what's the economic implication of your saying it? So here we are with the book.

Gary: So, here we are with the book, which is the case of the Disappearing Gauguin: a Study of Authenticity and the Art Market. Thank you very much for being on the show.

Doctor Brown: well, thank you so much. It's really been my pleasure.

Gary: As always, donations keep the podcast going. So if you would like to make a one time donation or become a patron, please consider doing so. Thank you very much for your continued support.