The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin: Exposing A Modern Art Mystery

THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GAUGUIN

The Haggin Museum in California has addressed a long-standing mystery with its latest exhibition, The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin. The show’s focus is Flowers and Fruit, a painting thought to be by Paul Gauguin but now disputed because it was left off of the Wildenstein catalogue raisonné. This bold show asks, if Flowers and Fruit isn’t a Gauguin, what is it?

The exhibition, based on a new book of the same title by Dr Stephanie Brown, takes the visitor on a journey through prestigious auction rooms in Paris to California’s Central Valley and exposes the history of the painting. It is believed that Gauguin gave the canvas to his friend Louis Roy, a fellow artist and peer. After his death, his collection was put up for auction in 1907. Flowers and Fruit went under the hammer at the Hôtel Drouot Paris and was sold to New York’s Reinhardt Galleries before reaching Robert McKee, who later donated it to the Haggin.

The McKee family purchased the canvas in 1929. In Brown’s words, it “set off a chain of events that would make the painting ‘disappear’ from the international art market.” Questions about its authenticity grew over the years, and it faded from view. Recent analysis has focused on the paint and canvas using up-to-date advanced technology, inviting the public to take another look at the evidence and redefine the authenticity of this important work of art.

The exhibition opened on 3 October, laying out the history of the painting but also inviting visitors to participate in the authentication process themselves.

According to Phyllis Hecht, Founding Director of Johns Hopkins University’s Museum Studies Program, “It is a riveting exploration of art authentication through the real-life journey of one painting. Brown’s meticulous research and masterful storytelling turn the art world into a detective story.”

Brown’s book is widely regarded as an academic achievement. It has taken what often can be a dry subject and provenance and turned it into the proverbial page-turner. Elizabeth Chew, president and CEO of the South Carolina Historical Society, praises how Brown married a world of late 19th—and early 20th-century French art with that of an American collector and a determined California town. “Paintings are not just pictures,” says Chew, “but records of connection over time.

Paul Gauguin was a giant amid giants in the annals of modern art. His radical use of colour and symbolic content made him a leader of French Post-Impressionism. Gauguin was unparalleled in the annals of Modern art. Born in Paris in 1848, Gauguin spent part of his childhood in Peru, catalysing his lifelong fascination with faraway lands. Except for a brief period as a stockbroker, until he was in his mid-30s, Gauguin pursued art full-time, collaborating with Impressionist masters such as Camille Pissarro and Paul Cézanne. Soon enough, however, his notion of artistry would shift completely, jettisoning European traditions for something raw and moving. The voyage to Tahiti in 1891 marked a turning point; he created some of his best-known works then: flat, bold compositions of Indigenous life, impregnated with colour and symbolic meaning.

Though largely overlooked in his lifetime, it is indeed confident that Gauguin was an artistic innovator. The bold experimentation with colour and form in his works of striking beauty and emotion became instrumental in the development of modern art, influencing such figures as Picasso and Matisse. Gauguin died in 1903 on the Marquesas Islands, yet his works continue to challenge viewers, inspire them, and overwhelm their gaze.

As The Case of the Disappearing Gauguin opens at the Haggin Museum, the public is invited to explore the mystery of one painting and deeper questions about the nature of art, authenticity, and how we connect across time through objects and stories.

THE CASE OF THE DISAPPEARING GAUGUIN On View: October 3, 2024 – April 6, 2025, Haggin Museum Stockton, CA USA

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