Dali House

Another respite from this nasty Dali Planet flooding thanks to some more breaking news …

Had a maintenance bloke around the other day to raise a stuck window and lower my beer supply, and he spilled some suds on a painting I’d just bought, a jungly view of Nakhon Nondescript in the days when Thai teak still lumbered across the land. (No, this isn’t the breaking news bit. Hang on.) There was some crisp fizzing and the pigment started to belch and then slide floorward, revealing an entirely different landscape underneath. Not quite the masterpiece I might have hoped for — some silked-up royal court ladies hanging a lantern for Loy Krathong — but a startling revelation nonetheless.

I don’t know why the artist I was patronising had such an abrupt change of heart. Perhaps, though, he’d simply run out of canvas and was strapped for cash, just like poor old crow-pecked Vincent Van Gogh a century before him.

As blogged round the world last week, museum curators in Amsterdam and Boston were dancing in wheatfields at their joint discovery of a Van Gogh work called “Wild Vegetation” — whose existence had until then been merely a matter of speculation — beneath the surface of “The Ravine” (shown at the top of this post) at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts. Previously the world had only seen a drawing of it, hanging at the Van Gogh Museum in Holland.

The Boston conservator who discovered the underlying work in an X-ray picked out features such as flowers like those visible in the “Wild Vegetation” drawing.

Vincent painted “Ravine” in February 1889, “Vegetation” in June. In between, he probably mailed his preparatory drawing of the latter to his brother Theo in Paris, along with his usual appeal for more paint and canvas, damn it! When the postman pulled up on his bicycle at the Saint-Remy asylum and didn’t deliver the requested materials, Van Gogh simply covered his ravine in vegetation. He just could not wait to get his latest vision on canvas, and likely chose a painting he didn’t much like to cover up. He was so anxious, in fact, that he didn’t even bother slapping on some primer first. The topography of “Vegetation” bubbles close to the surface in “Ravine”.

Oddly, another online source says this is “The Ravine”, and that it’s at the Rijksmuseum Kroeller-Mueller in Otterlo in the Netherlands! Maybe I’ll look into this anomaly later and see what’s going on, but it’s too bad Van Gogh didn’t whip up a second copy of “Vegetation”, because we have a dilemma on our hands.

What was not explained in the news reports (or the blogs, naturally) was what the curators plan to do. The Boston Globe did come right out and say “museumgoers will never be able to see [’Vegetation’]”, suggesting it will remain curtained behind its successor, but there could conceivably be the possibility of carefully removing the paint on top to let the smothered vegetation live again.

Deciding which one is sacrificed so the other can live would truly be a Sophie’s choice. It’s a pity the God of Art (Minerva, wasn’t it?) couldn’t be satisfied with a proxy sacrifice, of the sort announced at the same time as the discovery of “Vegetation”: that “Head of a Man” is no longer a Van Gogh painting.

A crack squad of sceptics from the aforementioned museum in Amsterdam had a really good look at the work hanging in Australia’s National Gallery in Melbourne and said, “No, that’s not our Vincent.” So “Head of a Man” goes rolling — couldn’t that be the sacrifice? The National Gallery of Victoria paid just £1,680 for it in 1940, so no one’s going to moan about its devaluation from an estimated £10.5 million now, are they? And anyway, the news reports said that this (obvious, to me) imposter had been owned by Keith Murdoch, Rupert Murdoch’s dad, so nobody gives a shit about it.

What is it with rich people and poor, old, shotgun-riddled Van Gogh? Here’s Elizabeth Taylor (yikes!) beaming over “View of the Asylum and Chapel at Saint-Remy”, which she picked up at an auction in 1963 when she was still Cleopatra-babe-a-licious.

Recently a United States appeals court said she could keep it because the original owners — from whom it was stolen by Nazis — “waited too long to ask for it back”. The original owners are a family whose designated whiner was Andrew Orkin of Hamilton, Ontario, and he’s a lawyer, so nobody gives a shit about their claim either.

Why is La Liz, who’s wealthy enough to buy many, many replacements, so keen to hang on to her Van Gogh? Oh …