Error during command authentication.

Error - unable to initiate communication with LISTSERV (errno=10061, phase=CONNECT, target=127.0.0.1:2306). The server is probably not started.

Print

---

----------------------------Original message----------------------------
------------------
Dear colleagues,
I thought you might be interested in the following:
Have a cool summer.
Ursula


From this morning's Washington Post:

Van Gogh's Portrait In Intrigue World's Priciest Artwork Is Missing Without
a Trace

By Doug Struck Washington Post
Foreign Service
Thursday, July 29, 1999=3B Page C01

TOKYO, July 28-The news bulletins today hinted of shadowy treasure and
riches slipped away: The world's most expensive painting has disappeared,
the newscasters say, a masterpiece painting last seen in the hands of an
eccentric Japanese man.

From New York to Paris, some of the world's foremost art curators have now
been forced to list the whereabouts of Vincent van Gogh's =22Portrait of Dr.
Gachet=22 as simply =22unknown.=22 That has prompted a flurry of reports =
this
week about this dark work and the mysterious man who last owned it--Ryoei
Saito, a conflicted symbol of Japan's magnificent rise and inglorious fall.

They were an odd couple from the start--Saito and Dr. Gachet--and some
found the mix of East and West too jarring to their rigid view of the
proper world order.

Which is perhaps what Saito, a self-made Japanese millionaire, relished
most when he stepped from obscurity at a New York art auction in 1990 with
=2482.5 million to buy Vincent van Gogh's sad portrait of the painter's
physician, Paul-Ferdinand Gachet.

The art world was aghast at the record price, doubly aghast two days later
when Saito paid just a bit less for a Renoir, and triply aghast that the
European masterpieces were to be spirited away by one of Japan's
bubble-economy nouveau riche.

There might have been some smug pleasure, then, at the curse that befell
this odd couple=3B at the ignominious fall and disgraced death of the
Japanese businessman=3B at the return of the van Gogh to the shadowy corners
of the art scene.

Two awkwardly joined worlds once again split--Saito, once a symbol of the
swaggering wealth of Japan, now epitomized its economic stumble=3B and the
painting, with its own lurid Nazi past and contested claims to its
ownership, now likely gone from Japan, according to Saito's son, probably
to the United States.

Where is =22The Portrait of Dr. Gachet=22? Curators now list it as =
=22present
location unknown.=22 The question has a sensational ring because of a remark
once made by Saito that he wanted the masterpiece placed in his coffin at
his cremation. It was a remark he quickly regretted, saying it was a bad
joke and a misunderstood acknowledgment that the painting is so precious it
would cost his heirs dearly in inheritance tax.

Indeed, that was true, according to his second-eldest son, Toshitsugu
Saito, 54, a member of the Japanese parliament.

=22As the remaining family, we had to give up that art,=22 he said Tuesday
night in Tokyo. =22I completely gave up my inheritance right. The van Gogh
painting went into the hands of the creditors. It was the bank that had the
substantial hold on it.=22

Tokyo's huge Fuji Bank appeared to be the main creditor, Toshitsugu Saito
said. But the secretive Japanese banks are loath to disclose their handling
of assets, and Saito asserted that even he is not certain what happened to
the painting.

=22I don't have an official report of what happened to the art. However, I
presume that this painting is in the United States, in the East Coast of
the United States,=22 he said. =22This is a world-class asset, so I am
convinced that it was treated very properly and respectfully. But to tell
you the truth, this is all that we know about it.=22

A Fuji Bank spokesman, Shuji Yonezawa, said the bank would have no comment
on the van Gogh painting. Saito's second big 1990 purchase, the Renoir, was
sold a year after his death--at a 26 percent loss.

Whatever happened to the Dr. Gachet portrait, it was not a part of the
elder Saito's funeral pyre. =22I can tell you for sure that this was not
burned with him and still exists,=22 said Iwao Sakamoto, a spokesman for
Saito's Daishowa Paper Manufacturing Co., where the painting was once
stored in a warehouse.

But Saito's cremation comment inflamed those who had sniffed that the
businessman's purchases were boorish and crass acquisitions of wealth.

Immediately, headlines in the French papers screamed. =22Scandal=21=22 =
protested
the usually staid French daily Le Figaro. =22Masterpieces in Peril--the
Yellow Peril,=22 sniffed a caption in the Tribune de Geneve, a Swiss daily.

=22When he bought this, he was almost treated like a criminal. There were =
all
these questions about how he could afford such a thing,=22 recalled =
Ryuichiro
Mizushima, president of Wildenstein Tokyo Ltd., an art dealer. =22But it
wasn't the media's business. It was his money.=22

Saito had made that money in the rough-and-tumble of the paper mill
industry. In 1961 he took a modest firm begun by his father, and bullied
his way into the territory of bigger companies by undercutting their prices
and raiding their clients.

It was a successful tactic, and Daishowa became the second largest paper
company in Japan. But Saito took financial risks to get there, betting
heavily on stocks and art. The Sumitomo Bank took control of the company
from him because of his losses in 1982, but he wrested it back in 1986.

The late 1980s were Japan's financial heyday, when the yen had humbled the
dollar and Japanese billionaires were raiding the West for treasures. Fine
art was considered--mistakenly, it turned out--to be a good investment, and
at the crest of Japan's wave, Saito sent a representative to a Christie's
auction in New York with instructions to pay whatever was necessary.

The van Gogh he acquired was a moody portrait of the homeopathic physician
who tried to arrest van Gogh's =22melancholy=22 in 1890. It didn't work. The
artist declared of Gachet, =22This doctor is sicker than I am,=22 and =
shortly
after finishing the portrait, van Gogh shot himself to death.

The price Saito paid for =22The Portrait of Dr. Gachet=22 was =2433 million =
more
than he had expected, the Japanese businessman later acknowledged. But he
seemed unconcerned, and two days later paid =2478.1 million for Pierre
Auguste Renoir's =22Au Moulin de la Galette,=22 single-handedly setting the
highest and second-highest prices paid for paintings at auction.

The art world pronounced the prices audacious, even for masterpieces. To
many, the Japanese were bidding to profane levels, and Saito epitomized the
greed and arrogance of the new rich Japanese.

But Saito shrugged. =22It wasn't a big shopping trip,=22 he said on =
television.
=22For paintings like that, the price was cheap,=22 he told The Washington =
Post
a few days after the purchases.

He said he would put the paintings on public display someday, but in the
meantime, he reportedly put them in a warehouse and rarely saw them.

=22If other good ones become available,=22 Saito said in 1990, =22I will buy=
 more
and more.=22

But that was not to be. Much of his wealth had been in overvalued forest
lands held by his paper company. As with many other Japanese land tycoons,
when real estate values fell, so did their fortunes. And so did the value
of some of their hyper-inflated purchases, including great artworks.

Once again, the Saitos' control of Daishowa was jeopardized, and they sold
shares in retreat. To try to generate cash from his properties, Saito
proposed to build a golf resort, and paid the governor of Miyagi Prefecture
to get land changed from forestry zoning to one that would permit
development.

Saito, another Daishowa company official and two politicians were indicted
in December 1993 on bribery charges. Saito, disgraced and broken, was
brought to the courtroom two years later in a wheelchair to hear his
sentence: three years, suspended.

He apologized tearfully for his conduct. Six months later, at age 79, he
collapsed in a Tokyo hotel and died of a stroke.

For more than three years, there has been no public sighting of the
treasure Saito collected, and no reliable account of what has happened to
it.

Two independent sources told The Post, however, that Sotheby's, the
international auction house, paid several million dollars to the Japanese
creditors for a limited option to sell the work. When that effort failed,
Sotheby's forfeited the sum, the sources said. (A call to Sotheby's press
office to confirm or deny these reports was not returned.)

Until recently, most informed observers believed the work was still in
Japan with the creditors, probably a Japanese bank. But those closest to
the situation, including Cynthia Saltzman, who wrote a well-received 1998
book =22Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece,=22 now
believe it has been sold.

=22I have since heard more reliably that it is in a European private
collection,=22 Saltzman said from her home in Brooklyn this week. She says
she does not know the name of the present owner.

=22There were many rumors over the past few years that it had been sold, but
whenever I would trace those rumors, they turned out to be just rumors,=22
she said. Philippe de Montebello, director of the Metropolitan Museum of
Art in New York, has also said he believes it has been sold.

Actually, both de Montebello and Saltzman could have heard of the sale from
the same reliable source: Anne Distel, curator in chief of the Musee
d'Orsay in Paris, where the recent exhibit =22Cezanne to Van Gogh: The
Collection of Dr. Gachet=22 originated. (The show is at the Metropolitan
through Aug. 15.) Distel apparently contacted the owner about borrowing the
painting for the exhibition, but was turned down.

The new owner has been rumored, among others, to be the great Swiss art
dealer Ernst Beyeler, who has his own museum. But Beyeler, reached by phone
at his home today, denied the rumor. He said he had had 15 calls that day
asking the same question. There have been plenty of rumors in Asia, too. A
Japanese magazine reported that the van Gogh had been sold in Switzerland
by a representative of Christie's. Last year, according to several art
dealers, stories swept through Tokyo that it had been sold very discreetly
to someone in America. A Christie's spokesman in Tokyo refused to comment.

=22I think for the sons, they are embarrassed that their father spent so =
much
money for the painting, even though it's a great painting,=22 said one Tokyo
art dealer, who asked not to be named.

The disappearance of the painting leaves still unsettled a fight over who
owns it. The painting had been confiscated by the Nazis, and allegedly sold
by Nazi air force chief Hermann Goering to Franz Koenigs, an Amsterdam art
collector, who was murdered in a Cologne rail station in May 1941. In the
early 1940s, he had sent it to the United States for safekeeping by
Siegfried Kramarsky, a banker. But the families have since feuded about who
had legal right to it even before the unsuspecting Saito bought it in 1990.

Mizushima, the art dealer who knew Saito for more than 20 years, said he
believed the businessman found a true appreciation for the masterpieces
before his death.

=22I saw a clear change in his attitude in his final years. I think he =
really
started enjoying the art from his heart,=22 Mizushima said. =22He enjoyed =
very
much seeing the van Gogh.=22

Special correspondents Shigehiko Togo in Tokyo and Jo Ann Lewis in
Washington contributed to this report.

=A9 Copyright 1999 The Washington Post Company


=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D
Ursula Kolmstetter
Head Librarian, Stout Reference Library
Indianapolis Museum of Art
1200 West 38th Street
Indianapolis, IN 46208
Tel.: 317-920-2662, ext. 225
Fax: 317-926-8931
e-mail: ukolmstetter=40ima-art.org
=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D=3D==
3D