"Head of a Man" purchased by Australian museum in 1940
for $3,500
MELBOURNE, Australia - A painting attributed to Vincent Van Gogh
for more than 70 years was said to be a fake Friday, after art
experts found it was probably painted by one his peers.
The director of Australias National Gallery of Victoria, Gerard
Vaughan, said a specialist team at the Van Gogh Museum in the
Netherlands found the painting had strong stylistic differences
from the Dutch artists other works, and was mostly likely painted
by one of his contemporaries.
The painting, Head of a Man, was brought to Australia in 1939 as
part of a contemporary art exhibit owned by Keith Murdoch, father
of media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
The piece became stranded in Australia with the outbreak of World
War II, and the gallery bought it in 1940 for around $3,500.
It was purchased as a Van Gogh work, and had been accepted as a
Van Gogh for more than a decade before the (gallerys) purchase,
Vaughan said in a statement.
He stressed the painting had simply been misattributed to Van
Gogh.
It is very important to make the point that its not a forgery,
he told reporters. There is no evidence to suggest that someone
produced this picture ... to pass it off as a work by Van
Gogh.
The paintings authenticity was first called into question last
August when it was on show at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh,
Scotland. Critics said the work, dated 1886, was of a different
style to other Van Gogh paintings of the same period and was not
mentioned in any of the Dutch masters letters.
When the exhibit closed, the National Gallery of Victoria sent the
painting a portrait of a bearded, curly haired man against a
brownish background to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam for
verification.
As a Van Gogh, the painting had been valued at around $21
million.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/20107111?GT1=10252
Pwned!!
