After having invested $ 30,000 (€ 29,000), written a 458 -page file, the LMI International group, an art design firm based in New York, tried in vain to authenticate an alleged work of Vincent Van GOGH (1853-1890) with the museum which bears his name, in Amsterdam (Pays Bas).
The LMI group had bought the table in 2019 for a sum not disclosed to an antique dealer which had bought it for less than $ 50 (€ 48) during a garage sale in the state of Minnesota (United States). The LMI group then constituted, according to it, a team of 20 experts and organizations, including chemists, conservatives and lawyers specializing in patents, in order to carry out expertise.
The team concluded that the painting had been painted by Van Gogh in 1889 when he stayed with the Saint-Paul psychiatric sanatorium in Mausole in Saint-Rémy de Provence, in France, where he also painted Starry night (1889). He would notably refer to Elimar, a literary character of Hans Christian Andersen, whom Van Gogh particularly liked, and whose name is inscribed in the lower right corner of the canvas. The potential value of the table was estimated at $ 15 million (€ 14.5 million).
The Van Gogh museum, however, refuses to allocate the painting to the artist. He had already expressed his doubts about the authenticity of the work for stylistic reasons in 2019, and had reaffirmed in January of this year that she maintained her opinion: “On the basis of our opinion previously expressed in 2019 on the table, we maintain our opinion according to which it is not a painting by Vincent Van Gogh”wrote the Amsterdam museum in a letter to the magazine Artdependence.
Wouter van der Veen, former director of the Van Gogh Institute in Auvers-sur-Oise, even qualified the expertise of LMI of Farce and stressed that the mention of Elimar would rather be the signature of Henning Elimar, an artist Danish less known from the 20th century.
The LMI group immediately disputed these claims in an email: “Pastoral landscapes (from Elimar) are nothing like the oil painting presented by the LMI group. In addition to a multitude of other elements used for its authentication and dating, the painting presented by the LMI Group is completely consistent with a 19th century palette and shows no sign of the modernity of the 20th century. »» Wouter van der Veen replied that he was “The main researcher in the specific field of literary sources of Van Gogh’s correspondence” And that he was therefore able to refute their argument.
