Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece: Story Van Gogh's Last Portrait Modernism Money Polits Collectors Dealers Taste G - Softcover

Saltzman, Cynthia

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140254870 ISBN 13: 9780140254877

Publisher: Penguin, 1999

Synopsis

At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has seemed to countless admirers to portray our times as "something bright in spite of its inevitable griefs."

This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the forces behind the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history: avant-garde European collectors, pioneering dealers in Paris and Berlin, a brilliant medievalist who acquired it for one of Germany's great museums, and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of "degenerate art." Remarkable and riveting, "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time.

About this title

About the Author:

A former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Saltzman earned degrees in art history at Harvard and Berkeley. She currently resides with her family in Brooklyn, New York.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0140254870
• ISBN 13: 9780140254877
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 436