Self -portrait is a fraud. Amateur art detective catches another false work of Gaugin

Amateur art detective Fabrice Fourmanoir, who previously identified a Fraudulent Gauguin sculpture that the Getty Museum had bought 4.6 million euros, claims that another work, attributed to the French artist, is false.

According to naval records, Paul Gauguin had brown eyes. In initial self-portraits, the French artist painted himself with a crooked nose and scribbled a signature and date in the corners.

So why Gauguin’s last self -portrait has blue eyes, a flat nose And no signature or date?

Second Fabrice Fourmanoiran art dealer and amateur researcher, these aesthetic anomalies are Only the most obvious evidence that the 1903 self -portrait housed at Kunstmuseum Basel, Switzerland, was not the work of Gauguin.

Fourmanoir claims that the work was actually painted in the 1910s, years after the artist’s death in 1903 by a friend of Gauguin, Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Camand which was later presented as an authentic Gauguin, until he was legacy to the Kunstmuseum Basel in 1945.

According to, the Swiss museum was already willing to check Fourmanoir’s allegations, and announced that it will Perform x-ray analysisinfrared and ultraviolet to help determine the provenance of painting.

“We take this subject very seriously, but these analyzes will take some tempo, ”says a Kunstmuseum spokesman.” There should be no results from these analyzes before June or July. “

A Official History of Painting It starts on the island of Hiva OA, in the French Polynesia, in 1903. Gauguin’s health was deteriorating.

Although in February of that year he wrote to a friend explaining that “he had barely touched a brush for three months,” the painter found somehow Motivation to make a last self -portrait. Gauguin died on the morning of May 8, probably heart attack.

Yours Weakened health is evident in the self -portrait. His face is dark, without the exuberance and carefree attitude visible in previous paintings. Henri Loyrette, former director of Musée D’Orsay and Louvre in Paris, once described it as “a portrait of eternity,” similar to Fayum’s funeral portraits of ancient Egypt, says.

But Fourmanoir does not believe in this story. The art detective states that after Gauguin was friends with Ky-Dong, who was exiled from his Vietname Natal for anticolonial activities, taught him how to paint.

After Gauguin’s death, Ky-Dong painted the portrait of his late friend and teacher Based on a black and white photograph, which partly explains the discrepancy in the color of the eyes and the shape of the nose.

Fourmanoir’s main source is Ky-Dong’s sonwhich he met in Papeete, the capital of Tahiti, in the 1980s. “We had long conversations about Gauguin and his father, Ky-Dong. He told me that The father told him that he had painted the portrait de Gauguin ”, Diz Fourmanoir.

The portrait appeared in 1923 in possession of Louis Gréleta Swiss liqueurs trader and photographer who knew Gauguin.

Fourmanoir alleges that Grélet knew that the painting was not an authentic Gauguinbut it got it given as such with the help of Jean-Louis Ormondnephew of painter John Singer Sargent. The two put the work for sale at Sotheby’s in London and divided the profits.

Fourmanoir’s allegations are not unpublished. In the late 1920s, the portrait was hanging from Kunsthalle Basel, a Swiss art gallery, where the records described it as a “presumed self -portrait”.

“The hypothesis that the work is not a Gauguin has already been expressed in the first documents we got on the subject,” he says Eva Reifert, Curadora do kunstmuseum, AO the daily newspaper.

“It is true that We also see documented opinions of specialists to work It is undoubtedly authenticBut with the new information shared by Fabrice Fourmanoir, there is an opportunity to study this issue again, ”he adds.

Fourmanoir has a talent for identifying counterfeits. In 2020, it claimed that a Sandalian sculpture Gauguin was attributed was a forgery. The Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which had bought it for about 4.6 million euros, would later correct the authorship of the play.

Although the results of the analyzes help to determine the truth of Fourmanoir’s allegations, there is actually another possibility: The portrait can be a collaborative work of Gauguin and Ky-Dong.

In the 1960s, Bengt DanielssonSwedish anthropologist and author of “Gauguin in the South Seas,” recalled a story that Grélet told him once.

“One day Ky-Dong was in Gauguin’s studio and began painting the artist’s portrait,” wrote Danielsson. “Without saying a word, Gauguin took a mirror and, driving his friend away, He took the brush and finished the portrait himself“.