Stolen Van Gogh Back at Dutch Museum After Being Anonymously Returned

The 1884 painting by a young Vincent van Gogh that was stolen during a dramatic late-night smash-and-grab from a Netherlands museum will go on public display in March for the first time since it was taken three years ago, The Guardian reported Wednesday.

Parsonage Garden at Nuenen in Spring, bearing a deep white scratch from the theft on the bottom of the canvas, was shown at a press conference at the Groninger Museum this week. The picture was stolen from the Singer Laren Museum in the Netherlands on March 30, 2020, just as the Covid-19 pandemic prompted stores, galleries, and museums to shut their doors to the public.

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Arthur Brand, the art detective who made his name recovering a range of treasure that include a Picasso painting and a ring owned by Oscar Wilde, retrieved the work late last year, albeit not through any sleuthing of his own.

As Brand tells it, he heard on a knock on his door late one evening last year. An unidentified man passed Brand a crumpled blue IKEA bag then sped off. The meeting had been prearranged and the police alerted, but Brand said still he ran up the stairs of his apartment in Amsterdam and excitedly opened the delivery. Inside, swaddled in bubble wrap, was the Van Gogh. Brand had a colleague film the unboxing, then compared the back of the work to a “proof of life” photograph he had been sent.

According to Brand, the painting was likely passed back and forth throughout the criminal underground, with no one person wanting to sell or fence it because, with a value between €3 million and €6 million (around $3.5 million-$6.5 million), the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze.

“We knew that the painting would go from one hand to another hand in the criminal world, but that nobody really wanted to touch it because it wasn’t worth anything,” Brand told The Guardian. “You could only get in trouble. So it was a little bit cursed.”

The picture’s restorer at the Rotterdam Museum, Marjan de Visser, told The Guardian that the scratch in the canvass is “severe” and “goes through all the layers, the varnish, the paint layers and then into the ground layer.”

Dust, and dirt have been removed from the canvass and de Visser is researching previous restorations and the original materials used so as to properly restore the painting.

The painting will be available for public view starting on March 29 at the Groninger Museum in the Northern Netherlands.

"I have never understood why the world reveres van Gogh....

Art is a completely artificial and subjective construct. Most "great" art only gets labeled "great" because the critics (who themselves are almost invariably poor artists) praise it, and then someone with more money than sense pays some long green to own it.

F'rinstance, the Parisians without question long have been the world's biggest art snobs. When the Mona Lisa was stolen (for the second time) in 1911, they didn't give a fig. If they had, they'd have demanded the police leave no stone unturned finding it. But the didn't. Somebody stole the Mona Lisa? Big yawn.

But when it was recovered two years later it made news headlines around the world and the painting became an international cause célèbre. It became a top attraction, not because it was a great work of art but because of its newfound notoriety, a painting that some wanted badly enough to risk prison to have it.

Abstract modern "art" was largely worthless until the 1950s when the CIA decided it would be a propaganda coup to convince the USSR that Americans were cultured and cosmopolitan far beyond anything a bunch of Russian peasants could ever hope to attain. So they secretly financed certain art collectors who spent millions on abstract modern "art." And this was the result:

Jackson Pollock's No. 5, last sold for $148 million

Mark Rothko's No. 10, last sold for $81.9 million

This effectively "monetized" what had previously been worthless and the rich started seeking out abstract "art" as a tax shelter. It gave them a place to "park" their money, tax-free.

After WWII, the Dutch put Han van Meegeren on trial for selling priceless works of classic art to the Nazis (by artists the likes of Vermeer, of "Girl with the Pearl Earring fame). Van Meegeren's defense was that all the paintings he sold were in fact fakes he had painted himself.

The state brought out all manner of art experts who testified the paintings (which since had been recovered by the Ditch) were authentic. Van Meegeren countered by demonstrating how he could "age" the canvases so they looked much older than they were. And he had hidden secret anachronisms in some of the paintings, inconspicuous objects that wouldn't have existed when the real paintings were, which was his proof they were his fakes and not originals.

Van Meegeren still got convicted of forgery and fraud, but they had no choice but to find him Not Guilty of the crime of selling priceless art to the Nazis.

When asked why he did it, Van Meegeren said he wanted to show the world that the art market is controlled by a cabal of talents hacks who earn their livings criticizing the work of the real artists. And his fakes fooled both the Nazi's experts and the Dutch's, so he was proved right on that point.

Then there' s the case of Lolo, the donkey whose painting was entered in a famous art contest.

There's a cabaret on the western slope of Paris' Montmartre hill called "The Agile Rabbit," which back in the day, was a dive bar frequented by artists. At the turn of the 20th Century it was owned by an old curmudgeon named Père Frédé, who happened to despise the (then) new "Impressionist" art.

The Impressionists couldn't get their works in Paris' biggest art show, "the Salon," because they refused to paint in the classical style, which was what the Salon was all about. So the Impressionists (Manet, Monet, Renoir, Degas, etc) started their own art show to compete with the Salon.

So in 1910, Père Frédé stood Lolo in front of an easel and canvas with a paint brush tied to its tail. And when they taunted Lolo with treats, it swished its tail against the canvas. This was what Lolo painted:

Lolo obviously had some human assistants but the final "flourishes" were applied by Lolo.

It's signed "J R Boronali," Frédé entered it in the Impressionists' art show claiming it was done by Joachim-Raphaël Boronali, an Italian from Genoa, and a painter in the new "excessivist" style. But it was all a fiction.

The painting won high praise from the critics and sold for the equivalent of about $1500 in 2024 money. But here's a photo of the true artist at work:

And if you have to ask what it's a picture of, it probably isn't art.

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