The Accidental Collector: A Portrait of Dr. Gachet - "Cezanne to Van Gogh: The Collection of Doctor Gachet" traveling exhibition

Art in America, Dec, 1999 by Aruna D'Souza

The son's determination to elevate the reputation of his father and canonize van Gogh seems a perversely obsessive drive; one gets the impression that he never left the world his father worked so hard to build. Gachet fils never took up a profession--he called himself an artist, although he stopped making art after World War I--and devoted himself to the van Gogh monograph that Doctor Gachet had planned to write. As a middle-aged man, he was often found walking around his ancestral home wearing the same jacket and white cap worn by his father in the infamous portrait by van Gogh. The son lived in a house in which, it was said, nothing had been thrown away in 100 years, in which family history was measured in an accumulation of things. The Gachets' determination to document their intimacy with artists gave rise to the most curious--and strangely poignant--aspect of this exhibition: the inclusion of numerous "souvenirs" of van Gogh and Cezanne, including still-life objects the artists had painted, their palettes, their brushes and so on. These objects were retained, just as the books were written, not only to preserve the aura of the great artists who touched them, but to extend that aura to the Gachet family.

In his enthusiasm to learn from his artist friends, Doctor Gachet made copies of their works and encouraged his students--his son and a young friend, Blanche Derousse--to do the same. The existence of these copies has been a mumble piece of evidence in the controversy over the authenticity of the collection. For Gachet's detractors, it has been evidence of Gachet and company's ability and disposition to make fakes. On the other side, Gachet's supporters argue that the existence of the copies proves the authenticity of the originals: if you were going to forge paintings, would you keep copies proudly signed with your own name? Luckily, since one of the goals of the exhibition is to settle the authenticity question, Distel and Stein chose to exhibit the copies made by Gachet and his amateur friends and students. About a third of the works in the show were done by Doctor Gachet and his circle; most were given to the Louvre at the same time that the bulk of the donations were made around 1950J5 These copies surely were not exhibited because of the curators' conviction as to their artistic merit. On the contrary, we were meant to view them as clumsy and almost naive reproductions. The Portrait of Doctor Paul Gachet and other suspect paintings in the Gachet collection (works more often thought to be authentic than inauthentic) must be judged original on the evidence of these copies, the curators imply. After all, how could such hapless amateurs create forgeries so good that they would fool generations of experts?

To consider the copies only in terms of their usefulness in proving the authenticity of the masterworks in the collection, however, does them a great disservice, for they are fascinating in their own right. For instance, displayed in one room of the exhibition were a number of copies of Cezanne's A Modern Olympia made by Doctor Gachet and by his student Derousse. Cezanne's original, depicting a man resembling the artist contemplating a candy-floss pink, curled-up woman who is being theatrically unveiled by her black maid, shocked seasoned art critics, both conservative and liberal-minded, when it was exhibited in 1874; one went so far as to call it an opium-induced hallucination,16 and many balked at Cezanne's frank inclusion of the brothel client in the scene. That Gachet copied the image--one of the most famous, even notorious, in his possession--is perhaps no surprise. But what of Blanche Derousse, a proper middle-class young woman who made her living as a seamstress? We have so little knowledge of women's contemporary reactions to vanguard art (besides those of professional artists like Mary Cassatt or Berthe Morisot), and Derousse provides a tantalizing glimpse. If she was shocked by the bald eroticism or impropriety of A Modern Olympia--a work that has shed little of its scandalousness in the years since its debut--she does not show it in her own version, which seems entirely sympathetic to Cezanne's conception. She reproduced the scene almost exactly, without trying to dilute its implications. In fact, she even added a detail lacking from the Cezanne painting: two touches of reddish pink paint on Olympia's torso to indicate her nipples.