The cost of fighting lawsuits and responding to an influx of inquiries during the coronavirus pandemic – when hundreds of people believed they had found an original van Gogh at an auction or in a dusty attic or under a grandfather’s bed – has made the museum increasingly resistant to authentication requests. Without its imprimatur, however, large auction houses such as Christie’s or Sotheby’s are unlikely to sell something attributed to van Gogh.

“This field can be quite litigious, and that’s something we’re at pains to avoid,” said Emilie Gordenker, director of the Van Gogh Museum. “We have these conversations a lot: Should we continue to play this role? It puts us sometimes in an awkward – let me rephrase that – it puts us in a delicate position.”

It is more difficult than ever for a theoretical van Gogh to become an actual van Gogh, a familiar reality for collectors of star 20th-century artists. More than a decade ago, foundations for Andy Warhol and Keith Haring, and the estate of Jean-Michel Basquiat, got out of the authentication business altogether. Keeping fakes from circulating is an important task but led to lawsuits that threatened their broader work.

“They recognise that the risks of litigation are high and the rewards of expressing an opinion are low,” said Maxwell Anderson, a former director of the Whitney Museum in New York who now works for an authentication company that uses a combination of scientific, curatorial and scholarly tools to assess artworks. “In the case of van Gogh, the stakes are even higher.”

Authentication is important to those who discover potentially lucrative artworks – van Gogh’s Orchard With Cypresses sold in 2022 for about US$117.2m ($204.7m) – and to scholars who want an accurate recording of everything an artist ever painted.

“It also matters to everyone who is interested in art and who walks into a museum and looks at a label on the wall,” said Gary Schwartz, an art historian who writes about van Gogh, Rembrandt and Johannes Vermeer. “It’s important for the quality of the trust that a museum projects, emanates and promises.”

The Van Gogh Museum, which was founded by the artist’s nephew, has staged exhibitions and performed research since opening in 1973. It does not charge for its authentication services, and to quickly rule out anything it deems “clearly far removed from van Gogh’s work,” most submissions are processed based on photos alone. In rare cases that it accepts a work for further analysis, it uses both scientific tools – scans, paint samples, X-rays – and connoisseurship to make comparisons with van Gogh’s other artworks, letters and personal history.

In 2021, the museum agreed to look at photographs of Pivar’s landscape after Michael P. Mezzatesta, a former curator of European art at the Kimbell Art Museum in Fort Worth, Texas, attributed it to van Gogh. But the Van Gogh Museum declined to inspect the painting in the studio, saying “it is evidently clear from the material presented to us” that it was not genuine.

While the museum prides itself as a centre of van Gogh expertise, Gordenker emphasised that its decisions are not binding. “We only offer an opinion, and it can be revised,” she said.

It can be difficult, even for experts, to make indisputable decisions about who painted what decades or centuries ago. After initially rejecting Sunset at Montmajour when it was sent for assessment in 1991, the Van Gogh Museum determined that the work was a “newly discovered landscape” in 2013.

In October, the museum issued opinions in The Burlington Magazine, an art journal, about three works attributed to van Gogh that it felt were not authentic. It had previously authenticated one of them, Head of a Woman, which Christie’s sold to a private buyer in 2011 for almost US$1m ($1.7m). When a second version came to light, the museum’s experts determined that Head of a Woman had been “executed by a copyist”.

The museum has not faced lawsuits because of those opinions, Gordenker said. But it has been sued over past determinations.

A German art dealer, Markus Roubrocks, filed a case in Dutch court after the museum decided in 2001 to reject Still Life With Peonies, a painting that had been deemed authentic by 10 experts, according to court filings. After examining the work, the museum found that the brushstrokes and colour palette did not conform to van Gogh’s style.

Roubrock’s complaint went all the way up to the Supreme Court of the Netherlands, which upheld a lower court’s judgment that the museum had not behaved neglectfully or unlawfully. He has kept the work in a safe-deposit box, he said, believing that a different expert may verify it in the future.

“I am sure that my painting is a real van Gogh,” he wrote in an email. “The entire painting radiates van Gogh. Everyone who sees it only thinks of van Gogh.”

There are about 2100 artworks in van Gogh’s catalogue raisonné – among them approximately 870 paintings – and some art historians think as many as 300 more may be discovered. Others say it is probably far fewer, given that they seem to be found about once a decade. Van Gogh sold only a couple of paintings in his lifetime and died penniless, but it is possible he traded some, gave some away or left some unfinished in a studio.

Specialists at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, art dealers and staff members at nonprofit art institutions said that if a collector wanted to sell a van Gogh, the person usually needed validation from the Van Gogh Museum. Other voices can have some impact, they said, but none has greater authority.

Officials at other Dutch art institutions – including the Kröller-Müller Museum in Otterlo, which has the second-largest van Gogh collection in the world – told The New York Times they defer to the Van Gogh Museum’s expertise. And independent experts have fallen by the wayside. Ronald Pickvance and Bogomila Welsh-Ovcharov were largely spurned by the art world when they attributed a sketchbook to van Gogh in 2016 that the museum’s experts declared a fake.

“Scholars in their respective fields should be invited for cooperative dialogue about attributions, as used to be, the way it was before,” said Welsh-Ovcharov, an art historian at the University of Toronto. “At least there should be an open dialogue. There is no pope, there is no Vatican of van Gogh studies.”

Walter Feilchenfeldt, a dealer and scholar in Zurich who has written several books about van Gogh and sometimes disagrees with the museum’s determinations, said there should not be “a monopoly on Van Gogh authenticity”.

“If someone is not of the same opinion,” he said, “then one is immediately wrong”.

Others in the art world say the Van Gogh Museum’s role is important and well earned. Mitzi Mina, a Sotheby’s spokesperson, said the auction house was usually guided by the museum’s decisions.

“They are the world’s leading authority, and industry-leading in terms of the sophistication and diligence of both academic and scientific research,” she wrote in an email.

Martin Bailey, an author of several books on van Gogh, said the museum was in a strong position because it had the family archives and the best specialists. “And importantly,” he said, “they’ve also got very good conservators, who are very experienced, who have the right equipment to assess the paintings”.

The Van Gogh Museum felt burdened by that role when authentication requests doubled in 2021 to more than 500 from about 250 a year. “We just couldn’t handle it,” Gordenker said. After changing its policy to limit authentication services to accredited art dealers and auction houses, the museum now handles about 35 requests each year.

“That doesn’t mean we have become more tentative in our commitment to the scholarship,” Gordenker said. “We are very open and transparent.”

One reason that museums, foundations and artist estates have been getting out of the authentication business is because their decisions can be expensive.

The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts in New York dissolved its authentication board in 2012 after being forced to defend itself in lawsuits filed by collectors. The turning point was an antitrust suit filed by film-maker Joe Simon after the foundation said his mid-1960s silk screen was a fake.

“We never lost any of those cases,” said Joel Wachs, the Warhol foundation’s director, “but it was still costing us millions of dollars that we felt were better spent on supporting our core mission: supporting artists”.

The void in authentication is being filled by companies that rely on new technologies, including digital scanning and artificial intelligence. Anderson, the former Whitney director, joined one such company, LMI Group, after working at major museums for 30 years.

In 2019, an antiques collector bought a painting for US$50 ($87) at a Minnesota garage sale and sent a picture of it to the Van Gogh Museum, which rejected the image of a fisherman smoking a pipe on stylistic grounds. LMI Group then bought the painting for “a negligible amount,” Anderson said, before spending at least US$1m to analyse it.

LMI Group declared in January that the painting, Elimar, was created by van Gogh in 1889, releasing a 458-page report that points to factors like canvas weave and the DNA from a hair found on the painting’s surface. In a statement, the Van Gogh Museum said it had “carefully considered the new information” but maintained its view “that this is not an authentic work”.

Anderson said the quick dismissal reflected a larger problem with connoisseurship.

“Only by piercing the museum’s veil of secrecy might there be some sunlight admitted into the complex, untold features of this remarkable artist,” he said in an email.

The US$300m ($524m) lawsuit by Pivar was ultimately dismissed for jurisdictional reasons. Although he now regrets suing, he is still frustrated that he has nowhere else to turn. “Suing a museum is a really disgusting thing to do,” he said. “I did it because I thought that what they were doing was antithetical to scholarship.”

Pivar remains determined to prove the Van Gogh Museum’s experts wrong. He invited an AI-based authentication firm to look at his art collection but decided they were “phonies”. Now he may ask LMI Group for its opinion about the rolling wheat fields of “Auvers, 1890”.

“I’m saying that this is one of van Gogh’s unique masterpieces,” Pivar said.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Nina Siegal

Photographs by: Peter Fisher, Ilvy Njiokiktjien and Herman Wouters

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