DISCOVERIES
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The Yellow House
Van Gogh, Gauguin, and Nine Turbulent Weeks in Arles
Martin Gayford
Little, Brown: 352 pp.,$24.99
IN 1888, Vincent van Gogh came to Arles looking for a place to fulfill his dream of an artists’ colony. He rented a yellow house outside of town for 15 francs a month: “The outside walls were the fresh, almost edible color of butter, the shutters were vivid green, the doors inside a soothing blue.” Soon, his friend Paul Gauguin arrived from Martinique. For a while, the two painted happily in the fields, brothels and gardens of Arles. Gauguin spent more time in the brothels than Van Gogh. They shared expenses; Gauguin did the cooking. They began to argue, over painters, subject matter. Gauguin grew tired of Van Gogh’s rants and then afraid of his housemate, who would appear at night by his bed or follow him with a razor into the fields. Then came the ear episode. Gauguin returned to a house bathed in blood and fled Arles, never to see Van Gogh again. Martin Gayford brings fresh insights into the personalities and work of this odd couple of art. His sympathies lie with the lonely, overwrought Van Gogh, whose efforts at love and comradeship were dashed forever in those nine weeks.
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I Was Vermeer
The Rise and Fall of the Twentieth Century’s Greatest Forger
Frank Wynne
Bloomsbury: 278 pp., $24.95
IN the first pages of Frank Wynne’s portrait of famous forger Han van Meegeren, we know we’re in a master’s hands. Jailed in 1945 for having sold a Dutch treasure -- a Vermeer -- to Hermann Goering, Han finally confesses to having forged it and other Vermeers (he even fooled the man whose painting text he used to make his pigments). The court cannot believe he painted “The Supper at Emmaus.” He is forced to paint it again. Wynne exposes Han’s despair when his own work was reviled by critics and his lust for revenge. “The why of forgery,” he writes, “is thornier than the how.” Yet the “how” is fascinating: Han reproducing centuries-old craquelure with Bakelite in the basement of his Cote d’Azur castle is the stuff of 1930s noir.
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The Girl With
the Gallery
Edith Gregor Halpert and the Making of the Modern Art Market
Lindsay Pollock
PublicAffairs: 484 pp., $30
FOR 40 years, Edith Gregor Halpert ran the Downtown Gallery on West 13th Street in New York, one of the first and most influential galleries of the pioneers of Modern art, including Ben Shahn, Georgia O’Keeffe and Stuart Davis. It was also one of the first galleries to show primitive and folk art. Halpert, a Russian Jewish immigrant, was an aggressive, ingenious promoter. She opened the gallery in 1926 when she was 26, surviving the Depression and competition from the new Abstractionists by tirelessly courting the Rockefellers and Guggenheims of the art world. “She had the heart of a flapper,” writes Lindsay Pollock, “rejecting all the old rules. She smoked cigarettes, drank bootleg liquor, wore scarlet lipstick, and spoke her mind.”
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The Private Lives of the Impressionists
Sue Roe
HarperCollins: 356 pp., $29.95
SUE ROE begins with Monet, an art student in 1860s Paris. Just as artists need galleries now, Monet and his fellows relied on the Salon shows to make their work known. But their ideas and techniques bloomed in the studios and cafes. At the Suisse studio, Monet met Pissarro; at the Gleyre, Renoir and Sisley. The circle widened: Cezanne, Degas, Manet. Roe describes where they lived, drank, studied (even the weather and the clothes they wore) as if she’d been with them. The group dynamic shifts. “Le Dejeuner sur l’herbe” propels Manet to fame (“radical standards were being set”). Roe’s achievement in this sometimes exhausting book is the web she re-creates: the feuds that entangled these artists, how each saw the Napoleonic wars, how they adjusted to Haussmann’s changes to the boulevards of Paris.
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