Will "Dr. Gachet" Reappear?

Will van Gogh's famous but elusive "Portrait of Dr. Gachet" soon return to the art market?

Reader discretion is hereby advised: This is a speculative item, following up on another speculative item---an article that I published on Mar. 7, 2000 in the Wall Street Journal. In that piece, I tried to do for the iconic van Gogh (which had fetched $82.5 million in 1990 at Christie's) what Marc Spiegler, a writer for New York Magazine, recently tried to do for Picasso's $95-million "Dora Maar au Chat"---figure out who might own it.

My interviews then with artworld sources led me to one likely candidate:

One possessor of "Gachet"-level paintings, Austrian-born investment fund manager Wolfgang Flöttl, "has an extensive collection, never comments on what he owns or sells and hardly ever lends," according to William Poppe, managing director of Normandy Asset Management in New York, which advises Mr. Flöttl on his fine-arts transactions. "If we did own 'Gachet,'" declared Mr. Poppe, "we wouldn't have any comment." Mr. Flöttl...received unaccustomed publicity late last year when he sold a major Cézanne to the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles for a price that Scott Schaefer, the museum's curator of paintings, indicated was more than $50 million.

Flöttl received some unaccustomed and considerably more unwelcome publicity this week in the Wall Street Journal (to which I can't link), Bloomberg News and today's Royal Gazette (the daily newspaper in Bermuda). In the words of the WSJ's report, Flöttl and eight others have been named by Austrian prosecutors "on charges ranging from embezzlement to fraud" as the result of an investigation into links between Refco, a U.S. commodity brokerage firm, and Bawag PSK, a Vienna bank for which Flöttl traded from New York. "Refco investors and U.S. prosecutors allege [that Bawag] sought to hide its own bad debt that largely was a result of Wolfgang Flöttl's trading losses," according to yesterday's WSJ. Bloomberg reported that Flöttl was charged with "involvement in the improper use of funds."

Flöttl has previously denied involvement in the Refco scandal, and his lawyer, Martin Goldenberg, told the Royal Gazette this week that Flöttl "feels strongly that no crimes have been committed."

Whether or not he owns, let alone plans to unload, "Gachet," Flöttl has already in the last few years sold several works for less than he paid for them, according to reports by Carol Vogel in the NY Times. One of those was Picasso's again-famous "Le Rêve," which he bought at Christie's for $48.4 million in 1997 and later sold to Steve Wynn (of errant elbow fame), for a reported $42 million.

In her coverage of the 2001 antitrust court proceedings against Sotheby's, Vogel reported that the auction house in 1998 had given a $240 million loan to Flöttl, "who had been a major buyer and seller at auction for years."

When I wrote my WSJ article, curator Gary Tinterow of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, who had unsuccessfully tried to borrow "Gachet" for an exhibition, told me that he knew who the owner was---a major collector of "all sorts of distinguished European pictures---old masters as well as Impressionist and post-Impressionist" and "someone who doesn't lend."

Whether or not the van Gogh is (or ever was) in Flöttl's possession, his current predicament may have significant art-market ripples. As for "Gachet," the comment made to me more than six years ago by John Leighton, then director of the Van Gogh Museum, still holds: Noting wistfully that his institution badly needed a good portrait by the artist, he expressed confidence that the painting "at some stage will appear again."

(For a photo of the Flöttl with his wife, Anne Eisenhower, granddaughter of the former President, go here and scroll down to the 11th row of couples' photos.)