The Portrait of Dr. Gachet: Story Van Gogh's Last Portrait Modernism Money Polits Collectors Dealers Taste G (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9780140254877)

At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, Vincent van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has seemed to countless admirers to portray our times as "something bright in spite of its inevitable griefs."

This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the forces behind the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history: avant-garde European collectors, pioneering dealers in Paris and Berlin, a brilliant medievalist who acquired it for one of Germany's great museums, and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of "degenerate art." Remarkable and riveting, The Portrait of Dr. Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time.

Author: Cynthia Saltzman
ISBN-10: 0140254870
ISBN-13: 9780140254877
Publisher: Penguin Books
Language: English
Published: 04/01/1999
Pages: 448
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 7.74h x 5.05w x 0.85d