Lost Artworks – Vincent van Gogh

Vincent van Gogh “Painter on the way to Tarascon”

Our boutique online gallery is bringing you a few stories of lost and highly precious artworks – like the following one:

This particuar painting is showing shimmering summer heat, a field of grain, and a man packed with painter’s utensils. It is Vincent van Gogh on his way to the southern French town of Tarascon. In this art work, created in 1888, van Gogh depicted himself in a life-size portrait. It is quite extraordinary as his other known 36 self-portraits are so called “Bust portraits” or “Head and Shoulders” portraits.

The Kulturhistorisches Museum Magdeburg, a highly valued gallery containing around 400 pictures, has been searching almost for 77 years for this missing artwork. The van Gogh’s artwork has belonged to the museum since 1912 and is listed in the “Lost Art” database. It measures only 49 centimeters in height and 45 centimeters in width. The Magdeburg museum considers its estimated value of 100 million euros to be quite “realistic”.

A large part of the Magdeburg Fine Art Gallery disappeared after the works had been moved 460 meters down into a salt mine depot near Neu Straßfurt, to protect them from the bombings during the Second World War. Among the paintings stored in the museum, which at that time by the way was still named after Emperor Frederick, were works by Liebermann, Cezanne and Corinth – and the one by van Gogh. It is possible that many paintings fell victim to two fires that raged in the salt mine in April 1945. Today, the mine has long since been flooded. But it is also possible that capable art thieves got rid of the most valuable paintings in the turmoil of the war.

The historian and curator Tobias von Elsner, who worked at the Magdeburg museum until 2018, had long studied the museum losses. He says: “It remains a mystery what happened to the picture of van Gogh”. After all, no one really saw that the paintings had burned, no traces of the paintings were found in the salt mine, such as canvas or ash residues.

Moreover, Elsner says, for art thieves at the time, there would have been an opportunity at least in theory to set aside the paintings. These chances would have been for US soldiers, Nazi officers, forced laborers or civilians. “A lot of things were burned, but not everything,” says the art historian. The museum library, for example, was salvaged from the underground depot, which was as large as a church nave. Elsner believes it is quite possible that van Gogh’s Tarascon painting still exists today. “Hope,” he says, “dies last.”

Vincent van Gogh: Painter on the way to Tarascon

Information source:
Thorsten Schmitz and Kia Vahland:”Where are you?”