Stolen art sheds priceless light on painters' careers
By Rachel Campbell-Johnson, Art Critic
NONE of the three watercolours stolen yesterday from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester was the sort that the public would recognise from greetings cards, posters, fridge magnets or mugs. And yet, though their combined value is somewhere around £1 million, their loss will be far more than financial. It will leave a serious gap in the museum’s Post-Impressionist collection.
Each of these stolen works stems from a formative period of the artist’s career. And it is for this reason, perhaps more than for the actual quality, that these pictures will be much missed. The earliest, Vincent Van Gogh’s sketch of a woman making her way alongside the fortifications of Paris, dates to about 1878 when the artist was barely 25. He had not yet at this date become truly aware of his artistic vocation. Rather, his quest was religious. He longed to become, as he himself put it, “a preacher of the Gospel and a sower of the Word”. But depressed and unbalanced, he had failed dismally both in his studies and his ministry.
By the time he painted this work, he must already have been feeling homesick for the land of pictures that had entranced him when he was a teenager and to which he was about to return. It was only a year later that he was to make his momentous resolution to seek a sense of belonging, not in religious ministry but in art. Paul Gauguin’s Tahitian sketches, 1891-1903, date from towards the end of his career. The artist, who had attempted so disastrously to collaborate with Van Gogh in setting up a studio in southern France, was by this time in his forties. Van Gogh was dead. And yet they bear testimony to a time of excitable exploration. Early in 1891, a moderately successful auction of Gauguin’s works had allowed him to sail to Tahiti. There he was to begin his long dreamt-of self-styled mythic quest into the mysterious symbolism of pagan cultures.
His sketches find him exploring the dazzling beauty of the Polynesian island with his paintbrush, heightening the luxuriance of their tropical colour. He saw in the Tahitian landscapes and their inhabitants the classical rhythms of Ancient Egyptian bas reliefs, the peaceful spirituality of the Italian primitives and the flat planes of Japanese prints. It was a combination of these elements that would come together in the creation of several of his most characteristic works, although two years later, running out of money, he was forced to return to Paris.
Pablo Picasso’s sketch Poverty, painted in 1903, is probably less coveted for its rarity than because, much like Gauguin’s Tahitian sketches, it captures the quintessential spirit of an era. Poverty derives from his Blue Period, so called because of the prevailing colour of the paintings.
Picasso, having visited Paris for the first time in 1900, was to return to the French capital again periodically until 1904 when he finally settled there. This sketch may have been completed in Barcelona, or it could have been done in Paris. Both cities would have had a similar population of sick and destitute people, of emaciated down-and-outs and syphilitic whores. But this sketch also shows him, still a young man, still seeking his way, looking back to the influences he had known since his childhood, to the elongated forms of Catalan Gothic sculpture, for instance, or the simplified colour schemes of his fellow Spaniard Goya.
http://www.timesonline.co.uk/
Thieves grab £1m paintings from gallery
By Pippa Dunlop (Filed: 28/04/2003)
Three paintings, by Gauguin, Van Gogh and Picasso, valued at more than £1 million, have been stolen from the Whitworth Art Gallery in Manchester. The raid was discovered yesterday.
Stolen: Van Gogh's The Fortifications of Paris with Houses The thieves took Pablo Picasso's watercolour Poverty, a melancholy blue period pen and ink piece from 1903, Vincent Van Gogh's The Fortifications of Paris with Houses, a watercolour from 1878, and Paul Gauguin's Tahitian Landscape, painted in 1899. They were given to the gallery as gifts, with the Gauguin and the Picasso donated through the National Arts Collection Fund. The largest of the stolen works measures 15in by 20in. Greater Manchester police think the paintings were taken between 9pm on Saturday night and noon yesterday. A spokesman said: "This was a well planned theft and we have launched a major inquiry." Most public galleries have only rudimentary security systems consisting of a burglar alarm and security guards. They are often unable to insure collections because of the prohibitively high cost. Although, in theory, a thief who takes an important painting from a gallery could make as much as a major bank robber, in practice the resulting publicity means that it is impossible to sell on the open market. Charles Hill, a private investigator who deals in art crime, said: "The people who stole the paintings from the Whitworth are essentially fools. "They have miscalculated. They have been more cunning than clever and have stolen paintings that cannot be sold." Mr Hill, a former policeman who last year recovered Titian's Rest on the Flight to Egypt, stolen from the Marquess of Bath in 1995, said: "Stealing them is the easy bit. Now comes the hard part: what to do with them next."
The Whitworth Art Gallery is internationally renowned as home to an impressive range of watercolours, prints, drawings, modern art and sculpture. Its collection of 40,000 works of art includes 12 by Picasso and two by Van Gogh. The gallery was founded in 1889 and takes its name from Sir Joseph Whitworth, a Stockport-born engineer who left money to the institution in his will.
It has been part of the University of Manchester since 1958.