Portrait of Dr. Gachet The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss

At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has seemed to countless admirers to portray our times as "something bright in spite of its inevitable grief's." This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's journey & becomes a rich story of modernist art & the forces behind the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting & shaped its hirsute: avant-garde European collectors, pioneering dealers in Paris & Berlin, a brilliant medievalist who acquired it for one of Germany's great museums, & a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of "degenerate art." Remarkable & riveting, Portrait of Dr., Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market & of culture in our time.Saltzman, Cynthia is the author of 'Portrait of Dr. Gachet The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss', published 1999 under ISBN 9780140254877 and ISBN 0140254870.