At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, one of the last done by Vincent van Gogh, had been pinted almost exactly one hundred years earlier.
This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's hundred-year-journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the political and commercial forces influencing the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history, including avant.garde European collectors and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of "degenerate art." Remarkable and riverting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time.
