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00:00On the 24th,
00:29on the 25th of January, 1891,
00:33Theo van Gogh died at the age of 33.
00:38Just six months earlier,
00:39his brother Vincent van Gogh had also died,
00:43leaving behind an astonishing collection of artworks
00:46that were almost completely unknown.
00:49With the death of Theo,
00:51Vincent's closest confidant and most ardent supporter,
00:54the van Gogh artistic legacy hung in the balance
00:58and the responsibility fell on the shoulders of Joanna Bonga,
01:02Theo's widow.
01:10This was a great act of faith.
01:13She may only have met this very difficult person,
01:16her husband's brother, two or three times in her life,
01:20and yet she determined to keep together this legacy of painting.
01:24She did it with great tenacity
01:27and also found skill with lending pictures,
01:31allowing pictures to be bought,
01:33so that slowly and then increasingly quickly,
01:36the fame of Vincent began to spread.
01:42Without Joanna Bonga,
01:44Vincent van Gogh may have been completely lost to the world.
01:50In the decades that followed,
01:51van Gogh's works have been on a truly remarkable journey.
01:55They inspired an entire artistic movement.
01:58They fell victim to the trials of World War II.
02:02They have been the target of greedy forgers and daring thieves.
02:0622 million.
02:08And their value has skyrocketed
02:10from the day they first caught the world's attention.
02:15The man himself also became a legendary figure,
02:18thanks to the publication of the letters between Vincent and Theo.
02:21And the story is still being told.
02:25A long-lost masterpiece by Vincent van Gogh
02:28was only revealed in 2013.
02:32I think van Gogh will always have huge commercial value
02:34because of the myth of the man.
02:36He really is this character that everyone is fascinated by.
02:40She sold more than 250 works of art.
02:44We are sitting here having this conversation
02:47because that's why Van Gogh has grown so famous.
02:51She spread them all over the world.
02:55We have glimpses of his other lost paintings,
02:58some of which could still be out there.
03:14Joanna Bonga had only been married to Theo van Gogh
03:17for two years when he died.
03:18With his passing,
03:20she had inherited almost all of Vincent's works.
03:24But as a young widow with a newborn son to care for,
03:26she was in a very precarious position.
03:29She had the assistance of our art-loving brother Andreas,
03:33but even he didn't appreciate her new collection of masterpieces.
03:37You could have your own room at home.
03:44The mother could help with the boy.
03:56What will you do for money?
03:57Joanna was a middle-class Dutch girl,
04:07sister of a friend of a Dutchman living in Paris
04:11who was in the Van Gogh brothers' circle.
04:13She was a very educated woman.
04:14She worked as a translator in the library of the British Museum.
04:18I think it was a mixture of sort of Dutch steeliness and Victorian sentimentality.
04:23She doesn't seem to have been tremendously interested in art
04:27before she was pulled into this circle of avant-garde art.
04:31In the very first letter, Theo wrote to Jo.
04:35And Vincent was in the hospital in Aarhus.
04:37He wrote,
04:38We must keep the memory of my brother together.
04:43Don't you think?
04:43Shant we, darling?
04:45He says.
04:46So before being married,
04:48she knew that she was part of the game.
04:54I'll teach again.
04:55Take lodgers.
04:56I'm not going back.
05:01Besides, mother doesn't have room for all the paintings.
05:04Nobody would think any less of you for selling.
05:07She seems to me to have been a rather serious-minded, intellectual young woman
05:14who took her responsibilities seriously and who really took on this project of
05:21posthumously conserving the reputation of Vincent van Gogh.
05:25She was the person who championed van Gogh after his death.
05:28I think she really saw herself as taking over the mantle from Theo,
05:31who was his main support, both commercially and emotionally.
05:36And she knew how important it was to him to really launch the career of Vincent.
05:40Why don't we try to find a buyer for you here?
05:44I could ask you in my office, if you'd like.
05:45The insurance brokers.
05:48Well, it wouldn't be much, obviously.
05:49No.
05:51They don't approve of bohemian art, do they?
05:53Well, it's better than nothing.
05:58Joanna Bonga's brother, Andreas, who had known Vincent van Gogh, would eventually assist in Joanna's quest.
06:05But at one point, it's believed he proposed a horrifying solution to his sister's storage problem.
06:11You know, they may not be painters, Joe, but they're perfectly decent people.
06:17It isn't boring to work hard or provide for oneself.
06:21Not everybody's brother is so easy to take advantage of.
06:24Well, it's said that Andreas Bonga wanted to destroy the paintings after Vincent's death.
06:30It does seem strange afterwards and it does seem slightly out of character.
06:34So it may have been something he did or he thought of at one point very quickly.
06:39There still weren't very many sales. There still wasn't very much of a reputation.
06:43So it would have been an entirely rational thing to do, not to hang on to all this junk.
06:49I'm sorry.
06:50Theo loved Vincent.
06:52I know.
06:53He was happy to help. And Vincent did work hard. He made himself sick. He worked so hard.
06:59I'm sorry.
07:00She was fiercely protective of his art. She really saw herself as carrying on Theo's legacy,
07:09making sure that Vincent became known and got what he deserved really as an artist.
07:14She apparently decided that what she ought to do is devote herself to becoming a sort of curator of this collection.
07:25I'd like you to leave.
07:26But I only want what's best for you and the boy.
07:32You won't get a better price in Amsterdam.
07:36Get out!
07:43Vincent was a genius. Theo knew. I'm not selling.
07:48But how did Joanna Bonga become a curator for an almost unknown artist?
07:57Her discovery of the letters written between the brothers would prove key in telling the lost story
08:02of Vincent van Gogh's life. As would his reputation amongst other avant-garde artists,
08:08who also struggled for recognition of their work.
08:24In 1891, Joanna Bonga was left widowed at the age of 28 with hundreds of artworks by her troubled brother-in-law,
08:32Vincent van Gogh. There were no obvious buyers for the paintings, as Vincent is only thought to have sold one picture during his lifetime.
08:41The Red Vineyard was purchased by the neo-impressionist painter Anna Bock.
08:46Vincent may not have had any real commercial success, but he was very appreciated by the other avant-garde artists of his era.
08:53This reputation he developed would prove a starting point for Joanna's quest, as would her discovery of the letters that Theo and Vincent wrote to each other, that brought Vincent's story to life.
09:08She found them in a kind of bottom drawer. They were living in Pigalle at the time, her and Theo.
09:12And of course, she poor woman was widowed very young, and she was left with nothing except 200 van Gogh's.
09:18She said, every week I saw the yellow envelopes coming in, and Theo put it in the cupboard, and she got letters too from Vincent.
09:28But she said, I only want to publish the letters after his work will be known.
09:34So she waited, and she did it on purpose, and I have a very strong idea that she waited until the mother of Vincent and Theo died.
09:45So it was not too complicated for this old mother.
09:52I think there's something like 700 between the two boys. Most of them are from Vincent because he threw Theo's away.
09:58The great one where he says, I'm going to sign my picture as Vincent because the French can't pronounce Van Gogh.
10:03You know, that kind of thing. They're wonderful letters.
10:05She was so aware that when she married Theo, she got Vincent too. That was part of it.
10:14Vincent had lived in Paris with his brother Theo from 1886 to 1888, when the city was still enthralled by the work of Impressionist painters.
10:24And Vincent had begun to ever so slightly make his mark on the art world.
10:29As soon as he arrived in Paris, and thanks to Theo in part, he did meet all of the avant-garde artists.
10:38And in fact, before he left for Arles in the south, the last artist he went to see was Georges Seurat.
10:46And we know that Gauguin was coming to admire him, but it remained a very marginal kind of enthusiasm.
10:54Another of the great artists of the era who admired him was Toulouse-Lautrec.
11:00He even made a pastel sketch of his friend Vincent in 1887.
11:05He'd spent two years living in Paris. Almost everything we know about Van Gogh's life comes from his letters.
11:12And that was the one time when he was living, he was actually sharing a flat most of the time with his brother Theo.
11:19So there was no need for him to write. So there are very, very few letters from those two years.
11:26Although the exact details may not be known, what is for sure is that it was in Paris that Vincent's style of painting changed dramatically.
11:35He'd been influenced by the Impressionists of the era, but also by Japanese art.
11:40He was ahead of his time, though many of the tendencies in terms of very bright colour, in terms of decorative patterning, in terms of self-expression in the way he did it, were coming to be valued in the avant-garde.
11:57But before he could make any real name for himself in the world artistic capital of Paris, Van Gogh moved to Arles in the south of France in 1888.
12:06We sometimes think of him as an isolated figure, working away in the south of France with little contact with other artists.
12:15But in fact, when he was in Paris, he was right in the heart of things.
12:19And actually, one of the reasons he left Paris was he found it too exhausting.
12:24It was in Arles that he created his best-known works, including The Sunflowers.
12:29His most commercially successful work now is made really in the last part of his life.
12:34I mean, when he died, a lot of the paint wouldn't have been dry on the sunflowers, and that thick impasto paint would still be wet.
12:40So there really wasn't much of a chance for him to be promoting his work.
12:45And I don't think he was that kind of person.
12:46He wanted to be in the south, just working frenetically as he did.
12:51The pictures that we see as attractive and full of life and bubbling with enthusiasm at the time were rejected and seen as just too avant-garde.
13:0420 or 30 years later, things that he had intuited about fragmentation.
13:09So if you look at the surface of Van Gogh, it's very clearly made up of fragmentary brushstrokes.
13:15And there are all sorts of fallings apart going on, including mental ones.
13:18That would have been very unfashionable in the 1880s. People wanted synthesis.
13:23I think people relate to it now just because it's highly emotive.
13:26It's subject matter, which feels its nature, its portraits.
13:30But in the colours and the marks and the vibrancy of it, it's almost mythic.
13:36By sort of 40 years later and after the First World War, people were aware of a world that was fragile.
13:42And they found that in Van Gogh's paintings, you know, sort of strident, anxious colours and flickering brushwork.
13:49Had he lived another few decades, I suspect he would have become very marketable.
13:56But he died just too soon.
13:58It did then take a few generations for a wider public to appreciate those values.
14:06Whilst in the south of France, Van Gogh had stayed in touch with two other struggling artists of the era,
14:11Emile Bernard and Paul Gauguin.
14:14In his letters to them, he even included sketches of the paintings he was creating in Arles.
14:19It's one of the things that's given Van Gogh such a fame, because the letters give a marvellous insight into his art.
14:37Van Gogh, Gauguin and Bernard had also remained in contact by painting self-portraits and sending them to each other,
14:45with the other member of the trio in the background.
14:50If you look at the museum, you see some paintings by Gauguin and by Bernard.
14:54Why are they there? Because they were exchanged.
14:59As he had done for most of his adult life, Van Gogh wrote many letters to Theo during his time in Arles.
15:05My dear Theo, many thanks for the canvas you sent. Now we can join battle once more.
15:13My dear Vincent, your new consignment arrived yesterday evening. The painting is truly remarkable.
15:28I have rented a room in Montmartre which you'd like. It is small, but overlooks a little garden full of ivy.
15:36Jo sends her warm regards and a smile from the little one.
15:41I remember you insisted a great deal on me getting married. You were right.
15:47Van Gogh's attempt to start an artistic community in the south of France did not end well, though.
15:53He had checked himself into the asylum at Saint-Rémy, where he painted many more of his best-known works.
16:01I do so wish you would tell me how you feel. Nothing is more distressing than uncertainty.
16:07I don't say that my work is good, but rather it is the least bad that I can do.
16:14Every day I wish for your speedy recovery.
16:18There is one very important moment when Vincent sliced part of his ear and had to go to the hospital in Arles.
16:25And then there's a letter of Modavan go to Theo and she says, how beautiful, two heads on one cushion.
16:35So it means that in the hospital, the two brothers were on the same bed and talked things over just like they did when they were very young.
16:44And I think that's a very moving moment in realizing how close this relation was.
16:51All your kindness to me, dear brother. I've felt it more than ever today.
16:58Don't bother your head about me or about us, old chap.
17:02I am beginning to consider madness and illness like any other, and we all must accept the illnesses of our time.
17:10Do not despair.
17:12Sooner or later, we each have our share.
17:15Better days will come.
17:18Write to me, dear brother.
17:19Ever yours, your loving Vincent.
17:22Your loving Theo.
17:28Vincent van Gogh would eventually return to Paris in 1890, where Theo and Joanna had recently had a son, also called Vincent.
17:37Vincent and Joanna's relationship was vestigial as far as actual person-to-person meeting is concerned.
17:48She saw him when he arrived in Paris in May 1890, and there was another visit to Auvers while Vincent was living in the small village north of Paris.
17:58She says, I thought I would meet a boy that was very struck by all these diseases, but he was well formed.
18:07And he was at broad shoulders.
18:10I was surprised that he was so alive and so well aware of his position.
18:16And then they visited him in Auvers-sur-Oise, 30 kilometers north of Paris.
18:23And they had a good time that day, and they had lunch together, and he played with little Vincent.
18:29Everything else Joanna found out about Vincent, she would either have heard from Theo, learnt from reading the letters, or learnt after Vincent's death, which makes it all the more remarkable that she devoted most of the rest of her life to Vincent's reputation and achievements as an artist.
18:50Vincent would not last long in Auvers-sur-Oise, he continued painting right until the very end, though, making some of his most experimental works, including a piece called Tree Roots, which is believed by some to be his last ever painting.
19:06He would die on July 29th, 1890, of a gunshot wound.
19:13She had a little feeling of guilt after Vincent died, and she said, but we didn't say anything wrong, did we?
19:22No, we did, Theo said.
19:24It was not our fault.
19:25It was in his head, and we did not cause it.
19:28Theo van Gogh would also be dead within six months.
19:33It must have been incredibly stressful for Theo, being his benefactor, making sure that he was funded, also being his pretty much sole confidant to all of the highs and lows of Vincent's work and mental state.
19:49Of course, he was heartbroken, and he had lots of grief, and it was very hard for him, and he was sad, and he was everything.
19:58But still, he had a second stage of syphilis, too.
20:02No doubt, the emotional shock of losing his brother, who he'd been so close to, must have also exacerbated his condition.
20:10Within a few months, he went totally mad, and if you want to have an uncomfortable night, read the report of the doctor, of Theo, because it was a very hard, very hard time for him.
20:27Following the death of her husband and brother-in-law, Johanna had to make use of the limited reputation Vincent had built up amongst his fellow artists.
20:37Following the death of Theo and Vincent, Johanna really rallied to make sure that his art became known, and her house became a sort of hub for people interested in Van Gogh, and she really, really pushed him.
20:51It didn't take her long. Soon, Claude Monet came to see Van Gogh's works and announced his surprise that a man who loved flowers and light so much could have been so unhappy.
21:02Another giant of the time, Camille Pissarro, also showed his appreciation, declaring that Vincent's flowers look like people.
21:11There were some young artists, and they helped her with the first exhibitions here in Amsterdam in 1892, and she did it very well.
21:23She did essentially, I think, three things. She published the letters bit by bit. She lent pictures to international exhibitions of which there were a sequence so that people saw Van Gogh's work, and a certain amount of it was sold.
21:41These early sales were made to some of the most influential and wealthy people of the era. The major galleries would quickly follow behind them in trying to purchase works.
21:53And it's during this time that many of the mysteries of what happened to Van Gogh's paintings started to form.
22:00Some items would sadly be lost forever. Some are still missing, and one has been sitting unappreciated in an attic for decades.
22:10Joanna Bonger wasted no time in presenting the works of her brother-in-law, Vincent van Gogh, to the world.
22:24She arranged numerous exhibitions and loaned the paintings to various galleries.
22:29And it wasn't long before buyers soon came knocking on her door.
22:33Joanna had works from the entirety of Vincent's career, but it was the sunflower paintings that would unsurprisingly prove the most popular.
22:45Possibly the very first buyer of Vincent van Gogh's work after he died was the celebrated French writer Octave Mirbeau.
22:54In 1891, he purchased both the irises painting and the three sunflowers painting for a mere 600 francs.
23:06In 1894, Emile Schuffenecker, an avant-garde artist himself, started collecting Van Gogh's when he purchased one of the series of sunflowers.
23:15Amazingly, he chose to alter the picture by stretching out the canvas on all sides and painting in the gaps himself.
23:23Hugo von Schudy, the director of the National Gallery in Berlin, was also taken by the sunflowers, buying one of the series for himself in 1905.
23:37The painting has remained in Germany ever since.
23:40But it was in 1908 that the most determined collector emerged.
23:46That year, Helene Krollermuller first acquired this early painting by Van Gogh titled, Edge of a Wood.
23:53And it would begin a long love affair with the artist.
23:58Helene Krollermuller was a very, very wealthy person. One of the wealthiest person in Holland at the time.
24:05When Helene went to Paris, she did not buy little bags, but she did buy Van Gogh's. Just having them five at a time or ten at a time.
24:15She mostly, but her husband also was buying. In the beginning she started buying one and one.
24:20And then they went to Paris to auctions, visiting artist studios. And there is one weekend she bought five Van Gogh's.
24:29Together, the Krollermullers managed to purchase 91 Van Gogh's, making it the second largest collection in the world.
24:37And eventually, the centerpiece of the Krollermuller Museum.
24:42It was very obvious that in the Netherlands, she was the wealthiest collectioner at that moment.
24:48For her, Van Gogh was the greatest artist that there had been. And he was sort of the start of modern art.
24:54And she was also very interested in him because he was painting and drawing social themes.
24:59And she was a very social conscious person. So that attracted her too.
25:04Helene Krollermuller's support played a key role in developing Van Gogh's legacy.
25:09But surprisingly, she had no contact with Joanna Bonger and bought her paintings from the first dealers in Van Gogh's works.
25:17That's quite surprising because Jo had the paintings. And if you see with a kind of U-turn what went from Jo to Helene Krollermuller,
25:28that had everything to do with the fact that Helene Krollermuller was a very, very wealthy person.
25:34And Jo was a very convinced social demograph. And I think the characters of the ladies were not that close to each other.
25:44She was also playing a very important role in that because she showed her own collection.
25:50She gave them a loan to other exhibitions, both nationally as internationally.
25:55And Jo Bonger also gave her collection.
25:58They both were very important in making him so famous and so well known.
26:03Joanna Bonger would marry again in 1901.
26:06Her new husband, Johan Cohen Gosschalk, was also an artist and painted portraits of her.
26:13But she would be left widowed again in 1912.
26:17She went to live in New York City soon after World War I broke out.
26:21And it was during this terrifying time that she first published the letters of Vincent and Theo.
26:27They sold very well. It was during the First World War.
26:32And people think that's the wrong moment to publish letters like that.
26:36But on the contrary, during wartime people are more attached to literature or to very important things that were happening in the past.
26:47After World War I, Joanna returned to the Netherlands where she continued to work on building Vincent's legacy.
26:53She loaned out the sunflowers to another artist called Isaac Israels, who used them as the backgrounds for his paintings.
27:00Israels also painted portraits of Joanna, with whom he at once had a brief relationship.
27:06Isaac already knew Theo when he lived in Paris and visited him there.
27:12And he was a well known painter here.
27:17He painted a lot of impressionist things in cities, very well known in Amsterdam.
27:21Jo and he met each other.
27:24And they liked each other very well.
27:27They liked each other very, very well.
27:29We have the diaries of Jo still.
27:32And there is a line and she says, I was at the studio of Isaac Israels.
27:39We played with fire.
27:41And then two lines are cut out.
27:44Very interesting.
27:46And I think the only one who could have done this was a son, Vincent.
27:50The series of sunflowers paintings had become Van Gogh's most recognized work, thanks to Joanna's efforts.
28:03In 1924, Jim Eade, the curator of the National Gallery in London, made it his mission to purchase one of the sunflowers.
28:11But it wouldn't be easy to convince Joanna to part with her personal favorite.
28:17Would you care for some tea?
28:22Yes.
28:23He had begun to paint sunflowers in Paris.
28:27Already, Paul Gauguin had told him this was a great subject for him, had told him that these were marvelous.
28:35He repeatedly said how tremendous he thought the sunflower paintings were and tried to get Van Gogh to give him one of them as well.
28:44So, Vincent and Gauguin both thought that these were important pictures.
28:49We know from a quote from Vincent van Gogh that he really saw the sunflower as his own symbol.
28:55There's something about them that grabs people.
28:57I mean, the color of the yellow on yellow is a dramatic and interesting way of presenting it.
29:02It's so become an iconic that one just associates sunflowers, almost the flowers, with Van Gogh.
29:08To paint a picture which was effectively all in modulations of one color would have seemed tremendously radical.
29:16Or indeed, to some relatively avant-garde artists who saw it early on, completely insane.
29:22I cannot express how honored we would be.
29:29The Sunflowers truly is a masterpiece.
29:33We acquired this in 1924 when we received money from Samuel Courtauld, the industrialist,
29:40specifically to buy modern paintings for the National Gallery.
29:45And right then, Van Gogh was right at the top of the list of modern artists whom we wanted to represent here.
29:52It was very keen to buy a Van Gogh and really wanted the sunflowers.
29:56And they pleaded with the Ohana to sell the sunflowers to the National Gallery.
30:01We would take the greatest of care.
30:04There's a couple of letters from her which are very moving.
30:08She says that she's seen the painting every day during her life, or her adult life,
30:13and she didn't want to part with it.
30:15She knew that it was important and she wanted to hang on to it.
30:18I think she had a connection with it and knew that Teo did too and wanted to keep it.
30:24It's not for sale.
30:31I understand.
30:34Jim Eade, at that point, was one of the few people in Britain who really knew about modern art
30:40and could speak authoritatively.
30:43What he said to Johanna Bangor, in my understanding, was that we are the National Gallery.
30:49If this artist is to be represented here, we really need a picture of the highest achievement.
30:56Jim Eade's persistence would eventually prove worthwhile in the end.
31:05A few days later, she sent another letter to the director of the National Gallery saying that she would reluctantly sell it for the sake of Vincent's glory,
31:23because she wanted him to be represented in such an important gallery.
31:30She said,
31:32Dear Mr. Eade,
31:33I have tried to harden my heart against your appeal.
31:37I have looked on that picture every day for 30 years.
31:53I could not bear to part with it.
31:58It was really the kudos and importance of that gallery that made her think, this is really going to set in stone Vincent as a titan of the 20th century.
32:10I have come to realise that no other picture could represent Vincent in a more worthy manner.
32:19He would have wanted it to be there in your gallery.
32:25It's interesting that Van Gogh actually had lived in London earlier in his life when he worked as an art dealer when he was in his early 20s and he loved going to the National Gallery.
32:37So it's very nice that his sunflowers have ended up there.
32:41She also would have known that he was a great admirer of certain aspects of British art and British literature, the moralising side of it, that art was about something, that it taught you things.
32:58It is a sacrifice I must make for his glory.
33:08With Van Gogh's work now in the National Gallery, Joanna's mission could be declared a complete success as Vincent had been accepted as a truly great artist.
33:19She would die just a year after the painting was sold.
33:23But what of the huge number of Van Gogh's that Joanna still had in her possession?
33:29They would eventually become the very foundation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam when it opened in 1973.
33:38But in the intervening decades, many works by Vincent had gone missing due to the chaos of World War II and a collection of mysterious owners and devious forgers.
33:49The struggle to get them all back continues.
34:03Joanna Bonger, the guardian of Vincent van Gogh's legacy, died on September the 2nd, 1925, soon after selling the painting of 15 sunflowers to the National Gallery in London.
34:15Before she passed away though, Van Gogh had already inspired a whole new generation of artists, especially in Germany.
34:24It truly was Germany that first embraced him as a great artist.
34:30And if we look at the art that emerged in Germany in the decades following, it is as if they'd been waiting for someone who would show them how to paint with this intense expressivity and with this extraordinary sense of colour.
34:46Van Gogh had in fact been so lauded in Germany that fakes of the artist first started to emerge here.
34:53The major incident was in the 1920s when a Berlin gallery owner, Otto Wacker, faked dozens of Van Gogh paintings which were initially accepted by the experts.
35:08And then they realised they were wrong and he was found guilty.
35:13And since then there has been a continual problem of faking.
35:17A number of Van Gogh's have been de-attributed, even those which belong to museums.
35:22So it continues to be highly controversial.
35:25The fear of fakes continues to the present day.
35:29One of the Sunflowers paintings once owned by Emile Schuffenecker was sold for a record £22.5 million in 1987.
35:38It was known that the picture had been extended around the edges, but some of the time claimed that the whole painting was a copy done by Schuffenecker.
35:46However, this claim was later confirmed to be untrue.
35:51The problem of fakery has also dogged another work by Vincent van Gogh for nearly its entire existence.
35:58But in 2013, the Van Gogh Museum was able to present a newly rediscovered painting for the first time in many decades.
36:07The Sunset and Mont Majeur.
36:10It is a great pleasure for us to present to you this morning a new work by Vincent van Gogh.
36:19That painting was one of the paintings that was owned by Theo van Gogh and passed into the hands of Johanna.
36:24And it was first sold in 1901.
36:26And then it went through a period until 1908 where we don't know the provenance.
36:30And then it went into the collection of a Norwegian businessman.
36:33Quite soon after he bought it, he was told it was a fake.
36:36So he just put it up in his attic and there it stayed with his family.
36:41And then about 20 years ago, it was sent to the Van Gogh Museum to ask whether it might be authentic.
36:48And at that point it was rejected and the museum said it was not right.
36:53And then in 2011, research was launched again.
36:57And they looked at the paint technique, the type of paint really under the microscope.
37:02They used a letter from July 1888 when it was painted from Vincent Chuteo,
37:07which described a very similar scene of this abbey painted from the scrubland below.
37:14There were two key points. One was it had a number chalked on the back,
37:20which turned out to be an inventory number from Andreas Bonger.
37:25So we could link it up with an 1890 inventory.
37:29And the other thing which was surprising was missed by the Van Gogh Museum the first time
37:33is that it shows the castle of Mont Major in the south of France,
37:39which had a very unusual tower. And that helped to identify it.
37:44There is a kind of rule in art history that when a picture disappears off the beaten track,
37:52when it goes to a place like Norway, where it's not seen by a lot of people,
38:00then it becomes, the assumption arises, oh, it can't be right.
38:05And it falls out of favour.
38:09The discovery of this new work gives us hope that other missing Van Goghs may be found one day.
38:16Many of them vanished during World War II.
38:20There are probably roughly ten Van Gogh paintings which disappeared during the Second World War.
38:26There were a few that were probably burnt and destroyed, including a very important self-portrait.
38:32There were some that were looted or stolen and had not turned up.
38:37One of the lost Van Goghs which I personally would most like to see is the picture of the painter on the road to Tarascon.
38:44That is a picture of Van Gogh himself walking along the road which led past his yellow house out into the fields.
38:52This one disappeared during the Second World War. It was probably destroyed in a fire.
38:59The chances, unfortunately, are rather small that it survived.
39:02There are others which one day we may see again.
39:06There's an important flower still alive, which was stolen during the war, has not turned up.
39:12I mean, it might one day. Who knows?
39:14There is an extraordinary photograph of Hermann Goering sort of caressing in a creepy way this very important late Van Gogh from the Auvers period called A Tree with Ivy.
39:28A painting which possibly Goering then appropriated. A lot of pictures in Paris were disappearing into collections of prominent Nazi officials.
39:39It seems Goering had a taste for contemporary art as well as Renaissance art and Baroque art.
39:45But if he did, it didn't remain with the main collection of Goering's work which was then recovered.
39:51Maybe it's in a bank vault somewhere still. One can hope.
39:55There are a tantalizing number of lost Van Goghs, which it would be wonderful to see again, and also destroyed Van Goghs.
40:05Amongst the latter, one of the most poignant is the sunflower painting.
40:12This one was bought by a Japanese collector in 1920.
40:16It was actually the first Van Gogh to go to Japan, which is interesting.
40:20It was in a private collection and was destroyed on the 6th of August 1945, the very same day as the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.
40:32This was on a separate bombing raid in Tokyo itself. It's a very interesting coincidence.
40:40It tells us a lot about the different ways he was thinking about sunflowers at that moment, because it doesn't resemble our picture at all.
40:51So clearly he was working out a lot of possibilities in his mind.
40:55We had a rather poor photographic reproduction of the painting.
41:00But what I found was a very early 1920s color reproduction in a portfolio published in Japan, which had not been known about to Van Gogh specialists.
41:11And this had much more natural colors, so it gave us an idea of what the picture looks like.
41:17And even more interestingly, this reproduction has an orange frame around the painting, an orange strip of wood.
41:26And if you look at Van Gogh's letters, he describes how he wanted to present the blue sunflowers against an orange frame.
41:33So for the first time, we can see how Van Gogh wanted to present the picture.
41:37Some of the others which have disappeared, one might entertain hopes that one day they will reappear.
41:44While the search for lost Van Gogh's continues, the story of Vincent's life has become world famous.
41:51After the publication of the letters, the writer Irving Stone released the wildly successful novel Lust for Life in 1934,
42:00which told the story of Vincent Van Gogh's many hardships.
42:04What do you know about pain?
42:07It would be made into a film starring Kirk Douglas 20 years later.
42:12Let me talk to Kay for as long as I can keep my hand in this frame.
42:16Vincent!
42:17The movie captured would have become one of the most legendary times in Van Gogh's life,
42:22when he was staying in Arles with Paul Gauguin, another artist who was largely unappreciated during his lifetime.
42:29I've dug ditches in the stinking heat of the tropics.
42:33I've worked in the docks and whether so-called my hands froze on the ropes.
42:37And I can tell you there's nothing noble or beautiful about it.
42:40I did it so I could go on painting.
42:43I didn't have a brother to support me.
42:46There was already a sort of bit of a myth of the man around Gauguin.
42:52He had been a stockbroker and he left his wife and he was really sort of a character within those circles.
42:58And Vincent, I think, really looked up to him, saw him as this pioneer of an emotive form of art full of synesthesia
43:05and using paint to conjure different ways of thinking and set the senses.
43:10He was just on the edge of having a breakdown when Gauguin arrived.
43:15Gauguin actually mentions this in his own letter to Theo.
43:19And then Van Gogh actually gets better for a couple of months.
43:24I think he paints something like 25 pictures in five months and he's just painting and painting and painting.
43:28Not necessarily the happiest period in his entire life.
43:31The idyll that they both envisaged of working in this wonderful artistic commune never came to fruition.
43:39It was a disaster.
43:43The reason we know so much about the life and work of the unknown Vincent van Gogh is thanks to the tireless efforts of Joanna Bonger.
43:52The epic battles with Paul Gauguin down in Arles.
43:56His tortured mental state.
43:58The mutilation of his own ear.
44:00And, of course, the devoted relationship between the artist and his brother Theo.
44:06All of these elements are part of the legend of Vincent van Gogh.
44:11So why has Joanna's story largely been forgotten?
44:14Well, I suppose Joanna's contribution comes from a lot of people's points of view after the story's ended.
44:21After the brothers van Gogh died, her role becomes very important.
44:26I guess in the public eye people are really interested in Vincent and to some extent they're interested in Theo.
44:32But Joanna was further away from them and didn't know Vincent well.
44:37She sold more than 250 works of art because she has sold them.
44:47That's why I think Ghost has grown so famous.
44:50I think it's certainly true that her name, Joanna Bonger, is not as well known to the general public as she ought to be.
44:59Because what she did was on an heroic scale in assuring this legacy and assuring the fame of Vincent.
45:09She spread him over the world.
45:12But still, she had about 600 works by Van Gogh.
45:18Many drawings, 200 paintings, and about 200 pieces of art of other people.
45:24The paintings went to the Van Gogh Museum in the 1970s, so everyone just assumes they've been in a museum.
45:34And I guess for that reason, she's not well known.
45:37It's quite possible that Van Gogh would have been completely forgotten without Joanna Bonger
45:42because there would have been very, very few works surviving.
45:45She did play a very important role.
45:48Without her, so much of the material wouldn't have survived.
45:51Vincent, he said, people will only understand my portraits 25 years after.
46:00And he was right.
46:03The Great!
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