Gauguin paintings at the National Gallery and MFA Boston may be fakes. Fabrice Fourmanoir is out to prove it.

An elderly woman had stopped Rheims on the street in Paris and asked him to look at a painting wrapped in newspaper. It was a still life by Gauguin, which Rheims subsequently sold for what was then a record price.

As a child, Fourmanoir says, “every time we saw Rheims, I asked him to tell me again and again this extraordinary” — and possibly apocryphal — “story. He did it every time with the same emotion he had that 1956 day.”

It was this story, he says, that gave him “the wish to be an art treasure hunter and also a Gauguin connoisseur.”

Like Gauguin, who spent time in the French navy and merchant marines, Fourmanoir loves boats, and literature. When he was 18, inspired by the writings of Joseph Conrad and Herman Melville, Fourmanoir set off to sail the world for the better part of three decades.

“I start like the first sentences of Melville in ‘Moby Dick,’ ” he says, when asked to provide a short bio. “Call me Fabrice (Ishmael). Some years ago — never mind how long precisely — I was a … young man smuggling Chinese porcelains, guns and cigarettes between communist China and the Philippines with the Sulu Islands pirates and fascinated by the beauty of island girls. One day I discovered Tahiti, which I knew before only by the paintings of Paul Gauguin and the books of Melville, [Robert Louis] Stevenson [and Jack] London.”

Fourmanoir liked Tahiti enough to settle there, opening a small gallery and marrying three Polynesian women in succession. Over the years, his Gauguin obsession deepened. At a Paris auction in 1992, he bought a trove of Gauguin letters, notes, drawings and photographs. This led to collaborations with a few Gauguin scholars, including Elizabeth C. Childs, who thanked Fourmanoir in her book “Vanishing Paradise: Art and Exoticism in Colonial Tahiti.”

Fourmanoir says he lost all of his money during the financial crisis of 2008-2009, after which he divorced “my last Tahitian wife.”

“Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?” (1897–1898) by Paul Gauguin. (Tompkins Collection—Arthur Gordon Tompkins Fund/Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

Trouble in paradise

Gauguin, along with Vincent van Gogh and Paul Cézanne, is one of the three great post-impressionists and one of the best-known artists in history. On the rare occasions when his paintings come on the market, they can fetch tens or even hundreds of millions of dollars. And yet, today more than ever, Gauguin is a highly divisive figure.

To his admirers, he was one of the last great romantic adventurers, a former stockbroker who sloughed off bourgeois conventions and voyaged across the world to live out a dream. He was, they say, a visionary artist who was determined to learn from other cultures, and who used his expanded awareness to make some of the most ambitious, original works of the modern era.

To others, however, he was a scoundrel who traveled to French Polynesia and shamelessly stole creative ideas from cultures he barely knew. These critics also see a man who abandoned his wife and family to father children with teenage girls in the South Seas, relationships that he got away with due to his colonial prestige but that can clearly be seen as more sinister today.

When he decided to travel to Tahiti, Gauguin had imagined himself living “free at last, with no money troubles” and able “to love, to sing, and to die.” But in French Polynesia, the artist was not so free.

In his final months, after Vaeoho, his pregnant, 14-year-old Marquesan companion, had left him to await the baby’s birth with her grandmother, Gauguin had serious eye problems, and the “Maison du Jouir” reeked so badly from the rot of his ulcerated leg that few could stand to be near him. Most scholars agree that by his death at 54, in May 1903, the artist was not in any state to be turning out masterpieces.

His end was “truly pitiable,” according to George Shackelford, who organized a 2003-2004 exhibition about Gauguin in Tahiti. “I mean, he was really, really, really in extremis. … That he was painting at all in the first months of 1903 is almost miraculous.”

And that’s just it: Fourmanoir thinks Gauguin wasn’t painting, which is why he believes all of the canvases attributed to him in 1903 are forgeries. He claims — sensationally — that the forgeries were commissioned by Gauguin’s art dealer, Ambroise Vollard, who wanted to profit from a sudden surge in demand for Gauguin’s work.

“The Invocation” (1903) by Gauguin. (Gift from the Collection of John and Louise Booth in memory of their daughter Winkie/National Gallery of Art, Washington DC )

‘The weakest picture in the room’

“Its brushwork is clumsy, its colors muddy, its South Sea maidens crudely drawn,” he wrote.

Remarking on the painting’s connection with other Gauguins, including “Women and a White Horse” and “Where Do We Come From?” (also at the MFA Boston), Richard noted that “uninventive forgers often assemble fakes from such half-familiar images.” “Were ‘Invocation’ by another painter,” he wrote, “its authenticity might be questioned.”

Fourmanoir has taken up where Richard left off.

Of course, it is easier to cast doubt on the authenticity of paintings that are already weak. Art scholarship has traditionally been built on a model of mastery (on the artist’s part) and connoisseurship (on the scholar’s). You could tell something was by Jan Van Eyck or Leonardo da Vinci because it was demonstrably better than work by their imitators. But in the modern era, this model broke down as such artists as van Gogh, Matisse and Picasso tried to “unlearn” conventional ideas of virtuosity and skill, embracing new ways of painting that were often deliberately awkward or clumsy.

Even in these new, mold-breaking modes, modern artists had good days and bad. But admirers of Gauguin don’t like to admit that an artist capable of “Where Do We Come From?” was also capable of very ordinary paintings. So they are left with a choice: They can acknowledge that in 1903 Gauguin was sick, his powers waning. Or they can reach for an explanation that is both more dramatic and less injurious to the artist’s reputation: The weak pictures must be fakes.

Shackelford, a former department head at the MFA who is now senior deputy director at the Kimbell Art Museum in Texas, knows both “Invocation” and “Women and a White Horse” well. He feels positive about the latter painting: Despite “moments of ineptitude,” he says, “there’s a loveliness to the overall patterning of the colors.” The museum itself, according to MFA spokeswoman Karen Frascona, has “confidence in the attribution of ‘Women and a White Horse’ ” — although she notes that “we always remain open to new scholarly research about works in our care.”

As for “The Invocation,” Shackelford says he once looked at it “very closely” in the company of NGA senior conservator Carol Christensen. “I came away from that telling them, ‘Don’t worry about this painting. It’s correct.’ And I also said, ‘But it’s not very good.’ ”

In fact, he tells me, it’s “really pathetic. But if you understand where it comes from” — a reference to Gauguin’s circumstances in the final months of his life — “it’s literally pathetic. The fact that the gallery doesn’t cherish it [is one thing], but I hope that they don’t doubt it.”

An emailed statement from the NGA, however, implies that some uncertainty persists: “We have looked hard at … ‘The Invocation,’ discussing it with scholars and including it in research projects,” spokeswoman Anabeth Guthrie wrote. Gauguin’s late works, she continued, “present particular challenges — he was often ill, and living in the Marquesas — and there are few reliable documents relating to his production there.”

Mastery or masters of disguise?

How can some experts look at “Invocation” and “Women and a White Horse” and see Paul Gauguin’s artistry, while others see the work of a clever forger? Here’s a snapshot of the complex debate, starting with “The Inovcation,” pictured below.

FAKE: The signature is very weak. The P and the G don’t have Gauguin’s characteristic

“proud” style.

AUTHENTIC: If the signature is weak it may be because Gauguin was gravely ill.

FAKE: The central nude figure is a poor imitation of the central figure wearing a loin cloth in Gauguin’s 1897 “Where Do We Come From?” Where that figure is reaching for fruit, here she is grabbing at air.

AUTHENTIC: The central reaching figure closely resembles a drawing once attributed to Rembrandt, which Gauguin used as a source but which a forger at that time is unlikely to have known about.

FAKE: In 1903, the big white cross at the cemetery would have been hidden by trees. Gauguin was at loggerheads with the Catholic bishop who had it erected, so he had no motive to paint it.

AUTHENTIC: The paint in many areas has been applied with Gauguin’s characteristic parallel vertical strokes, inspired by Cézanne, and consistent with other authentic canvases.

Source: Photograph of “The Invocation” copyright

National Gallery of Art. Gift from the Collection of John

and Louise Booth in memory of their daughter Winkie.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mastery or masters of disguise?

How can some experts look at “Invocation” and “Women and a White Horse” and see Paul Gauguin’s artistry, while others see the work of a clever forger? Here’s a snapshot of the complex debate, starting with “The Invocation” below.

The signature is very weak. The P and the G don’t have Gauguin’s characteristic

“proud” style.

If the signature is weak it may be because Gauguin was gravely ill.

The central nude figure is a poor imitation of the central figure wearing a loin cloth in Gauguin’s 1897 “Where Do We Come From?” Where that figure is reaching for fruit, here she is grabbing at air.

The central reaching figure closely resembles a drawing once attributed to Rembrandt, which Gauguin used as a source but which a forger at that time is unlikely to have

known about.

In 1903, the big white cross at the cemetery would have been hidden by trees. Gauguin was at loggerheads with the Catholic bishop who had it erected, so he had no motive to paint it.

The paint in many areas has been applied with Gauguin’s characteristic parallel vertical strokes, inspired by Cézanne, and consistent with other authentic canvases.

Source: Photograph of “The Invocation” copyright National Gallery of Art.

Gift from the Collection of John and Louise Booth in memory of their

daughter Winkie.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Mastery or masters of disguise?

How can some experts look at “Invocation” and “Women and a White Horse” and see Paul Gauguin’s artistry while others see the work of a clever forger? Here’s a snapshot of the complex debate, starting with “The Invocation” below.

The signature is very weak. The P and the G don’t have Gauguin’s characteristic

“proud” style.

If the signature is weak it may be because Gauguin was gravely ill.

The central nude figure is a poor imitation of the central figure wearing a loin cloth in Gauguin’s 1897 “Where Do We Come From?” Where that figure is reaching for fruit, here she is grabbing at air.

The central reaching figure closely resembles a drawing once attributed to Rembrandt, which Gauguin used as a source but which a forger at that time is unlikely to have

known about.

In 1903, the big white cross at the cemetery would have been hidden by trees. Gauguin was at loggerheads with the Catholic bishop who had it erected, so he had no motive to paint it.

The paint in many areas has been applied with Gauguin’s characteristic parallel vertical strokes, inspired by Cézanne, and consistent with other authentic canvases.

Source: Photograph of “The Invocation” copyright National Gallery of Art. Gift from the Collection of John and

Louise Booth in memory of their daughter Winkie.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

An unreliable narrator

Talking to Fourmanoir about Gauguin, who was fond of alter-egos and pseudonyms and loved sowing confusion, can give you an uncanny, hall-of-mirrors feeling: one unreliable narrator telling a story about another. The self-described “iconoclast” and “adventurer” resides in Sayulita, a small village in Mexico that is popular with surfers. He lives off savings and occasional sales of art works. When we speak over WhatsApp, he wears no shirt and moves about a large, open room with sunlight pouring in. Other Gauguin scholars have more resources, but Fourmanoir likes being unbeholden to museums or universities. It also helps, he believes, to have certain things in common with Gauguin, including his love of Tahitian women, which he says allows him to get inside Gauguin’s “skin and mind.”

He believes his biggest asset is that — unlike almost every Gauguin specialist — he has lived in Tahiti and the Marquesas. “I know Polynesian,” he says, “I know their culture, legends, language, philosophy, magic beliefs and their way of living.”

Still, Fourmanoir gets overexcited, and he can be prone to invention. Aspects of his own biography fall apart upon examination. He claims, for instance, to have co-owned the first draft, written in Gauguin’s hand, of “Noa Noa,” the artist’s account of his life in Tahiti. He says he and his partner sold it to the Getty Research Institute for $2 million, but the manuscript was actually sold to the Getty by the Boston-based book dealer Ars Libri, for $132,000, according to parties involved with the sale. When challenged on this, he attempts alternative explanations and eventually shrugs it off.

Still, Fourmanoir’s role in the Getty’s painful decision to downgrade its sculpture — from Gauguin to “Unknown Maker” — has made it harder to ignore him.

Growing doubts

No one had seen “Head With Horns” until 1997, when it emerged in an exhibition in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, in the South of France. Five years later, it was displayed at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where Scott Schaefer, then a senior curator at the Getty, saw it and persuaded his employer to buy it.

It was subsequently shown as a genuine Gauguin in exhibitions at Tate Modern in London, the National Gallery of Art in Washington and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. But a few people, including Fourmanoir, had been expressing doubts about it as early as 2003.

Several things troubled Fourmanoir: the absence of a signature, the unusual pedestal, the sculpture’s smooth surface. There was also a huge gap — almost a hundred years — in the sculpture’s provenance.

“Head With Horns,” a late 1800s sculpture purchased for millions as a Gauguin. (The J. Paul Getty Museum)

The experts Schaefer consulted before buying “Head With Horns” all vouched for its attribution, with good reason: Gauguin had pasted two photographs of the sculpture into his “Noa Noa” manuscript and made drawings and prints featuring the work. So its appearance in 1997 seemed like finding the missing piece of a puzzle.

The museum had purchased the sculpture from New York’s Wildenstein gallery, an art dealer with a storied history that includes many well-publicized lawsuits. Wildenstein’s independent offshoot, the Wildenstein Plattner Institute, is sponsoring the research and upcoming publication of the Gauguin catalogue raisonné, the comprehensive, annotated listing of all known paintings by the artist. One of the most authoritative voices supporting the attribution of “Head With Horns” to Gauguin was Rick Brettell, who was heading the catalogue raisonné project.

Several people I spoke with believe the Wildensteins had a financial interest in the sale of “Head With Horns.” Wildenstein and Co. would not confirm whether the Wildenstein Institute (a forerunner of the Wildenstein-Plattner Institute) had played a part in supporting the attribution of “Head With Horns” to Gauguin, but wrote in an email that “we have always strived to maintain a firewall between Wildenstein and Co. and the Wildenstein Institute.”

Brettell, who died on Friday, was a former director of the Dallas Museum of Art and one of the world’s foremost authorities on impressionism and post-impressionism. In an email he sent me before being admitted to hospice, he said the revelations around the Agostini album hadn’t altered his opinion of the sculpture’s authenticity. He wrote: “I am unpersuaded by the arguments of M. Fourmanoir and his followers at the Getty Museum that have allowed that distinguished museum to formally downgrade their great late sculpture. I am confident that, in the fullness of time, this work will be returned to Gauguin.”

In his email, Brettell, who had three degrees from Yale University, described Fourmanoir as “a very persuasive publicity seeker.”

Unfazed, Fourmanoir has turned his attention to the much broader claim that several great museums — not just the NGA and the MFA Boston, but also the National Gallery in Prague, the Israel Museum in Jerusalem and the E.G. Bührle Foundation in Zurich — are displaying forged Gauguins. If he is right, he says, the credibility of Brettell and the Wildenstein Plattner Institute’s catalogue raisonné will “collapse.”

Fourmanoir played a leading role in the admission by the Getty Museum that a Gauguin sculpture, purchased in 2002 for millions, is not actually by Gauguin. (César Rodríguez/For The Washington Post)

Questionable assumptions?

Many of Fourmanoir’s quibbles with the Gauguins are speculative, as he freely admits. He believes that the female figures in “The Invocation,” for instance, lack “the charisma” of Polynesian women, and that Gauguin wouldn’t have painted the central figure — who is based on the most prominent figure in “Where Do We Come From?” — without a loin cloth and with pubic hair.

He is certain, what’s more, that Gauguin would not have painted the white cross in the background of both paintings, because he loathed the local bishop who had the cross erected and because, from the paintings’ implied viewpoint, the cross would have been “hidden by big trees” in 1903.

Observation-based claims of this kind often rest on questionable assumptions. (What counts as a “weak signature?” And was Gauguin only painting what he saw?) Yet they can be first steps in the discovery of forgeries, and Fourmanoir believes they reinforce his main argument: that both paintings have a suspicious, unexplained gap in their provenance.

There is no record of Gauguin shipping the two paintings from the Marquesas to his dealer in Paris. And since they were not listed in the inventory of his home’s contents after he died, Fourmanoir says that they must be by someone else.

June Hargrove, an internationally renowned expert in French art, thinks he could be right: “It may be just that straightforward,” she says, adding that the lists “don’t jibe, making it logical to conclude that the mysterious additions are fakes.”

But other scholars see holes. Caroline Boyle Turner — a specialist in Gauguin’s final years in the Marquesas — speculates that the paintings might have been taken from Gauguin’s studio by locals, or traded to other Europeans living on the islands, and made their way back to France from there. Gauguin might also have consigned them to sailors passing through. He was not a good record keeper, she notes, and his life was falling to pieces.

“I think there are possibilities for things getting left off lists,” Shackelford says.

Fake or real? Some of the arguments for and against “Women and a White Horse”

FAKE: The painting is signed “P. Gauguin,” instead of “Paul Gauguin.” It seems unlikely he would have signed two contemporary works differently.

AUTHENTIC: In 1898, Gauguin signed two works painted within months of each other as, respectively, “P. Gauguin” and “Paul Gauguin.”

FAKE: The vegetation on the mountain is not typical of the Marquesas Islands.

AUTHENTIC: Gauguin did not simply paint what he saw. He freely invented things, and may have easily invented the cross at the top of the painting and the look of the

vegetation here.

FAKE: The area at the bottom of the work looks bland and badly painted.

AUTHENTIC: In Polynesia, Gauguin made his own ground layer and “frosted” the surface just short of the edge, leaving a margin of raw canvas all around the painting.

Source: Photograph of “Women and a White Horse”

copyright Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Fake or real? Some of the arguments for and against “Women and a White Horse”

The painting is signed “P. Gauguin,” instead of “Paul Gauguin.” It seems unlikely he would have signed two contemporary works differently.

In 1898, Gauguin signed two works painted within months of each other as, respectively, “P. Gauguin” and

“Paul Gauguin.”

Gauguin did not simply paint what he saw. He freely invented things, and may have easily invented the cross at the top of the painting and the look of the vegetation here.

The vegetation on the mountain is not typical of the Marquesas Islands.

In Polynesia, Gauguin made his own ground layer and “frosted” the surface just short of the edge, leaving a margin of raw canvas all around the painting.

The area at the bottom of the work looks bland and badly painted.

Source: Photograph of “Women and a White Horse” copyright Museum of

Fine Arts, Boston.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Fake or real? Some of the arguments for and against “Women and a White Horse”

The painting is signed “P. Gauguin,” instead of “Paul Gauguin.” It seems unlikely he would have signed contemporary

works differently.

In 1898, Gauguin signed two works painted within months of each other as, respectively, “P. Gauguin” and “Paul Gauguin.”

The vegetation on the mountain is not typical of the Marquesas Islands.

Gauguin did not simply paint what he saw. He freely invented things, and may have easily invented the cross at the top of the painting and the look of the vegetation here.

The area at the bottom of the work looks bland and badly painted.

In Polynesia, Gauguin made his own ground layer and “frosted” the surface just short of the edge, leaving a margin of raw canvas all around the painting.

Source: Photograph of “Women and a White Horse” copyright Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

SHELLY TAN/THE WASHINGTON POST

Leaving a stain

Art historians and curators tend to be wary of getting tangled up in debates about attributions. But it’s not always easy to stay above the fray.

But six years later, a brilliant forger named Shaun Greenhalgh was convicted of money laundering in connection with a forged sculpture that had been acquired by the British Museum. Allusions were made in the trial to other, untraced forgeries. The Art Newspaper’s Martin Bailey (who was later one of the first to question the Getty’s “Head With Horns”) picked up on a reference to a sculpture sounding like “The Faun” and traced it to the Art Institute. “The Faun” was soon declared a forgery.

Such incidents leave a stain, which is why many scholars are reluctant to raise awkward questions that might embarrass the institutions they depend on. Plus, where there’s a suspected forgery, there’s the potential of becoming entangled with criminals.

Hargrove told me that years ago, when she was starting to raise questions about the authenticity of sculptures attributed to Auguste Rodin in a private collection, a colleague warned her off: “I don’t want to find you floating face down in the Potomac,” he said.

A closer look

In April, in an hour-long demonstration over Zoom, Shackelford used his expert eye to show me similarities between the two Gauguin paintings in question and other paintings known to be authentic. He focused on physical details: Gauguin’s distinctive parallel brushstrokes and the way he applied the ground layer of paint, leaving areas of raw canvas at the edges.

“Now, Fabrice would say, ‘Well, that’s something the faker copied.’ And he could be right. … The faker could be working from the known pictures that had … come from the Marquesas in the last shipment and he could be saying, ‘I’m going to copy these in their every detail, including the kind of canvas they’re on and the way the ground is prepared.’ He might even have been able to use the very same pigments Gauguin used. But to me, everything about the way they’re made leads me to believe they’re by Gauguin.”

The day after I spoke with Shackelford, Fourmanoir gave me a 90-minute, online slide show addressing details in not only the NGA and MFA works, but also other Gauguin paintings, ostensibly, from 1903, that he considers problematic. He argued that the leaf in a work supposedly made in Tahiti is not from any Tahitian plant, that the thatching on a roof in another painting is not Tahitian-style and that the walls of a hut in another work are higher than they should be.

Determining the way forward

When you stand very close to a painting by an impressionist or post-impressionist, it is thrilling to see the individual brushstrokes, but you tend to lose sight of the bigger picture. In the same way, focusing on the details of Fourmanoir’s claims can blind you to the magnitude of what he is claiming.

The idea that Ambroise Vollard, the most important dealer in the history of modern art, might have commissioned forgeries is shocking. Vollard was close to the impressionists Degas, Renoir and Cassatt, and played a leading role in the careers of Cézanne, Gauguin, van Gogh, Picasso and Matisse.

And yet no scholar I spoke to seemed to think fraud was beyond him.

Some artists felt Vollard exploited them. They used his name as a pun connected to “voleur,” meaning “thief.” (Matisse, who profoundly distrusted him, called him “Fifi voleur.” The artist Émile Bernard called him “Vole-art.”)

Gaugin’s “Contes Barbares” (1902). (© Photo: Museum Folkwang, Essen, Germany)

Fourmanoir believes that when Gauguin died and a potentially lucrative romantic legend began taking hold, Vollard added to his dwindling stock by commissioning forgeries.

“Vollard knew what he was doing,” Fourmanoir says. To deceive people, he says, the dealer and his forger based the faked paintings on monotype drawings known to be authentic, “so if you pick up that the paintings correspond to these drawings you think they are authentic. So smart!”

The only way to try to settle the issue, everyone agrees, is to subject the paintings to technical analysis. It wouldn’t be difficult, or even expensive, according to Shackelford, and even though it might not be conclusive, it could produce information for or against the attribution.

He explains: “Let’s look at the canvas. Say there were an imperfect thread in ‘Women and a White Horse’ and with X-rays we could see that the same thread runs right across the middle of ‘Contes Barbares’ [a 1902 painting recognized as authentic]. That would suggest that the two paintings were painted from the same bolt of cloth, which makes the chance that it was painted in Paris completely invalid — unless a forger got hold of some blank fabric that came from the Marquesas, which is unlikely.

“Alternatively, you could look at the paint through XRF — X-ray fluorescence. This would produce a map of the elements — like cobalt or lead — that are present on the canvas.” If you compared six paintings looking for anomalies and “they all ended up containing the same ingredients, with nothing that shouts out as being wrong, that would be pretty powerful evidence.” If there were inconsistencies, he pointed out, that would raise a red flag.

In news that delights Fourmanoir, Guthrie told me that the NGA has discussed with the MFA Boston subjecting the paintings to scientific analysis, believing it to be “the most effective way forward.” She said the museum plans to resume those discussions “when the Gallery curatorial and conservation staff can come together again, in the near future.”

When I ask Fourmanoir whether he thinks he has embarrassed experts like Brettell and Schaefer, he says: “For sure.”

“I am free,” he adds. “I can say what I like. The science will say I’m right. It’s too bad for Rick because all his credibility will collapse.”

But Fourmanoir’s own credibility — compromised by a penchant for fabrication and evasion — also is on the line.

“All of [Fourmanoir’s] idiosyncrasies don’t necessarily mean that he is wrong,” Shackelford says. “But they don’t fill you with confidence that he is right, either.”

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Story editing by Janice Page and Amy Hitt. Graphics by Shelly Tan. Photo editing by Moira Haney. Photo research by Kelsey Ables. Copy editing by Annabeth Carlson. Design by Beth Broadwater.