Van Gogh's Bandaged-Ear Self-Portrait Resurfaces in Paris After 35 Years

By Daniel Okafor

Vincent van Gogh's Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe, January 1889 hasn't been loaned to a public exhibition since 1990. Now it hangs at the Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, roughly a third of the way through "Gustave Fayet, Collector-Designer: Icons of Modern Art," on view through March 8.

The painting's owners are reportedly the Greek shipping billionaire Niarchos family. Van Gogh made the work after cutting off his earlobe following a fight with Paul Gauguin. The catalog calls him "poor Vincent." He smokes a pipe, an activity he associated with calm contemplation, against swaths of orange and red.

The show's real subject is Fayet himself. He's nearly forgotten now, but at the dawn of the 20th century he was dazzlingly connected to the French avant-garde.

Who was Gustave Fayet?

"[Fayet] was important, because he was one of the first in France to understand van Gogh, Gauguin, and to support Odilon Redon," cocurator Sylvie Patry told ARTnews. She added that he was "adventurous in a really positive sense, and had a form of audacity in his choices."

Fayet inherited his fortune from wealthy winegrowers; his father and uncle were amateur painters. He painted too, in the nature-inspired realist style of the Barbizon School (a mid-19th-century French movement painting directly from landscape). Cocurator Angeline Scherf said that practice "gave him a particular sensitivity" toward other artists.

In Paris, he became famous for his so-called Gauguin museum—about 200 works across all mediums—and his room of van Goghs. At the time, few others were buying either artist, so visitors typically had to see them in private collections like his. The guest list at his lavish homes included Picasso, Matisse, Bonnard, Vuillard, Colette, Edith Wharton, and the collectors Sergei Shchukin and the Morozov brothers, whose collections have also been the subjects of Fondation Louis Vuitton exhibitions.

What's on view?

The Fondation has gathered more than 250 artworks that once belonged to Fayet, spanning the entire museum. The numbers speak for themselves:

• 86 works by Odilon Redon
• 78 by Gauguin
• 10 by van Gogh
• Multiple works by Cezanne, Degas, Toulouse-Lautrec, Renoir, Morisot, Signac, Bonnard, Vuillard, and Matisse

Fayet is thought to have owned about 750 artworks at one point, and over 300 works by Redon alone.

A floor devoted to Gauguin, on the scale of a small survey, reunites three connected Christ paintings—Self-Portrait with the Yellow Christ (1890–91), Le Calvaire Breton (1889), and The Yellow Christ (1889), the latter considered a manifesto on Synthetism (the style favoring flat form and expressive color over naturalism). They have never been exhibited together in France before.

The Redon highlight is his monumental Symbolist ensemble of three paintings—Day, Night, and Silence—commissioned by Fayet in 1908 for the library of Fontfroide Abbey in southwest France. The library hasn't typically been part of regular public tours. The show culminates in a chapel-like scenography with color-bursting stained glass by Richard Burgsthal, commissioned for the abbey Fayet restored and turned into his own total artwork.

Was Fayet a speculator?

Not really. He preferred mid- to lower-priced works by living, less-recognized artists. "He made a few nice deals with some Gauguins, but if he was really collecting in order to speculate, he'd have done it more systematically," Patry said. "Instead, when the opportunity presented itself, he sometimes jumped. He didn't like losing money and tended to come out even in the end."

He wasn't an entirely original taste-maker either. George Daniel de Monfreid and Emile Schuffenecker steered him toward Gauguin and van Gogh respectively, and his childhood friend, the critic and collector Maurice Fabre, introduced him to the art world. He once declared Cezanne "as great a painter as Rembrandt"—then resold several of his Cezannes.

What does the show leave out?

On Gauguin's Tahitian works, a wall label notes the artist "sought to penetrate what he called the 'Māori soul,'" while acknowledging that "Gauguin himself was part of the colonial world he denounced," living "with underage vahines," or local girls. The label adds he was "one of the first European artists to view Polynesian forms and culture in aesthetic rather than ethnographic terms, as equal to European traditions." That's the furthest the show goes on the question. It's a light touch.

Why does Fayet's resurrection matter?

Fayet only ever donated two paintings to the Louvre, both by Adolphe Monticelli, and his family didn't preserve his legacy after his death. Hence the near disappearance from art history.

The Fondation bet on fixing that. "Exhibitions on subjects that haven't been addressed fall squarely within our remit," artistic director Suzanne Pagé told ARTnews, "especially when it offers an opportunity to present major works of modernity that have never been shown in France."

"The masses in France were completely against this kind of French avant-garde art" at the time, "because the most important artists break the rules," Pagé said. Her closing point applies well beyond Fayet: "It's first and foremost through other artists, that other [avant-garde] are discovered."