A work by painter Vincent van Gogh fetched a record amount of $35.85 million (31.35 million euros) at an auction in New York on Thursday. It concerns the watercolor, Meules de blé (Wheat Stacks), a canvas that was once confiscated by the Nazis.
Auction house Christie’s reports that the work yielded more than twice as much as La Moisson En Provence, the previous record for a work on paper by Van Gogh, which sold for almost 15 million dollars in 1997. The sale also exceeded the expectations of experts, who thought the work could fetch 25 million euros.
The Dutch artist (1853-1890) made the canvas in 1888 while living in Arles, in the south of France. In 1913 it was bought by Max Meirowsky, a German Jew with an enormous art collection, who gave it to a German art dealer in Paris in 1938, before fleeing to Amsterdam because of the persecution of the Jews. Subsequently, the work came into the possession of Alexandrine de Rothschild, a member of a Jewish banking family. The Nazis confiscated the work and it went missing for decades until it surfaced in 1978 and was bought by Texan oil magnate Edwin L. Cox.
After the oil tycoon’s death, the Cox, Meirowsky and Rothschild families reached an agreement last year, whereby they each get a share of the proceeds from the sale.
The last time the canvas was on public display was more than a hundred years ago at an exhibition in Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum.
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