Minisode 1: Lost & Found - Van Gogh's Drawing of Starry Night

Did you know that there are TWO Starry Nights? Well, you do now! This minisode covers the harrowing, fascinating, and infuriating story of Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night. Come for the intrigue, stay in spite of the bad Russian pronunciation.

Transcript

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Wait, am I recording? You are listening to Stuff About Things, an art history podcast. All right, let's bango. Hello and welcome to Stuff About Things, an Art History Podcast. My name is Lindsay Howdy, and I am your host for this podcast, in which I tell you stuff about cool things. My credentials for doing so, you ask? Well, I have got my PhD in art history and a penchant, a penchant, if you will, for spending a lot of time alone in a walk-in closet talking into a microphone. You put those things together, and bada bing, bada boom, you've got an art history podcast. Thank you for joining me for this episode, which I am declaring a mini sode in the hopes that it's under 30 minutes. That for me is a mini sode. I was originally going to include this material in episode 33, but that script ran to over 15,000 words, which is something like three hours when recorded, which, mmm, no, just no. So I cut a bunch of stuff, but some of it I really wanted to talk about. And, you know, now we're here. For this episode, I am going to jump right in with minimal background on Van Gogh or the painting uh known as the Starry Night. But if you want that background and you want to learn more about this man and that painting, you can head on over to episode 33. With that said, let's get to the good part. The part where I tell you stuff about a thing in hopefully under 30 minutes. Vincent Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night, Lost and Found. As covered in episode 33, Van Gogh painted Starry Night in early June of 1889 while he was a patient at the asylum of Saint Paul du Mazole in the town of Saint-Rémy in southern France. While at that asylum, he had been given a spare room to use as a studio. It was in that studio that Van Gogh would go on to paint what are now some of his most famous works, including The Starry Night, which now resides in the collection of the Museum of Modern Arts in New York. It's a painting that basically everyone knows. What many people don't know is that Van Gogh made another version of Starry Night in the form of an ink and paper drawing. Now the reason I'm dedicating the podcast's first ever mini sewed to this drawing is actually two reasons. One, prior to researching Starry Night, I was not aware that such a drawing existed. And two, when I did start coming across mentions of the drawing, all of them said that it had been either destroyed or lost during World War II. But then I find an article from 2018 that says the drawing, which again for decades had been thought to be lost or destroyed, was actually in Russia. To which I responded, What? I had so many questions about this that I wanted answered, so I went out looking. And y'all, let me tell you, this story is fascinating. Also slightly infuriating, but mostly fascinating. Bailey is the author of a blog that's hosted on the Artnewspaper.com website called Adventures with Van Gogh. He has a ton of different postings, including a 2018 post about the discovery of this drawing in Russia. He also covers that discovery in his 2018 book called Starry Night, Van Gogh at the Asylum. I will, of course, provide links to all of those on the podcast's website if you would like to go take a look yourself. Those were both, once again, by our boy, Martin Bailey. First things first, let's talk about the drawing itself. Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Nights is an ink on paperwork that is almost identical to Starry Night the painting. It's obviously in a different medium than the painting. It's ink on paper, not oil paint on canvas, but the two compositions look exactly alike. Van Gogh made the work by applying ink to the surface of the paper, both directly with a pen of some kind, as well as with brushes, thereby mimicking the very bold brush strokes of the painting that we all know and love. For a long time, it was believed that Van Gogh did this drawing only using one color of ink, sometimes described as black, sometimes described as brown. That's because all of the known photographs of the drawing had been done before 1943, when color photography was not common. As more recent images of the drawing show, however, Van Gogh also used blue ink to do some accent work throughout the drawing, including in the halos of lights around the stars, as well as in a register of the hilly landscape at the bottom of the composition. It adds a really lovely dimension to what is otherwise a fairly simple line drawing. The drawing is rather large, it measures in at about 1.5 by 2 feet, or 47 by 63 centimeters, making it about two-thirds the size of the painting. That's a pretty significant size for a drawing, definitely bigger than any average piece of paper that you might have sitting around your house right now. And certainly too big to fit into a suitcase without folding it in half. Which is a highly specific reference that may or may not come up again later. Spoiler alert, it does. Look at me building tension, making you wait for it. Van Gogh likely made this drawing in mid to late June of 1889. Contrary to what you might assume, Van Gogh did not make this drawing in anticipation of painting Starry Nights. He actually did the drawing after the fact to document the finished painting. Now you might ask, what's the point of making a drawing of a painting unless it's to help you paint the painting? Well, around this time, Van Gogh was making several drawings after some of his finished paintings for the purposes of sending them to his brother Theo, who lived in Paris. He wanted his brother to be able to see what he was working on, but sending 10 canvases 440 miles north to Paris wasn't really an option, so he made these drawings and sent those along instead. Theo receives this batch of drawings in July of 1889 and presumably looks at them before putting them away somewhere, making them, you know, 10 more of the hundreds, if not thousands, of works that Theo has by his brother that are just laying about the Van Gogh household. Within the next two years, both Vincent and Theo Van Gogh would pass away, leaving the entirety of the Van Gogh estate to Theo's widow Joanna, or Jo. Jo makes it her mission to make Vincent Van Gogh a household name, and she succeeds. Soon enough, there are tons of people who are interested in buying Van Gogh's work. That included a German art collector based in Bremen, Germany, who bought the drawing of Starry Night from Joe in 1907. Unfortunately, that art collector died a few years later in the First World War, and his collection was subsequently transferred to the Kunsthalle Bremen, which was the major art museum in the city. Kunst meaning Arts, Halle meaning hall, Bremen meaning Bremen, the Bremen Art Hall. That is where the drawing remained until the fateful year of 1943. It was in that year, at the height of World War II, that the collection of the Kunsthalle Bremen was evacuated to four castle locations throughout the German countryside, the logic being that these works would be safer at those locations than in the city. And that was a pretty good assumption given that Bremen was getting the beans bombed out of it by the Allied army. Unfortunately, in the final days of the war, one of those castles, the Karnsau Castle in Brandenburg, fell into the hands of the Soviet army and served as a stopping point on the march of captured Soviet soldiers back to Russia. Side note, the Soviet Union actually made these soldiers who had gotten captured in World War II walk back to Russia as part of their punishment. Imagine what these people's feet looked like when they finally got home. While these soldiers were chilling at the castle, they somehow discovered a false wall behind one of the wardrobes. In later accounts, you would think that they were just kind of looking around, you know, seeing what's up, but no, they were definitely looking for stuff to steal, and who boy did they find it? Because behind that false wall was one-fourth of the Kunsthal Bremen's collection, which included 50 paintings, over 1,700 drawings, and somewhere between three and five thousand prints. The drawing of Starry Night just so happened to be one of those works. As I am sure you can imagine, the Soviet soldiers snickety-snatched those drawings and prints and paintings right up. They grabbed anything that they could possibly carry, and then on their way out, they just left the door open, which meant that locals and basically anyone passing by could just go in and yoinkity yoink whatever was left. Once the dust settled from World War II, literally and figuratively, the people in charge of the Kunstalabremen set out to recover what they could of these lost works, but it was slow and very defeating work, because the things that they did manage to recover had sustained irreparable damage and had been basically trashed. They didn't give up hope, though, and for decades they had people searching for these stolen works. The museum even put out inventories in Russian that documented what works were missing and characteristic markings that they had, including stamps that basically said property of the Kunst Talebremen, so that people who acquired such works through buying them or inheritance stuff could confirm that they were indeed stolen and would hopefully return them. Some did, but it was mostly wishful thinking. With every year that went by, that wishful thinking started to look something more and more like delusion, and any hope of getting these works back started to fade. It seemed that these works, including Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night, were lost for good. Enter Stage left the hero of this episode, Mr. Martin Bailey. In 1990, when Martin Bailey was working as an investigative reporter for The Observer, he started to hear some strange rumors, which were that some of the works looted from the Carnzau Castle in Germany were being held in a top secret vault in the Soviet Union. Intrigued by this rumor, Bailey decides to take this up as his newest lead, one that he will chase for years. In 1992, two years after first learning of these rumors, Bailey's investigation leads him to the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg, which is one of the greatest museums in the world, and one, it seems, with many secrets. Bailey doesn't say specifically what brought him to the Hermitage Museum, but he clearly knew something, and his credentials and contacts there must have been significant. Significant enough, in fact, to score an audience with the newly appointed director of the museum, a man by the name of Mikhail Pietrovsky. While he's taking part in this meeting, Bailey has one goal. He wants to confirm that the Hermitage is indeed in possession of those stolen works from the Kunsthalebremen. But he can't just walk into a meeting and ask a Russian government official if they have any stolen arts around. And uh, you know, like, what's this? I've been hearing about these top secret vaults. Can you tell me anything? No, they cannot. It's just not a good tactic. And our boy Martin Bailey is better than that. What he does instead is he puts in a request to see a single work that he just happens to have heard that the museum might have. Vincent Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night. To Bailey's shock, Pietrovsky is like, wink, wink, wink, sure, you can see it. And within hours, Martin Bailey is brought face to face with this drawing, confirming that one, it still exists, and two, it's in the possession of the Russian government. Pietrovsky even allows Bailey to examine the drawing and take photographs of it, which is why we now have at least a few images of this work in color. That's all due to Mr. Martin Bailey. But Martin Bailey is not off the case just yet, because after seeing the drawing, he keeps digging, and he eventually finds the Red Army soldier who claims to have personally taken this drawing of Starry Knight from Germany back to Russia, or, you know, what was then the Soviet Union. That man's name was Viktor Ivanovich Baldin. Baldin? Baldin? I'm just gonna say Balden. And this dude's story is wild. At the time of World War II, Balden was a 25-year-old architecture student turned soldier. He was one of the people in charge of manning the march of captured Soviet soldiers back to Russia. So he was there at the Karnzau Castle when soldiers discovered that hidden cache of works behind the wardrobe. According to Balden, he walked into that wardrobe area, and the first thing that he saw was a large drawing on the floor that he immediately recognized as being Starry Knight. At that point, the painting was already famous, and Baldon, being an architecture student, certainly knew what it was. Not because he was an architecture student, but because he clearly, you know, had an interest in the arts. He also saw that these soldiers were just going hog wild, taking anything that they could get their little grubby mitts on. So Balden starts grabbing what he can to keep them from falling in the hands of these other soldiers. He also had the advantage of having a suitcase with him that he could put stuff in, and he managed to fit not just two paintings, but 367 drawings into that suitcase. He also had the luxury of riding a tractor back to Russia because he wasn't a soldier who got captured or defected. He was just monitoring the march, making it a little bit easier to carry a suitcase a thousand miles. When Balden returns to Russia, he inventories the things in the suitcase and realizes the magnitude of what he now has. Not just a large drawing by Van Gogh, but ones by Rembrandt, Durr, Verenese, Van Dyck, Degas, Henri Toulouse Letrec. The list goes on. He stashes this suitcase until a few years later when he decides to turn over these drawings and those two paintings to the museum where he worked, which is the Museum of Architecture in Moscow. He does so on account that they'll be much better taken care of in the museum than they would stashed in a suitcase in his home. This act of transferring the Bremen works puts this collection of objects on the radar of the Russian government, at the time, still the USSR, and for decades the collection remains there at the museum, with Balden eventually becoming director. Now Balden seems like a pretty decent dude, and as time goes on, he feels increasingly guilty about having these stolen works. But at the time that he was director of the museum, the Cold War was in full swing, and the only thing leaving the Soviet Union during that time was SAS and the threat of nuclear warfare. There was no way in heck that the Soviet government would be handing anything back to Germany, much less these treasured objects. Ain't gonna happen, y'all. Things take a turn in 1990, when it becomes quite clear that the Soviet Union is about to fall. For whatever reason, the KJB orders the Museum of Architecture in Moscow to transfer the Bremen works 400 miles away to the Hermitage in St. Petersburg. My guess would be that the communist government was concerned that the museum might get ransacked, but I'm not sure about that. In any case, the Bremen works saved by Balden get transferred into these top secret vaults beneath the Hermitage Museum and become the property of the Russian state if they weren't already before. And when I say that this operation was top secret, I mean top secret. There were people in positions of power at the Hermitage who had absolutely no idea that this was happening, including one Mikhail Pietrovsky, who was at that time the deputy director of the museum. At the time in 1990, he had absolutely no idea that this was happening, and he wouldn't find out about it for almost two years. When he ascended to be director of the Hermitage, Pietrovsky was absolutely furious to find out that all of this had gone on without his knowledge. As a museum professional, he was absolutely horrified that his museum was being used as a storehouse for looted arts on the orders of the government. Now, was Pietrovsky actually able to say any of these things to Martin Bailey when they met in 1992? No. These are all things that came out after the fact as Bailey continued to follow this story. It does kind of explain, though, why Pietrovsky was so accommodating when Bailey requested to see Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Knight. Both of them knew that this work had been looted from the Karnzau Castle and rightfully belonged to the Kunsthalebremen. In bringing it out and sharing it with this reporter, Pietrovsky obviously knew that Word was going to get out that the Hermitage had these works in its possession. Pietrovsky must not have been too concerned about Word getting out, because in November of 1992, just a couple of months after meeting with Bailey, he exhibited many of the Bremen drawings at the Hermitage. So if the world didn't know where those works were before, they definitely did by November of 1992. Bailey would go on to interview Russia's deputy minister of culture, Tatiana Nikitina, who assured him that, quote, we have to give them back. That conversation happened in September of 1992. It wouldn't be until 2003 that the Russian government formally commits to returning the works in Russian possession back to Bremen. Not only did that never happen, but the Russian government rescinded that commitment in 2005, when a new Minister of Culture took over. But it wasn't enough to rescind the commitment. The Ministry of Culture also ordered the removal of the Bremen works from the Hermitage Museum, where the world now knew that they were being kept, and transferred them to an unknown location. And to this day, in 2022, we have absolutely no idea where those works are being kept. From an asylum in Provence to a super secret cellar somewhere in Russia, Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night has lived quite the life. One can only hope that this drawing, once presumed lost, only to be found, might one day be found again. Until then, the drawing of Starry Night that Van Gogh made with the explicit intention of sharing his work with his beloved brother Theo is destined to remain with hundreds of other looted works in a pitch black cellar where its ink stars cannot shine. That is all that I have for you today on Vincent Van Gogh's drawing of Starry Night. I hope that you enjoyed hearing this story and found it as fascinating as I do. I want to once again recognize the work of Martin Bailey, which I will have posted along with relevant images and other source material on the podcast's website, stuffaboutthingspodcast.com. And please check back in about a week for another mini sode regarding a previously unknown self-portrait of Van Gogh that was recently discovered in Scotland. If you enjoyed the episode and have not done so yet, I would really appreciate it if you took the time to give it a rating and even a review. That would absolutely make my day. I would also love to hear from you if you are so inclined, either through the podcast's website or at the podcast's email, stuffaboutthingspodcast at gmail.com. Speaking of time, we are near the 30-minute mark. Oh boy, so I am simply going to leave things at that, remind you to look at something beautiful today, and let the royalty free music from hooksounds.com and freemusicarchive.org lead us out.