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Writer's pictureStephanie Brown

10. In which the Getty rearranges its storage

Updated: May 26, 2020

Last week the Parisian daily Le Figaro announced that the Getty Museum had downgraded a sculpture previously attributed to Paul Gauguin to "artist unknown." The sandalwood sculpture had been taken off view and put into storage. "A hard blow for the Getty," announced the article with only a whiff of schadenfreude.


The museum purchased Head with Horns in 2002 from Wildenstein and Company in Paris for something between 3 and 5 million dollars, at the time the highest price ever paid for one of Gauguin's sculptures. CNN reports that Wildenstein had purchased the sculpture from "an unnamed private collection in Switzerland." The horned head had surfaced for the first time in decades in an exhibition on Le Sculpture des peintres at the Fondation Maeght in St-Paul-de-Vence; so certain was the museum of the Gauguin attribution that it was the cover image for the catalog.






The work is unsigned and bears no artist's mark. Gauguin never mentioned it in his letters home from Tahiti or the Marquesas, and in his lifetime, it was never exhibited with any of his other works. But an image of the sculpture appears in several works by Gauguin beginning in the late 1890s:

(L: Gauguin’s drawing Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit (around 1900), Museum of Modern Art, New York/Scala, Florence; R: Paul Gauguin, Tahitian Woman with Evil Spirit, private collection, image © Fine Art Images/Heritage Images/Getty Images)


Right? It's unmistakable. Notice the statue's forehead, lips, cheeks. The competition for which image is c