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Why such a price for Sunflowers? It is one of the larger Van Goghs, if not necessarily the best. Thanks to mass reproduction, it is exceptionally popular and famous. Its clones have hung on so many suburban walls over the decades that it has become the Mona Lisa of the vegetable world. What is more, everyone associates it with Van Gogh's madness; it is the embodied sign of what all persons of cultural pretension long ago learned to call his "last outburst of frenzied genius," or words to that effect. Thus, apart from its merits as a painting, it has the sentimental pull of a truck. Against this must be set its reduced condition. The high chrome yellow paint that Van Gogh used was unstable, and it has darkened to ocher and brown, so that the whole chromatic key of the painting is gone; the paint surface has turned callused with time and has little of the vivacity or even the textural beauty one sees in other Van Goghs.
What the eager art world saw at Christie's on Monday of last week, Van Gogh's 134th birthday, was less a market transaction than a quasi-religious rite. The house was being washed in the blood of Vincent, the Lamb of Modernism. (And none too soon, skeptics might say, since less than two years ago the president of Christie's, David Bathurst, had to admit that he had tried to rig the market by falsely announcing he had sold a Van Gogh and a Gauguin.)
The form of the rite divided neatly into three phases. First, the Manifestation, during which Sunflowers was exhibited, behind bars, to long queues of curiosity seekers at Christie's. Then the Ascension, or auction proper, in which Vincent's glorified body was raised to the empyrean in 4 minutes 30 seconds, a rate of climb of $147,700 per second. And third, the Eucharistic Feast. After the sale, Christie's brought out a savory cake in the form of Sunflowers, the frame made of flaky pastry, the colors rendered impasto furioso in various hues of saffron-tinted cream cheese, the green bits done in spinach, and detail added with studdings of seeds. It was cut up and eaten by the worshipers. No doubt when and if a major Van Gogh self-portrait comes on the block, there will be a distribution of marzipan ears.
Two days later in a lakefront tent at the Hotel Beau-Rivage in Geneva, another event began: the sale of the late Duchess of Windsor's jewelry, organized by Christie's rival auction house Sotheby's. Here was a nominal contrast at least, since though everyone admires Van Gogh, none but a snob or a fantasist (not that we are short of either) could feel much nostalgia for Wallis Simpson and her husband, who abdicated the throne of England in 1936 and was obliged to spend the war years as governor of the Bahamas on account of his thinly veiled Nazi sympathies. Nevertheless, this pair of calcified drones, who wrote to each other in baby talk ("Eanum Pig" was his code for her) but never said a memorable thing to anyone else -- except for the Duchess's mot, refuted by her own person, that one cannot be "too rich or too thin" -- are still imagined, especially by elderly Americans, to be a modern version of Tristan and Isolde. Hence Sotheby's spent a bundle before the sale hyping the jewels and went into a second printing with a $50 catalog that dilated, as though describing the iconography of a Rubens, on such events as the death of the future Duchess's dog Slipper.