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For three nights in early September 1888, Vincent van Gogh stayed up painting in a 24-hour drinking establishment a short distance from his house in Arles, France. The sight of him doing so, he wrote to his brother, caused great joy (read great hilarity) to the streetwalkers and insomniac imbibers who frequented the place. Those tipsy bystanders would no doubt be amazed — and perhaps amused — to discover that 121 years later the picture is posing an intricate question in international law. It’s the subject of a suit and countersuit in U.S. courts between the descendant of a former owner and Yale University Art Gallery. In the meantime, Van Gogh’s picture, “The Night Cafe,” has risen from being an almost valueless object — even, in moments of despondency, in the eyes of the artist himself — to become one of the world’s best known and hence potentially most expensive pictures. Its history is tangled, illustrating the complexity of the question “Who really owns this work of art?” By 1908, the painting was a desirable item on the Parisian art market. There it was bought by Ivan Morozov (1871-1921), a Russian textile tycoon and discerning collector of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist art. By the outbreak of World War I, he, his brother Mikhail and his contemporary Sergei Shchukin owned two of the finest ensembles of early modernist painting in existence. After the 1917 Revolution, both collections were nationalized — or seized, the choice of word depends on your point of view — by the new Bolshevik government. (Bloomberg)
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