Van Gogh’s “piles of wheat” in auction with expected price of 20 million dollars
Christie’s Auction House has announced that a watercolor painting by Vincent van Gogh, which was confiscated by the Nazis during the Second World War, is scheduled to be sold next month at an auction in New York, where it is expected to generate $20 million or more.
Christie’s plans to sell the 1888 painting, known as the ‘’Piles of Wheat’’, at an auction after facilitating negotiations between the heirs of an American oil magnate they now own and the heirs of two Jewish art collectors who owned it at various times before it was looted by the Nazis.
A Christie spokesman said details of the settlement were confidential.
The painting is scheduled to be auctioned on November 11, along with other works of art from the Edwin L. Cox. group, the oil magnate from Texas, died last year at the age of 99.
The table shows three large stacks of wheat, and below them harvest workers during a summer day.
It was bought in 1913 by industrialist Max Mirowski, who fled Germany to Amsterdam in 1938 for fear of Nazi persecution.
Mirowski entrusted the painting to an art dealer residing in Paris who sold it to Alexandrine de Rothschild, who was a member of a famous Jewish banker’s family.
Rothschild fled to Switzerland at the beginning of World War II and the Nazis confiscated her collection of art, including the Van Gogh waterboard during the occupation.
It’s unclear where the artwork was between the end of the war and the 1970s, but Cox bought it at the Wildenstein Exhibition in New York in 1979.
Giovanna Bertazoni, vice president of the 20th and 21st century arts division at Christie’s, described the painting as one of Van Gogh’s most powerful works of paper ever seen on the open market.
