Portrait of Dr. Gachet: The Story of a Van Gogh Masterpiece, Money, Politics, Collectors, Greed, and Loss

New York: Viking; Penguin, 1998. xxii, 406 pages, illustrations; 24 cm. Firm binding, clean inside copy. Light dust spotting/top edge. Dust jacket price-clipped on front flap. Another copy available. Van Gogh's painting sold at auction for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million in 1990. "At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet, has seemed to countless admirers to portray our times as 'something bright in spite of its inevitable griefs.' This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the forces behind the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history: avant-garde European collectors, pioneering dealers in Paris and Berlin, a brilliant medievalist who acquired it for one of Germany's great museums, and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of 'degenerate art.' Remarkable and riveting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time. / A former reporter for Forbes and The Wall Street Journal, Cynthia Saltzman earned degrees in art history at Harvard and Berkeley. She currently resides with her family in Brooklyn, New York." - Publisher.. 1st. Hardcover. Very Good/Very Good. 8vo.