While legend has it that Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) sold only one work during his lifetime, it was not long after his death that sales of his paintings began to shatter auction house records. In this carefully researched book, leading Van Gogh scholars provide us with a glimpse into classified client files and illuminate the critical role that the Thannhauser Gallery occupied in cultivating and shaping an early clientele for the artist's works. Founded in Munich in 1909, the Thannhauser Gallery was Germany's preeminent promoter of the avant-garde in the decades before World War II. In other European cities and in New York, the business thrived, selling an impressive number of Van Gogh's oeuvre: roughly 110 works, including many masterpieces, now part of museum collections all over the world. Distributed for Mercatorfonds

This volume features the Thannhauser bequest of early modern art, made to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. With 32 pieces representing Picasso alone, the collection includes works by Manet, Gauguin, Degas, Van Gogh and Cezanne. A series of essays helps to place them in an art-historical context.

Edited by Matthew Drutt. Essays by Jack Flam, Robert Rosenblum, Richard Schiff, Ann Dumas, Theodore Reff, Colin A. Bailey, Albert Boime, Beth Archer Brombert, Anne F. Collins, Elizabeth W. Easton, Michael Fitzgerald, Fred Licht, Joachim Pissarro, Belinda