New York-based art research firm LMI International has come out fighting following the backlash it faced last month, when it claimed a painting titled Elimar bought at a Minnesota garage sale for $50 was a long-lost van Gogh. After spending $30,000 on high-tech analysis, the company dated it to 1889 and said it’s worth $15 million.
However, several van Gogh specialists argued that the work was painted by a little-known 20th-century Danish artist called Henning Elimar, who died in 1989. They include Wouter van der Veen, a scholar specializing in the Dutch Post-Impressionist who previously worked for Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum. He said the text “Elimar” in the bottom right-hand corner of Elimar is not its title (as LMI believes) but the artist’s signature.
But LMI has now doubled down by buying and analyzing what it claims is one of only two surviving works by the late Danish artist, titled Bridge and Stream, in a bid to prove he did not paint Elimar.
“Throughout the years-long research process of studying the painting [Elimar], LMI Group chased down any plausible lead or connection to ‘Elimar,’ part of the due diligence of the company’s approach to examining orphaned artworks,” LMI told ARTnews. “Because Henning Elimar painted in the mid-20th century, and the LMI Group’s Elimar painting is late 19th century, the team decided it did not warrant further study. However, after the Henning Elimar theory emerged on social media, and was surprisingly embraced by several scholars, LMI decided to pursue it. In one day, LMI was able to track down Bridge and Stream in northern Denmark and brought it back to New York for study, with their findings released this week. To protect the privacy of the seller of the Henning Elimar, we won’t be sharing their name.”
LMI’s initial investigation into Elimar is detailed in a 458-page report that states it “yielded the evidence required to identify [the unknown painting] as an autograph work by [van Gogh].” LMI even went so far as to genetically test a hair that was embedded in the canvas in the hope it belonged to the Dutch Post-Impressionist. (The result was “inconclusive.”)
Among the experts who dismissed the report were those from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum, who also wrote off the painting as not genuine in 2019. Van der Ween told ARTnews that LMI’s findings were “full of conjectures, weird assumptions, and useless information.”
LMI’s new report that analyzes Bridge and Stream says it “bears no similarities to Elimar in size, technique, style, or subject matter.”
“Infrared images of Bridge and Stream reveal more visible evidence of brushwork and pallet knife usage. When examining the infrared image of Elimar next to [Bridge and Stream], difference is composition, technique, and subject are evident,” the report reads.
Henning Elimar signed his surname in block letters in the bottom left-hand corner of Bridge and Stream. LMI argues that this inscription differs from the “Elimar” text in the bottom right-hand corner of Elimar in color, the “downward tilt” of the letters, and because it was “painted wet-on-dry” as opposed to “wet-on-wet” (as in Elimar).
The report also makes eight key arguments rebutting the theories that Henning Elimar painted Elimar.
One of them centers of the alleged literary inspiration for the artwork. In the initial 458-page report released in January, LMI argued that van Gogh had a “veracious appetite for reading” and that Danish author Hans Christian Andersen was one of his favorite writers. The firm said a character called “Elimar” appears in Andersen’s 1848 novel, The Two Baronesses, and served as the inspiration for van Gogh’s painting. Van der Veen rubbished this theory, telling ARTnews that he is “the leading scholar in the specific field of literary sources in van Gogh’s correspondence… As such, I’m in a good position to challenge their … argument.” In LMI’s new report, it argues that The Two Baronesses “was published in Danish, English, and German in 1848 and in Dutch in 1849, 40 years before Elimar was painted. Claims that the novel could not have inspired Elimar based on the date of publication are therefore unsubstantiated.”
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