Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) had been dead for 32 years before any American museum bought a painting by him. While he was famously (if exaggeratedly) unsuccessful in life, by then Europe had long since embraced him. Yet at the landmark 1913 Armory Show in New York—Van Gogh’s public debut here, with at least 21 paintings on view—nothing of his sold, and one critic wrote that Van Gogh had “little if any sense of beauty and spoiled a lot of canvas with crude, quite unimportant pictures.” In 1920, when New York’s Montross Gallery gave him a retrospective, only three of 67 pictures sold, all to one collector. And when in 1921 the Metropolitan Museum of Art presented “A Loan Exhibition of Impressionist and Post-Impressionist Paintings,” including seven Van Gogh loans, it was condemned by many as degenerate art.
