Adar Poonawalla in his private office in Pune, housed in a decommissioned Airbus A320 plane Photo: Serum Institute of India
Adar Poonawalla, who heads the Serum Institute of India, owns a Van Gogh landscape. His company, which manufactures the AstraZeneca vaccine, has become the largest producer of Covid-19 jabs. The Poonawalla family, with Adar and his father Cyrus, is now the seventh wealthiest in India, worth $13.5bn. Even before Covid, the company was producing 1.5 billion vaccines a year of various types one for every five people on earth.
In 2013 Poonawalla bought Van Gogh’s
Watermill at Opwetten (November 1884) at Sotheby’s. Early works from the artist’s Dutch period are often dark and do not fetch the huge prices of his exuberantly coloured paintings which he later made in France.
The Khalil Museum, with its fabled Impressionists in a mansion by the Nile, has reopened after an 11-year renovation without Vincent’s flower still-life
Van Gogh’s Olive Grove (July 1889), Olive Trees (June 1889) and Olive Trees (June 1889) Courtesy of Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo (photo: Rik Klein Gotink); Museum of Modern Art, New York (license: SCALA/Art Resource); and Minneapolis Institute of Art (William Hood Dunwoody Fund, 51.7)
The first exhibition to explore Vincent’s olive groves now has new dates. Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum was originally to have presented the show this summer, but it has been delayed because of Covid-19.
Van Gogh and the Olive Groves will instead start at the Dallas Museum of Art (17 October-6 February 2022) and then open at its Dutch venue next year (11 March-12 June 2022).
Christie’s is to auction Van Gogh’s
Le Pont de Trinquetaille (The Trinquetaille Bridge) in New York on 13 May, with an estimate of $25m to $35m. This will be a rare opportunity to acquire one of the artist’s Arles pictures, his most sought-after period by collectors.
Painted in June 1888, it depicts the road bridge to the suburb of Trinquetaille, across the river from Arles. Van Gogh set up his easel on the quayside, just a few minutes’ walk from the Yellow House, the home that he would later share with Paul Gauguin. The riverside view was not far from where three months afterwards he would paint a nighttime vision,
Van Gogh’s Drawbridge in Nieuw-Amsterdam (October 1883) Courtesy of the Groninger Museum, Groningen
Vincent van Gogh was always on the move, looking for new places to develop his art. He worked in cities such as The Hague, Antwerp and Paris, in villages in his native Brabant, in Provence and finally in Auvers-sur-Oise. His life has been studied by art historians and biographers in minute detail, but his period in Drenthe, a remote province in the north of the Netherlands, remains more of a mystery.
That is set to change, with a new publication and an exhibition.
Van Gogh: Heritage Locations in Drenthe prepared by the province’s museum, archive and landscape foundation provides a detailed guide to 15 sites linked to the artist. A major exhibition, which should include all of the artist’s Drenthe oil paintings, is being planned by the Drents Museum in the provincial capital, Assen.