The art world has historically benefited the wealthy and privileged, creating barriers to entry based on elitism and exclusivity, which many feel prevents accessibility.
Ali Smith's essay on Edvard Munch is a door opener for understanding the artist's immediate approach to painting. The gift of Munch is that he strips back everything that is not important.
"A lot of people say that the varnish should never be removed, that that's a patina that is on the surface of the painting and that it adds to the painting's quality: it makes the painting look better, it makes it look more serious," says Baumgartner.
Fourmanoir, a Gauguin researcher who now lives in Mexico, takes a very different view. He dates the work to 1916, 13 years after Gauguin's death, and believes it was painted by Ky-Dong Nguyen Van Cam (1875-1929), a Vietnamese friend of the French artist on the Marquesan island of Hiva Oa.
"In the end we kept both copies, neither wanting to part with their own. And having two on the shelf seemed a clever reference to the notion of artistic duplication."
"The results were full of freaking treasures," Poundstone recalled. "Just stuff I had never seen and never would have expected to see. That was the beginning of this obsession to find more."