Bookshelf

Cynthia Saltzman: "Portrait of Dr. Gachet: the story of a van Gogh masterpiece", Penguin Books, 1999.

"A unique and fascinating biography: the biography of a painting." The New York Times.

At a star-studded auction in 1990, a painting was sold for the record-breaking price of $82.5 million. That painting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet, one of the last done by Vincent van Gogh, had been pinted almost exactly one hundred years earlier.

This fascinating book reconstructs the painting's hundred-year-journey and becomes a rich story of modernist art and the political and commercial forces influencing the art market. Masterfully evoked are the lives of the thirteen extraordinary people who owned the painting and shaped its history, including avant.garde European collectors and a member of the Nazi elite who sold it after it had been confiscated as a work of "degenerate art." Remarkable and riverting, Portrait of Dr. Gachet illuminates, in dramatic detail, the dynamics of the art market and of culture in our time.

About the author

Nadia Sikorsky

Nadia Sikorsky was born and raised in Moscow. She graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Moscow State University and went on to complete her postgraduate studies there, earning a PhD in History. She spent 13 years at UNESCO, first in Paris and then in Geneva. After serving as Director of Communications at Green Cross International, founded by Mikhail Gorbachev, she launched NashaGazeta.ch in 2007, Switzerland’s first Russian-language online daily newspaper.

In 2022, Nadia Sikorsky was named to Le Temps’ Forum des 100, which brings together individuals who, in the newspaper’s view, have “significantly contributed to the success of French-speaking Switzerland”, from across public life, business, politics, science and culture.

After 18 years at the helm of NashaGazeta.ch, Nadia Sikorsky decided to devote herself to what had always held a special place in her work as a journalist: culture in all its diversity. This led to the creation of Russian Accent, a trilingual cultural blog in Russian, French and English, born in the heart of Europe, in Switzerland, which has become her second home and whose multiculturalism and multilingualism have helped shape the character of this new project.

At the heart of the project is the perspective of a European of Russian origin, drawing on more than 35 years of professional experience and a deep knowledge of both cultural traditions. Nadia Sikorsky sees her role as that of a cultural mediator between the two. The title of the blog, Russian Accent, reflects this idea: the accent is neither a linguistic barrier nor a political position, but a distinctive cultural imprint within a European context.

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