Vincent van Gogh’s haunting Self-Portrait with Bandaged Ear and Pipe is returning to the temporary exhibition circuit after an absence of more than 35 years. Owned by the Niarchos family and held in a private collection, it will be one of the star loans to Gustave Fayet, Collector–Designer: Icons of Modern Art at Fondation Louis Vuitton in Paris, from 9 October 2026 to 8 March 2027.
Although the picture has occasionally appeared on loan within the Kunsthaus Zurich collection, its last temporary exhibition was in 1990. Numerous requests made in the intervening decades were turned down.nnVan Gogh painted the portrait in Arles in mid-January 1889, around three weeks after the crisis in which he mutilated his ear. A second self-portrait with a bandaged ear from the same period is now at London’s Courtauld Gallery.
In the Niarchos work, an orange-and-red background creates an intense complementary contrast with the painter’s deep green coat. The pipe in his mouth is not merely a domestic detail: Van Gogh described smoking as a source of consolation in his correspondence. By turning his head to emphasise rather than conceal the bandage, he made the image a record not only of vulnerability but also of an effort to regain control through painting.nnThe picture’s provenance reads like a compressed history of 20th-century collecting and war.
Émile Schuffenecker sold it to Gustave Fayet for 3,000 French francs in 1902; Fayet, an early champion of Van Gogh, eventually owned sixteen of his paintings. It later passed to the Paris dealer Paul Rosenberg, who lent it to the Prince Paul Museum in Belgrade in 1939 for safekeeping. The Nazis seized it in 1941, and it entered Hermann Göring’s possession before being smuggled into Switzerland in a diplomatic bag.
Recovered in Zurich in 1945, it was restituted to Rosenberg in 1948. After ownership by Albert Lasker and then Leigh and Mary Block, Stavros Niarchos acquired it in the 1970s.nnThe Paris exhibition will place the portrait within the larger story of Fayet’s decisive role in modern art. Fondation Louis Vuitton is bringing together more than 250 works once in his now-dispersed collection and 325 creations by Fayet, many never previously shown, including ten Van Goghs, 78 works by Gauguin and 88 by Odilon Redon.
Van Gogh’s portrait will also be displayed alongside Gauguin’s 1898 Self-Portrait with a Palette, another work formerly owned by Fayet. Once the exhibition closes, the exceptionally valuable Van Gogh is expected to return to secure storage, making the Paris presentation a genuinely rare opportunity to encounter one of modern art’s most intimate images.
