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Following claims made by two authors of a new eBook that eight paintings By Vincent Van Gogh on view at the Philipps collection were fakes, the Cleveland Museum of Art dismissed such allegations  on January 28th 2014.

Benoit Landais and Hanspeter Born of Zurich, have claimed that the eight works in question were in fact painted by Emile Schuffenecker(1851-1934), an  artist in the circle of Van Gogh's friend Paul Gauguin who sold them as originals after van Gogh's death in 1890.

The exhibition "Van Gogh: Repetitions," is on view through February 2, 2014 at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., before going to the Cleveland museum on March 2, 2014 . Comprising  35 paintings and works on paper, notably 13 repetitions, such exhibition has been the first to pinpoint Van Gogh's tendency  of painting various versions of favorite images.

Landais and Born asserted that  the fact that Van Gogh had often repeated himself  led some artists, above all Schuffenecker, to produce fake works but  William Robinson, the Cleveland museum's curator of modern European art and a co-organizer of the Van Gogh show brushed away such claim, according to the New York Times.

Robinson said that most Van Gogh specialists did  not agree with the strange theories of Landais and Born found in their book titled "Schuffenecker's Sunflowers and other van Gogh forgeries" which has been made available on amazon.com.

Based  in Zurich, Born is an investigative reporter and foreign correspondent for Die Weltwoche  while Landais, who is the son of Hubert Landais, a former director of the French National Museums,  spent several years in the Netherlands before moving to a village some 100 miles South-East  of Paris. Both won supporters through their longstanding claims but most scholars,  have ignored them. For instance, the curators and conservators  at the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam have used analysis technologies apparently sure enough to assert their findings regarding the works of the Dutch artist.