[Caption: A realistic digital painting of personified Mercury. Portrait is from the hip up. Mercury is a pale headless man dressed all in black with a silver pinky ring on his right hand, which he holds over his heart. His shape is blurred on either side of him as if shifting faster than we can blink. The “planet” Mercury floats where his head should be, a deep burgundy crystalline sphere with a ragged crack down the middle revealing glowing-hot violet crystals inside. The background is a gradient from soft pale violet to deep pink.]
Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.
Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.
I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.
“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.””
And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.
Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.
His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny.
“ Bob Simon: What do you think this Max Ernst would be worth? Wolfgang Beltracchi: This one? Simon: Yeah. Beltracchi: $5 million, I think. Simon: $5 million. And you can do it in three days? Beltracchi: Yeah, oh yes, yes, sure, or quicker”
-From a 60 minutes interview with Bob Simon
In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.
His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.
At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”
Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible.
Heroes
Also fun fact we learned in class today: Michelangelo carved a sculpture of a Roman god, broke off the arm, and then buried it. The sculpture was dug up and was considered to be an authentic Roman artefact, until Michelangelo came along with the missing arm and called shenanigans on himself, just to prove he was as skilled a sculptor as the ancient Romans.
I’m actually surprised that anyone could look at the paintings in the Lascaux caves and think, “how primitive”. I know they’re like the quintessential prehistoric cave paintings, but the observational proportions and the line weight are actually really good. Also they have an incredible sense of movement. (In fact, some people think that’s the purpose of overlapping the different colored images – to basically animate the drawings. The only lighting would be flickering torchlight, and the pictures are very large. I can imagine it might be rather intimidating in person.)
Just to show you what I mean. You try drawing a better lion than some of these
Prehistoric art work is such an underrated and underappreciated part of our culture as humans and anyone who belittles it needs to just look at them! They are gorgeous!
