March 22, 2025 • 47 mins
When you get a bunch of artistic types together into a community – aka, the art world – some intrigue and mystery are bound to arise. Listen in to this classic episode as Chuck and Josh cover strangeness around Van Gogh, Caravaggio, Raphael, and Vermeer – plus don’t miss Hilter!
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Hey, everybody, it's me joshuam. For this week's select I've
chosen our episode on art Mysteries. It's a great one.
Chuck and I are secretly jazzed by art history, it
turns out, and this episode is the best of any
we've done on the subject. May also be the only
one at any rate. It's a good episode, and I
think you'll enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's here somewhere.
So this is Stuff you should know, the Art World edition.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, you know what, I just realized. We record these
in two's and we just recorded the Pog's episode, right,
And you didn't say welcome to the podcast. I didn't
have missed opportunity for a great dad joke.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
That sounds like something I would skip though, even had
I thought of it, or I don't know that I
would have pulled.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
The trigger on I think or I could see you
pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Right, But I would have just been engaged in self
loathing for the rest of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Well retroactively, I'm gonna say, I hope everyone enjoyed the podcast.
Now let's talk about art mysteries.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I love this one, man, this is great. This reminds
me of a Stuff you Should Know episode from years back.
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well, it's because we don't do these top lists anymore.
Are part of it, you know, very famously we used
to have top tens on our old House Stuffworks website,
of which usually there were maybe seven decent entries, so
we never did I don't think we ever did a
full ten on anything. Maybe somebody could probably correct this,
but this one actually came in at seven. They didn't
(01:58):
even try, and I don't even and we may do
like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
We'll see. We're gonna play it fast and loose. I
think that's another reason why it reminds me of an
old Stuff you Should Know episode. Yeah, Fast and loose.
First you got the fast, then you got the loose.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But never furious because he wants to be mad. I
don't know they should have called out series Fast and Loose.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
That I think I've heard it before that that series
is the highest grossing movie franchise in the history of
film like worldwide.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah. You know what's funny is at one point we
were this is years ago, we were talking with Ludicrous
about doing something with a network, and I, uh, because
he's he's a local guy here in Atlanta. And I
talked to our boss and said, what's he what's he
doing these days? Like I haven't heard any music? And
he went, he makes fast and furious movies, Like that's
(02:55):
his job now, yeah, because he's just getting rich off
of making these movies, like I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And plus also, I mean they're pretty it's pretty involved
movie making. I would guess, like I'm sure because there's
so many stars involved that, you know, the shooting schedule
for each one isn't necessarily you know, a year long
endeavor or anything like that, and they probably have it
down to like a pretty fast science by now. But like,
I would think that would eat up a pretty decent
(03:23):
amount of your time shooting one of those films every
few you know, a couple of times, well, I guess
every few years.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I only saw one of those.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
I think, Man, I'm slowly like degenerating into Bob Newhart. Man.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Have you known man good.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, you could degenerate into worse things than that. But
I mean, like I've really I'm really hitting that new
Heart note these days.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I've noticed that's a great note. I love it. I've
always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So well, you've you've there, you go, You've got it.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
All right, number one on the list. You want to
talk a little uh cut of Asio.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So Caravaggio is my new favorite painter. Oh yeah, not
just because he was a scummy lowlife swordsman from the murderer.
He was a gambler, He had weapons charges against him
while he was alive. He was not a good guy
(04:23):
by any stretch of the imagination. Very troubled person is
a really polite way to put it. But if you
look at his art, like I had no idea, I've
seen like so many works of his art and I
never pieced together that they were the same person. And
then when I really started to read some criticism of
his work, I'm like, oh my god, this guy he's
(04:43):
considered one of the fathers of modern art, and this
guy was painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
the early sixteen hundreds, and just like POGs, he burned
hot and bright and fast and furious.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Actually sadly, Oh, that's right, that wasn't even forced. Nice work,
Bob so. Michelangelo Marisi de Caravaggio was an Italian Baroque painter.
He at one point in sixteen oh six killed a
man name Ramuccio Tomasani and said, I got to get
(05:19):
out of here because I'm in big trouble now, and
went to went away from Rome and fled to Malta,
where he had a pretty brief but I guess, notable stay.
He was only there about six months and kind of
hiding out and quickly hooked up with the Knights of
Malta and was briefly one of the Knights of Malta,
(05:43):
like for a month. Yeah, and painted one of his
most famous paintings there, the oil on canvas twelve feet
by seventeen feet, the Beheading of John the Baptist.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, it was an altarpiece for the Order of Saint John,
also known as the Knights of Malta. They were going
to again put this behind the altar in their church
on Malta, and it was actually his little entry fee.
They charged an entry fee usually money to their initiates.
But they accepted, Yeah, but they accepted this altars giant
(06:16):
painting of Saint John the Baptist being beheaded, and it
was actually, I mean, as far as the Caravaggio goes,
especially toward the end of his life, it's actually fairly
tame because there's not you know, like jets of blood
spurting out. It's a pool of blood that's being shown.
He paints some really violent stuff and like you said
(06:39):
that that kind of that. He was a master of
light and shadow. It's called kira scuro and he used
it to really dramatic effect, including in that painting, and
in fact, one of the other paintings that you might
have seen of his chuck it's called Judith beheading Holofernes.
Have you seen it?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have so.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Judith, the woman who's in that painting, the woman who
modeled for that for Judith, that was the woman that
he killed. Bernuccio TOMASONI over.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Right, did you know that I did?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
You did?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Well? At anyway, they really in this House of Works
article they called it a petty squabble and that that
really doesn't tell the story.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, another explanation I saw was that it was over
a tennis wager. And this is real tennis, not lawn tennis,
and real tennis is kind of like this kooky mix
between squash and racquetball and tennis, and it's all indoors
and there's like horse sheds basically involved that you can
(07:47):
play off the roofs of It's really interesting stuff. And
he used to play that a lot too. But so
it was either over a wager or it was over
this woman.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Her name was what was it, Judith.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
No Felidae Fellide I believe was the actual woman's name
who modeled for Judith. So he ends up on Malta,
he becomes a knight, and when he becomes this night
he paints his altarpiece and he signs his name in
the pool of blood, which you're like, well, he's an artist.
That seems like something an artist would do, not Caravajio.
This is actually the first and only work of his
(08:23):
that he ever signed, which a lot of people are like, Okay,
wait a minute, let's examine this.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, And it kind of took a while for it
to be even very visible because it underwent some restorations
over the years and in the nineteen fifties they did
a restoration where they really could see the signature and
what it said I don't know about for the first time,
but like super clearly at least, and it said F period, god,
(08:53):
F mitche lang m I, C H E, l A
n G. And then you know, of course, everyone it's like, well,
what does this mean because there is no F in
his name. It's not like his initial. Is he saying,
you know, hey, screw Michelangelo, myself, screw me, or I'm screwed. No,
no one really said that. They thought the F. They
(09:15):
are a couple of different theories. Thought it was shorthand
for fratter or which means brother because he was one
of the knights, and maybe he just meant like brother
Michelangelo or whatever. And then some other people said, no,
maybe it means stands for fesset fecit, which is Latin
for did, translating basically into I did it, and it's
(09:38):
spelled out in blood, kind of confessing to his crime.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Right, So that's kind of like where the mystery comes in.
Was he confessing to the crime of murdering Renuccio Tomusoni?
From what I saw, most I can't say most, but
the art historians and critics that I saw basically said no,
he almost certainly wasn't doing that. For one, everybody knew
that he did it. He'd already been convicted in absentia,
(10:04):
so it's not like he was confessing to it. Although
you can make the case that he was confessing in
the Catholic sense of the word, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Like before God, yeah, exactly, or de Bear's That painting
still hangs at Saint John's co Cathedral in multitude.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Okay, yeah, yeah, well, I mean it was the altar piece,
like they like, it was a big deal that they
got their hands on it, because he was a celebrated
painter at the time, already in his lifetime. But the
other interpretation that he was saying f as in Freighter
or Brother Michelangelo about himself, that's probably the likelier version
because he was at the time seeking a pardon from
(10:45):
the Pope so he could return to Rome, and by
saying like, I'm in this holy order, I'm basically like
a Catholic holy man now a leader of the church,
because the Order of Saint John, the Knights of Malta
of inducted me. He was basically shouting it loud and
proud by signing that one particular very holy painting that
(11:09):
he did.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But they said, nice, try, buddy, and they kicked him
out for being a quote foul and rotten member end quote.
So it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
A month after a month, dude, he lasted a month
in the Order of Saint John. And it's not like
they ran around willy nilly inducting people like. They basically
had no idea that they had. What was Vic's last
name in The Shield, victay Beck, No, not victay Back.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I don't know. I didn't watch The Shield, Oh.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You didn't know. It was good. I rewatched like the
last seven episodes the other night, over a couple of nights.
It still holds up actually, But anyway, they didn't realize
that they had inducted him, the guy from the Shield,
and they figured it out pretty quickly. So he made
his way back from Malta to I believe sicily on
his way to Rome, and I think he actually got
a harden and got into yet another squabble, another sword fight,
(12:04):
and sustained some wounds and between infected wounds, they think
he got a staff infection lead poisoning. He apparently had
gone rather mad from being exposed to the paints that
he painted with and then sun exposure sunstroke on the
beach in Tuscan. He finally killed him, and so it goes, Yes,
(12:26):
it does. But his paintings are still just amazing. I
can look at him all day, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah, me too. I like this. I like this stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I do too. So that's a Caravaggio. How about Vermire, Well,
I think we should take a break. Oh gosh, and
we'll be back right after this. All right, we had
(13:04):
a great cliffhanger with Vermire. Vermire, the very famous Dutch
artist Johannes Vermire, had a very famous painting, a lot
of very famous paintings, but one in particular that has
had a bunch of names over the years. In fact,
it did not get the name Girl with a Pearl
ear Ring until the twentieth century. It was called everything
(13:25):
from a Girl with a turban to Girl with an Earring,
had lots of different names because it was not officially
titled by Vermir nor dated, even though they think it
was around sixteen sixty five. Yeah, he was just like
this dude who lived in Delft in the Netherlands and
never left his hometown and had a wife in fifteen
(13:48):
kids fifteen yeah, fifteen kids, and it just kind of painted.
And he made probably a comparatively small number of works.
I think around third six are attributed to him, and
there's a theory that as many as a fifth of
those were done by his oldest daughter Maria. But he's
(14:09):
kind of like this enigma at the time, not just personally,
but also the stuff he was painting. There was a
huge movement among the Dutch painters at the time that
they would paint like these, you know, horrific hellscapes or
there was a lot of like obvious narrative and symbolism
(14:30):
just all over the paintings. There was just a lot
going on. Vermire went a different way where he would
almost peek in on very normal daily life and capture
like these these really just kind of boring or otherwise
mundane moments. But he did it in a way that
that this guy was like the master of light. He
(14:53):
makes he makes Thomas Kinkaid look like puke as far
as like you know, light mastery.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So girl with a pearl earring. Everyone has seen it,
Like I said, it's very famous it's a young girl
looks to be sort of like mid teenage years, looking
over her shoulder. She's wearing a dress. She's wearing that turban.
Very prominent ear rings, large pearl earrings, and pearls factored
into quite a few of his works over the years.
(15:20):
And it's one of those paintings where the eyes follow
you supposedly, which we've talked about in one of our
short stuff episodes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
On Mona Lisa.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I think, so, yeah, it's, you know, the effect of
the eyes following, which doesn't happen in all paintings with eyes.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Oh no, the Mona Lisa's eyes actually don't follow you.
I think that was the big reveal of that one,
was it?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah? All right, So he paints his painting, and then,
of course the mystery of this one is who is
this person. There has been speculation that it might be
a mistress. A lot of people think it was his
daughter Maria, who would have been about fifteen or sixteen,
and like you said, who some people believe painted about
(16:03):
a fifth of the works attributed to him, because about
a fifth of his collected works aren't. I mean this
sounds mean to say, but they aren't as they aren't
up to snuff compared to his other works, so they
sort of stand out from the rest, so they think
that they may have been Maria's good paintings.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Still, yeah, there's still a lot better than anything I
could say.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, it's not like there were stick figures, you know,
out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
They're like this, Vermere seems off.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
But you know, if you've there was a nineteen ninety
nine novel from Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
and then the two thousand film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson,
who was perfectly cast. She looks, you know, quite a
bit like The Girl with a Pearl ear Ring. But
this was historical fiction. If you've seen that movie and
you're like, no, she was the family's maid's assistant and
(16:50):
love interest to Vermire, that was just I don't even
think that was based on anything. It's just historical fiction.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Yes, from what I've seen, the art critics and historians
basically tend to think that there was no person that
this was modeled on.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
There.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It wasn't even necessarily his daughter. In fact, it was
kind of a trend at the time, a painting called
a trony, which was an imaginary figure, a person who
didn't actually exist, and the point was to kind of
show off things like costumes and jewelry, which is ostensibly
(17:27):
the point of that painting. But the thing is the vermire,
the face that he did and the place that he
put her. Like we were talking about how she gets
compared to Mona Lisa. She's called the Mona Lisa of
the North. Mona Lisa is like sitting back in the painting.
The girl with the pearl earring is like right in
the foreground, like right, there's very little between you and her,
(17:50):
and she's turned around and her mouth so open, which
apparently was very unusual for painting Dutch painting at the time,
and it looks like she's going to say something. I
guess that is what entrances people with this, this image
that you know, what's she going to say? What did
he capture her about to say? You know, it looks
like she's turning around like, oh, and you know this
(18:12):
other thing I hadn't told.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
You maybe she was an improv comedian. And she was, yes, yes,
you never know, but this is a mystery that'll never
be solved, which sometimes I like those kind of mysteries
when it comes to stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, And I saw that argued as well that it
was like, you know, if we knew who she was,
it would just it would we would lose a lot
of the interest in.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
It, and we would have found out by now.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I think, yes, yeah, and you're right, we probably won't
ever know. But because of this so like, it wasn't
like very well thought of, or nobody really thought much
of it until nineteen ninety five in the National Gallery
used it as the poster for their big exhibit. But
since then a lot of people have really kind of
examined it. And I hadn't noticed this before, but I
(18:56):
saw it, pointed out Chuck. If you look at the
pearl earring, first of all, it's improbably large, is how
I saw it described, like that the ear couldn't physically
hold up a pearl that size. But then secondly, it's
really basically made with two brushstrokes. Both of them are
reflecting light. One is from the light source and then
the lower one is reflecting the light off of the caller.
(19:20):
And it's pretty amazing that, you know, we talk about
this the girl with the pearl earing, and this pearl
itself is is like a kind of a cultural icon too.
And it's basically just two brushstrokes, which is kind of
goes to show how great Vermir was.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Have you ever seen Tim's Vermure the documentary? I have not, Oh, Chuck,
You've got to see it. It's directed by Teller from
Penn and Teller, which makes you think, like, how did
he direct if he doesn't talk, you know, but he
somehow did. I think it's about what that's just a
bit and it's about It's about a guy who basically
(19:58):
figured out that Vermire somehow projected images that he built
in real life onto a canvas and then painted him
that way, and he actually replicates a Vermir like perfectly.
It's really just one of the better documentaries you'll ever see.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah, so what do you think?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
On to rafae yel, Yeah, so the mystery here and
this is one of our This actually has a Simpsons
crossover as well, which is kind of fun because Raphael
painted a very famous painting called Portrait of a young
Man and is largely described as one of the most famous,
(20:38):
if not the most famous, pieces of art to go
missing during the plundering of great art in World War
Two by Hitler in The Gang. And this is a
crossover with the Simpsons in that in the Fighting Hellfish
episode when Grandpa Abe and Burns are stealing art, this
is one of the paintings Portrait of a young Man. Oh,
(21:01):
it's one of the paintings that they stole. Wow, which
shows that you know Simpsons writers back then at least,
we're definitely doing their work, like their research work. Because
that's a nice little easter egg.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
I think, yeah, totally. Doesn't it even talk? Doesn't it
say something like someone's guilty conscience or something. I don't
remember making that up.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
I don't know. I don't remember. I mean, it's been
a long time since I've seen that one. But it
was one of the great episodes, I think.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
So the Portrait of the young Man, which they think
was a Raphael self portrait, and actually we have no
idea what the colors were because the only photographs we
have of it were in black and white. But he
used to hang in the Prince's zar Torski Museum in Poland,
along with two other really important paintings, Leonardo's Lady with
(21:45):
an Ermine, which is a scout stoat. I can't remember
kind of a weasel like animal and then Remembrant's landscape
with the Good Samaritan, and all three of those and
everything else, and the princes Are Museum were swiped by
the Nazis when they came to Poland and placed in
the office of a guy named Hans Frank, who was
(22:07):
the head of the government for the Nazis in Poland.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Right, Yeah, and you know, they almost they almost got
these hidden away successfully when Poland was being invaded. They
knew that the art was going to be plundered, and
so those three paintings were actually rescued by the prince
and hidden away in a house in a place that
I can't even pronounce, Sienawa. I'm not sure what that is.
(22:32):
But they were ultimately found by the Gestapo and handed
over to Frank and Frank you know, they were supposed
to go to Hitler. Hitler was going to open a museum,
the Furia Museum, and Lenz and Frank actually kind of
kept it for a little while, hung it in his residence,
and then eventually this thing went to Germany and then
(22:54):
Austria for a little while, and then back with Frank
in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Which seems crazy probable that they would end up back
with him, but they did. And the Allies came in
to Poland, I guess, and arrested Hans Frank in nineteen
forty five, and they were able to find the lady
with an ermine and the landscape with the Good Samaritan,
but the portrait of the young Man was nowhere to
(23:19):
be found, and.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
A lot of other stuff too.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Sure, they definitely did, but the three most important pieces
in the Prince's Zartarski Museum were those three, and two
were recovered, one wasn't. And it's very odd to think
that they were separated at any time, or that it's
even odder to think that two were kept together, but
one wasn't. And so because the portrait of the young
(23:42):
Man was not recovered, and it's a Raphael who's you know,
one of the great Italian Renaissance painters, it's considered maybe
the most important piece to go missing in World War two.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, and they, you know, along with I think over
eight hundred other artifacts they got from him, and they
could not go on to question him very long because
he was executed just a year later. And since then
there have been a lot of rumors about where this
thing ended up. Who has it a lot of speculation
that maybe a private collector in another country has it.
(24:16):
I think in twenty twelve there was a false report
that it was supposedly in some bank vault, and they
really don't know. It's just sort of one of those
great mysteries of a disappeared painting. And my money is
on a private collector probably has this thing stashed away.
But you would also think that at some point somebody
would talk.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You would think so, and you know, maybe they will eventually.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Unless it's really stashed.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Well, some people think it was destroyed. And that movie
monuments Men, right, they show the Nazis igniting it with
the flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art,
and you know there's a whole camp that says, now
this thing is It's gone forever. So they did something
to it because the Nazis were known not just plunder
but also destroyed as well, which just one more reason
(25:02):
to love them Nazis.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, and I think this is oil on panels, so
it's I don't think this could even be like rolled
up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, I would guess not. No, I didn't realize it
was on panel, but that makes sense. But the the state,
the National Museum in Krakow, bought the entire Princess zark
Torsky collection from a private collector for one hundred million
euros back in twenty sixteen, and that I know, and
that included the rights to portrait of a young man
(25:31):
in case it's ever found. And for now it's just
they have the original frame hanging empty in the in
the gallery.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, that's it. Turns out that's a thing I didn't
know as a thing in frames in galleries. It's kind
of sad.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah, it's sad. It's very poignant. It says, come home,
come home. We're leaving the light on for you, come home,
just like Motel six. That's right right, Tom Broke call,
we'll leave the light out for it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
All right. Well, that means it's time for another break
and we'll be back right after this to talk a
little bit about Van goch.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
So Chuck. Before I launched into soaka go away type
tirade onto you? Is that how you accurately pronounce his name?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I don't know it. It was from the filmmaker who
dare not speak his name. It was from a Woody
Allen movie. I think it was in the most problematic
movie Manhattan, when he's with Diane Keaton and some obnoxious
person says Van or I think it's Diane Keaton, says
Van Gough, and he's you know, he's incense. He's like
Van Gock, Like how pretentious?
Speaker 1 (26:56):
So okay, So instead we're just gonna go with Van
go like everybody else, right.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, sure, okay, And we can cut all that out
if we want to. Don't you want to talk about
Widdy Allen? That's fine, sure, sure, I hear you.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So Van Goh was most he was just such a sad,
tragic figure out for this guy so much after learning
more about him, we should do an entire podcast on him,
if you ask me, I agreed. But instead here we're
going to talk about his death because there is a
mystery surrounding his death. He's very famous for having cut
off his ear. He definitely did that, and I had
(27:28):
always learned that he did it to impress a sex
worker who he was enamored with, and he definitely did
give her his ear after he cut it off. But
that's not why he cut it off. He cut it
off in a fit of angst, basically after having an
argument with his friend Paul Gogan, who he was living
with in Arles in the south of France, and he said, well,
(27:52):
I'm going to make some sort of lemonade out of
this lemon I just gave myself and he took it
to his I guess a hopeful girlfriend, and I believe
she was not that impressed with it.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah, so he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation
that he had bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, I saw that too.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Was you know, just sort of long suffering as an artist.
He only sold one painting before he died in eighteen
ninety at the age of thirty seven. And the story
goes is that he shot himself in the chest with
a revolver. But it gets a little more complicated than that.
And in what year was the book? In twenty eleven,
(28:35):
there was a book written called Van go Colon the
Life written by Stephen I'm gonna say, Maifa okay and
Gregory white Smith, and it seems like they sort of
launched this idea, or at least really put it in
the public forefront that he was actually killed almost certainly
(28:56):
accidentally by one of two boys, younger gentleman that he
was hanging out with that day.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Right, So here's the thing, Like, there's a lot of
circumstantial evidence that supports that theory that he was killed
by two boys. There's also it's also circumstantially plausible that,
you know, Van God died by suicide as well. But
even if you take his story and start digging into
(29:25):
it and the statements that he made supposedly made, apparently
everything we know about it comes from the owner of
the inn where he rented a room's thirteen year old
daughter at the time was a witness to all this.
But even if you take what he supposedly said, it
still doesn't add up that number one, he shot himself
in the chest, and most importantly the number two, the
(29:48):
gun that he shot himself with could never be found
and instead of actually, you know, finishing the suicide, completing
the suicide, he couldn't find the gun after he shot
himself in the chest and just walked back to his
room where he died after suffering twenty more hours, but
still to the end claiming that he had done this himself.
(30:10):
Even if you take all that together, it seems like, no,
this there's something really fishy going on here.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah. So this bullet misses all of his internal organs,
very improbably because it deflected off his rib cage and
he walked, like you said, to the doctor who they
didn't have a surgeon on duty, so they couldn't remove
the bullet. He lived a total of thirty hours after
the shot and died of infection. Got to talk with
(30:38):
his brother, you know, was speaking to people, so he
had every opportunity to say that these two boys that
I was hanging out with that I was drinking, and
I say boys, I think they were maybe lateeen's, early twenties. No,
there were sixteen, Oh okay, I saw early twenties and
another thing. Oh yeah, but you know, hanging out getting
drunk with them. One of these boys, Renee Sacratan, had
(31:03):
a gun that apparently misfired a lot, and he liked
playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboys, supposedly
he did. And so it all just seems and even
his statement, he he said he didn't say I shot myself.
He said, do not accuse anyone. It was I who
wanted to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, which is very well.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, It's ambiguous, I think as far as like because
the idea is that maybe he was accidentally shot, and
then after he was shot, he was like, this is
kind of what I wanted all along, you know, I've
been heading down this road towards suicide and then now
it's just done for me.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So what seems to have happened is that this gun
possibly that it wasn't actually murdered or any kind of
premeditated murder, more like a manslaughter where Renee and his
brother guests Dollan were messing around and accidentally Basically he
had seen a wild Bill Cody Wild West show the
(32:05):
year before and became obsessed with it, so that's what
he was doing with a gun and playing cowboy, and
that they had accidentally shot him with this gun that
was kind of, you know, known to misfire. So the
thing was that the gun was never found. Renee went
back to school like right after that, which was still
(32:26):
in the middle of summer break from what I saw,
and the town seems to have circled the wagons around
this this these boys, because you know, Van Goh was
an outsider. He was not very well thought of. He
used to get really drunk and argue with the locals
in the cafe and the and everything, like basically every night.
(32:46):
And these boys came from like a good well to
do family. So for many years like that was just
the thing, like like it just happened. And then slowly,
little by little it seems to have trickled out some
support for this idea. Like no, like Vano wasn't anywhere
near this field. He said that he had shot himself
in he was actually on the road to the Secraton's house.
(33:07):
And then finally years later, Renee's Secraton said that, you know,
he it probably was his gun and that Vango had
somehow gotten a hold of it. It seems it seems
likely that he was shot by them, whether accident or not.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, And these two authors, they put forth some other
circumstantial evidence, like that the bullet went in at a
weird angle that would not have been the angle if
you shot yourself in the chest, that his more recent
works were a little more upbeat and a little more positive,
and that he was not in that kind of mindset
(33:43):
at the time, and that he had had recently even
written his thoughts about suicide, that he thought it was
sinful and immoral, and so they sort of use all
this as evidence that he would not have done it
himself and that it was you know, they believe it
was an accident. His last words, very sad, where the
sadness will last forever, he spoke to his brother, which
(34:06):
that's tough.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah it is. I really do want to do an
episode on him.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And I think Sekhatan came out in the fifties even
and denied it, right, like finally he once and for
all he did.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
He did, but he also he also said that it
probably was his gun and that somehow van Go had gotten.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
It right, but hey, that ain't my fault.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
No, but to also to back pedal and be like,
it probably was my gun, because that was another thing,
and everybody's like, where did Vango get a gun? Van
Go didn't have a gun, no, And no one would
have given Vang a gutten ye right, he was the
guy who got drunk every night and had cut off
his ear before that was like they no one in
town would have given him a gun. And so the
fact that he even admitted that it was his gun
(34:47):
is probably as close as Renee Serkatan ever came to
confessing publicly about it, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, and it makes sense what he said was do
not accuse anyone like that. Really seems like he's trying
to cover for these kids that he didn't want to
get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, because if he wanted to die, but it was
also he didn't want to die by his own hand.
Like this is kind of a lucky gift in a
very strange way.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
You know. Yeah, I'm going to that immersive van go
thing in July.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Where is that?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
It is at here in Atlanta. It's at the Pullman Yards.
Oh yeah, over in Kirkwood where they're shoot Like every
movie in Atlanta shoots there, right, Yeah, So yeah, it's
supposed to be pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
It's very very neat. Sounds neat, I mean like basically
they just make the stars come out whenever you come in,
and I think, so, I think you sit in this
yellow chair.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I think that's the deal. I think you go in
and you are surrounded by projected art in different ways
from what I can get, that's all.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
I got to check that out, man, Thanks for telling
me about it.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah, it looks kind of cool, all.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Right, Chuck, you want to finish out talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Hitler don't you mean Hilter.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Did you know there's Hilter. Oh my gosh, yes, in
the headline, in.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
The headline, did Hilter really do these paintings? Do these paintings?
Who wrote that? I feel bad? But like, did Hilter
really do these paintings?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
That's great?
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Oh yeah he did them.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, Hilter did these paintings. So we're talking not about
Hilter but about Hitler, Adolf Hitler in particular, and as
everybody knows, Hitler was a frustrated artist.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
You know, people have made a lot of hay about
how possibly the world would be a totally different place
had he been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts.
And he came well, I don't want to say he
came close, but he made two different attempts in one
year to be accepted, and they basically looked at his
stuff and said, look, man, you you have the skill
(36:57):
of a draftsman. Maybe you should go into archit texture like,
but you're not going to be an artist. And that
was a direct quote. But this was a huge deal
for him. I think I read that in mind comf.
I haven't read mine, comp but I read an article
by somebody who read mine comp and said that he
said it was like a bolt from the blue, and
(37:18):
that you know, he was pursuing this dream that his
father would like beat him out of. Like his father
enrolled him in a technical school. He's like, no, son
of mine's going to be an artist. He would beat
him up whenever he brought he brought the idea up.
And so finally, after his father died and then he
nursed his mal ailing mother until she died, he got
(37:40):
up the gumps and did like go enroll in art school.
And apparently, he, being Hitler, who I guess had been
fairly bonkers his whole life, just knew that he was
destined to become an artist. So the idea that he
was rebuffed not once but twice by this Vienna school.
These people were like the the the guardians of what
(38:01):
is art and what is not, and they were telling
him what you got is not. That was a huge
deal to him.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It was a very big deal. And it's funny, it's
just now occurring to me that there was sort of
a similar thing with Manson's rejection as a musician. Yeah,
by the music industry. I never really kind of really
thought of that parallel. But in nineteen oh nine, Hitler
is trapesing around Vienna and he is selling watercolors copied
(38:31):
from postcards to tourists. So if you've ever traveled to Europe,
he was one of those guys that was down by
the river, the river bank van. Yeah, in a van,
selling these and literally copied from postcards. So he did
that for a little while, made a little bit of
money because you know, if you look at his art,
it's it's way better than I could do. It's you know,
(38:53):
it's okay. But yeah, like modern and it's hard to
tell with modern art critics like how much goes into
looking at a Hitler painting and reviewing it, Like it's
really hard to kind of separate those things. But yeah,
the general thought is that he had nothing exceptional about
him at all. It was he was the kind of
artists that would sell stuff down by the river to tourists.
(39:16):
They were fine, he was capable, but they were copycat paintings.
He was copying things. He had no point of view.
He did this in nineteen thirteen as well in Munich,
painting Munich city scapes and landscapes and selling them to
tourists and then in nineteen fourteen got hauled in by
the police of all things, for failing to register for
(39:37):
the military.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah. And then he went down and registered, and then
they gave him a physical exam and he failed it.
They said he was too weak to fire a weapon. Yeah,
so they arrested him so that they could humiliate him, basically.
And then when World War One came around, he enlisted
and they say, need everybody we can get, come on in, and.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
He actually did, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Even Hilter. Hilter did this army thing.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
So when he rose to power in Germany, one of
the things he did was he had his works collected
and destroyed. I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was
behind that. I guess because he knew it wasn't very
good and he needed to focus on his political career
rather than his artistic career, or have everybody else focus
on it. But to no avail, because I saw a
(40:32):
nineteen thirty six critic or a critic wrote in nineteen
thirty six that his style was prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling,
or spiritualism. Yeah, and this was before he I'm sorry,
or spiritual imagination and this was before he had really
become an obvious threat. This is nineteen thirty six, so
(40:55):
even back then, even without hindsight, people thought his stuff
wasn't very good. So, yeah, he had his stuff destroyed
and that's he It was kind of a footnote for
a very long time that he was an artist, and
no one really cared after his death.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, I mean this, and that was one of the
major reasons that he was such an art plunderer during
the war and stole as much art as he could
from real famous artists and famous paintings because he had
all this backstory as a failed artist, and it was interesting.
I did see that like one of his major I mean,
(41:32):
because he wasn't an utter failure at first. He had
a backer early on. I think he was a Jewish Man. Yeah,
which was really interesting, and there was I don't know, man,
it's there's a lot of speculation about what that all
meant to him, and like people try and draw parallels,
just like some of the paintings I saw, I mean,
(41:53):
some of it feels like a stretch, definitely, like the
you know, the cold the Cold Street of Munich, like
were painted like clearly with a future cleansing in mind
to make it look like this, and that's a stretch. Yeah,
some of that stuff seems like a stretch, But you
could definitely read into the backstory at least I think
(42:13):
with some accuracy.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, And even if like you can't necessarily suss out
like the future from his paintings, you can make a
pretty strong case that his artistic ambitions being utterly crushed, yeah,
had some sort of driving force or impact on a
psyche at the very least. Sure like that and his
(42:37):
later political career and dictatorship did not exist in a vacuum.
I don't think you can possibly make the case that
they were just unrelated in any way.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
No. I think any sociopath you can look at their
past and see the dots connected, you know. Yeah, So,
like you said, there was this kind of just was
the deal for a long time. And then in like
anything else, like people wanting to get original Charles Manson
music reels, in the early late nineties early two thousands,
(43:06):
there was a market for Hitler's work. I think in
two thousand and nine a British auction house someone paid
one hundred and fifty grand for fifteen early sketches and watercolors,
including a self portrait, and then in twenty fifteen, some
unnamed investors paid four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for
a set of watercolors. I think there were twelve or
(43:27):
thirteen that survived.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Yeah, the problem is is because he didn't have a
style of his own, that he was copying postcards, that
he didn't have any formal training, and that he was
he lacked like a lot of creativity or any creativity.
It seems like it's really hard to say this is
a Hitler and this is a fake, And there's been
(43:52):
developed a really a really enormous market of fakes because
anybody who's like a passingly good good artists in watercolors
of street scapes and landscapes could drum up something and
be like, this is a Hitler, and it would be
really difficult to say yes it is, or no it's not.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, what kind of a garbage human do you have
to be to think I'll do Hitler forgeries and try
and sell them to garbage humans that want to collect them.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah, and it's not like these are even fetching like
ten million dollars apiece. We're talking like you might get
ten thousand dollars for it for your your Hitler forgery.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Unbelievable but totally believable.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he
do this?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Yeah? Did he do those paintings?
Speaker 1 (44:44):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I got nothing else. That was a good five. I
think we have committed to doing a robust episode on
the Gardener Museum heist because that's a good one and
that was on this list and way underplayed for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
So keep it near out for that, everybody. And since
I said keep a near out for that, I think
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah. I'm gonna call this middle names because we had
a little discussion in our John Mure episode about how
Emily and I and our friends justin Melissa one night,
we're going by our middle names as a joke, and
I had the theory that you have no emotional connection
to your middle name if you don't have a reaction
when you hear it set out loud, and I just
(45:32):
meant sort of the non dominant name. It didn't necessarily
mean middle names because my brother goes by his middle name.
Scott is his middle name, and some people do that.
It's a thing and certainly Amy does. She said, I
was listening to the show and at the end you
were chatting about using middle names and how you don't
have an emotional connection when you hear it. I have
an interesting situation that everyone everyone in my family uses
(45:54):
their middle names. So I've always been called Amy ever
since I was born, but my first name is Helen.
This causes an interesting situation at airports and doctor's appointments
where they refer to me as Helen, and I always
have to remember that they're talking to me. A big
fan of the show kept me curious and my curious
spirits satisfied over the last three or four years, and
it's such a comfort knowing there's always another episode to
(46:15):
listen to. Best wishes from the UK. They're always so
nice and that is sure Amy, Helen Amy.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Thanks Helen. Amy. Wolves call her Amy as is customary.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yeah, because we say Helen, She's like, who.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Wow. I can't wait until they read my listener mail,
says Amy. If you want to be like Amy and
get in touch with us for whatever reason, you can
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
F
Hey, everybody, it's me joshuam. For this week's select I've
chosen our episode on art Mysteries. It's a great one.
Chuck and I are secretly jazzed by art history, it
turns out, and this episode is the best of any
we've done on the subject. May also be the only
one at any rate. It's a good episode, and I
think you'll enjoy it.
Speaker 2 (00:19):
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production
of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 1 (00:35):
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh Clark, and
there's Charles w Chuck, Brian over there, and Jerry's here somewhere.
So this is Stuff you should know, the Art World edition.
Speaker 2 (00:46):
Yeah, you know what, I just realized. We record these
in two's and we just recorded the Pog's episode, right,
And you didn't say welcome to the podcast. I didn't
have missed opportunity for a great dad joke.
Speaker 1 (01:05):
That sounds like something I would skip though, even had
I thought of it, or I don't know that I
would have pulled.
Speaker 2 (01:09):
The trigger on I think or I could see you
pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Right, But I would have just been engaged in self
loathing for the rest of the podcast.
Speaker 2 (01:20):
Well retroactively, I'm gonna say, I hope everyone enjoyed the podcast.
Now let's talk about art mysteries.
Speaker 1 (01:28):
I love this one, man, this is great. This reminds
me of a Stuff you Should Know episode from years back.
For some reason.
Speaker 2 (01:36):
Well, it's because we don't do these top lists anymore.
Are part of it, you know, very famously we used
to have top tens on our old House Stuffworks website,
of which usually there were maybe seven decent entries, so
we never did I don't think we ever did a
full ten on anything. Maybe somebody could probably correct this,
but this one actually came in at seven. They didn't
(01:58):
even try, and I don't even and we may do
like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.
Speaker 1 (02:03):
We'll see. We're gonna play it fast and loose. I
think that's another reason why it reminds me of an
old Stuff you Should Know episode. Yeah, Fast and loose.
First you got the fast, then you got the loose.
Speaker 2 (02:15):
But never furious because he wants to be mad. I
don't know they should have called out series Fast and Loose.
Speaker 1 (02:25):
That I think I've heard it before that that series
is the highest grossing movie franchise in the history of
film like worldwide.
Speaker 2 (02:34):
Yeah. You know what's funny is at one point we
were this is years ago, we were talking with Ludicrous
about doing something with a network, and I, uh, because
he's he's a local guy here in Atlanta. And I
talked to our boss and said, what's he what's he
doing these days? Like I haven't heard any music? And
he went, he makes fast and furious movies, Like that's
(02:55):
his job now, yeah, because he's just getting rich off
of making these movies, like I can't even imagine.
Speaker 1 (03:02):
And plus also, I mean they're pretty it's pretty involved
movie making. I would guess, like I'm sure because there's
so many stars involved that, you know, the shooting schedule
for each one isn't necessarily you know, a year long
endeavor or anything like that, and they probably have it
down to like a pretty fast science by now. But like,
I would think that would eat up a pretty decent
(03:23):
amount of your time shooting one of those films every
few you know, a couple of times, well, I guess
every few years.
Speaker 2 (03:30):
I only saw one of those.
Speaker 1 (03:31):
I think, Man, I'm slowly like degenerating into Bob Newhart. Man.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
Have you known man good.
Speaker 1 (03:37):
Yeah, you could degenerate into worse things than that. But
I mean, like I've really I'm really hitting that new
Heart note these days.
Speaker 2 (03:44):
I've noticed that's a great note. I love it. I've
always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner.
Speaker 1 (03:49):
So well, you've you've there, you go, You've got it.
Speaker 2 (03:54):
All right, number one on the list. You want to
talk a little uh cut of Asio.
Speaker 1 (04:00):
So Caravaggio is my new favorite painter. Oh yeah, not
just because he was a scummy lowlife swordsman from the murderer.
He was a gambler, He had weapons charges against him
while he was alive. He was not a good guy
(04:23):
by any stretch of the imagination. Very troubled person is
a really polite way to put it. But if you
look at his art, like I had no idea, I've
seen like so many works of his art and I
never pieced together that they were the same person. And
then when I really started to read some criticism of
his work, I'm like, oh my god, this guy he's
(04:43):
considered one of the fathers of modern art, and this
guy was painting at the beginning of the seventeenth century,
the early sixteen hundreds, and just like POGs, he burned
hot and bright and fast and furious.
Speaker 2 (04:57):
Actually sadly, Oh, that's right, that wasn't even forced. Nice work,
Bob so. Michelangelo Marisi de Caravaggio was an Italian Baroque painter.
He at one point in sixteen oh six killed a
man name Ramuccio Tomasani and said, I got to get
(05:19):
out of here because I'm in big trouble now, and
went to went away from Rome and fled to Malta,
where he had a pretty brief but I guess, notable stay.
He was only there about six months and kind of
hiding out and quickly hooked up with the Knights of
Malta and was briefly one of the Knights of Malta,
(05:43):
like for a month. Yeah, and painted one of his
most famous paintings there, the oil on canvas twelve feet
by seventeen feet, the Beheading of John the Baptist.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
Yeah, it was an altarpiece for the Order of Saint John,
also known as the Knights of Malta. They were going
to again put this behind the altar in their church
on Malta, and it was actually his little entry fee.
They charged an entry fee usually money to their initiates.
But they accepted, Yeah, but they accepted this altars giant
(06:16):
painting of Saint John the Baptist being beheaded, and it
was actually, I mean, as far as the Caravaggio goes,
especially toward the end of his life, it's actually fairly
tame because there's not you know, like jets of blood
spurting out. It's a pool of blood that's being shown.
He paints some really violent stuff and like you said
(06:39):
that that kind of that. He was a master of
light and shadow. It's called kira scuro and he used
it to really dramatic effect, including in that painting, and
in fact, one of the other paintings that you might
have seen of his chuck it's called Judith beheading Holofernes.
Have you seen it?
Speaker 2 (06:58):
I have so.
Speaker 1 (07:00):
Judith, the woman who's in that painting, the woman who
modeled for that for Judith, that was the woman that
he killed. Bernuccio TOMASONI over.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
Right, did you know that I did?
Speaker 1 (07:17):
Oh?
Speaker 2 (07:17):
You did?
Speaker 1 (07:18):
Okay?
Speaker 2 (07:18):
Well? At anyway, they really in this House of Works
article they called it a petty squabble and that that
really doesn't tell the story.
Speaker 1 (07:24):
Yeah, another explanation I saw was that it was over
a tennis wager. And this is real tennis, not lawn tennis,
and real tennis is kind of like this kooky mix
between squash and racquetball and tennis, and it's all indoors
and there's like horse sheds basically involved that you can
(07:47):
play off the roofs of It's really interesting stuff. And
he used to play that a lot too. But so
it was either over a wager or it was over
this woman.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
Her name was what was it, Judith.
Speaker 1 (08:01):
No Felidae Fellide I believe was the actual woman's name
who modeled for Judith. So he ends up on Malta,
he becomes a knight, and when he becomes this night
he paints his altarpiece and he signs his name in
the pool of blood, which you're like, well, he's an artist.
That seems like something an artist would do, not Caravajio.
This is actually the first and only work of his
(08:23):
that he ever signed, which a lot of people are like, Okay,
wait a minute, let's examine this.
Speaker 2 (08:28):
Yeah, And it kind of took a while for it
to be even very visible because it underwent some restorations
over the years and in the nineteen fifties they did
a restoration where they really could see the signature and
what it said I don't know about for the first time,
but like super clearly at least, and it said F period, god,
(08:53):
F mitche lang m I, C H E, l A
n G. And then you know, of course, everyone it's like, well,
what does this mean because there is no F in
his name. It's not like his initial. Is he saying,
you know, hey, screw Michelangelo, myself, screw me, or I'm screwed. No,
no one really said that. They thought the F. They
(09:15):
are a couple of different theories. Thought it was shorthand
for fratter or which means brother because he was one
of the knights, and maybe he just meant like brother
Michelangelo or whatever. And then some other people said, no,
maybe it means stands for fesset fecit, which is Latin
for did, translating basically into I did it, and it's
(09:38):
spelled out in blood, kind of confessing to his crime.
Speaker 1 (09:41):
Right, So that's kind of like where the mystery comes in.
Was he confessing to the crime of murdering Renuccio Tomusoni?
From what I saw, most I can't say most, but
the art historians and critics that I saw basically said no,
he almost certainly wasn't doing that. For one, everybody knew
that he did it. He'd already been convicted in absentia,
(10:04):
so it's not like he was confessing to it. Although
you can make the case that he was confessing in
the Catholic sense of the word, you know what I mean.
Speaker 2 (10:13):
Like before God, yeah, exactly, or de Bear's That painting
still hangs at Saint John's co Cathedral in multitude.
Speaker 1 (10:22):
Okay, yeah, yeah, well, I mean it was the altar piece,
like they like, it was a big deal that they
got their hands on it, because he was a celebrated
painter at the time, already in his lifetime. But the
other interpretation that he was saying f as in Freighter
or Brother Michelangelo about himself, that's probably the likelier version
because he was at the time seeking a pardon from
(10:45):
the Pope so he could return to Rome, and by
saying like, I'm in this holy order, I'm basically like
a Catholic holy man now a leader of the church,
because the Order of Saint John, the Knights of Malta
of inducted me. He was basically shouting it loud and
proud by signing that one particular very holy painting that
(11:09):
he did.
Speaker 2 (11:09):
But they said, nice, try, buddy, and they kicked him
out for being a quote foul and rotten member end quote.
So it didn't work.
Speaker 1 (11:17):
A month after a month, dude, he lasted a month
in the Order of Saint John. And it's not like
they ran around willy nilly inducting people like. They basically
had no idea that they had. What was Vic's last
name in The Shield, victay Beck, No, not victay Back.
Speaker 2 (11:39):
I don't know. I didn't watch The Shield, Oh.
Speaker 1 (11:41):
You didn't know. It was good. I rewatched like the
last seven episodes the other night, over a couple of nights.
It still holds up actually, But anyway, they didn't realize
that they had inducted him, the guy from the Shield,
and they figured it out pretty quickly. So he made
his way back from Malta to I believe sicily on
his way to Rome, and I think he actually got
a harden and got into yet another squabble, another sword fight,
(12:04):
and sustained some wounds and between infected wounds, they think
he got a staff infection lead poisoning. He apparently had
gone rather mad from being exposed to the paints that
he painted with and then sun exposure sunstroke on the
beach in Tuscan. He finally killed him, and so it goes, Yes,
(12:26):
it does. But his paintings are still just amazing. I
can look at him all day, you know.
Speaker 2 (12:30):
Yeah, me too. I like this. I like this stuff.
Speaker 1 (12:33):
I do too. So that's a Caravaggio. How about Vermire, Well,
I think we should take a break. Oh gosh, and
we'll be back right after this. All right, we had
(13:04):
a great cliffhanger with Vermire. Vermire, the very famous Dutch
artist Johannes Vermire, had a very famous painting, a lot
of very famous paintings, but one in particular that has
had a bunch of names over the years. In fact,
it did not get the name Girl with a Pearl
ear Ring until the twentieth century. It was called everything
(13:25):
from a Girl with a turban to Girl with an Earring,
had lots of different names because it was not officially
titled by Vermir nor dated, even though they think it
was around sixteen sixty five. Yeah, he was just like
this dude who lived in Delft in the Netherlands and
never left his hometown and had a wife in fifteen
(13:48):
kids fifteen yeah, fifteen kids, and it just kind of painted.
And he made probably a comparatively small number of works.
I think around third six are attributed to him, and
there's a theory that as many as a fifth of
those were done by his oldest daughter Maria. But he's
(14:09):
kind of like this enigma at the time, not just personally,
but also the stuff he was painting. There was a
huge movement among the Dutch painters at the time that
they would paint like these, you know, horrific hellscapes or
there was a lot of like obvious narrative and symbolism
(14:30):
just all over the paintings. There was just a lot
going on. Vermire went a different way where he would
almost peek in on very normal daily life and capture
like these these really just kind of boring or otherwise
mundane moments. But he did it in a way that
that this guy was like the master of light. He
(14:53):
makes he makes Thomas Kinkaid look like puke as far
as like you know, light mastery.
Speaker 2 (15:00):
So girl with a pearl earring. Everyone has seen it,
Like I said, it's very famous it's a young girl
looks to be sort of like mid teenage years, looking
over her shoulder. She's wearing a dress. She's wearing that turban.
Very prominent ear rings, large pearl earrings, and pearls factored
into quite a few of his works over the years.
(15:20):
And it's one of those paintings where the eyes follow
you supposedly, which we've talked about in one of our
short stuff episodes.
Speaker 1 (15:27):
On Mona Lisa.
Speaker 2 (15:29):
I think, so, yeah, it's, you know, the effect of
the eyes following, which doesn't happen in all paintings with eyes.
Speaker 1 (15:36):
Oh no, the Mona Lisa's eyes actually don't follow you.
I think that was the big reveal of that one,
was it?
Speaker 2 (15:41):
Yeah? All right, So he paints his painting, and then,
of course the mystery of this one is who is
this person. There has been speculation that it might be
a mistress. A lot of people think it was his
daughter Maria, who would have been about fifteen or sixteen,
and like you said, who some people believe painted about
(16:03):
a fifth of the works attributed to him, because about
a fifth of his collected works aren't. I mean this
sounds mean to say, but they aren't as they aren't
up to snuff compared to his other works, so they
sort of stand out from the rest, so they think
that they may have been Maria's good paintings.
Speaker 1 (16:19):
Still, yeah, there's still a lot better than anything I
could say.
Speaker 2 (16:22):
Yeah, it's not like there were stick figures, you know,
out of nowhere.
Speaker 1 (16:26):
They're like this, Vermere seems off.
Speaker 2 (16:28):
But you know, if you've there was a nineteen ninety
nine novel from Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with a Pearl Earring,
and then the two thousand film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson,
who was perfectly cast. She looks, you know, quite a
bit like The Girl with a Pearl ear Ring. But
this was historical fiction. If you've seen that movie and
you're like, no, she was the family's maid's assistant and
(16:50):
love interest to Vermire, that was just I don't even
think that was based on anything. It's just historical fiction.
Speaker 1 (16:57):
Yes, from what I've seen, the art critics and historians
basically tend to think that there was no person that
this was modeled on.
Speaker 2 (17:05):
There.
Speaker 1 (17:06):
It wasn't even necessarily his daughter. In fact, it was
kind of a trend at the time, a painting called
a trony, which was an imaginary figure, a person who
didn't actually exist, and the point was to kind of
show off things like costumes and jewelry, which is ostensibly
(17:27):
the point of that painting. But the thing is the vermire,
the face that he did and the place that he
put her. Like we were talking about how she gets
compared to Mona Lisa. She's called the Mona Lisa of
the North. Mona Lisa is like sitting back in the painting.
The girl with the pearl earring is like right in
the foreground, like right, there's very little between you and her,
(17:50):
and she's turned around and her mouth so open, which
apparently was very unusual for painting Dutch painting at the time,
and it looks like she's going to say something. I
guess that is what entrances people with this, this image
that you know, what's she going to say? What did
he capture her about to say? You know, it looks
like she's turning around like, oh, and you know this
(18:12):
other thing I hadn't told.
Speaker 2 (18:13):
You maybe she was an improv comedian. And she was, yes, yes,
you never know, but this is a mystery that'll never
be solved, which sometimes I like those kind of mysteries
when it comes to stuff like this.
Speaker 1 (18:26):
Yeah, And I saw that argued as well that it
was like, you know, if we knew who she was,
it would just it would we would lose a lot
of the interest in.
Speaker 2 (18:34):
It, and we would have found out by now.
Speaker 1 (18:36):
I think, yes, yeah, and you're right, we probably won't
ever know. But because of this so like, it wasn't
like very well thought of, or nobody really thought much
of it until nineteen ninety five in the National Gallery
used it as the poster for their big exhibit. But
since then a lot of people have really kind of
examined it. And I hadn't noticed this before, but I
(18:56):
saw it, pointed out Chuck. If you look at the
pearl earring, first of all, it's improbably large, is how
I saw it described, like that the ear couldn't physically
hold up a pearl that size. But then secondly, it's
really basically made with two brushstrokes. Both of them are
reflecting light. One is from the light source and then
the lower one is reflecting the light off of the caller.
(19:20):
And it's pretty amazing that, you know, we talk about
this the girl with the pearl earing, and this pearl
itself is is like a kind of a cultural icon too.
And it's basically just two brushstrokes, which is kind of
goes to show how great Vermir was.
Speaker 2 (19:34):
Amazing.
Speaker 1 (19:35):
Have you ever seen Tim's Vermure the documentary? I have not, Oh, Chuck,
You've got to see it. It's directed by Teller from
Penn and Teller, which makes you think, like, how did
he direct if he doesn't talk, you know, but he
somehow did. I think it's about what that's just a
bit and it's about It's about a guy who basically
(19:58):
figured out that Vermire somehow projected images that he built
in real life onto a canvas and then painted him
that way, and he actually replicates a Vermir like perfectly.
It's really just one of the better documentaries you'll ever see.
Speaker 2 (20:14):
Very cool.
Speaker 1 (20:15):
Yeah, so what do you think?
Speaker 2 (20:18):
On to rafae yel, Yeah, so the mystery here and
this is one of our This actually has a Simpsons
crossover as well, which is kind of fun because Raphael
painted a very famous painting called Portrait of a young
Man and is largely described as one of the most famous,
(20:38):
if not the most famous, pieces of art to go
missing during the plundering of great art in World War
Two by Hitler in The Gang. And this is a
crossover with the Simpsons in that in the Fighting Hellfish
episode when Grandpa Abe and Burns are stealing art, this
is one of the paintings Portrait of a young Man. Oh,
(21:01):
it's one of the paintings that they stole. Wow, which
shows that you know Simpsons writers back then at least,
we're definitely doing their work, like their research work. Because
that's a nice little easter egg.
Speaker 1 (21:11):
I think, yeah, totally. Doesn't it even talk? Doesn't it
say something like someone's guilty conscience or something. I don't
remember making that up.
Speaker 2 (21:19):
I don't know. I don't remember. I mean, it's been
a long time since I've seen that one. But it
was one of the great episodes, I think.
Speaker 1 (21:24):
So the Portrait of the young Man, which they think
was a Raphael self portrait, and actually we have no
idea what the colors were because the only photographs we
have of it were in black and white. But he
used to hang in the Prince's zar Torski Museum in Poland,
along with two other really important paintings, Leonardo's Lady with
(21:45):
an Ermine, which is a scout stoat. I can't remember
kind of a weasel like animal and then Remembrant's landscape
with the Good Samaritan, and all three of those and
everything else, and the princes Are Museum were swiped by
the Nazis when they came to Poland and placed in
the office of a guy named Hans Frank, who was
(22:07):
the head of the government for the Nazis in Poland.
Speaker 2 (22:10):
Right, Yeah, and you know, they almost they almost got
these hidden away successfully when Poland was being invaded. They
knew that the art was going to be plundered, and
so those three paintings were actually rescued by the prince
and hidden away in a house in a place that
I can't even pronounce, Sienawa. I'm not sure what that is.
(22:32):
But they were ultimately found by the Gestapo and handed
over to Frank and Frank you know, they were supposed
to go to Hitler. Hitler was going to open a museum,
the Furia Museum, and Lenz and Frank actually kind of
kept it for a little while, hung it in his residence,
and then eventually this thing went to Germany and then
(22:54):
Austria for a little while, and then back with Frank
in nineteen forty five.
Speaker 1 (22:58):
Which seems crazy probable that they would end up back
with him, but they did. And the Allies came in
to Poland, I guess, and arrested Hans Frank in nineteen
forty five, and they were able to find the lady
with an ermine and the landscape with the Good Samaritan,
but the portrait of the young Man was nowhere to
(23:19):
be found, and.
Speaker 2 (23:20):
A lot of other stuff too.
Speaker 1 (23:22):
Sure, they definitely did, but the three most important pieces
in the Prince's Zartarski Museum were those three, and two
were recovered, one wasn't. And it's very odd to think
that they were separated at any time, or that it's
even odder to think that two were kept together, but
one wasn't. And so because the portrait of the young
(23:42):
Man was not recovered, and it's a Raphael who's you know,
one of the great Italian Renaissance painters, it's considered maybe
the most important piece to go missing in World War two.
Speaker 2 (23:54):
Yeah, and they, you know, along with I think over
eight hundred other artifacts they got from him, and they
could not go on to question him very long because
he was executed just a year later. And since then
there have been a lot of rumors about where this
thing ended up. Who has it a lot of speculation
that maybe a private collector in another country has it.
(24:16):
I think in twenty twelve there was a false report
that it was supposedly in some bank vault, and they
really don't know. It's just sort of one of those
great mysteries of a disappeared painting. And my money is
on a private collector probably has this thing stashed away.
But you would also think that at some point somebody
would talk.
Speaker 1 (24:36):
You would think so, and you know, maybe they will eventually.
Speaker 2 (24:39):
Unless it's really stashed.
Speaker 1 (24:41):
Well, some people think it was destroyed. And that movie
monuments Men, right, they show the Nazis igniting it with
the flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art,
and you know there's a whole camp that says, now
this thing is It's gone forever. So they did something
to it because the Nazis were known not just plunder
but also destroyed as well, which just one more reason
(25:02):
to love them Nazis.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Yeah, and I think this is oil on panels, so
it's I don't think this could even be like rolled
up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.
Speaker 1 (25:11):
Yeah, I would guess not. No, I didn't realize it
was on panel, but that makes sense. But the the state,
the National Museum in Krakow, bought the entire Princess zark
Torsky collection from a private collector for one hundred million
euros back in twenty sixteen, and that I know, and
that included the rights to portrait of a young man
(25:31):
in case it's ever found. And for now it's just
they have the original frame hanging empty in the in
the gallery.
Speaker 2 (25:39):
Yeah, that's it. Turns out that's a thing I didn't
know as a thing in frames in galleries. It's kind
of sad.
Speaker 1 (25:46):
Yeah, it's sad. It's very poignant. It says, come home,
come home. We're leaving the light on for you, come home,
just like Motel six. That's right right, Tom Broke call,
we'll leave the light out for it.
Speaker 2 (25:58):
All right. Well, that means it's time for another break
and we'll be back right after this to talk a
little bit about Van goch.
Speaker 1 (26:25):
So Chuck. Before I launched into soaka go away type
tirade onto you? Is that how you accurately pronounce his name?
Speaker 2 (26:34):
I don't know it. It was from the filmmaker who
dare not speak his name. It was from a Woody
Allen movie. I think it was in the most problematic
movie Manhattan, when he's with Diane Keaton and some obnoxious
person says Van or I think it's Diane Keaton, says
Van Gough, and he's you know, he's incense. He's like
Van Gock, Like how pretentious?
Speaker 1 (26:56):
So okay, So instead we're just gonna go with Van
go like everybody else, right.
Speaker 2 (26:59):
Yeah, sure, okay, And we can cut all that out
if we want to. Don't you want to talk about
Widdy Allen? That's fine, sure, sure, I hear you.
Speaker 1 (27:06):
So Van Goh was most he was just such a sad,
tragic figure out for this guy so much after learning
more about him, we should do an entire podcast on him,
if you ask me, I agreed. But instead here we're
going to talk about his death because there is a
mystery surrounding his death. He's very famous for having cut
off his ear. He definitely did that, and I had
(27:28):
always learned that he did it to impress a sex
worker who he was enamored with, and he definitely did
give her his ear after he cut it off. But
that's not why he cut it off. He cut it
off in a fit of angst, basically after having an
argument with his friend Paul Gogan, who he was living
with in Arles in the south of France, and he said, well,
(27:52):
I'm going to make some sort of lemonade out of
this lemon I just gave myself and he took it
to his I guess a hopeful girlfriend, and I believe
she was not that impressed with it.
Speaker 2 (28:04):
Yeah, so he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation
that he had bipolar disorder.
Speaker 1 (28:11):
Yeah, I saw that too.
Speaker 2 (28:13):
Was you know, just sort of long suffering as an artist.
He only sold one painting before he died in eighteen
ninety at the age of thirty seven. And the story
goes is that he shot himself in the chest with
a revolver. But it gets a little more complicated than that.
And in what year was the book? In twenty eleven,
(28:35):
there was a book written called Van go Colon the
Life written by Stephen I'm gonna say, Maifa okay and
Gregory white Smith, and it seems like they sort of
launched this idea, or at least really put it in
the public forefront that he was actually killed almost certainly
(28:56):
accidentally by one of two boys, younger gentleman that he
was hanging out with that day.
Speaker 1 (29:04):
Right, So here's the thing, Like, there's a lot of
circumstantial evidence that supports that theory that he was killed
by two boys. There's also it's also circumstantially plausible that,
you know, Van God died by suicide as well. But
even if you take his story and start digging into
(29:25):
it and the statements that he made supposedly made, apparently
everything we know about it comes from the owner of
the inn where he rented a room's thirteen year old
daughter at the time was a witness to all this.
But even if you take what he supposedly said, it
still doesn't add up that number one, he shot himself
in the chest, and most importantly the number two, the
(29:48):
gun that he shot himself with could never be found
and instead of actually, you know, finishing the suicide, completing
the suicide, he couldn't find the gun after he shot
himself in the chest and just walked back to his
room where he died after suffering twenty more hours, but
still to the end claiming that he had done this himself.
(30:10):
Even if you take all that together, it seems like, no,
this there's something really fishy going on here.
Speaker 2 (30:16):
Yeah. So this bullet misses all of his internal organs,
very improbably because it deflected off his rib cage and
he walked, like you said, to the doctor who they
didn't have a surgeon on duty, so they couldn't remove
the bullet. He lived a total of thirty hours after
the shot and died of infection. Got to talk with
(30:38):
his brother, you know, was speaking to people, so he
had every opportunity to say that these two boys that
I was hanging out with that I was drinking, and
I say boys, I think they were maybe lateeen's, early twenties. No,
there were sixteen, Oh okay, I saw early twenties and
another thing. Oh yeah, but you know, hanging out getting
drunk with them. One of these boys, Renee Sacratan, had
(31:03):
a gun that apparently misfired a lot, and he liked
playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboys, supposedly
he did. And so it all just seems and even
his statement, he he said he didn't say I shot myself.
He said, do not accuse anyone. It was I who
wanted to kill myself.
Speaker 1 (31:24):
Yeah, which is very well.
Speaker 2 (31:27):
Yeah, It's ambiguous, I think as far as like because
the idea is that maybe he was accidentally shot, and
then after he was shot, he was like, this is
kind of what I wanted all along, you know, I've
been heading down this road towards suicide and then now
it's just done for me.
Speaker 1 (31:43):
So what seems to have happened is that this gun
possibly that it wasn't actually murdered or any kind of
premeditated murder, more like a manslaughter where Renee and his
brother guests Dollan were messing around and accidentally Basically he
had seen a wild Bill Cody Wild West show the
(32:05):
year before and became obsessed with it, so that's what
he was doing with a gun and playing cowboy, and
that they had accidentally shot him with this gun that
was kind of, you know, known to misfire. So the
thing was that the gun was never found. Renee went
back to school like right after that, which was still
(32:26):
in the middle of summer break from what I saw,
and the town seems to have circled the wagons around
this this these boys, because you know, Van Goh was
an outsider. He was not very well thought of. He
used to get really drunk and argue with the locals
in the cafe and the and everything, like basically every night.
(32:46):
And these boys came from like a good well to
do family. So for many years like that was just
the thing, like like it just happened. And then slowly,
little by little it seems to have trickled out some
support for this idea. Like no, like Vano wasn't anywhere
near this field. He said that he had shot himself
in he was actually on the road to the Secraton's house.
(33:07):
And then finally years later, Renee's Secraton said that, you know,
he it probably was his gun and that Vango had
somehow gotten a hold of it. It seems it seems
likely that he was shot by them, whether accident or not.
Speaker 2 (33:23):
Yeah, And these two authors, they put forth some other
circumstantial evidence, like that the bullet went in at a
weird angle that would not have been the angle if
you shot yourself in the chest, that his more recent
works were a little more upbeat and a little more positive,
and that he was not in that kind of mindset
(33:43):
at the time, and that he had had recently even
written his thoughts about suicide, that he thought it was
sinful and immoral, and so they sort of use all
this as evidence that he would not have done it
himself and that it was you know, they believe it
was an accident. His last words, very sad, where the
sadness will last forever, he spoke to his brother, which
(34:06):
that's tough.
Speaker 1 (34:07):
Yeah it is. I really do want to do an
episode on him.
Speaker 2 (34:11):
And I think Sekhatan came out in the fifties even
and denied it, right, like finally he once and for
all he did.
Speaker 1 (34:16):
He did, but he also he also said that it
probably was his gun and that somehow van Go had gotten.
Speaker 2 (34:22):
It right, but hey, that ain't my fault.
Speaker 1 (34:25):
No, but to also to back pedal and be like,
it probably was my gun, because that was another thing,
and everybody's like, where did Vango get a gun? Van
Go didn't have a gun, no, And no one would
have given Vang a gutten ye right, he was the
guy who got drunk every night and had cut off
his ear before that was like they no one in
town would have given him a gun. And so the
fact that he even admitted that it was his gun
(34:47):
is probably as close as Renee Serkatan ever came to
confessing publicly about it, you know.
Speaker 2 (34:53):
Yeah, and it makes sense what he said was do
not accuse anyone like that. Really seems like he's trying
to cover for these kids that he didn't want to
get in trouble.
Speaker 1 (35:02):
Yeah, because if he wanted to die, but it was
also he didn't want to die by his own hand.
Like this is kind of a lucky gift in a
very strange way.
Speaker 2 (35:12):
You know. Yeah, I'm going to that immersive van go
thing in July.
Speaker 1 (35:18):
Where is that?
Speaker 2 (35:20):
It is at here in Atlanta. It's at the Pullman Yards.
Oh yeah, over in Kirkwood where they're shoot Like every
movie in Atlanta shoots there, right, Yeah, So yeah, it's
supposed to be pretty cool.
Speaker 1 (35:32):
It's very very neat. Sounds neat, I mean like basically
they just make the stars come out whenever you come in,
and I think, so, I think you sit in this
yellow chair.
Speaker 2 (35:40):
I think that's the deal. I think you go in
and you are surrounded by projected art in different ways
from what I can get, that's all.
Speaker 1 (35:50):
I got to check that out, man, Thanks for telling
me about it.
Speaker 2 (35:52):
Yeah, it looks kind of cool, all.
Speaker 1 (35:54):
Right, Chuck, you want to finish out talking about.
Speaker 2 (35:57):
Hitler don't you mean Hilter.
Speaker 1 (36:00):
Did you know there's Hilter. Oh my gosh, yes, in
the headline, in.
Speaker 2 (36:04):
The headline, did Hilter really do these paintings? Do these paintings?
Who wrote that? I feel bad? But like, did Hilter
really do these paintings?
Speaker 1 (36:18):
That's great?
Speaker 2 (36:19):
Oh yeah he did them.
Speaker 1 (36:20):
Yeah, Hilter did these paintings. So we're talking not about
Hilter but about Hitler, Adolf Hitler in particular, and as
everybody knows, Hitler was a frustrated artist.
Speaker 2 (36:32):
Yeah.
Speaker 1 (36:33):
You know, people have made a lot of hay about
how possibly the world would be a totally different place
had he been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts.
And he came well, I don't want to say he
came close, but he made two different attempts in one
year to be accepted, and they basically looked at his
stuff and said, look, man, you you have the skill
(36:57):
of a draftsman. Maybe you should go into archit texture like,
but you're not going to be an artist. And that
was a direct quote. But this was a huge deal
for him. I think I read that in mind comf.
I haven't read mine, comp but I read an article
by somebody who read mine comp and said that he
said it was like a bolt from the blue, and
(37:18):
that you know, he was pursuing this dream that his
father would like beat him out of. Like his father
enrolled him in a technical school. He's like, no, son
of mine's going to be an artist. He would beat
him up whenever he brought he brought the idea up.
And so finally, after his father died and then he
nursed his mal ailing mother until she died, he got
(37:40):
up the gumps and did like go enroll in art school.
And apparently, he, being Hitler, who I guess had been
fairly bonkers his whole life, just knew that he was
destined to become an artist. So the idea that he
was rebuffed not once but twice by this Vienna school.
These people were like the the the guardians of what
(38:01):
is art and what is not, and they were telling
him what you got is not. That was a huge
deal to him.
Speaker 2 (38:09):
It was a very big deal. And it's funny, it's
just now occurring to me that there was sort of
a similar thing with Manson's rejection as a musician. Yeah,
by the music industry. I never really kind of really
thought of that parallel. But in nineteen oh nine, Hitler
is trapesing around Vienna and he is selling watercolors copied
(38:31):
from postcards to tourists. So if you've ever traveled to Europe,
he was one of those guys that was down by
the river, the river bank van. Yeah, in a van,
selling these and literally copied from postcards. So he did
that for a little while, made a little bit of
money because you know, if you look at his art,
it's it's way better than I could do. It's you know,
(38:53):
it's okay. But yeah, like modern and it's hard to
tell with modern art critics like how much goes into
looking at a Hitler painting and reviewing it, Like it's
really hard to kind of separate those things. But yeah,
the general thought is that he had nothing exceptional about
him at all. It was he was the kind of
artists that would sell stuff down by the river to tourists.
(39:16):
They were fine, he was capable, but they were copycat paintings.
He was copying things. He had no point of view.
He did this in nineteen thirteen as well in Munich,
painting Munich city scapes and landscapes and selling them to
tourists and then in nineteen fourteen got hauled in by
the police of all things, for failing to register for
(39:37):
the military.
Speaker 1 (39:39):
Yeah. And then he went down and registered, and then
they gave him a physical exam and he failed it.
They said he was too weak to fire a weapon. Yeah,
so they arrested him so that they could humiliate him, basically.
And then when World War One came around, he enlisted
and they say, need everybody we can get, come on in, and.
Speaker 2 (40:01):
He actually did, right, Yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1 (40:03):
Even Hilter. Hilter did this army thing.
Speaker 2 (40:08):
Right.
Speaker 1 (40:09):
So when he rose to power in Germany, one of
the things he did was he had his works collected
and destroyed. I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was
behind that. I guess because he knew it wasn't very
good and he needed to focus on his political career
rather than his artistic career, or have everybody else focus
on it. But to no avail, because I saw a
(40:32):
nineteen thirty six critic or a critic wrote in nineteen
thirty six that his style was prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling,
or spiritualism. Yeah, and this was before he I'm sorry,
or spiritual imagination and this was before he had really
become an obvious threat. This is nineteen thirty six, so
(40:55):
even back then, even without hindsight, people thought his stuff
wasn't very good. So, yeah, he had his stuff destroyed
and that's he It was kind of a footnote for
a very long time that he was an artist, and
no one really cared after his death.
Speaker 2 (41:11):
Yeah, I mean this, and that was one of the
major reasons that he was such an art plunderer during
the war and stole as much art as he could
from real famous artists and famous paintings because he had
all this backstory as a failed artist, and it was interesting.
I did see that like one of his major I mean,
(41:32):
because he wasn't an utter failure at first. He had
a backer early on. I think he was a Jewish Man. Yeah,
which was really interesting, and there was I don't know, man,
it's there's a lot of speculation about what that all
meant to him, and like people try and draw parallels,
just like some of the paintings I saw, I mean,
(41:53):
some of it feels like a stretch, definitely, like the
you know, the cold the Cold Street of Munich, like
were painted like clearly with a future cleansing in mind
to make it look like this, and that's a stretch. Yeah,
some of that stuff seems like a stretch, But you
could definitely read into the backstory at least I think
(42:13):
with some accuracy.
Speaker 1 (42:15):
Yeah, And even if like you can't necessarily suss out
like the future from his paintings, you can make a
pretty strong case that his artistic ambitions being utterly crushed, yeah,
had some sort of driving force or impact on a
psyche at the very least. Sure like that and his
(42:37):
later political career and dictatorship did not exist in a vacuum.
I don't think you can possibly make the case that
they were just unrelated in any way.
Speaker 2 (42:46):
No. I think any sociopath you can look at their
past and see the dots connected, you know. Yeah, So,
like you said, there was this kind of just was
the deal for a long time. And then in like
anything else, like people wanting to get original Charles Manson
music reels, in the early late nineties early two thousands,
(43:06):
there was a market for Hitler's work. I think in
two thousand and nine a British auction house someone paid
one hundred and fifty grand for fifteen early sketches and watercolors,
including a self portrait, and then in twenty fifteen, some
unnamed investors paid four hundred and fifty thousand dollars for
a set of watercolors. I think there were twelve or
(43:27):
thirteen that survived.
Speaker 1 (43:30):
Yeah, the problem is is because he didn't have a
style of his own, that he was copying postcards, that
he didn't have any formal training, and that he was
he lacked like a lot of creativity or any creativity.
It seems like it's really hard to say this is
a Hitler and this is a fake, And there's been
(43:52):
developed a really a really enormous market of fakes because
anybody who's like a passingly good good artists in watercolors
of street scapes and landscapes could drum up something and
be like, this is a Hitler, and it would be
really difficult to say yes it is, or no it's not.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
Yeah, what kind of a garbage human do you have
to be to think I'll do Hitler forgeries and try
and sell them to garbage humans that want to collect them.
Speaker 1 (44:22):
Yeah, and it's not like these are even fetching like
ten million dollars apiece. We're talking like you might get
ten thousand dollars for it for your your Hitler forgery.
Speaker 2 (44:33):
Unbelievable but totally believable.
Speaker 1 (44:36):
So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he
do this?
Speaker 2 (44:40):
Yeah? Did he do those paintings?
Speaker 1 (44:44):
You got anything else?
Speaker 2 (44:45):
I got nothing else. That was a good five. I
think we have committed to doing a robust episode on
the Gardener Museum heist because that's a good one and
that was on this list and way underplayed for sure.
Speaker 1 (44:59):
So keep it near out for that, everybody. And since
I said keep a near out for that, I think
it's time for listener mail.
Speaker 2 (45:09):
Yeah. I'm gonna call this middle names because we had
a little discussion in our John Mure episode about how
Emily and I and our friends justin Melissa one night,
we're going by our middle names as a joke, and
I had the theory that you have no emotional connection
to your middle name if you don't have a reaction
when you hear it set out loud, and I just
(45:32):
meant sort of the non dominant name. It didn't necessarily
mean middle names because my brother goes by his middle name.
Scott is his middle name, and some people do that.
It's a thing and certainly Amy does. She said, I
was listening to the show and at the end you
were chatting about using middle names and how you don't
have an emotional connection when you hear it. I have
an interesting situation that everyone everyone in my family uses
(45:54):
their middle names. So I've always been called Amy ever
since I was born, but my first name is Helen.
This causes an interesting situation at airports and doctor's appointments
where they refer to me as Helen, and I always
have to remember that they're talking to me. A big
fan of the show kept me curious and my curious
spirits satisfied over the last three or four years, and
it's such a comfort knowing there's always another episode to
(46:15):
listen to. Best wishes from the UK. They're always so
nice and that is sure Amy, Helen Amy.
Speaker 1 (46:22):
Thanks Helen. Amy. Wolves call her Amy as is customary.
Speaker 2 (46:27):
Yeah, because we say Helen, She's like, who.
Speaker 1 (46:30):
Wow. I can't wait until they read my listener mail,
says Amy. If you want to be like Amy and
get in touch with us for whatever reason, you can
send us an email to Stuff Podcast at iHeartRadio dot com.
Speaker 2 (46:47):
Stuff you Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio For
more podcasts my heart Radio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts,
or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
Speaker 1 (47:00):
F
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If you've ever wanted to know about champagne, satanism, the Stonewall Uprising, chaos theory, LSD, El Nino, true crime and Rosa Parks, then look no further. Josh and Chuck have you covered.
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