August 11, 2023 • 36 mins
Cautionary Conversation: Andy Warhol’s assistant, Gerard Malanga, is facing a long prison sentence in Italy. He’s forged several Che Guevara portraits and tried to pass them off as genuine Warhols. What happens next is a landmark event in the history of art and authenticity…
Tim Harford is joined by Alice Sherwood, author of Authenticity, to discuss truth and fakery in modern times. Today, authenticity seems to matter more than ever — and yet we’re also constantly assailed by people and products that are not what they seem. What’s going on here? And what’s the attention economy got to do with it?
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. Andy Warhole once gave a silkscreen portrait of Marilyn
Monroe to a skeptical friend. Just tell me in your
heart of hearts that you know it isn't art, said
his friend. Warhole wasn't offended. Wrap it up in brown paper,
put it in the back of a closet, he replied.
(00:37):
One day it'll be worth a million dollars. Perhaps he
under sold himself. In May twenty twenty two, another of
Warholes marilyn silkscreens, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, became the most
expensive work of twentieth century art when it sold for
one hundred and ninety five million dollars. Shot Sage Blue
(01:00):
Marilyn's backstory is as striking as the price. In nineteen
sixty four, Dorothy Podber, an artist and provocateur, came to
Warhole studio the factory, pulled out a gun and fired
through several of the portraits. Four years later, Warhol himself
was shot and nearly killed in the factory, which can
(01:20):
only have added to the mystique of bullet scarred Warhole pictures.
The picture deserves the cliche iconic, but there is a
much more obscure portrait that has a claim to being
Warhol's most interesting and definitive work. May I offer for
your consideration Chay, a silk screen picture based on a
(01:43):
newspaper photograph of the corpse of the recently executed Marxist
revolutionary leader Chay Guavara. It is, in most ways a
classic Warhol portrait. It was made in the same way
and by the same man as many of his other
instantly recognizable silk screens. But what makes Chay so interesting
(02:06):
is that when it was first exhibited for sale in
row Home's leading art gallery, Andy Warhol apparently had no
idea that the picture existed. I'm Tim Harford and you're
listening to Cautionary Tales. This is another one of our
(02:43):
cautionary conversations, and I'm very excited today to welcome Alice Sherwood.
Alice has worked for organizations from Accentia to the BBC
and is currently a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the
Policy Institute at King's College, London. But the reason I
wanted to talk to her is because she's written an
absolutely delightful book titled Authenticity, Reclaiming Real in a Counterfeit Culture.
(03:11):
It's absolutely packed with stories I hadn't heard. That immediately
made me think and learn. Alice, welcome to Caution Detales.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Thank you, Tim. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Well, I'm glad you're here as well. And I found
out about this story from your book Authenticity. And I
was a little bit naughty in my introduction because I
said that the Chay picture was made in the same
way and by the same man as many of Warhol's
other silk screens. But that man wasn't Andy Warhole, was it.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It wasn't Andy Warhole. It's absolutely true that it was
the same man who made many of Andy's warholes, and
it was a man called Gerard Malanga or Jerry, who
was Warhole's very very long time assistant in all his
silk screening and in much else. And in fact, this
(04:07):
was so well known and where knowlished that there's an
interview with Andy Warhol for Cavalier magazine when they're asking
Andy all about his pictures, and after a while he says,
slightly irritated, if you want to know about my pictures,
why don't you speak to Gerard? He painted most of them,
So it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Wasn't a secret at all. Andy was playing with these
ideas of authenticity and authorship. Could you tell me a
little bit about the actual process of making these silk screens,
what was going on when they were made.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Well, a silk screen is effectively a sophisticated multi layered stencil.
So in order to make a silk screen, you don't
take her paint brush in a canvas. What you take
is an image, which can be a drawing or a photo,
and you have various stencils made of it for the
different colors. And then what you do is you put
(04:59):
the stencils on top of the canvas or paper, and
you push the paint through with a squeegee to get
a layer of that color, and then you use another
stencil for another color and push the paint through there.
And sometimes you might touch it up a bit with
a paint bush at the end, but mostly when Andy
and Jerry worked together, they did very little touching up.
(05:23):
It was quite a mechanical, quite a fast process.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
And the photographs themselves were not by Warhole, and I
understand the stencils weren't made by Warhole either.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
There was an awful lot of if you like, borrowing,
an outsourcing. When he wanted to stop being a commercial artist.
He was very successful commercial artist, particularly making drawings for
shops and stores and retail outlets of ladies, handbags and shoes,
but he wanted to move into the artistic world properly,
(06:00):
and his big inspiration was that he wouldn't make drawings anymore.
What he would do would be to take photos, and
not just any photos, but I can't nick striking emotive photos.
So these could be Hollywood stars like Marilyn monroel Is Taylor.
And then what he would do is have the stencils
the ascetates made for him by someone else, and then
(06:23):
he and Jerry or other people would make the images.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So you've got these images where the photograph is not
by Warhol and the stencil is made by a printer,
and then Jerry Malanga is often the guy actually squeezing
the paint onto it and doing the silkscreen process. So
is it fair to say that in some cases Warhol
would never have touched the canvas at all.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It's absolutely fair to say that. And in fact, later
on in his life he actually had a rubber stamp
made of his signature, and he gave the rubber stamp
to friends so that they could sign in inverted Commas
his pictures for him, and certainly as time went on
he outsourced more and more, so you certainly got situations
(07:10):
where the whole thing was made off site, sometimes with
instructions Aroundy, sometimes with instructions from someone who knew Andy,
and he really wouldn't see the result, sometimes until it
turned up to where he was meeting the client, still
slightly with the paint wet.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So this is a huge break, I think, from traditions
in art. And it's not like a stylistic break in
the way that say, a Jackson Pollock drip painting looks
different to a Rubens. I mean, stylistically they're incredibly different.
But deep down people really really care where the Rubens
actually painted the Rubens, and people really care whether Pollock
(07:53):
painted the Pollock. But in the case of the Warholes,
we know perfectly well that Warhole didn't touch the painting
in some cases and gave credit to Jerry Malango, and
that was kind of part of the art.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
He was very deliberately distancing himself from the classical way
of making pictures. You know, our classic picture of the
artist is the man. It's usually a man with the
brushloaded with paint, conceiving of this great image which he
then paints, and authenticity is linked to a person, a
(08:28):
person's idea, a person's inspiration, and a person's work. And
Andy disposed pretty much of all of that. You know,
he actually said once, I want to be a machine.
He didn't want works that were literally man made. He
wanted to shock people and to make art industrial. And
that really messes with our ideas of authenticity.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
No, it really does. And he wasn't, I think, the
first artist to not necessarily be doing much of the
actual painting, but he does seem to have been the
first artist to have made a virtue of it. And
I wanted to go back all the way back to
Ruben's because there is this wonderful passage in your book
where you describe various negotiations between Rubens and various rich,
(09:14):
powerful clients, and what they're arguing about is how much
of the painting is Ruben's actually going to do.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
There's a completely lovely correspondence which is between a diplomat
called Sir Dudley Carlton, who is very keen to acquire
a Rubens and is prepared to swap all sorts of
ancient antiquities and statues that he's bought in Italy for
a genuine Rubens. And Rubens is very helpful and says,
(09:40):
I offer you the flower of my stock. But as
he describes each of his paintings, he keeps saying, oh, yes,
this one is completely wonderful. It was begun by one
of my students, but I'll touch it up so it
can pass for an original. And each time Dudley Carton goes,
that's not really what I had in mind, and again
Rubens comes back and said, oh well, I'll offer you
(10:01):
another painting. And this correspondence keeps going until Dudley Carlton says,
I want one that is by Rubens and only by Rubens,
And at the end of that Rubens says, very charmingly,
of course I'll do that for you, but it will
cost you a bit more. So.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
People were very clear that, you know, not every Rubens
is exclusively by Rubens, and Rubens was, well, I I
guess we don't know exactly what the clients were getting,
but it seemed that he was quite transparent about it. Now,
of course, in the modern world we have to look
back at Rubens or Rembrandts or whatever and we have
(10:40):
to deduce how much were they actually involved. And I
learned from your book that there were these quite fine
distinctions between saying the Rembrandt and studio of Rembrandt and
circle of Rembrandt. Could you explain those to us?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yes, I mean one of the most fascinating things is
there are if you're in the art market, and particularly
if you're an auction has basically nine levels of authenticity
for a picture, so going from totally authentic to really
not sure, and you will find them at the back
of auction catalogs. But just to pick the key ones.
(11:16):
If you have the artist's full name in the description
of picture, so ren Brandt van Raun, they think it's
actually by the artist, anything less than the full name,
and it's less than totally by the artists. So it
might be studio, of which means, rather like Rubens, it
(11:41):
was done by some students, maybe with some touchups or
the original sketch by the artist. Or it can be circle,
of which means it was done by someone at the
same time who was an admirer or working in the
same tradition, and that's slightly less valuable obviously than one
completely by the master. And then if something is done,
(12:04):
say several hundred years later, but in that style, it's
worth a lot less, but it would be described as
manner of And all these gradations affect the authenticity but
also the price. And then this to a huge extent,
to a huge extent. So I write about something called
(12:25):
a drawing called Labella Princeipessa, which the owner totally believes
is by Leonardo da Vinci, in which case it will
be worth he says, one hundred and fifty million dollars.
But when it was sold, it was sold as manner
of so at nineteenth century kind of imitation, and it
(12:45):
was sold for twenty two thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Well, I'm
curious as to what we should make of the decisions
of the army market in this respect, because you've got
(13:11):
the same painting, it has the same quality, the same
visual quality. But if an art historian or a connoisseur
decides to upgrade it or downgrade it, and the art
market accepts that change in status, I mean we're talking
about adding several zeros or subtracting several zeros to the
(13:32):
price of this painting. Even though it's the same painting.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
It's difficult because even art experts are fallible, so sometimes
they'll make a judgment and sometimes they'll change it. And
the market really does decide, you know. It takes into
account all the available information and says, well, we can
listen to this scholar, and we can listen to that scholar,
(13:57):
but we noticed that that museum didn't exhibit that painting
as a Leonardo, and on balance, the market will decide
the value of this work.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Well, you describe these nine grades of authenticity, but it
seems that Warhole kind of obliterates many of those grades.
This brings us back to the story of the chay
Guavara silk screen that I teased people with at the
beginning of this episode. Tell us how this chay Guavara
(14:28):
painting comes into existence. It's quite a fascinating tale.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, it starts, as we said, with Andy and Jerry,
with Warhole and Malanga, and in nineteen sixty three when
they meet, Warhol is looking for somebody to help him
do these silk screens, these pictures that aren't what we
would traditionally call paintings or art, and Malanga, as well
(14:56):
as being very cool and very beautiful, which matters to
Warhole has also had experience as silk screening, not art
but actually men's ties, men's neckwear. He already knows how
to do these things, and he's got a useful skill,
and they set to it and they create an astonishing
(15:17):
number of screen prints in the first year. I think
they do something like sixty Liz Taylor's, a handful of Elvis's,
a lot of those car crash pictures. All of these
are multiples, so lots of screen prints, and within the
screen prints, if you've ever seen a warhole, quite a
(15:39):
lot of repetitive images too. So they work really really
hard churning out these things, and Andy is building a
name for himself and they're getting more and more into
the underground and artistic circles, both Malanga and Andy. And
by about nineteen sixty four sixty five, Andy is also
(16:02):
getting very interested in film. He's made some things on film,
and he's quite key to use one of the very
new fangled video cameras, but video cameras then are very
very expensive. And what he does is he comes to
a deal where he says, look, I will run off
(16:23):
some screen prints of a portrait of myself from an
assetate he'd made a year earlier, and I will give
those to you in exchange for having the video to use.
So he's really getting into using these screen prints almost
(16:43):
as currency because there are so many of them. He
swaps them for all sorts of things, and Gerard is
involved in those, and Gerrard is actually involved in his films.
And then what happens is that they've both done so
much of this screen printing and filming that Gerard is
(17:06):
beginning to tire of what he calls the factory scene.
And he's also in love actually with a Italian society
beauty called Benedetta, and he follows her to Rome. He
says to Andy, look, I'm just going to stop. I'm
off to Rome. I'm off to Italy for the film festival.
And Andy tries to persuade him to stay because obviously
(17:29):
he's a very valuable person in the making of all
these screen prints, but no, no, no, Gerard heads off.
About a month in to being in Italy, Gerared runs
out of money, so he telegrams Andy and says, I
am broke. You promised, please send money, but he gets
(17:53):
no reply, possibly because Andy is a not really very
amused that Gerard has left him in the lurch.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I mean, Andy could be quite cruel, I think to
his associates, couldn't he.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yes, he was certainly very keen on getting the best
use out of them.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So we have Andy in New York. He's lost his assistant,
Jerry in Rome, chasing this society beauty, running out of money,
writing to Andy. Andy's ignoring him. So what happens next?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
So what happens next is that Jered simply does on
his own and for himself what he has always done
with Andy, which is he takes a striking image, in
this case one of the jacobarra taken after his death,
and he sends the photograph off to get some assetates made,
(18:53):
and then he runs off some screenprints. At first he
runs off a couple, and he gets in touch with
Andy and says, listen, I'm doing these as warholes. I'm
sure you won't mind, And again he doesn't get an answer,
so he assumes it's okay, and then he runs off
(19:13):
fifty more versions and copies for an exhibition at an
Italian art gallery called the Tartaruga Gallery.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And he's very clear that he is proposing to sell
these as Andy warholes. They're not circle of warhole, to
use the old distinction. They are Andy warholes absolutely, and
Andy doesn't say yes, but he doesn't say no.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Andy doesn't say anything. Jared keeps saying, I assume it's okay.
And of course the way he tells and sells it
to the gallery owner is that these are warholes. I mean,
the gallery owner undeniably believes that they are. So the
show is a complete sellout, and in fact, the pictures,
(19:59):
the paintings are sold before the exhibition even opens. It's
a huge success. And Gerard does try telling Andy, look,
I've made you a huge success in communisticaly, he says,
but he still doesn't get any answer from Andy. The
rumors start flying that these are not actually real warholes,
(20:26):
and the gallery owner gets wind of these rumors and
he confronts Malanga and he says to him, listen, are
these real or not? Because I have to tell you
that forgery carries the fifteen to twenty year prison sentence
in Italy.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So this is a big problem for Jerry because he's
been running off these things. I mean, they're really not
clearly not warholes, and he is now facing spending half
a lifetime in an Italian jail. So what does he do?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
It's an absolute disaster from his point of view. There
is no money, threatened with jail and a very very
angry gallery owner, and he wires Andy a telegram saying
I will be in an Italian municipal prison without bail.
(21:23):
Please help me, Please please help me. And then what
I think is a very nice sixties touch signs it
peace Gerard.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
So there we are. Jerry Malanga is, in his own words,
trapped like a rat in Rome. He's threatened with fifteen
to twenty years in prison. He writes to Andy Warhol
one more time, begging for help, and we'll hear how
Warhole responds. After the break, I'm back with Alice Sherwood,
(22:05):
the author of the book Authenticity. We're talking about authenticity
in art. We are talking, in particular about a very
interesting episode in Andy Warhol's life where we left it.
Warhole's long term assistant, Jerry Malanga, had gone freelance sold
(22:26):
silkscreen prints in Rome, claimed they were Warhol originals. Warhole
possibly didn't know anything about it. Warhole certainly hadn't said
anything about it. And when Jerry Mlanger was threatened with
jail for forgery. He begged Andy to save his skin.
So Andy broke his silence. What did he say?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Eventually he breaks the silence and he agrees to authenticate
the pictures that Malanga has made on the condition that
he receives the proceeds of the sale. So he wires
the gallery owner and he says, Jay Gubars are originals. However,
(23:06):
Malanga not authorized to sell them. Contact me the bill.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Let's just underline that for a second. So Warhole may
not have even known these paintings existed. I mean, he
may have known because Malanga was writing to him, but
he may not even have known these paintings exist. Here's
these complaints from Italy that there are these forgeries circulating.
He gets this begging message from Malanga saying you've got
(23:30):
to help me, and his response is to retroactively create
genuine Andy Warholes. When he sends this telegram and he
says the Cheguavara paintings are genuine, what is he doing
is he is he stealing Jerry Mlanga's paintings, Is he
saving Malenger's skin? Or is the whole thing this astounding
(23:51):
piece of conceptual art how do we even understand what's
going on here?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I think we need to look back at Andy, who
was very, very keen on money to understand what was
going on in his head. And Andy a couple of
years earlier had worked out that he could put his
name on things and they would become more valuable or
(24:16):
they would become warholes. So he was ahead of the game,
if you like, in terms of understanding how art might
become a brand. And he even put an advert in
the Village Voice saying, this is Andy Warhol, I will
put my name to any of the following and he
sends a long list of all the things that he
(24:36):
would happily sign or endorse, from records to film equipment
to food. So I would say it's unlikely that top
of his mind he's tried to save Malanga's skin. So
I think it's in my view, something quite different. For me,
it is the moment when Warhol realized and enacted the
(25:01):
fact that what an artist said about a work could
be more important than the work itself. He was the
artist as authorizer. So I call it the authenticity shift
from a concept of artist's hand to the artist's brand,
where you have a whole collection of products that can
(25:25):
have the artists or the brands mark on them, but
don't necessarily need to have been made by the person
whose name they bear. I think it just points up
what a tangle we have got ourselves in about what
is authentic in a world where things are not just
(25:49):
handmade but machine made and multiplied, and where an artist
like Andy can make ten thousand works in a lifetime
you know you've written about for me, he made somewhere
between I think twenty one and forty.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
This seems to be an extraordinary parater because people everywhere,
but particularly in the art market, people prize scarcity. Ideally,
they prize uniqueness. And there's one of the reasons why
Leonardo da Vinci works are so highly valued, and Vermire
works are so highly valued, are so few of them.
(26:28):
And yet Warhol breaks all those rules, and yet the
Financial Times called him a one man art market index.
His whole thing was ubiquity and repetition. So he breaks
the scarcity rules, he breaks the uniqueness rules, and yet
his works are worth an enormous amount of money. So
what lessons should we draw from that?
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I think the lessons that we want to draw is
that we're living in different times, so that oil paintings,
if you like, belonged to a time where there were
fewer objects, more time to appreciate of subtlety and layers
(27:10):
of paint and the way they were applied, and things
were scarce. Pictures were limited by the hours of an
artist's life, and the number of objects that people owned
and the number of things vying for people's attention were
far fewer, so we were clear what authenticity was. Now
(27:31):
we live in very very different times. We live in
very crowded times. We are assailed by images all the time,
and so resources aren't the scarce thing. The real scarcity
is our attention. I think you could classify your warhole
(27:51):
buyers as people who are cash rich but time poor.
And what warholes do above all is their attention grabbing
they become and must have because you can appreciate a
warhole very quickly. We immediately recognize, as you said earlier,
as a warhole. We know it's a warhole, and if
we put it on our walls, everybody else will know
(28:14):
it's a warhole too, without any explanation needed. So it's
a very time effective purchase. We've moved into something where
the economy, the scarcity in the economy was things and money,
to an economy where the scarcity is really scarcity of attention.
(28:37):
And therefore the sort of things that we respond to
and particularly in the art world, are ones that are
much more like posters. Things have to stand out, and
they have to stand out quickly.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Now I can't help but draw a line between Warhole
and people, and I wanted to ask you about people.
So People, as many people will know, is a digital artist.
He has been creating the lot and posting it on
the web every day for quite a while and attracting
(29:17):
quite a followership. So's he's created this brand value. He's
got people's attention. And then Peopaule announced that he was selling,
well not really selling an artwork. He was selling an
nft A non fungible token asserting ownership of an artwork.
(29:41):
So effectively, anybody can look at the artwork that's free,
it's infinitely reproducible, but only one person has this cryptographic
token that asserts you own the work. And that cryptographic
token sold for nearly seventy million dollars. And I would
(30:04):
love to ask Andy Warhol what he makes of it all,
But I can't ask Candy Warhole because he's no longer
with us, So I want to ask you, Alis, well,
what do you think of people and this seventy million
dollar cryptographic token and what do you think Andy would
have made of it?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Well? I think People's seventy million price tag for his
work is absolutely spot on for our attention grabbing society,
our attention economy, because it was all over the papers
and all over the media. And of course, if you
(30:40):
get a high price for a work, that in itself
feeds the value of the work because it makes it
part of the attention economy. I think Warhol would have
beaten people to it, to be honest, because he was
always ahead of the game. He knew about the artist
as a brand before anyone else, and I think he
(31:03):
was always one for new tech. So I have a
hunch that Andy might have been people.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Now, Alice, Before I let you go, as a student
of authenticity and someone who clearly knows a great deal
about art and art markets and the history of art,
I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on one
of my favorite cautionary tales which loyal listeners will know
all about the art Forger and the Pope is the
(31:31):
title of the episode, and this was an occasion in
the nineteen thirties where a great art critic, Abraham Bradius,
was persuaded to authenticate this newly discovered work as a Vermir,
and not only a Vermir, but the masterpiece of Johannes
(31:54):
Vermir of Delft, and Vermir, as we've alluded to, is
a mysterious figure. He didn't paint many paintings. It was
sensational to discover a new one, and of course it
was too good to be true, and the whole thing
turned out to be a rotten fraud perpetrated by a
really repulsive character called Hahn van Megrin, and yet a
(32:19):
lot of people believed it, and a lot of people
continued to believe that, even when the fraud was discovered,
that Van Magrin was something of a hero. It feels
like a story with something to tell us today.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I think it's a wonderful story. And as you say,
so much of the fraud that was perpetrated, it was
the story that people wanted to hear, and in particular,
as you say, Brady's had been longing for some more
(32:52):
Vermiers to show up. So I think there's a huge
effect in the success of any art, forgery or any
other sort, if it taps into something that people want
and some deep desire. So I think there's a universal
(33:14):
thing to watch out for, which is if something really
makes people feel strongly you know, look again, what's going
on there?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
So Alice the book just to remind people is called authenticity,
and you're really wrestling with this subject from every direction.
It's full of fascinating stories. Having read it, I was
left with the question for you, which is is this
a more authentic age than before because we value authenticity
(33:46):
or is it more inauthentic than ever I think?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
And this has obsessed me for all the time I've
been writing the book, that we are in an age
where authenticity is more important to us than ever before,
and the pursuit of authenticity in very many ways has
become one of the most important goals in life. And
yet at the same time, we have created this world
(34:13):
that's faker than ever before. Really, across the board, it
doesn't matter whether you're talking to art people or academia
or fashion or technology or policy, they're all worried about
how inauthentic things are becoming. So we have this peculiar paradox,
(34:33):
which is really what I wanted to investigate. I'm very
much reminded of that famous phrase by William James, which
is that at the end of our days, our life
experience will equal what we paid attention to, whether by
choice or by default. So we are if we don't
(34:55):
pay attention to the things that are worthwhile, if we're
too distracted by the fakes, we're at risk of living
lives that are less our own, and that really matters.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Thank you so much, Alice Sherwood.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Alice Sherwood's book Authenticity is available to buy now from
all Good booksellers. And if you enjoyed this conversation, you
might also like to go back and listen to our
episode on Van Megren's not very convincing forgery of a
lost Vermire masterpiece. It's called The Art Forger, The Nazi
and the Pope. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
(35:44):
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Edith Uslow. The sound design and original music
is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Jemma Saunders and rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been
(36:05):
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Gretta Cohene,
Leitel Millard, John Schnaz, Carlie mcgliori and Eric Sandler. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded
in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
(36:25):
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review
go on you know it helps us and if you
want to hear the show, add free sign up for
Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Pushkin. Andy Warhole once gave a silkscreen portrait of Marilyn
Monroe to a skeptical friend. Just tell me in your
heart of hearts that you know it isn't art, said
his friend. Warhole wasn't offended. Wrap it up in brown paper,
put it in the back of a closet, he replied.
(00:37):
One day it'll be worth a million dollars. Perhaps he
under sold himself. In May twenty twenty two, another of
Warholes marilyn silkscreens, Shot Sage Blue Marilyn, became the most
expensive work of twentieth century art when it sold for
one hundred and ninety five million dollars. Shot Sage Blue
(01:00):
Marilyn's backstory is as striking as the price. In nineteen
sixty four, Dorothy Podber, an artist and provocateur, came to
Warhole studio the factory, pulled out a gun and fired
through several of the portraits. Four years later, Warhol himself
was shot and nearly killed in the factory, which can
(01:20):
only have added to the mystique of bullet scarred Warhole pictures.
The picture deserves the cliche iconic, but there is a
much more obscure portrait that has a claim to being
Warhol's most interesting and definitive work. May I offer for
your consideration Chay, a silk screen picture based on a
(01:43):
newspaper photograph of the corpse of the recently executed Marxist
revolutionary leader Chay Guavara. It is, in most ways a
classic Warhol portrait. It was made in the same way
and by the same man as many of his other
instantly recognizable silk screens. But what makes Chay so interesting
(02:06):
is that when it was first exhibited for sale in
row Home's leading art gallery, Andy Warhol apparently had no
idea that the picture existed. I'm Tim Harford and you're
listening to Cautionary Tales. This is another one of our
(02:43):
cautionary conversations, and I'm very excited today to welcome Alice Sherwood.
Alice has worked for organizations from Accentia to the BBC
and is currently a visiting Senior Research Fellow at the
Policy Institute at King's College, London. But the reason I
wanted to talk to her is because she's written an
absolutely delightful book titled Authenticity, Reclaiming Real in a Counterfeit Culture.
(03:11):
It's absolutely packed with stories I hadn't heard. That immediately
made me think and learn. Alice, welcome to Caution Detales.
Speaker 2 (03:20):
Thank you, Tim. I'm really glad to be here.
Speaker 1 (03:23):
Well, I'm glad you're here as well. And I found
out about this story from your book Authenticity. And I
was a little bit naughty in my introduction because I
said that the Chay picture was made in the same
way and by the same man as many of Warhol's
other silk screens. But that man wasn't Andy Warhole, was it.
Speaker 2 (03:42):
It wasn't Andy Warhole. It's absolutely true that it was
the same man who made many of Andy's warholes, and
it was a man called Gerard Malanga or Jerry, who
was Warhole's very very long time assistant in all his
silk screening and in much else. And in fact, this
(04:07):
was so well known and where knowlished that there's an
interview with Andy Warhol for Cavalier magazine when they're asking
Andy all about his pictures, and after a while he says,
slightly irritated, if you want to know about my pictures,
why don't you speak to Gerard? He painted most of them,
So it.
Speaker 1 (04:26):
Wasn't a secret at all. Andy was playing with these
ideas of authenticity and authorship. Could you tell me a
little bit about the actual process of making these silk screens,
what was going on when they were made.
Speaker 2 (04:38):
Well, a silk screen is effectively a sophisticated multi layered stencil.
So in order to make a silk screen, you don't
take her paint brush in a canvas. What you take
is an image, which can be a drawing or a photo,
and you have various stencils made of it for the
different colors. And then what you do is you put
(04:59):
the stencils on top of the canvas or paper, and
you push the paint through with a squeegee to get
a layer of that color, and then you use another
stencil for another color and push the paint through there.
And sometimes you might touch it up a bit with
a paint bush at the end, but mostly when Andy
and Jerry worked together, they did very little touching up.
(05:23):
It was quite a mechanical, quite a fast process.
Speaker 1 (05:28):
And the photographs themselves were not by Warhole, and I
understand the stencils weren't made by Warhole either.
Speaker 2 (05:35):
There was an awful lot of if you like, borrowing,
an outsourcing. When he wanted to stop being a commercial artist.
He was very successful commercial artist, particularly making drawings for
shops and stores and retail outlets of ladies, handbags and shoes,
but he wanted to move into the artistic world properly,
(06:00):
and his big inspiration was that he wouldn't make drawings anymore.
What he would do would be to take photos, and
not just any photos, but I can't nick striking emotive photos.
So these could be Hollywood stars like Marilyn monroel Is Taylor.
And then what he would do is have the stencils
the ascetates made for him by someone else, and then
(06:23):
he and Jerry or other people would make the images.
Speaker 1 (06:27):
So you've got these images where the photograph is not
by Warhol and the stencil is made by a printer,
and then Jerry Malanga is often the guy actually squeezing
the paint onto it and doing the silkscreen process. So
is it fair to say that in some cases Warhol
would never have touched the canvas at all.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
It's absolutely fair to say that. And in fact, later
on in his life he actually had a rubber stamp
made of his signature, and he gave the rubber stamp
to friends so that they could sign in inverted Commas
his pictures for him, and certainly as time went on
he outsourced more and more, so you certainly got situations
(07:10):
where the whole thing was made off site, sometimes with
instructions Aroundy, sometimes with instructions from someone who knew Andy,
and he really wouldn't see the result, sometimes until it
turned up to where he was meeting the client, still
slightly with the paint wet.
Speaker 1 (07:30):
So this is a huge break, I think, from traditions
in art. And it's not like a stylistic break in
the way that say, a Jackson Pollock drip painting looks
different to a Rubens. I mean, stylistically they're incredibly different.
But deep down people really really care where the Rubens
actually painted the Rubens, and people really care whether Pollock
(07:53):
painted the Pollock. But in the case of the Warholes,
we know perfectly well that Warhole didn't touch the painting
in some cases and gave credit to Jerry Malango, and
that was kind of part of the art.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
He was very deliberately distancing himself from the classical way
of making pictures. You know, our classic picture of the
artist is the man. It's usually a man with the
brushloaded with paint, conceiving of this great image which he
then paints, and authenticity is linked to a person, a
(08:28):
person's idea, a person's inspiration, and a person's work. And
Andy disposed pretty much of all of that. You know,
he actually said once, I want to be a machine.
He didn't want works that were literally man made. He
wanted to shock people and to make art industrial. And
that really messes with our ideas of authenticity.
Speaker 1 (08:51):
No, it really does. And he wasn't, I think, the
first artist to not necessarily be doing much of the
actual painting, but he does seem to have been the
first artist to have made a virtue of it. And
I wanted to go back all the way back to
Ruben's because there is this wonderful passage in your book
where you describe various negotiations between Rubens and various rich,
(09:14):
powerful clients, and what they're arguing about is how much
of the painting is Ruben's actually going to do.
Speaker 2 (09:20):
There's a completely lovely correspondence which is between a diplomat
called Sir Dudley Carlton, who is very keen to acquire
a Rubens and is prepared to swap all sorts of
ancient antiquities and statues that he's bought in Italy for
a genuine Rubens. And Rubens is very helpful and says,
(09:40):
I offer you the flower of my stock. But as
he describes each of his paintings, he keeps saying, oh, yes,
this one is completely wonderful. It was begun by one
of my students, but I'll touch it up so it
can pass for an original. And each time Dudley Carton goes,
that's not really what I had in mind, and again
Rubens comes back and said, oh well, I'll offer you
(10:01):
another painting. And this correspondence keeps going until Dudley Carlton says,
I want one that is by Rubens and only by Rubens,
And at the end of that Rubens says, very charmingly,
of course I'll do that for you, but it will
cost you a bit more. So.
Speaker 1 (10:18):
People were very clear that, you know, not every Rubens
is exclusively by Rubens, and Rubens was, well, I I
guess we don't know exactly what the clients were getting,
but it seemed that he was quite transparent about it. Now,
of course, in the modern world we have to look
back at Rubens or Rembrandts or whatever and we have
(10:40):
to deduce how much were they actually involved. And I
learned from your book that there were these quite fine
distinctions between saying the Rembrandt and studio of Rembrandt and
circle of Rembrandt. Could you explain those to us?
Speaker 2 (10:55):
Yes, I mean one of the most fascinating things is
there are if you're in the art market, and particularly
if you're an auction has basically nine levels of authenticity
for a picture, so going from totally authentic to really
not sure, and you will find them at the back
of auction catalogs. But just to pick the key ones.
(11:16):
If you have the artist's full name in the description
of picture, so ren Brandt van Raun, they think it's
actually by the artist, anything less than the full name,
and it's less than totally by the artists. So it
might be studio, of which means, rather like Rubens, it
(11:41):
was done by some students, maybe with some touchups or
the original sketch by the artist. Or it can be circle,
of which means it was done by someone at the
same time who was an admirer or working in the
same tradition, and that's slightly less valuable obviously than one
completely by the master. And then if something is done,
(12:04):
say several hundred years later, but in that style, it's
worth a lot less, but it would be described as
manner of And all these gradations affect the authenticity but
also the price. And then this to a huge extent,
to a huge extent. So I write about something called
(12:25):
a drawing called Labella Princeipessa, which the owner totally believes
is by Leonardo da Vinci, in which case it will
be worth he says, one hundred and fifty million dollars.
But when it was sold, it was sold as manner
of so at nineteenth century kind of imitation, and it
(12:45):
was sold for twenty two thousand dollars.
Speaker 1 (12:50):
Cautionary tales will be back after the break. Well, I'm
curious as to what we should make of the decisions
of the army market in this respect, because you've got
(13:11):
the same painting, it has the same quality, the same
visual quality. But if an art historian or a connoisseur
decides to upgrade it or downgrade it, and the art
market accepts that change in status, I mean we're talking
about adding several zeros or subtracting several zeros to the
(13:32):
price of this painting. Even though it's the same painting.
Speaker 2 (13:35):
It's difficult because even art experts are fallible, so sometimes
they'll make a judgment and sometimes they'll change it. And
the market really does decide, you know. It takes into
account all the available information and says, well, we can
listen to this scholar, and we can listen to that scholar,
(13:57):
but we noticed that that museum didn't exhibit that painting
as a Leonardo, and on balance, the market will decide
the value of this work.
Speaker 1 (14:07):
Well, you describe these nine grades of authenticity, but it
seems that Warhole kind of obliterates many of those grades.
This brings us back to the story of the chay
Guavara silk screen that I teased people with at the
beginning of this episode. Tell us how this chay Guavara
(14:28):
painting comes into existence. It's quite a fascinating tale.
Speaker 2 (14:32):
Well, it starts, as we said, with Andy and Jerry,
with Warhole and Malanga, and in nineteen sixty three when
they meet, Warhol is looking for somebody to help him
do these silk screens, these pictures that aren't what we
would traditionally call paintings or art, and Malanga, as well
(14:56):
as being very cool and very beautiful, which matters to
Warhole has also had experience as silk screening, not art
but actually men's ties, men's neckwear. He already knows how
to do these things, and he's got a useful skill,
and they set to it and they create an astonishing
(15:17):
number of screen prints in the first year. I think
they do something like sixty Liz Taylor's, a handful of Elvis's,
a lot of those car crash pictures. All of these
are multiples, so lots of screen prints, and within the
screen prints, if you've ever seen a warhole, quite a
(15:39):
lot of repetitive images too. So they work really really
hard churning out these things, and Andy is building a
name for himself and they're getting more and more into
the underground and artistic circles, both Malanga and Andy. And
by about nineteen sixty four sixty five, Andy is also
(16:02):
getting very interested in film. He's made some things on film,
and he's quite key to use one of the very
new fangled video cameras, but video cameras then are very
very expensive. And what he does is he comes to
a deal where he says, look, I will run off
(16:23):
some screen prints of a portrait of myself from an
assetate he'd made a year earlier, and I will give
those to you in exchange for having the video to use.
So he's really getting into using these screen prints almost
(16:43):
as currency because there are so many of them. He
swaps them for all sorts of things, and Gerard is
involved in those, and Gerrard is actually involved in his films.
And then what happens is that they've both done so
much of this screen printing and filming that Gerard is
(17:06):
beginning to tire of what he calls the factory scene.
And he's also in love actually with a Italian society
beauty called Benedetta, and he follows her to Rome. He
says to Andy, look, I'm just going to stop. I'm
off to Rome. I'm off to Italy for the film festival.
And Andy tries to persuade him to stay because obviously
(17:29):
he's a very valuable person in the making of all
these screen prints, but no, no, no, Gerard heads off.
About a month in to being in Italy, Gerared runs
out of money, so he telegrams Andy and says, I
am broke. You promised, please send money, but he gets
(17:53):
no reply, possibly because Andy is a not really very
amused that Gerard has left him in the lurch.
Speaker 1 (18:03):
I mean, Andy could be quite cruel, I think to
his associates, couldn't he.
Speaker 2 (18:06):
Yes, he was certainly very keen on getting the best
use out of them.
Speaker 1 (18:13):
So we have Andy in New York. He's lost his assistant,
Jerry in Rome, chasing this society beauty, running out of money,
writing to Andy. Andy's ignoring him. So what happens next?
Speaker 2 (18:29):
So what happens next is that Jered simply does on
his own and for himself what he has always done
with Andy, which is he takes a striking image, in
this case one of the jacobarra taken after his death,
and he sends the photograph off to get some assetates made,
(18:53):
and then he runs off some screenprints. At first he
runs off a couple, and he gets in touch with
Andy and says, listen, I'm doing these as warholes. I'm
sure you won't mind, And again he doesn't get an answer,
so he assumes it's okay, and then he runs off
(19:13):
fifty more versions and copies for an exhibition at an
Italian art gallery called the Tartaruga Gallery.
Speaker 1 (19:23):
And he's very clear that he is proposing to sell
these as Andy warholes. They're not circle of warhole, to
use the old distinction. They are Andy warholes absolutely, and
Andy doesn't say yes, but he doesn't say no.
Speaker 2 (19:38):
Andy doesn't say anything. Jared keeps saying, I assume it's okay.
And of course the way he tells and sells it
to the gallery owner is that these are warholes. I mean,
the gallery owner undeniably believes that they are. So the
show is a complete sellout, and in fact, the pictures,
(19:59):
the paintings are sold before the exhibition even opens. It's
a huge success. And Gerard does try telling Andy, look,
I've made you a huge success in communisticaly, he says,
but he still doesn't get any answer from Andy. The
rumors start flying that these are not actually real warholes,
(20:26):
and the gallery owner gets wind of these rumors and
he confronts Malanga and he says to him, listen, are
these real or not? Because I have to tell you
that forgery carries the fifteen to twenty year prison sentence
in Italy.
Speaker 1 (20:45):
So this is a big problem for Jerry because he's
been running off these things. I mean, they're really not
clearly not warholes, and he is now facing spending half
a lifetime in an Italian jail. So what does he do?
Speaker 2 (21:02):
It's an absolute disaster from his point of view. There
is no money, threatened with jail and a very very
angry gallery owner, and he wires Andy a telegram saying
I will be in an Italian municipal prison without bail.
(21:23):
Please help me, Please please help me. And then what
I think is a very nice sixties touch signs it
peace Gerard.
Speaker 1 (21:34):
So there we are. Jerry Malanga is, in his own words,
trapped like a rat in Rome. He's threatened with fifteen
to twenty years in prison. He writes to Andy Warhol
one more time, begging for help, and we'll hear how
Warhole responds. After the break, I'm back with Alice Sherwood,
(22:05):
the author of the book Authenticity. We're talking about authenticity
in art. We are talking, in particular about a very
interesting episode in Andy Warhol's life where we left it.
Warhole's long term assistant, Jerry Malanga, had gone freelance sold
(22:26):
silkscreen prints in Rome, claimed they were Warhol originals. Warhole
possibly didn't know anything about it. Warhole certainly hadn't said
anything about it. And when Jerry Mlanger was threatened with
jail for forgery. He begged Andy to save his skin.
So Andy broke his silence. What did he say?
Speaker 2 (22:45):
Eventually he breaks the silence and he agrees to authenticate
the pictures that Malanga has made on the condition that
he receives the proceeds of the sale. So he wires
the gallery owner and he says, Jay Gubars are originals. However,
(23:06):
Malanga not authorized to sell them. Contact me the bill.
Speaker 1 (23:09):
Let's just underline that for a second. So Warhole may
not have even known these paintings existed. I mean, he
may have known because Malanga was writing to him, but
he may not even have known these paintings exist. Here's
these complaints from Italy that there are these forgeries circulating.
He gets this begging message from Malanga saying you've got
(23:30):
to help me, and his response is to retroactively create
genuine Andy Warholes. When he sends this telegram and he
says the Cheguavara paintings are genuine, what is he doing
is he is he stealing Jerry Mlanga's paintings, Is he
saving Malenger's skin? Or is the whole thing this astounding
(23:51):
piece of conceptual art how do we even understand what's
going on here?
Speaker 2 (23:55):
I think we need to look back at Andy, who
was very, very keen on money to understand what was
going on in his head. And Andy a couple of
years earlier had worked out that he could put his
name on things and they would become more valuable or
(24:16):
they would become warholes. So he was ahead of the game,
if you like, in terms of understanding how art might
become a brand. And he even put an advert in
the Village Voice saying, this is Andy Warhol, I will
put my name to any of the following and he
sends a long list of all the things that he
(24:36):
would happily sign or endorse, from records to film equipment
to food. So I would say it's unlikely that top
of his mind he's tried to save Malanga's skin. So
I think it's in my view, something quite different. For me,
it is the moment when Warhol realized and enacted the
(25:01):
fact that what an artist said about a work could
be more important than the work itself. He was the
artist as authorizer. So I call it the authenticity shift
from a concept of artist's hand to the artist's brand,
where you have a whole collection of products that can
(25:25):
have the artists or the brands mark on them, but
don't necessarily need to have been made by the person
whose name they bear. I think it just points up
what a tangle we have got ourselves in about what
is authentic in a world where things are not just
(25:49):
handmade but machine made and multiplied, and where an artist
like Andy can make ten thousand works in a lifetime
you know you've written about for me, he made somewhere
between I think twenty one and forty.
Speaker 1 (26:05):
This seems to be an extraordinary parater because people everywhere,
but particularly in the art market, people prize scarcity. Ideally,
they prize uniqueness. And there's one of the reasons why
Leonardo da Vinci works are so highly valued, and Vermire
works are so highly valued, are so few of them.
(26:28):
And yet Warhol breaks all those rules, and yet the
Financial Times called him a one man art market index.
His whole thing was ubiquity and repetition. So he breaks
the scarcity rules, he breaks the uniqueness rules, and yet
his works are worth an enormous amount of money. So
what lessons should we draw from that?
Speaker 2 (26:48):
I think the lessons that we want to draw is
that we're living in different times, so that oil paintings,
if you like, belonged to a time where there were
fewer objects, more time to appreciate of subtlety and layers
(27:10):
of paint and the way they were applied, and things
were scarce. Pictures were limited by the hours of an
artist's life, and the number of objects that people owned
and the number of things vying for people's attention were
far fewer, so we were clear what authenticity was. Now
(27:31):
we live in very very different times. We live in
very crowded times. We are assailed by images all the time,
and so resources aren't the scarce thing. The real scarcity
is our attention. I think you could classify your warhole
(27:51):
buyers as people who are cash rich but time poor.
And what warholes do above all is their attention grabbing
they become and must have because you can appreciate a
warhole very quickly. We immediately recognize, as you said earlier,
as a warhole. We know it's a warhole, and if
we put it on our walls, everybody else will know
(28:14):
it's a warhole too, without any explanation needed. So it's
a very time effective purchase. We've moved into something where
the economy, the scarcity in the economy was things and money,
to an economy where the scarcity is really scarcity of attention.
(28:37):
And therefore the sort of things that we respond to
and particularly in the art world, are ones that are
much more like posters. Things have to stand out, and
they have to stand out quickly.
Speaker 1 (28:52):
Now I can't help but draw a line between Warhole
and people, and I wanted to ask you about people.
So People, as many people will know, is a digital artist.
He has been creating the lot and posting it on
the web every day for quite a while and attracting
(29:17):
quite a followership. So's he's created this brand value. He's
got people's attention. And then Peopaule announced that he was selling,
well not really selling an artwork. He was selling an
nft A non fungible token asserting ownership of an artwork.
(29:41):
So effectively, anybody can look at the artwork that's free,
it's infinitely reproducible, but only one person has this cryptographic
token that asserts you own the work. And that cryptographic
token sold for nearly seventy million dollars. And I would
(30:04):
love to ask Andy Warhol what he makes of it all,
But I can't ask Candy Warhole because he's no longer
with us, So I want to ask you, Alis, well,
what do you think of people and this seventy million
dollar cryptographic token and what do you think Andy would
have made of it?
Speaker 2 (30:20):
Well? I think People's seventy million price tag for his
work is absolutely spot on for our attention grabbing society,
our attention economy, because it was all over the papers
and all over the media. And of course, if you
(30:40):
get a high price for a work, that in itself
feeds the value of the work because it makes it
part of the attention economy. I think Warhol would have
beaten people to it, to be honest, because he was
always ahead of the game. He knew about the artist
as a brand before anyone else, and I think he
(31:03):
was always one for new tech. So I have a
hunch that Andy might have been people.
Speaker 1 (31:10):
Now, Alice, Before I let you go, as a student
of authenticity and someone who clearly knows a great deal
about art and art markets and the history of art,
I wanted to ask you for your thoughts on one
of my favorite cautionary tales which loyal listeners will know
all about the art Forger and the Pope is the
(31:31):
title of the episode, and this was an occasion in
the nineteen thirties where a great art critic, Abraham Bradius,
was persuaded to authenticate this newly discovered work as a Vermir,
and not only a Vermir, but the masterpiece of Johannes
(31:54):
Vermir of Delft, and Vermir, as we've alluded to, is
a mysterious figure. He didn't paint many paintings. It was
sensational to discover a new one, and of course it
was too good to be true, and the whole thing
turned out to be a rotten fraud perpetrated by a
really repulsive character called Hahn van Megrin, and yet a
(32:19):
lot of people believed it, and a lot of people
continued to believe that, even when the fraud was discovered,
that Van Magrin was something of a hero. It feels
like a story with something to tell us today.
Speaker 2 (32:32):
I think it's a wonderful story. And as you say,
so much of the fraud that was perpetrated, it was
the story that people wanted to hear, and in particular,
as you say, Brady's had been longing for some more
(32:52):
Vermiers to show up. So I think there's a huge
effect in the success of any art, forgery or any
other sort, if it taps into something that people want
and some deep desire. So I think there's a universal
(33:14):
thing to watch out for, which is if something really
makes people feel strongly you know, look again, what's going
on there?
Speaker 1 (33:25):
So Alice the book just to remind people is called authenticity,
and you're really wrestling with this subject from every direction.
It's full of fascinating stories. Having read it, I was
left with the question for you, which is is this
a more authentic age than before because we value authenticity
(33:46):
or is it more inauthentic than ever I think?
Speaker 2 (33:49):
And this has obsessed me for all the time I've
been writing the book, that we are in an age
where authenticity is more important to us than ever before,
and the pursuit of authenticity in very many ways has
become one of the most important goals in life. And
yet at the same time, we have created this world
(34:13):
that's faker than ever before. Really, across the board, it
doesn't matter whether you're talking to art people or academia
or fashion or technology or policy, they're all worried about
how inauthentic things are becoming. So we have this peculiar paradox,
(34:33):
which is really what I wanted to investigate. I'm very
much reminded of that famous phrase by William James, which
is that at the end of our days, our life
experience will equal what we paid attention to, whether by
choice or by default. So we are if we don't
(34:55):
pay attention to the things that are worthwhile, if we're
too distracted by the fakes, we're at risk of living
lives that are less our own, and that really matters.
Speaker 1 (35:09):
Thank you so much, Alice Sherwood.
Speaker 2 (35:11):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (35:15):
Alice Sherwood's book Authenticity is available to buy now from
all Good booksellers. And if you enjoyed this conversation, you
might also like to go back and listen to our
episode on Van Megren's not very convincing forgery of a
lost Vermire masterpiece. It's called The Art Forger, The Nazi
and the Pope. Cautionary Tales is written by me Tim
(35:44):
Harford with Andrew Wright. It's produced by Alice Fines with
support from Edith Uslow. The sound design and original music
is the work of Pascal Wise. Julia Barton edited the scripts.
It features the voice talents of Ben Crowe, Melanie Guttridge,
Jemma Saunders and rufus Wright. The show wouldn't have been
(36:05):
possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Ryan Dilly, Gretta Cohene,
Leitel Millard, John Schnaz, Carlie mcgliori and Eric Sandler. Cautionary
Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. It was recorded
in Wardall Studios in London by Tom Berry. If you
(36:25):
like the show, please remember to share, rate and review
go on you know it helps us and if you
want to hear the show, add free sign up for
Pushkin Plus on the show page in Apple Podcasts or
at pushkin dot fm, slash plus
Host
Tim Harford
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Stuff You Should Know
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.