Art forgery is the best crime tbh. It requires absolutely incredible artistic talent, technical skill, and attention to detail to make convincing fakes. Does anyone get hurt from it? No! The only people who suffer for it are the extremely wealthy who want the prestige of having original paintings in their own homes. It’s full of international intrigue and mystery. Perfect.
Also… art forgers like van Meegeren sometimes become a kind of folk hero. A swindler, sure, but a gentleman’s swindler.
I liked this guy’s story, Mark Landis, who conned several dozen museums into displaying his forgeries, but when the FBI came after him they couldn’t do anything because he had always given them away as donations. They said if they could have found that he’d ever taken anything in exchange they would have prosecuted him, but all he wanted was get to out of the house and meet people.
“The first painting Landis “donated” was a copy of a work by Maynard Dixon, an artist well-known for his paintings of cowboys and Indians. It started as impulse, Landis says, but then “everybody was just so nice and treated me with respect and deference and friendship, things I was very unused to — I mean, actually not used to at all. And I got addicted to it.””
And it looks like all his forgeries are done with cheap materials, like markers and Hobby Lobby frames.
Ok, but Wolfgang Beltracchi is probably one of the best Fraud Artists in the world.
His career brought him millions upon millions of dollars and lasted almost 40 years. He finally admitted to painting fraudulent art after the white paint he used came under scrutiny.
In The interview with Beltracchi, he said that none of his forgeries are copies, they’re all original works that the famous artists could have painted.
His wife was also in on the scam, she would dress up in old clothing and take pictures holding the paintings with old cameras to fake proof of the paintings’ ages.
At the end of the interview with Wolfgang Beltracchi he was asked if he felt he had done anything wrong, his answer was “ Yeah, I used the wrong kind of paint”
Just … the levels of con there, the fake photos and … wow. That’s incredible.
Heroes
Also fun fact we learned in class today: Michelangelo carved a sculpture of a Roman god, broke off the arm, and then buried it. The sculpture was dug up and was considered to be an authentic Roman artefact, until Michelangelo came along with the missing arm and called shenanigans on himself, just to prove he was as skilled a sculptor as the ancient Romans.
honestly mike? chill.
One of the fathers of art history as we know him today is Winckelmann. He was obsessed with ancient classic Greek and Roman art, and one of his biggest regrets was that while they had a lot of sculpture, authentic classical paintings were almost impossible to find (keep in mind this is the 18th century. We have barely started in Pompeii and archeology as a whole is in its infancy, so the examples were indeed very few and far between).
So he was incredibly happy when a friend of his, Anton Raphael Mengs, a respected painter in his own right, recovered an almost perfectly conserved ancient Roman painting depicting Jupiter and Ganymede. He praised the painting in the first edition of his seminal work on the art of the ancients, altho he later eliminated it due to the suspicious behaviour of one of Mengs’ collaborators, Giovanni Casanova (brother of the more famous playboy Casanova). Still, nothing really came out of those suspicions and the painting remained to be widely believed an authentic Roman painting until Anton Raphael Mengs himself, on his deathbed, revealed the truth to his sister: he had painted it then simulated finding it during an archaeological dig. Apparently he had meant it as good-natured prank but he wasn’t expecting Winckelmann to fall for it. He kept the secret as long as he could, to preserve his friend’s image as a flawless art coinnesseur, but the guilt was eating at him so much and Winckelmann was dead now so he decided he needed to unburden his soul before he left this earth.
I love this story because it reveals the very fundamental truth that no matter how much of an expert you are, you can still make mistakes.
