Stuff You Should KnowSelects: Seven - No, Wait, Five - Mysteries of the Art World
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!
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.
So enjoy. Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
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.
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.
That sounds like something I would skip though, even had I thought of it, or I don't know that I would have pulled.
The trigger on I think or I could see you pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself.
Right, But I would have just been engaged in self loathing for the rest of the podcast.
Well retroactively, I'm gonna say, I hope everyone enjoyed the podcast. Now let's talk about art mysteries.
I love this one, man, this is great. This reminds me of a Stuff you Should Know episode from years back. For some reason.
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 even try, and I don't even and we may do like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.
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.
But never furious because he wants to be mad. I don't know they should have called out series Fast and Loose.
That I think I've heard it before that that series is the highest grossing movie franchise in the history of film like worldwide.
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 his job now, yeah, because he's just getting rich off of making these movies, like I can't even imagine.
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 amount of your time shooting one of those films every few you know, a couple of times, well, I guess every few years.
I only saw one of those.
I think, Man, I'm slowly like degenerating into Bob Newhart. Man.
Have you known man good.
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.
I've noticed that's a great note. I love it. I've always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner.
So well, you've you've there, you go, You've got it.
All right, number one on the list. You want to talk a little uh cut of Asio.
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 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 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.
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 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, 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.
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 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 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?
I have so.
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.
Right, did you know that I did?
Oh?
You did?
Okay?
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.
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 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.
Her name was what was it, Judith.
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 that he ever signed, which a lot of people are like, Okay, wait a minute, let's examine this.
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, 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 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 spelled out in blood, kind of confessing to his crime.
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, 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.
Like before God, yeah, exactly, or de Bear's That painting still hangs at Saint John's co Cathedral in multitude.
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 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 he did.
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.
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.
I don't know. I didn't watch The Shield, Oh.
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, 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, it does. But his paintings are still just amazing. I can look at him all day, you know.
Yeah, me too. I like this. I like this stuff.
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 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 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 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 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 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 makes he makes Thomas Kinkaid look like puke as far as like you know, light mastery.
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. 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.
On Mona Lisa.
I think, so, yeah, it's, you know, the effect of the eyes following, which doesn't happen in all paintings with eyes.
Oh no, the Mona Lisa's eyes actually don't follow you. I think that was the big reveal of that one, was it?
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 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.
Still, yeah, there's still a lot better than anything I could say.
Yeah, it's not like there were stick figures, you know, out of nowhere.
They're like this, Vermere seems off.
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 love interest to Vermire, that was just I don't even think that was based on anything. It's just historical fiction.
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.
There.
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 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, 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 other thing I hadn't told.
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.
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.
It, and we would have found out by now.
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 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. 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.
Amazing.
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 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.
Very cool.
Yeah, so what do you think?
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, 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, 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.
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.
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.
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 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 the head of the government for the Nazis in Poland.
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. 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 Austria for a little while, and then back with Frank in nineteen forty five.
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 be found, and.
A lot of other stuff too.
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 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.
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. 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.
You would think so, and you know, maybe they will eventually.
Unless it's really stashed.
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 to love them Nazis.
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.
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 in case it's ever found. And for now it's just they have the original frame hanging empty in the in the gallery.
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.
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.
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.
So Chuck. Before I launched into soaka go away type tirade onto you? Is that how you accurately pronounce his name?
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?
So okay, So instead we're just gonna go with Van go like everybody else, right.
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.
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 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, 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.
Yeah, so he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation that he had bipolar disorder.
Yeah, I saw that too.
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, 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 accidentally by one of two boys, younger gentleman that he was hanging out with that day.
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 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 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. Even if you take all that together, it seems like, no, this there's something really fishy going on here.
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 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 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.
Yeah, which is very well.
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.
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 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 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. 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. 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.
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 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 that's tough.
Yeah it is. I really do want to do an episode on him.
And I think Sekhatan came out in the fifties even and denied it, right, like finally he once and for all he did.
He did, but he also he also said that it probably was his gun and that somehow van Go had gotten.
It right, but hey, that ain't my fault.
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 is probably as close as Renee Serkatan ever came to confessing publicly about it, you know.
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.
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.
You know. Yeah, I'm going to that immersive van go thing in July.
Where is that?
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.
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.
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.
I got to check that out, man, Thanks for telling me about it.
Yeah, it looks kind of cool, all.
Right, Chuck, you want to finish out talking about.
Hitler don't you mean Hilter.
Did you know there's Hilter. Oh my gosh, yes, in the headline, in.
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?
That's great?
Oh yeah he did them.
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.
Yeah.
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 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 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 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 is art and what is not, and they were telling him what you got is not. That was a huge deal to him.
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 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, 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. 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 the military.
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.
He actually did, right, Yeah, yeah.
Even Hilter. Hilter did this army thing.
Right.
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 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 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.
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, 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, 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 with some accuracy.
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 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.
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, 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 thirteen that survived.
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 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.
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.
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.
Unbelievable but totally believable.
So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he do this?
Yeah? Did he do those paintings?
You got anything else?
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.
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.
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 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 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 listen to. Best wishes from the UK. They're always so nice and that is sure Amy, Helen Amy.
Thanks Helen. Amy. Wolves call her Amy as is customary.
Yeah, because we say Helen, She's like, who.
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.
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