Selects: Seven - No, Wait, Five - Mysteries of the Art World

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This information is provided by Lily USA, LLC. Hey everybody, it's me, Josh.
And 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.

It 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 Bryan 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 twos, and we just recorded the Pogs episode. Right.
And you didn't say, welcome to the Pogcast. I didn't, did I? What a missed opportunity for a great dad joke.
That sounds like something I would skip, though, even had I thought of it. I don't know that I would have pulled the trigger on that.
Or I could see you pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself. Right.
I would have just been engaged in self-loathing for the rest of the podcast. Well, retroactively, I'm going to 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.

That's part of it.

Very famously, we used to have top tens on our old HowStuffWorks 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 us, but this one actually came in at seven. They didn't even try.
And I don't even know, we may do like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.
We'll see. We're going to play it fast and loose.
I think that's another reason why it reminds me of an old Stuff You Should Know episode. Fast and Loose.
Like I was, yeah, Fast and Loose. First you got the fast, then you got the loose.
But never furious. Fast and Loose.
No. Because who wants to be mad? I don't know.
They should have called that series Fast and Loose. Tokyo Drift.

I think I've heard it before that that series is the highest grossing movie franchise in the history of film, like worldwide.

Yeah, and you know what's funny is at one point we were, this was years ago, we were talking with Ludacris about doing something with the network.

And I, because he's a local guy here in Atlanta.

And I talked to our boss and said, 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, for sure.
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 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 noticed? Oh, man, good. Yeah, you could degenerate into worse things than that.
Fantastic. But I mean, like, I'm really hitting that Newhart note these days, I've noticed.

That's a great note.

I love it.

I've always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner.

Well, you've got it, buddy.

All right.

Number one on the list.

You want to talk a little Caravaggio?

So Caravaggio is my new favorite painter.

Oh, yeah? Not just because he was a scummy lowlife swordsman. Murderer.
Murderer, yeah. 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 17th century, the early 1600s. And just like Poggs, 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 1606, killed a man named Romuccio Tomassoni and said, I got to get out of here because I'm in big trouble now. and 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, 12 feet by 17 feet, the beheading of John the Baptist.
Yeah, it was an altar piece for the Order of St. 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. Or pogs.
But they accepted this altar piece, this giant painting of St. John the Baptist being beheaded.
And it was actually, I mean, as far as 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 painted some really violent stuff.

Yeah.

And like you said, that kind of, that he was a master of light and shadow.

It's called Chiriscuro. 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 Renuccio Tomassoni over. Right.
Did you know that? I did. Oh, you did? Okay.
Well, at any rate, while he was— Because they really, in this HowStuffWorks article, they called it a petty squabble, and 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.
So, it was either over a wager or it was over this woman. Her name was, what was it? Judith.
No, Felide. Felide, 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 knight, he paints this 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 Caravaggio.
This is actually the first and only work of his that he ever signed, which a lot of people are like, OK, 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 1950s, 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, dot, F, Michelang, M-I-C-H-E-L-A-N-G.
And then, you know, of course, everyone'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, there are a couple of different theories, thought it was shorthand for fratter, 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 Fesit, F-E-C-I-T, 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 Ranuccio Tomassoni? 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. That's what I thought.
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.
Do you know what I mean? Right. Like before God.
Yeah, exactly. Or De Bears.
That painting still hangs at St. John's Co-Cathedral in Malta too.
Okay, yeah. Well, I mean, it was the altar piece.
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 Frater or brother, Michelangelo, about himself, that's probably the likelier version because he was at the time seeking a pardon from the pope.
Yeah. 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 St.
John, the Knights of Malta have 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 St. 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? Vic Tabak.
No, not Vic Tabak. I don't know.
I didn't watch The Shield. Oh, you didn't? 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 pardon and got into yet another squabble, another sword fight, and sustained some wounds. And between infected wounds, they think he got a staph 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 Tuscany finally killed him.
And so it goes.

Yes, it does.

But his paintings are still just amazing.

I can look at them all day, you know?

Yeah, me too.

I like this stuff.

I do too.

So that's Caravaggio.

How about Vermeer?

Well, I think we should take a break.

Oh, gosh. And we'll be back right after this.
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We had a great cliffhanger with Vermeer. Vermeer, the very famous Dutch artist, Johannes Vermeer, 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 Earring until the 20th century. It was called everything from Girl with a Turban to Girl with an Earring.
Had lots of different names because it was not officially titled by Vermeer nor dated, even though they think it was around 1665. Yeah, he was just like this dude who lived in Delft in the Netherlands and never left his hometown and had a wife and 15 kids.
Fifteen. Yeah, 15 kids.
And just kind of painted and he made probably a comparatively small number of works.

I think around 36 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. Vermeer went a different way where he would almost peek in on very normal daily life and capture like these really just kind of boring or otherwise mundane moments.
But he did it in a way that this guy was like the master of light. He makes Thomas Kinkade look like puke as far as light mastery goes.
So Girl with a Pearl Earring, everyone has seen it. Like I said, it's very famous.
It's of 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 earrings, 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.

Thank you. I think that was the big reveal of that one.
Was it? Yeah. All right, so he paints this painting, and then, of course, the mystery of this one is who is this person? There's been speculation that it might be a mistress.
A lot of people think it was his daughter, Maria, who would have been about 15 or 16. 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 painting still. Yeah, they're still a lot better than anything I could do.
Yeah, it's not like they were stick figures, you know, out of nowhere. They're like, this Vermeer seems off.
But, you know, if you've, there was a 1999 novel from Tracy Chevalier, The Girl with the Pearl Earring, and then the 2000 film adaptation starring Scarlett Johansson, who was perfectly cast.

She looks, you know, quite a bit like The Girl with the Pearl Earring.

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 Vermeer, 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.
It wasn't even necessarily his daughter. In fact, it was kind of a trend at the time, a painting called a tronie, 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 Vermeer, 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's 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 that is what entrances people with this, 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 and.
She said yes and. You never know.

But this is a mystery that will 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, 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 1995. 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 the ear couldn't physically hold up a pearl that size.
But then secondly, it's really basically made with two brush strokes. Both of them are reflecting light.
One is from the light source, and then the lower one is reflecting the light off of the collar. And it's pretty amazing that, you know, we talk about the girl with the pearl earring.
This pearl itself is like kind of a cultural icon, too. And it's basically just two brush strokes, which kind of goes to show how great Vermeer was.
Amazing. Have you ever seen Tim's Vermeer, the documentary?

I have not. Oh, Chuck, you've got to see it.
It's directed by Teller from Penn & Teller, which makes you think, like, how did he direct if he doesn't talk, you know? But he somehow did. I think he talks in private.
It's about—what? That's just a bit. and it's about it's about a guy who basically figured out

that Vermeer somehow

projected It's about what? That's just a bit. And it's about a guy who basically figured out that Vermeer somehow projected images that he built in real life onto a canvas and then painted them that way.
And he actually replicates a Vermeer 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 Raphael? 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 II by Hitler and 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, yeah. It's one of the paintings that they stole.
Wow. Which shows that, you know, Simpsons writers back then at least were 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 know. Or am I 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 it used to hang in the Prince's Zartorsky Museum in Poland, along with two other really important paintings, Leonardo's Lady with an Ermine, which is a goat, stoat, I can't remember, kind of a weasel-like animal, and then Rembrandt's Landscape with the Good Samaritan.
And all three of those and everything else in the Princes or Torski 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 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 Fuhrer Museum in Linz. 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 1945.

Which seems crazy improbable 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 1945,

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. Yeah, they found a lot of other stuff too.
Sure, they definitely did. But the three most important pieces in the Prince's Zartarsky 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 II. Yeah, and they, you know, along with I think over 800 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 2012 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. In that movie Monuments Men, they show the Nazis igniting it with a flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art.
And, you know, there's a whole camp that says, no, this thing is gone forever. So they did something to it because the Nazis were known not just plunder but also destroy art as well, which just one more reason to love them Nazis.
Yeah. And I think this is oil on panel, so I don't think this could even be like rolled up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.
Yeah, I guess not. No, I didn't realize it was on panel, but that makes sense.
But the National Museum in Krakow bought the entire Princess Zartorsky collection from a private collector for 100 million euros back in 2016. And that included the rights to a portrait of a young man in case it's ever found.
And for now, they's just, they have the original frame hanging empty

in the gallery.

Oh, yeah.

That's,

it turns out

that's a thing

I didn't know was a thing.

Empty 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 6.

That's right.

I'm Tom Brokaw.

We'll leave the light on

for you.

All right.

Well, that means it's time

for another break.

and we'll see you next time. Just like Motel 6.
That's right. I'm Tom Brokaw.

We'll leave the line out for you.

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 Gogh.

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Call Star Star Guts to get... So Chuck, before I launch into a Sakaka Goe-type tirade onto you, is that how you accurately pronounce his name? I don't know.
It was from the filmmaker who dared 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 Gogh and he's, you know, he's incensed. He's like Van Gogh, like how pretentious.
So, okay. So instead we're just going to go with Van Gogh like everybody else, right? Yeah, sure.
Okay. And we can cut all that out if we want to – don't even want to talk about Woody Allen.
That's fine. Sure, sure.
I hear you. So Van Gogh was most—he was just such a sad, tragic figure.
I feel for this guy so much after learning more about him. We should do an entire podcast on him if you ask me.
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 Gauguin, 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, 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.
Uh, was, um, you know, just sort of long suffering as an artist. He didn't, he only sold one painting before he died in 1890 at the age of 37.
And the, the, 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 2011, there was a book written called Van Gogh, colon, The Life, written by Stephen, I'm going to say, Mifa 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, a 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. I buy it.
There's also – it's also circumstantially plausible that, you know, Van Gogh died by suicide as well. But even if you take his story and start digging into it, in 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 13-year-old daughter at the time,

who 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, that, 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 20 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, 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. They didn't have a surgeon on duty, so they couldn't remove the bullet.
He lived a total of 30 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 late teens, early 20s.

No, they were 16.

Oh, okay.

I saw early 20s in another thing.

Oh, yeah.

But, you know, hanging out, getting drunk with them.

One of these boys, René Sacretin, had a gun that apparently misfired a lot.

And he liked playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboy, supposedly.
He did. And so it all just seems, and even his statement, 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 peculiar as 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 toward 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 murder or any kind of premeditated murder, more like a manslaughter where Rene and his brother, Gaston, were messing around and accidentally... Playing cowboy.
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 the 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 these boys because, you know, Van Gogh 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 everything like basically every night.
And came from, like, a good, well-to-do family. So for many years, like, that was just the thing.
Like, it just happened. And then slowly, little by little, it seemed to have trickled out some support for this idea.
Like, no, like, Van Gogh wasn't anywhere near this field. He said that he had shot himself in.
He was actually on the road to the Secretan's house. And then finally, years later, René Secretan said that, you know, it probably was his gun and that Van Gogh had somehow gotten a hold of it.
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 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, were,

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 Secretan came out in the 50s even and denied it, right? Like finally, once and for all.
He did, but he also said that it probably was his gun and that somehow Van Gogh had gotten it. Right, but hey, that ain't my fault.
No, but also to backpedal and be like, it probably was my gun, because that was another thing. Everybody's like, where did Van Gogh get a gun? Van Gogh didn't have a gun.
And no one would have given Van Gogh a gun. He was the guy who got drunk every night and had cut off his ear before.
That was like, no one in town would have given him a gun. So the fact that he even admitted that it was his gun is probably as close as Rene Circuiton ever came to confessing publicly about it.
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 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 Gogh thing in July. Where is that? It is here in Atlanta.
It's at the Pullman Yards. Oh, yeah.
Over in Kirkwood where they shoot like every movie in Atlanta shoots there. Right.
Yeah. So, yeah, it's supposed to be pretty cool.
It's very neat. Sounds neat.
I mean, like, basically they just make the stars come out whenever you come in. I think so.
You come 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 gather. Oh, 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 notice that? Is he in there as 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 Hiltor really do these paintings? That's great, man. Oh, yeah, he did them.
Yeah, Hiltor did these paintings. So we're talking not about Hiltor, but about Hitler, Adolf Hitler in particular.
And as everybody knows, Hitler was a frustrated artist. Yeah, big time.
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, 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 have the skill of a draftsman. Maybe you should go into architecture, but you're not going to be an artist.
And he said, architecture? That was a direct quote. But this was a huge deal for him.
I think I read in Mein Kampf, I haven't read Mein Kampf, but I read an article by somebody who read Mein Kampf 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 no son of mine's going to be an artist he would beat him up whenever he he brought he brought the idea up um and so finally after his father died and then he nursed his male ailing mother until she died he got up the gumption to like go and enroll in art school and apparently he being hitler 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 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 by the music industry. I never really kind of really thought of that parallel.
But in 1909, Hitler is traipsing 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 riverbank.
In a 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 way better than I could do.

It's, you know, it's okay.

Oh, yeah.

But like modern, and it's hard to tell with modern art critics, like so much goes into looking at a Hitler painting and reviewing it.

Like it's really hard to kind of separate those things.

But the general thought is that he had nothing exceptional about him at all. It was, he was the kind of artist that would sell stuff down by the river to tourists.
He was, 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 1913 as well in Munich, painting Munich cityscapes and landscapes and selling them to tourists. And then in 1914, 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 it was too weak to fire a weapon. Yeah.
So they arrested him so that they could humiliate him, basically. And then when World War I came around, he enlisted, and they say, we need everybody we can get.
Come on in. And he actually did fight.
Yeah. Yeah.
Even Hilter.

Hilter did this army thing.

Right.

So when he rose to power 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 1936 critic or a critic wrote in 1936 that his style was prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritualism.
Yeah. And this was before he, or I'm sorry, or spiritual imagination.
And this was before he had really become an obvious threat. This is 1936.
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, 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, 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, who was a Jewish man. Yeah, Morgenstern.
Yeah, which was really interesting. And there was – I don't know, man.
There's a lot of speculation about what that all meant to him. And people try and draw parallels to some of the paintings.
I mean, some of it feels like a stretch. Definitely like the cold streets of Munich were painted clearly with a future cleansing in mind to make it look like this.
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 had some sort of driving force or impact on his 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 90s, early 2000s, there was a market for Hitler's work.
I think in 2009, a British auction house, someone paid $150,000 for 15 early sketches and watercolors, including a self-portrait. And then in 2015, some unnamed investors paid $450,000 for a set of watercolors.
I think there were 12 or 13 that survived. Yeah, the problem 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 lacked 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, really enormous market of fakes because anybody who's like a passingly good artist in watercolors of streetscapes 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 $10 million a piece.
We're talking like you might get $10,000 for it for 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 Gardner Museum heist because that's a good one.
And that was on this list and way underplayed. For sure.
So keep an ear out for that, everybody. And since I said keep an ear out for that that I think it's time for listener mail.

Yeah, I'm going to call this middle names

because we had a little discussion

in our John Muir episode

about how Emily and I

and our friends Justin and Melissa

one night were going by our middle names

as a joke

and I had the theory

that you have no emotional connection