Selects: 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! See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.

• 0:04Josh Clark?

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• 0:38Speaker 02

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• 1:06Josh Clark?

  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. May also be the only one. At any rate, it's a good episode, and I think you'll enjoy it. So enjoy.

• 1:30Speaker 03

  Welcome to Stuff You Should Know, a production of iHeart Radio.

• 1:40Josh Clark?

  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.

• 1:52Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 1:52Speaker 04

  You know what I just realized? We, we record these in twos. And we just recorded the POGs episode.

• 2:01Josh Clark?

  Right.

• 2:02Speaker 04

  And you didn't say, welcome to the POGcast.

• 2:06Josh Clark?

  I didn't, did I?

• 2:07Speaker 04

  Well, I missed opportunity for a great dad joke.

• 2:10Josh Clark?

  That sounds like something I would skip, though, even had I, I thought of it. I don't know that I would have pulled the trigger on that.

• 2:16Speaker 04

  I think, or I could see you pulling the trigger and then making fun of yourself.

• 2:20Josh Clark?

  Right, but I would have just been engaged in self-loathing for the rest of the podcast.

• 2:25Speaker 04

  Well, retroactively, I'm gonna say, I hope everyone enjoyed the podcast. Now, let's talk about art mysteries.

• 2:34Josh Clark?

  I love this one, man. This is great. This reminds me like of a Stuff You Should Know episode from years back for some reason.

• 2:41Speaker 04

  Well, it's because we don't do these top lists anymore.

• 2:45Josh Clark?

  That's part of it.

• 2:45Speaker 04

  You know, very famously, we used to have top 10s on our old How Stuff Works website, of which usually there were maybe seven decent entries. So we never did, I don't think we ever did a full 10 on anything. Maybe somebody could probably correct us, but this one actually came in at seven.

• 3:03Josh Clark?

  They didn't even try.

• 3:05Speaker 04

  And I don't even know, we may do like five of these. We haven't even figured it out yet.

• 3:08Josh Clark?

  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.

• 3:14Speaker 04

  Fast and loose.

• 3:14Josh Clark?

  Like I was, yeah, fast and loose. First you got the fast, then you got the loose.

• 3:21Speaker 04

  But never furious. Because he wants to be mad.

• 3:25Josh Clark?

  I don't know.

• 3:27Speaker 04

  They should have called that series Fast and Loose. Tokyo Drift.

• 3:31Josh Clark?

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

• 3:39Speaker 04

  Yeah, do 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, he's a local guy here in Atlanta, and I

• 3:51Josh Clark?

  That's right.

• 3:51Speaker 04

  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.

• 4:02Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 4:02Speaker 04

  Because he's just getting rich off of making these movies.

• 4:06Josh Clark?

  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 a, well, I guess every few years.

• 4:35Speaker 04

  I only saw one of those, I think.

• 4:37Josh Clark?

  Man, I'm slowly like degenerating into Bob Newhart, man. Have you noticed?

• 4:41Speaker 04

  Oh, man, good.

• 4:42Josh Clark?

  Yeah, you could degenerate into worse things than that. But I mean, like, I'm really, I'm really hitting that Newhart note these days, I've noticed.

• 4:51Speaker 04

  That's a great note. I love it. I've always wanted Bob Newhart as my podcasting partner, so.

• 4:55Josh Clark?

  Well, you, you've, you've.

• 4:57Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 4:58Josh Clark?

  You've got it, buddy.

• 5:00Speaker 04

  All right, number one on the list. You want to talk a little Caravaggio?

• 5:06Josh Clark?

  So Caravaggio is my new favorite painter.

• 5:09Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah?

• 5:11Josh Clark?

  Not just because he was a scummy low-life swordsman.

• 5:15Speaker 04

  Murderer.

• 5:15Josh Clark?

  From the, murderer, yeah. He was a gambler. He would, he had weapons charges against him while he was alive. He, 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.

• 5:57Josh Clark?

  And just like pogs, he burned hot and bright and, and fast. And furious, actually, sadly.

• 6:05Speaker 04

  Oh, that's right. That wasn't even forced. Nice work, Bob. So Michelangelo Marisi de Caravaggio was an Italian Baroque painter.

• 6:16Speaker 04

  He, at one point in 1606, killed a man named Remuccio Tomassoni, and said, "I gotta 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.

• 6:48Josh Clark?

  Yeah, like for a month.

• 6:49Speaker 04

  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."

• 7:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it was an altarpiece 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.

• 7:17Speaker 04

  Or pogs.

• 7:18Josh Clark?

  But they, they accepted, yeah. But they accepted this altarpiece, this giant painting, of St. John the Baptist being beheaded. And it was actually, I mean, as far as a 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, he painted some really violent stuff.

• 7:42Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 7:43Josh Clark?

  And, and like you said, that, that kind of, that, he was a master of light and shadow. It's called chiaroscuro. And, 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 Hall of Farnes. Have you seen it?

• 8:04Speaker 04

  I have.

• 8:05Josh Clark?

  So Judith, the woman who's in that painting, the, the woman who modeled for that, for Judith, that was the woman that he killed Remuccio Tomassoni over.

• 8:19Speaker 04

  Right.

• 8:20Josh Clark?

  Did you know that?

• 8:21Speaker 04

  I did.

• 8:23Josh Clark?

  Oh, you did, okay. Well, at any rate.

• 8:24Speaker 04

  Because they really, they really, in this How Stuff Works article, they called it a petty squabble, and that, that really doesn't tell the story.

• 8:30Josh Clark?

  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, um, so it was either over a wager, or it was over this woman. Her name was, uh, what was it?

• 9:05Speaker 04

  Judith.

• 9:06Josh Clark?

  No, Felidae, Felidae, I believe, was the, the actual woman's name, who modeled for Judith. So he ends up on Malta, he becomes a knight. And when he, he becomes this knight, he paints his altarpies, 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, okay, wait a minute, let's examine this.

• 9:33Speaker 04

  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.

• 9:58Speaker 04

  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, 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 fecit, F E C I T, which is Latin for did, translating basically into, I did it.

• 10:43Speaker 04

  And it's spelled out in blood, kind of confessing to his crime.

• 10:47Josh Clark?

  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.

• 11:09Speaker 04

  That's what I thought.

• 11:10Josh Clark?

  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?

• 11:17Speaker 04

  Right, like before God.

• 11:20Josh Clark?

  Yeah, exactly, or de bears.

• 11:24Speaker 04

  That painting still hangs at St. John's Co-Cathedral in Malta, too.

• 11:28Josh Clark?

  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 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 St. John, the Knights of Malta, have inducted me." He was basically shouting it loud and proud by signing that one particular, very holy

• 12:13Josh Clark?

  painting that he did.

• 12:15Speaker 04

  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.

• 12:23Josh Clark?

  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?

• 12:41Speaker 04

  Vic Tabak.

• 12:43Josh Clark?

  No, not Vic Tabeck.

• 12:44Speaker 04

  I don't know. I didn't watch The Shield.

• 12:46Josh Clark?

  Oh, you didn't? That 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, sun stroke on the beach in Tuscan, he finally killed him.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  And so it goes.

• 13:31Josh Clark?

  Yes, it does. But his paintings are still just amazing. I can look at them all day, you know?

• 13:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, me too. I like his stuff.

• 13:38Josh Clark?

  I do, too. So that's Caravaggio. How about Vermeer?

• 13:44Speaker 04

  Well, I think we should take a break.

• 13:46Josh Clark?

  Oh, gosh.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  And we'll be back right after this.

• 14:02Speaker 02

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• 14:32Josh Clark?

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• 16:17Josh Clark?

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• 16:52Speaker 04

  All right, 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.

• 17:28Josh Clark?

  Yeah, he was just like this dude who lived and delved in the Netherlands and never left his hometown and had a wife and 15 kids.

• 17:38Speaker 04

  Fifteen.

• 17:39Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 18:23Josh Clark?

  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 like, you know, light mastery goes.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 19:17Josh Clark?

  On Mona Lisa?

• 19:18Speaker 04

  I think so, yeah. It's, you know, the effect of the eyes following, which doesn't happen in all paintings with eyes.

• 19:25Josh Clark?

  Oh, no, the Mona Lisa's eyes actually don't follow you. I think that was the big reveal of that one.

• 19:29Speaker 04

  Was it?

• 19:30Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:09Josh Clark?

  Yeah, they're still a lot better than anything I could do.

• 20:11Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's not like they were stick figures, you know, out of nowhere.

• 20:15Josh Clark?

  They're like, this Vermeer seems off.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  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.

• 20:46Josh Clark?

  Yes, from what I've seen, 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 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 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.

• 21:31Josh Clark?

  Mona Lisa's 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. 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.

• 22:03Speaker 04

  Maybe she was an improv comedian and she was yes anding.

• 22:08Josh Clark?

  Yes and.

• 22:09Speaker 04

  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.

• 22:16Josh Clark?

  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.

• 22:24Speaker 04

  And we would have found out by now, I think.

• 22:26Josh Clark?

  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, 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 collar.

• 23:09Josh Clark?

  And it's pretty amazing that, you know, we talk about this, the girl with the pearl earring, and this pearl itself is a, 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 Vermeer was.

• 23:23Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 23:24Josh Clark?

  Have you ever seen Tim's Vermeer, the documentary?

• 23:27Speaker 04

  I have not.

• 23:29Josh Clark?

  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.

• 23:39Speaker 04

  I think he talks in private.

• 23:41Josh Clark?

  It's about, what?

• 23:43Speaker 04

  That's just a bit.

• 23:45Josh Clark?

  And it's about, 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.

• 24:03Speaker 04

  Very cool.

• 24:04Josh Clark?

  Yeah. So what do you think, on to Raphael?

• 24:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 24:49Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 24:50Speaker 04

  It's one of the paintings that they stole.

• 24:52Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 24:53Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:01Josh Clark?

  Yeah, totally. Doesn't it even talk? Doesn't it say something like, someone's guilty conscience or something?

• 25:06Speaker 04

  I don't.

• 25:07Josh Clark?

  Or am I making that up?

• 25:08Speaker 04

  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.

• 25:13Josh Clark?

  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 Princesz Arturski 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 Princesz Arturski Museum, were swiped by the Nazis when they came to Poland, and placed in the office of a guy named Hans

• 25:55Josh Clark?

  Frank, who was the head of the government for the Nazis in Poland, right?

• 26:00Speaker 04

  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, in a house in a place that I can't even pronounce, Sienowa. 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 Führer 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,

• 26:43Speaker 04

  and then Austria for a little while, and then back with Frank in 1945.

• 26:48Josh Clark?

  Which seems crazy improbable that they would end up back with him, but they did. And the Allies came into 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.

• 27:09Speaker 04

  Yeah, they found a lot of other stuff, too.

• 27:11Josh Clark?

  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 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.

• 27:43Speaker 04

  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.

• 28:25Josh Clark?

  You would think so. And, you know, maybe they will eventually.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  Unless it's really stashed.

• 28:30Josh Clark?

  Well, some people think it was destroyed in that movie Monuments Men.

• 28:34Speaker 04

  Right.

• 28:35Josh Clark?

  They show the Nazis igniting it with a flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art. And there, 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 destroy art as well. Which, just one more reason to love them Nazis.

• 28:52Speaker 04

  Yeah. And I think this is oil on panel. So it's, I don't think this could even be like, rolled up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.

• 29:00Josh Clark?

  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 Zsark Torski collection from a private collector for 100 million euros back in 2016. And they, I know. And that included the rights to Portrait of a Young Man in case it's ever found. And for now, it just, they have the, the original frame hanging empty in the, in the gallery.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's, it turns out that's a thing. I didn't know it was a thing. Empty frames in galleries. It's kind of sad.

• 29:35Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it's sad. It's very poignant. It says, come home, come home. We're leaving the light on for you. Come home.

• 29:41Speaker 04

  Just like Motel 6.

• 29:43Josh Clark?

  That's right. On Tom Brokaw, we'll leave the light on for you.

• 29:48Speaker 04

  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.

• 30:07Speaker 02

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• 31:54Josh Clark?

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• 32:47Josh Clark?

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• 33:03Josh Clark?

  So Chuck, before I launch into a Sakagawei-type tirade onto you, is that how you accurately pronounce his name?

• 33:12Speaker 04

  I don't know. 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 Gogh. And he's, you know, he's incensed. He's like, Van Gogh, like, how pretentious.

• 33:34Josh Clark?

  So, okay, so instead, we're just gonna go with Van Gogh like everybody else, right?

• 33:38Speaker 04

  Yeah, sure.

• 33:39Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 33:39Speaker 04

  And we can cut all that out if we don't even wanna talk about Woody Allen. That's fine.

• 33:42Josh Clark?

  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.

• 33:55Speaker 04

  Agreed.

• 33:56Josh Clark?

  But instead, here, we're gonna 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 Aurl's, in the south of France. And he said, "Well, I'm gonna make some sort of lemonade out of this lemon I just gave myself." And he took it to his, I guess, hopeful girlfriend.

• 34:39Josh Clark?

  And I believe she was not that impressed with it.

• 34:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation that he had bipolar disorder.

• 34:49Josh Clark?

  Yeah, I saw that, too.

• 34:51Speaker 04

  Was, 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 story goes is that he shot himself in the chest with a revolver. But it gets a little more complicated than that. And what year was the book? In 2011, there was a book written called Van Gogh: The Life, written by Stephen, I'm gonna say, Mifah?

• 35:21Josh Clark?

  Okay.

• 35:22Speaker 04

  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 gentlemen that he was hanging out with that day.

• 35:42Josh Clark?

  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.

• 35:52Speaker 04

  I buy it.

• 35:53Josh Clark?

  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, 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 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, 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,

• 36:36Josh Clark?

  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, this is something really fishy going on here.

• 36:54Speaker 04

  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 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 twenties.

• 37:29Josh Clark?

  No, they were 16.

• 37:30Speaker 04

  Oh, okay, I saw early twenties in another thing.

• 37:32Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:33Speaker 04

  But, you know, hanging out, getting drunk with them. One of these boys, Rene Sacre-Tin.

• 37:41Speaker 04

  Had a gun that apparently misfired a lot and he liked playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboy supposedly.

• 37:48Josh Clark?

  He did.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:03Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 38:03Speaker 04

  Which is a little fishy.

• 38:04Josh Clark?

  Very peculiar as well.

• 38:05Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 38:05Josh Clark?

  Yeah, for sure.

• 38:06Speaker 04

  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.

• 38:22Josh Clark?

  So what, 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. Basically, he, 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, the thing was that the gun was never found. Rene went back to school like right after that, which was still in the middle of summer break from what I saw.

• 39:07Josh Clark?

  And, and the town seems to have circled the wagons around this, this, 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, in the cafe and the, and everything like basically every night. And this, these boys came from like a, 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 Van Gogh wasn't anywhere near this field. He said that he had shot himself in. He was actually on the road to the secrétin's house. And then finally, years later, Rene's

• 39:48Josh Clark?

  secrétin said that, you know, he, it probably was his gun and that Van Gogh had somehow gotten a hold of it. It seems, it seems likely that, that he was shot by them, whether accident or not.

• 40:01Speaker 04

  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.

• 40:14Speaker 04

  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, uh, that's tough.

• 40:45Josh Clark?

  Yeah, it is. I really do want to do an episode on him.

• 40:49Speaker 04

  And I think Secrétan came out in the 50s even and denied it, right? Like, finally, once and for all?

• 40:54Josh Clark?

  He did, he did, but he also, he also said that it probably was his gun and that somehow Van Gogh had gotten it.

• 41:00Speaker 04

  Right, but, hey, that ain't my fault.

• 41:03Josh Clark?

  No, but to also to backpedal and be like, "It probably was my gun," because that was another thing, everybody was 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, you know? 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 Secrétan ever came to confessing publicly about it, you know?

• 41:31Speaker 04

  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.

• 41:41Josh Clark?

  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?

• 41:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm going to that immersive Van Gogh thing in July.

• 41:57Josh Clark?

  Where is that?

• 41:58Speaker 04

  It is here in Atlanta, it's at the Pullman Yards.

• 42:01Josh Clark?

  Oh, yeah.

• 42:02Speaker 04

  Over in Kirkwood, where they shoot, like, every movie in Atlanta shoots there.

• 42:07Josh Clark?

  Right, yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  So, yeah, it's supposed to be pretty cool.

• 42:10Josh Clark?

  It's very, very neat, sounds neat. I mean, like, basically, they just make the stars come out whenever you come in?

• 42:16Speaker 04

  I think so.

• 42:17Josh Clark?

  Like, come sit in this yellow chair?

• 42:18Speaker 04

  I think that's the deal. I think you go in and you are surrounded by projected art in different ways.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  From what I can gather.

• 42:28Josh Clark?

  Oh, that's all. I gotta check that out, man. Thanks for telling me about it.

• 42:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it looks kinda cool.

• 42:33Josh Clark?

  All right, Chuck, you wanna finish out talking about Hitler?

• 42:36Speaker 04

  Don't you mean Hilter? Did you notice that?

• 42:39Josh Clark?

  Is he in there? Is Hilter? Oh, my gosh, yes, in the headline.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  In the headline, "Did Hilter Really Do These Paintings?" "Do These Paintings?" Who wrote that?

• 42:51Speaker 04

  I feel bad, but like, "Did Hilter Really Do These Paintings?"

• 42:56Josh Clark?

  That's great, man.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, he did 'em.

• 42:59Josh Clark?

  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.

• 43:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, big time.

• 43:11Josh Clark?

  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 wanna 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."

• 43:41Speaker 04

  And he said, "Architecture?"

• 43:44Josh Clark?

  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 was like, "No son of mine's gonna be an artist." He would beat him up whenever he brought the idea up. And so finally, after his father died, and then he nursed his ailing mother until she died, he got up the gumption to like go and enroll in art school. And apparently, he, being Hitler, who I guess had been fairly bonkers his whole life, just

• 44:29Josh Clark?

  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.

• 44:47Speaker 04

  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.

• 44:57Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Speaker 04

  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.

• 45:19Josh Clark?

  In a van.

• 45:20Speaker 04

  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. Cause 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 like modern, and it's, 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.

• 45:43Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Speaker 04

  The general thought is, 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.

• 46:17Josh Clark?

  Yeah. And then they, he, he went down and registered and then they, they gave him a, a physical exam and he failed it. They said he was too weak to fire a weapon.

• 46:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:28Josh Clark?

  So they arrested him so that they could humiliate him basically. And, and then when World War One came around, he enlisted and they say, we need everybody we can get. Come on in.

• 46:40Speaker 04

  Even Hilter.

• 46:41Josh Clark?

  Yeah. Yeah. Even Hilter, Hilter did this army thing.

• 46:46Speaker 04

  Right.

• 46:47Josh Clark?

  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 1936 critic or a critic wrote in 1936 that his style was prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritualism.

• 47:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:22Josh Clark?

  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.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  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.

• 48:15Josh Clark?

  Yeah, Morgenstern.

• 48:17Speaker 04

  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 to 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 streets of Munich like, were painted like clearly with a future cleansing in mind to make it look like this and.

• 48:45Josh Clark?

  That's a stretch.

• 48:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, some of that stuff seems like a stretch, but you could definitely read into the backstory at least, I think, with some accuracy.

• 48:53Josh Clark?

  Yeah, and even if like you can't necessarily suss out like the future from, from his paintings, you can make a pretty strong case that his artistic ambitions being utterly crushed

• 49:04Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 49:06Josh Clark?

  had some sort of driving force or impact on his psyche at the very least.

• 49:11Speaker 04

  Sure.

• 49:11Josh Clark?

  Like that and his, 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.

• 49:24Speaker 04

  No, I think any sociopath, you, you can look at their past and see the dots connected, you know?

• 49:29Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  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, for Hitler's work. I think in 2009, a British auction house, someone paid 150 grand 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.

• 50:07Josh Clark?

  Yeah.

• 50:07Speaker 04

  That survived.

• 50:08Josh Clark?

  Yeah, the problem is, is because he didn't have a style of his own.

• 50:12Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:12Josh Clark?

  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, 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.

• 50:50Speaker 04

  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?

• 51:00Josh Clark?

  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.

• 51:08Speaker 04

  Right.

• 51:08Josh Clark?

  For your, your Hitler forgery.

• 51:12Speaker 04

  Unbelievable.

• 51:12Josh Clark?

  Wow.

• 51:13Speaker 04

  But totally believable.

• 51:15Josh Clark?

  So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he do this?

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah, did he do those paintings?

• 51:22Josh Clark?

  You got anything else?

• 51:24Speaker 04

  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.

• 51:36Josh Clark?

  For sure. So keep an ear out for that, everybody. And since I said, keep an ear out for that, I think it's time for listener mail.

• 51:47Speaker 04

  Yeah, I'm gonna 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 to your middle name if you don't have a reaction when you hear it said 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.

• 52:28Speaker 04

  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. Big fan of the show, kept me curious. Am I curious spirit 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 from Amy, Helen Amy.

• 53:00Josh Clark?

  Thanks, Helen Amy. We'll just call her Amy, as is customary.

• 53:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, because we say Helen, and she's like, who?

• 53:09Josh Clark?

  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 [email protected].

• 53:26Speaker 03

  Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts, iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

• 53:41Josh Clark?

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