the art life

Ensor's Skeletons Fighting Over a Pickled Herring (1891), at MoMA

"The art gods cooked up something special for James Ensor. This avant-garde painter’s decisive moment came in a salon show in Brussels in 1887 (the same year the gods had Van Gogh meet Gauguin). Ensor was a co-founder of a group called “the Twenty,” living with his mother at 27, and doing all right in his native Belgium. That year, he exhibited a breakthrough series of large, smoky drawings of Christ in modern-day settings. As fate had it, they were installed near Georges Seurat’s epic, world-changing A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. Reactions to Ensor’s work were mixed at best. Many critics and viewers, including his artist friends, enamored of Seurat’s ideas and methods, found Ensor’s religious subject matter and murky drawings “fatally retrograde.” (The criticism set him off; he referred to “bizarre Pointillists operating behind the scenes,” of being “surrounded by hostility” and “mean vile attacks.” He condemned Impressionists as “superficial daubers suffused with traditional recipes.”)

"Today, Ensor is still squaring off against the master of speckles. The L.A. Times critic Christopher Knight calls him “the anti-Seurat.” Ensor’s swirling surfaces, kaleidoscopic color, corkscrewing space, fluttery fevered touch, and fiendish feel for facial features and fanfare make him, with El Greco, one of the great weird painters of all time. At the Museum of Modern Art’s diligent, disciplined Ensor retrospective, you can see that he was better than just about anyone at painting crowds, clowns, contempt, and cacophony. Despite the flushed grandstanding in many of his paintings, his perfect storm of inflated self-esteem, angry viewpoint, and perverse inner landscape combine to make him one of art history’s visionaries..."

Jerry Saltz, Teeing Up the Twentieth Century, New York Magazine.

Labels: art museums, painting, public galleries

Labels: art news, environmental art, photography

"With a normal photograph, you look at the scene you want to record, check your light meter (or more typically, let the camera do it), then press the shutter release. With these pictures, David Malin says, the process is back to front. You point the camera at something that can't be seen with the human eye. You press the shutter, allow for exposures of up to three hours, then see what emerges from the glass negatives.

"You're aware that what you are collecting on the glass plate has travelled halfway round the universe," he says.

"At the observatory near Coonabarabran, Malin could turn from the photographic plate and see the canopy of stars the telescope was about to reveal. "That's a lovely feeling. Nowadays, with digital technology, you can do the same thing in an office looking at a monitor. That's more efficient but not as romantic."

In black and white: the viewfinder's guide to the galaxy, Sydney Morning Herald

Labels: photography, science, space photography

CHRISTOPH GRUNENBERG In 1951 you did a number of paintings with random arrangements of bright colours. These works, in particular Colors for a Large Wall (1951), were a radical departure from your previous, mostly figurative paintings and from the collages experimenting with abstraction derived from observed phenomena of the visible world. Can you describe their genesis?

ELLSWORTH KELLY In October 1951 I left Paris and went to the south of France. The summer before, observing how light fragmented on the surface of water, I painted Seine, made of black and white rectangles arranged by chance. I then started a series of eight collages titled Spectrum Colors Arranged by Chance I to VIII. Before this I had not used colour extensively. The collages employed different systems and arrangements, using chance to organise where a spectrum of eighteen colours would be placed.


Ellsworth Kelly, Colors for a Large Wall, 1951.
Courtesy the Museum of Modern Art, New York, gift of the artist 1969 © Ellsworth Kelly
Oil on canvas mounted on 64 joined panels
240 x 240 cm

CHRISTOPH GRUNENBERG: Did you use a mathematical system with the early works?

ELLSWORTH KELLY It was a chance system for the placement of colours on a grid. Numbered slips of paper each referred to a colour, one of eighteen different hues to be placed on a grid 40 inches by 40 inches. Each of the eight collages used a different process.

CHRISTOPH GRUNENBERG Did you make conscious references in the arrangement of these works to the aesthetics of the colour chart?

ELLSWORTH KELLY I never thought of colour charts at all when I was working on them. They were really an experiment. I wanted to show how any colour goes with any other colour. Above all, I wanted to learn about colour relationships. Many of the works of this period start from chance encounters, such as shadows on a staircase, the reflections of the sun on the River Seine and the exposed sides of buildings that showed the abstract black patterns where the chimneys had been. After the experiments with arranging colours by chance came my first works using the actual colour spectrum as a source (Spectrum I, 1953)...

Sixty Years at Full Intensity - TATE ETC

Labels: interviews, painting

"When Clement Greenberg developed his canonical account of American-style painting, he identified Jackson Pollock and the other Abstract Expressionists as heirs to early twentieth-century French modernism. China has very distinguished modernists, the great Wu Guangzhong, who was born in 1919, is still painting, but their concerns are too distant for them to play any role in [Karen] Smith’s history. Her avant-garde artists borrow from the West, but it is impossible to map their development onto the history of our artistic development. China really is another world. Mao, the most important political figure, is not easy for Westerners to understand, for though his responsibility for great disasters is acknowledged, he is much admired. Xu Bing, a victim of the Cultural Revolution, still expresses “a strong Maoist art philosophy that art should derive from routine life and should serve the people” [...]

"Nine Lives focuses on artists who mostly remained in China, figures whose careers Smith has followed at a first hand. And so it deserves to be supplemented with her account of Ai Weiwei, who spent the 1980s in New York City. Living there “his response to his own personal experience was to deny China—his roots, his culture and the value system that had been imposed upon him”. But since he returned to Beijing in 1993, and, taking a major role there in serving to inspire Herzog & de Meuron’s planning for the 2008 Olympics, clearly now he is part of the story.

Smith describes Wang Guangyi’s appropriation of Maoist propaganda techniques in Great Criticism Series: Andy Warhol (2002); Geng Jianyi’s laughing faces; Fang Lijun’s images of “the sense of isolation”; Gu Dexin’s decaying red meat and spoiling ripe fruit; Li Shan’s homoerotic images of Mao; Zhang Xiaogang’s deadpan portraits; Xu Bing’s deconstructions of calligraphy; Zhang Peilli’s video showing public social dancing and Wang Jianwei’s, which displays emerging social conflicts. A great teller of this “history that has yet to be set in stone”, her narrative combines marvelous detailed interpretation with suggestive a historical perspective..."

Nine Lives: The Birth of Avant-Garde Art in New China by Karen Smith, and Ai WeiWei by Karen Smith, Hans Ulrich Obrisi, Bernard Fibicher reviewed by David Carrier, Art Critical

Labels: art criticism, China

Rodolphe A. Reiss, False bomb found in front of the Banque Cantonale Vaudoise,
Lausanne, January 15, 1905.

"Scientific police photographs are very rarely presented to the public, remaining stored for many years in confidential files because they transgress taboos when their subjects are violent death and crime. These pictures, taken almost a hundred years ago by Rodolphe Archibald Reiss, founder of the l’Institut de police scientifique of the Université de Lausanne, reveal their entire aesthetic dimension while retaining their intense emotional strength. As a forensic science pioneer, Reiss shows photographic skills which are unequalled in this field..." Art Daily

Labels: arson, art news, exhibitions

Strasser & Lysssiotis, A Long Road, 2009.
lithograph and acrylic on Arches paper
94 x 119cm, edition of 5
"An artists’ book, paintings and works on paper, collaboratively produced by Theo Strasser and Peter Lyssiotis, present a reflection of political tension and global turmoil in many parts of the world. Wars that have raged in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sudan, Lebanon, ongoing unrest in Chechnya, Palestine, Zimbabwe, East Timor, Sri Lanka and North Korea, and the all encompassing war on terror. During this period, Australian David Hicks was incarcerated at Guantanamo Bay without charge. Strasser and Lyssiotis have produced a powerful and emotive body of work in direct response to the media coverage of these events where horrific situations are reduced to catch-phrase headlines coupled with repetitive shock imagery that functions to dehumanise and desensitise us to the loss of human life. Theo Strasser is a painter, while Peter Lyssiotis is concerned with reproducing text and symbolic imagery. Through the process of collaboration each of these works has evolved into something unique that is far greater than the sum of its parts." Exhibiting here

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should no larger than 350k each

Labels: new work

Todd McMillan, swim 4 (from the series ague), 2009
C type photograph, 131.67 x 87.78cm
Courtesy GrantPirrie.

A new exhibition by young artist Todd McMillan opens at GrantPirrie next week. The show is notable for a very special reason – the show is a celebration of failure.

Earlier this year McMillan attempted to swim the English Channel but he didn’t quite make it. He swam until he got tired. He then abandoned the attempt for the safety of a boat... still in sight of the shore.

This new series of video works carries on from other recent McMillan videos that have seen the artist endlessly and pointlessly hitting golf balls down a driving range somewhere in Germany, or in another where he stumbles around on crutches with a plaster cast on one leg. Failure is his theme.

You’d be forgiven for wondering why an artist would take on failure and indeed, why it would be worth watching. Isn’t art supposed to be about success? The popular measure of artistic merit is a demonstration of the artist’s ability to use craft skills – to paint a portrait that looks like the subject, to take a lovely photograph, to convincingly chisel a head in stone – these are the things that make people say, wow, I wish I could do that.

Failing to swim the English Channel is something that everyone can do. Or fail to do... No special skills are required not to be able to do something. We generally like to enjoy looking at things being done by people who have the ability to do unusual things in the same way we appreciate a monkey using the telephone. That is a very special skill, and it’s noteworthy. Oh look – the monkey is wearing pants!


"Pray... for... Mojo."
McMillan is notable as a successful failure and his work is being taught in high schools as part of the Kaldor Projects video art package. But he’s just one of a whole generation of younger artists who strive to fail. The Melbourne-based performance video artist Anastasia Klose celebrates the fact that she has failed in romance, has failed to get a decent job or to make a decent living from her art. Another artist of note is the young Sydney painter Tom Polo, who combines frank admissions of failure with the ambition to win.

There are many other examples of failure in contemporary art and it must be said that these examples are of intentional failure, an ironic kind of activity that isn’t truly a mistake, or a disaster, since the artists do manage to finish their works, exhibit them and, in some cases, sell them to people who appreciate failure when they see it.


Tom Polo, Me, 2009.
Watercolour and pencil on paper
24 x 32 cm.

The roots of this trend towards disgrace are found in the rich soil of Australia’s artistic legacy. Older artists such as the painter Adam Cullen or the performance artist Tony Schwensen have tackled the cold toed comedy of Samuel Beckett who, after all, wrote an entire play about a lead character who fails to show up. Blame for the popularity of the failure theme should also be placed on UK artist David Shrigley who has parlayed his inability and unwillingness to draw "properly" into art stardom.

There may be another reason why being crap is so popular now – and that’s the ugly tendency in Australian culture to revel in triumphalism. One need only think of the absurd and unreasonable expectation of success at every level of sporting competition to realise just how deep the need to win runs in the Australian psyche.

The much touted ANZAC spirit - based on an event that can be best characterised as a noble failure - is an exception that it is also sadly out of date. It’s not about how you play the game these days, it’s about winning.

Australia’s attitude to winning and losing is best summed up in the stunning victory of ice skater Steven Bradbury at the 2002 Winter Olympics. Bradbury, who’d managed to get into the final after a series of improbable strokes of luck, won a gold medal from last position when all the other competitors literally fell over. Bradbury is now a folk hero.

Todd McMillan’s inability to swim the English Channel is far more interesting that had he actually done it.

Being a winner, a success, or a top sportsperson or artist, is incredibly overrated. To happily fail is an admission of the essential frailty of the human condition. We all should strive to fail again, and to fail better.

This op ed appeared in a slightly different form here.

Labels: op ed

This whole recession thing is

Good for breadline art 10% 12
Really cramping my os travel plans 16% 20
Helping me reorder my priorities into a less socially and evironmentally impactful lifestyle 11% 14
Reminding me that someone is always making money, and I want to get in on it 20% 25
Same as usual 32% 40
sending cheesecake futures down 11% 14

125 votes total

Labels: poll

Oh Industry comprises a new performance video by Daniel Mudie Cunningham alongside The Jodie Foster Archive, a body of performance work about celebrity and fandom, which began in 1996 and was completed in 2008. Filmed during an artist residency at Newington Armory, the new work Oh Industry, mashes popular culture depictions of naval, military and factory labour with the amusements and distractions of early 20th century modern life. Bette Midler’s performance of the song ‘Oh Industry’ from Beaches (1988) and references to the popular motion picture serial The Perils of Pauline (1914) intersect with conveyor belt choreography to suggest how the machine age and its class structures were shaped during the rise of modernity and industrialisation.

Daniel Mudie Cunningham is a Sydney based artist, curator and writer whose work primarily negotiates the queering of visual histories, popular cultures and oppositional identity politics. Cunningham’s art practice incorporates performance, video and installation. His practice is profiled at www.danielmcunningham.com

image: Daniel Mudie Cunningham, Oh Industry, 2009, HDV video, 16:9, 4 min 11 sec.

The Project was assisted by a grant from the New South Wales Government – Arts NSW, through a program administered by the National Association for the Visual Arts (NAVA)





Mel Curtiss’s new work, made for MOP Projects, repeats her interest in the “spatial turn” currently re-energising fields as diverse as architecture, urban studies, geography, sociology, and social theory. The territory explored in this work concerns the cinematic nature of architecture and the dynamic relationship between space and identity.

The figure of the whore as urban flâneuse, posturing at the intersection of “streetwalker” and “street”, drives an aesthetic of “re-use” and “making do” in a mixed-media installation that is at least one part road movie. Curtiss poaches diverse cultural terrains to re-write material and
social spaces constituted by discourses of pathology and pollution.

Mel Curtiss is an Adelaide artist whose multi-disciplinary approach, while it is rooted in sculpture and installation, often pursues connection with spaces and communities outside of the gallery. Curtiss primarily explores her interests in the production of space and hierarchical dualism.

Image: Escort Red, digital scan of found cigarette box, Mel Curtiss 2009

The Project was assisted by a grant from the South Australian Government - Ministry for the Arts, through a program administered by Arts SA.

Labels: press releases

Jaye Early, Having A Bad Day, 2009.

"Primarily my work is autobiographical: Whether navigating hesitant paths of fragility and fear associated in the psychological surrender present in various sexual/private/ public contracts, or the anxieties surrounding unwavering experiences of lonesomeness, and lack of any authentic connection with others -often exacerbated in an era of endemic superficiality, or the failure of culture to address my subjective sensibilities- sometimes resulting in laborious cycles of habitual and often vicious self- destructive patterns. Given this, an intension of my work is to consciously transform my personal dislocation/s into a visual strategy of disclosure. Another, less conscious, intension is to reach out to the viewer without the need (hopefully) to re-inscribe or idealize the hyper-subjectivity, ego, or sentimentality sometimes associated with documenting a lived experience. I’m less interested in breaking taboos, but rather more stimulated by exploring the reality in and between things and saying the unsayable-or perhaps giving some kind of uniqueness to what has already been said before. This image is part of my work currently exhibiting at the SCA mid-year postgraduate degree show" - Jaye Early.


Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should no larger than 350k each

Labels: new work

"As a public experiment, artist Julia Burns (alias: 'rose_burns') decided to blog on twitter in full view of the lunchtime crowd in Martin Place, Sydney, for one hour. She sat on her living room couch, wearing ugg boots and a comfy sweater, next to her heater, favourite cup, and a box of chocolate mints as she posted tweets about her life in front of the Channel 7 building.



"Burns is interested in the concepts of public access to the private sphere and the changing nature of privacy.Do 'followers' read with the same zest in the real world as they do in cyberspace? What is it like to follow a stranger's blog entries, while standing in front of them? Why do individuals increasingly publicize their private lives?

"Recognising the immense complexity and power of social networking and blogging sites, Burns does not wish to condemn these tools. Rather she wants to provoke, especially for the younger generation, debate on the integrity of some of their uses. She is concerned by the increasing need for public acceptance and validation in the social networking scene..."

Labels: new media, performance art

"Leading Chinese artist Ai Weiwei’s activism has finally provoked the Chinese authorities to act against him. His studio is being staked out by plainclothes police, and last month the artist’s popular blog on Sina.com was deleted, as well as his commentaries on China’s version of Twitter.

"Ai Weiwei has been running a campaign documenting the death of schoolchildren in the Sichuan earthquake of May 2008, alleging that the number of fatalities was due to local officials siphoning money from school building costs.

"Ai Weiwei told The Art Newspaper that he was recently involved in two other worrying incidents: in the first, unknown persons visited his mother’s house; when Ai Weiwei asked them for identification they refused to provide any, nor would they leave, leading him to call the local police..."

The Art Newspaper

Labels: art news

"Today marks the first day of National Art Hate Week. A seething critical mass that sprung, initially at least, from the hands of Billy Childish, prolific painter, poet, punk and self-proclaimed hero of the British art resistance movement. Childish was also Tracey Emin's former lover and the founder – now ex-member – of Stuckism, a sizeable art movement best-known for protesting on the steps of Tate Modern to demand more contemporary figurative art; Childish left at the first hint of his idea manifesting itself into an actual, physical demonstration.

"It's this concept of disorganised, ramshackle creativity that's key to National Art Hate Week: "I was making a series of new posters and just liked the way the words 'art' and 'hate' fitted together," Childish says, perhaps a mite disingenuously. The notion of turning the slogan into a national week apparently didn't occur until Steve Lowe, "chief engineer" of the L-13 Light Industrial Workshop gallery, and Jimmy Cauty, former half of art pop agitators the KLF, collaboratively spurred him on. Lowe's independent art space opened just a couple of months ago in London, set up as a "private ladies and gentlemen's club for the disruptive betterment of culture". And, aside from creating acid house pop smashes in What Time is Love and Justified and Ancient, Cauty famously set fire to £1m in cash in 1994, on a remote Scottish island with his KLF partner, Bill Drummond. Counter-cultural subversiveness seems ingrained in their psyches, and the three of them are well-positioned to unleash a manifesto declaring art war...."

More at the Guardian UK

Labels: art news

In a world which is crumbling under economic pressures the questions of identity through material worth are being challenged by both Eastern and Western cultures. The ever-present struggles of uniqueness and homogeneity are observed by a range of artists born in the Ukraine, Kazakhstan, Thailand, Southern Italy and Australia for the creation of the camouflage exhibition.

Painting, installation and digital media are used to explore the rich tapestry of response to life circumstance, in this exhibition, opening Friday, July 17th 2009, at Project Contemporary Artspace Gallery in Wollongong, a centre dedicated to providing opportunities for emerging, innovative and experimental artists.

The concept of camouflage is the focus for this group of artists. Presenting their examinations of the structures, contradictions and complexities of cultural belonging.

Labels: press releases

Hobart Hughes, Bunny man angers deer 1.

"I have always been interested in forms of consciousness, how they can be triggered and how they rupture or rapture. A lot of the early film work was the vision that a consciousness can construct. My very early drawings always tried to render the process of thinking. About 1994 I started to consider the consciousness we have when we dream. In particular I was curious about what I’d call dream slip. That is when we have a bubble of dream consciousness whilst awake. I’m not at all talking about daydreaming. Not in the sense of seeing a movie in your minds eye anyway. No what I’m talking about is that extended and very focused thinking that often starts with for instance by observing a tiny pile of sugar crystals on a table surface. A first we view it as a metaphore for let's say your relationship. A loose arrangement of individuals..."

Hobart Hughes, My Approach, from his website. Currently exhibiting the above work and others in Animals Attacking People in Animal Costumes, at Damien Minton Gallery.

Got new work you'd like to share? Send images and description of your work to thearlife at hot mail dot com. Images should be smaller than 350k each

Labels: new work, sculpture

"Homer (not the slouch of Springfield heralding the end of Western civilization, but the blind, semi-mythical poet at the dawn of Greek history) was seen by Strabo and the Stoics as the father of geography. His overarching geographic concept was of the world as a flat, round disk of land, completely encircled by Okeanos, the world sea.

"All this was enclosed by the fixed dome of the Heavens, filled with cloud and mist close to the Earth, but with clear aether closer to the sky’s dome. Sun, Moon and stars rose from the eastern waters of the Ocean, moved along the dome and sank again into the western waters. The whole thing is reminiscent of nothing so much as of one of those snowdomes that are the staple of any self-respecting tourist trap.

"This vision is expounded in the Iliad, in which Homer uses Achilles’ shield, forged by Hephaestos, to metaphorically describe the universe as a circular island, surrounded by water. Human activities, celestial objects and stellar motions are described on the shield, which is actually a map, on the threshold between a purely mythological and an nascent scientific view of the world..."

From Strange Maps

Labels: new work

"Hi - Thought I'd share some hilarious comments about our current show from some people who'll probably never have the benefit of seeing it in the flesh. They were reacting to Raquel Welch's I HATE YOUR GUTS!, a series based on the life and times of alleged funny man Robin Williams. Each portrait depicts a different film character played by this excruciatingly annoying comic. It intends on making the audience understand just how much she loathes Robin McLaurim Williams..."

Pop reader Luke G. heard about an upcoming art exhibition in Sydney, Australia, and he thought it sounded so awesome some of you may want to purchase a plane ticket: "It's a series of (authentically hairy) portraits of Robin Williams -- done in tapestry," he says. On July 3, the Black & Blue gallery debuts "I Hate Your Guts!," a series of Williams-inspired work by Raquel Welch. (Yes, the artist's name really is Raquel Welch.)

[snip]

"Whitney, why the hell would anyone in his right mind want to go see an exhibition by some anonymous Australian be-atch dishonoring one of America's greatest cultural icons? What foreigners like “Raquel Welch” don't understand is that when you disparage one of our finest entertainers, you also disparage all who respect and admire him. I happen to have had the honor of being present at a Robin Williams USO show for America's troops in Iraq not long ago and I can assure you that he was welcomed with open arms and shown great appreciation for putting himself out like that. There aren't many entertainers who have the guts, the generosity, or the magnanimous, selfless spirit to do what he did. Until this Aussie dingbat puts her a$$ on the line to entertain our troops and issues an apology to America and Robin Williams, I'll continue to consider her lower than a snake's belly. She knows where she can stuff her art (and her Dork magazines). PS: The only thing awesome in this story is the talent of Robin Williams."

From Pop Candy

Labels: fake controversies

Kate Carr is a sound artist who describes her practice as ‘emo glitch pop meets droney soundscapes’. She has released work internationally on Pertin-nce (Canada), Retinascan (Germany) and 442 (Australia). Adrian Elmer of Cyclic Defrost said of her recordings: ‘the sound is so transfixing and hypnotic that I am consistently sucked in to deeper emotional attachments to it.’


Covering the Mirrors documents a resistance, a reversal; where each ‘roadside memorial’ undermines the (non-) nature of the motorway space.

The proliferation of non-space seems perversely natural; airports, freeways, shopping centres, stations and hubs appear at each turn and beyond every turn off. These vast areas designed for functionality,supposed progress, in fact programmatically efface ‘the local’ with its community interests and historical presence; this leaves empty meaningless space in abundance.

Contrary to intent the ‘universal network’ actually isolates the individual by atomizing the community. It does this through an expanding ‘grid’ of interstitial non-spaces that affects all aspects of daily life – from our environment through to our emotions. No longer are these in-between zones mere links; they are fast-forming generic centres, places in and of themselves – that control and re-order the social experience.

Yet the presence of roadside memorials somehow resists this deterritorialization. As the visual markers carry with them a sacred significance and a small piece of history, which once situated in monotonous space they activate a subversion of the spatial homogenization. Suddenly these non-spaces are filled with meaning. These shrines with their folk rituals and cult following hint at a growing social dissent – as an emergent material culture they tap into an underlying collective impulse to reclaim lost space.

Taking the roadside memorial as his starting point, Neuman uses a variety of lens-based media, and techniques that span from appropriation to documentary to the staged, to critically respond to physical and cultural changes in the Australian landscape.

Labels: music, press releases

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Labels: Twitter

Uwe Henneken, Europa endlich, 2009.
Oil on canvas, 102x76.5cm.

"Uwe Henneken's work reflects upon the human condition; the search for meaning and fear of the unknown. When the work includes a figure it is placed in the painting as an awkward interloper, searching or confused. Because Henneken moves between and imitates different styles of painting, the figures are forced to grapple with the ever changing art-historical backdrops that surround them, leaving the viewer to consider what is aesthetically good, and contemplate the cyclical movement of cultural trends."

Andrew Keps Gallery. Hennecken reviewed by Frieze


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Labels: new work, painting

"Shortly after the liberation of Holland, Han van Meegeren, a painter and art dealer living in Amsterdam was arrested for collaboration with the Third Reich. He was accused among other things of having sold a Vermeer to Reichsmarshal Hermann Göring — essentially of having plundered the patrimony of his homeland for his own benefit and the benefit of the Nazis. To save his skin — the penalty for collaborating was imprisonment or hanging — Van Meegeren revealed that the painting sold to Göring and many other paintings that he had sold as works of the Dutch masters were forgeries. He had painted all of them.

On July 21, 1945, The New York Times weighed in on the story: “Authenticity of Several Paintings Sold as Vermeers Is Questioned”

The authenticity of several paintings introduced to the public as newly discovered works of Jan Vermeer, seventeenth century Dutch master, is in question and the case has become a national sensation in England. Originally many of these paintings were introduced to the public by Hans van Meegeren (sic), modern Dutch painter. Soon after the liberation of the Netherlands Van Meegeren was arrested for collaboration with the Germans and is now in prison awaiting trial. The press agency Anepaneta, which operates as a government mouthpiece, asserted a few days ago that Van Meegeren had made a statement that he himself painted the supposed Vermeers… Art experts say they are not convinced that the statements attributed to Van Meegeren are true. The director of the Rotterdam Museum said the prisoner was a fantasist who had a grudge against museums and similar institutions. A painting restorer in The Hague said that if one of the disputed works which he transferred to new canvas recently, “Pilgrims to Emmaus” [“Supper at Emmaus”] was indeed a forgery, then the painter must be considered a genius in that particular line.

“A genius in that particular line.” But what “particular line” is this? If the painting was indeed a forgery, then must the painter be considered a genius?"

Documentary-maker and essayist Errol Morris's seven-part essay on the forgeries of Han van Meegeren

Labels: forgeries, painting