In a century that has alternately venerated and ridiculed the notion of the original, what better revenge for the mediocre artist than to turn to forgery? The century that spawned Duchamp's urinal-turned-fountain, an art world in which American artist Mark Kostabi can pay students $8 an hour and sell the resulting 'paintings' for $30,000, can hardly carp at the chutzpah of a second-rate artist wedded to seventeenth-century ideals who palmed off his work on the most discerning connoisseurs of his time as priceless Vermeers. "I Was Vermeer" is the story of a paranoid, drug-addicted, alcoholic, hypochondriac painter whose journey from zero to hero earned him $50 million dollars, the acclamation of the world's press and the satisfaction of swindling the Nazis. His canvases would almost
… read more...certainly be prized among the catalogue of Vermeers if he had not confessed. Half a century after his death, his handiwork is still suspected in at least four Vermeers in major galleries, and the ugly daub sold last year at Sotheby's for $30 million (and denounced by Brian Sewell as a fake) had long been attributed to him. "I Was Vermeer" takes a wry, sometimes scathing, amoral and irreverent look at forgery, the expert, and the career of a second-rate painter who became the world's greatest forger.Read More read less...