Getting the brushoff

My all-time favorite painter is a woman named Wendy, who led a crew of three men from Certa-Pro Painters. Three years ago, they painted our house inside and out, and it all still looks great.

My second favorite is Norman Rockwell, because he actually painted things that looked like things - a family gathering, a cop with a kid, a Red Sox rookie rube, and thousands of other works.

Not for me is modern art where people have two eyes on one side of their face like a flounder, and a dropcloth is hailed as a breakthrough depicting "man's inhumanity to man." Sorry, art lovers, it's the philistine in me.  Like what you want; it's ok. As they say, "I don't know anything about what I like...all I know about is art."

But for you devotees of fine painting, have you heard of Fauvism? I'll let the dictionary define it for us, because I would have guessed that "Fauvism" means an illness you get from eating too much fauv.  Here's the word:

Fauvism: a style of painting with vivid expressionistic and nonnaturalistic use of color that flourished in Paris from 1905 and, although short-lived, had an important influence on subsequent artists, especially the German expressionists. Matisse was regarded as the movement's leading figure.

Well, then. Matisse aside, I read that another big shot in the wonderful world of Fauvism was Étienne Terrus. There is an art gallery in the South of France that has proudly displayed 140 of his fauvist works.

Or not. It seems that out of the 140 paintings that hang around in that museum, 82 of them are fakes.

C'est dommage.

The museum is in the town of Elne, where the mayor is Yves Barniol.  “It’s a catastrophe,” he says. “I put myself in the place of all the people who came to visit the museum, who saw fake works of art, who paid an entrance fee. It’s intolerable and I hope we find those responsible.”

"I didn't think that church was built
until after World War II"

What happened was that a group of art experts were assembling an exhibit for the museum when one of them said, "Terrus died in 1922, and some of the structures and buildings depicted in these paintings were not built until after that date...what th'......?

Some of the El Fakoes were bought out of municipal money over the past decades, and some were donated by collectors and several groups of art donors.

American den art

It's often said that lawyers enter a room right after the artists leave it (all right, so I'm the only one who says that? I say it often!) so now the attorneys are involved and the city of Elne has filed legal complaints for forgery and fraud.  The pretend paintings have been taken down, replaced by pictures of dogs playing poker, and wide-eyed kids.

Just kidding.

American
kitchen art

I now regard with gimlet eyes the priceless heirloom painting I inherited, showing Thomas Jefferson preparing lunch on a George Foreman grill.

“We know there have been a lot of forgeries circulating,” a source told a British newspaper, “and we believe a well organized network was behind this.”

Worldwide art forgeries! Sounds like a movie plot. Ben Affleck, you busy?