Breaking van Gogh
Saint-Rémy, Forgery, and the $95 Million Fake at the Met
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Narrated by:
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Jeff Cummings
About this listen
In Breaking van Gogh, James Grundvig investigates the history and authenticity of van Gogh's iconic Wheat Field with Cypresses, currently on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Relying on a vast array of techniques from the study of the painter's biography and personal correspondence to the examination of the painting's style and technical characteristics, Grundvig proves that the "most expensive purchase" housed in the Met is a fake.
The Wheat Field with Cypresses is traditionally considered to date to the time of van Gogh's stay in the Saint-Rémy mental asylum, where the artist produced many of his masterpieces. After his suicide, these paintings languished for a decade, until his sister-in-law took them to a family friend for restoration. The restorer had other ideas.
In the course of his investigation, Grundvig traces the incredible story of this piece from the artist's brushstrokes in sunlit southern France to a forger's den in Paris, the art collections of a prominent Jewish banking family and a Nazi-sympathizing Swiss arms dealer, and finally the walls of the Met. The riveting narrative weaves its way through the turbulent history of twentieth-century Europe, as the painting's fate is intimately bound with some of its major players.
©2016 James O. Grundvig (P)2017 Brilliance Publishing, Inc., all rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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Essential listening for Lunch fans
- By Michael P. Mesaros on 08-14-18
By: Dennis Lim
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The Lost Painting
- The Quest for a Caravaggio Masterpiece
- By: Jonathan Harr
- Narrated by: Campbell Scott
- Length: 6 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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An Italian village on a hilltop near the Adriatic coast, a decaying palazzo facing the sea, and in the basement, cobwebbed and dusty, lit by a single bulb, an archive unknown to scholars. Here, a young graduate student from Rome, Francesca Cappelletti, makes a discovery that inspires a search for a work of art of incalculable value, a painting lost for almost two centuries.
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an incredible and complex story unfolds seamlessly
- By Jeremiah on 10-31-05
By: Jonathan Harr
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The Vanishing Velázquez
- A 19th Century Bookseller's Obsession with a Lost Masterpiece
- By: Laura Cumming
- Narrated by: Siobhan Redmond
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When John Snare, a 19th-century provincial bookseller, traveled to a liquidation auction, he stumbled on a vivid portrait of King Charles I that defied any explanation. The Charles of the painting was young - too young to be king - and yet also too young to be painted by the Flemish painter to which the work was attributed. Snare had found something incredible - but what? His research brought him to Diego Velázquez, whose long-lost portrait of Prince Charles has eluded art experts for generations.
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A fascinating study of art history
- By Ron on 07-02-16
By: Laura Cumming
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What Are You Looking At?
- The Surprising, Shocking, and Sometimes Strange Story of 150 Years of Modern Art
- By: Will Gompertz
- Narrated by: Matthew Waterson
- Length: 13 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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What is modern art? Who started it? Why do we either love it or loathe it? And why is it such big money? Join BBC Arts Editor Will Gompertz on a dazzling tour that will change the way you look at modern art forever. From Monet's water lilies to Van Gogh's sunflowers, from Warhol's soup cans to Hirst's pickled shark, hear the stories behind the masterpieces, meet the artists as they really were, and discover the real point of modern art.
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A simply wonderful book with a serious flaw
- By 11104 on 05-02-21
By: Will Gompertz
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Printer's Error
- Irreverent Stories from Book History
- By: Rebecca Romney, J. P. Romney
- Narrated by: J.P. Romney
- Length: 8 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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Since the Gutenberg Bible first went on sale in 1455, printing has been viewed as one of the highest achievements of human innovation. But the march of progress hasn't been smooth; downright bizarre is more like it. Printer's Error chronicles some of the strangest and most humorous episodes in the history of Western printing. Take, for example, the Gutenberg Bible. While the book is regarded as the first printed work in the Western world, Gutenberg's name doesn't appear anywhere on it.
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Porn for Ye Old Bibliophiles
- By George M. Liveakos on 03-24-17
By: Rebecca Romney, and others
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Tom and Jack
- The Intertwined Lives of Thomas Hart Benton and Jackson Pollock
- By: Henry Adams
- Narrated by: Wayne Thompson
- Length: 11 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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The drip paintings of Jackson Pollock, trailblazing Abstract Expressionist, appear to be the polar opposite of Thomas Hart Benton's highly figurative Americana. Yet the two men had a close and highly charged relationship dating from Pollock's days as a student under Benton. Pollock's first and only formal training came from Benton, and the older man soon became a surrogate father to Pollock.
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I suggest you READ, not listen...
- By Grace O'Malley on 07-01-16
By: Henry Adams
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The Judgment of Paris
- The Revolutionary Decade that Gave the World Impressionism
- By: Ross King
- Narrated by: Tristan Layton
- Length: 14 hrs and 47 mins
- Unabridged
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While the Civil War raged in America, another very different revolution was beginning to take shape across the Atlantic, in the studios of Paris. The artists who would make Impressionism the most popular art form in history were showing their first paintings amid scorn and derision from the French artistic establishment. Indeed, no artistic movement has ever been, at its inception, quite so controversial.
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Try this!
- By Robert on 10-28-08
By: Ross King
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The Apparitionists
- A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
- By: Peter Manseau
- Narrated by: Jefferson Mays
- Length: 9 hrs and 31 mins
- Unabridged
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America's imagination. A "spirit photographer", William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for contact with their dead husbands and sons. It took a circus-like trial of Mumler on fraud charges to expose a fault line of doubt and manipulation.
By: Peter Manseau
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The Lost Gutenberg
- The Astounding Story of One Book's Five-Hundred-Year Odyssey
- By: Margaret Leslie Davis
- Narrated by: Coleen Marlo
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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For rare-book collectors, an original copy of the Gutenberg Bible - of which there are fewer than 50 in existence - represents the ultimate prize. Here, Margaret Leslie Davis recounts five centuries in the life of one copy, from its creation by Johannes Gutenberg, through the hands of monks, an earl, the Worcestershire sauce king, and a nuclear physicist to its ultimate resting place, in a steel vault in Tokyo.
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Spare me
- By Dr. Small on 05-04-20
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The Lost Book of Moses
- The Hunt for the World's Oldest Bible
- By: Chanan Tigay
- Narrated by: Chanan Tigay
- Length: 9 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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In the summer of 1883, Moses Wilhelm Shapira - archaeological treasure hunter and denizen of Jerusalem's bustling marketplace - arrived unannounced in London claiming to have discovered the world's oldest Bible scroll. When news of the discovery leaked to the excited English press, Shapira became a household name. But before the British Museum could acquire them, Shapira's nemesis, French archaeologist Charles Clermont-Ganneau, denounced his find as a fraud.
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Fascinating!
- By Deborah on 07-27-17
By: Chanan Tigay
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The Art of Rivalry
- Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art
- By: Sebastian Smee
- Narrated by: Bob Souer
- Length: 10 hrs and 22 mins
- Unabridged
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Rivalry is at the heart of some of the most famous and fruitful relationships in history. The Art of Rivalry follows eight celebrated artists, each linked to a counterpart by friendship, admiration, envy, and ambition. All eight are household names today. But to achieve what they did, each needed the influence of a contemporary - one who was equally ambitious but who possessed sharply contrasting strengths and weaknesses.
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Death by bob souer
- By SKWAD on 01-18-18
By: Sebastian Smee
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When Paris Sizzled
- The 1920s Paris of Hemingway, Chanel, Cocteau, Cole Porter, Josephine Baker, and Their Friends
- By: Mary McAuliffe
- Narrated by: Saskia Maarleveld
- Length: 11 hrs and 15 mins
- Unabridged
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When Paris Sizzled vividly portrays the City of Light during the fabulous 1920s, les Annees folles, when Parisians emerged from the horrors of war to find that a new world greeted them - one that reverberated with the hard metallic clang of the assembly line, the roar of automobiles, and the beat of jazz. Mary McAuliffe traces a decade that saw seismic change on almost every front, from art and architecture to music, literature, fashion, entertainment, transportation, and, most notably, behavior.
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Informative, but no sizzle
- By OzEnigma on 06-01-17
By: Mary McAuliffe
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Stealing the Mystic Lamb
- The True Story of the World's Most Coveted Masterpiece
- By: Noah Charney
- Narrated by: John Allen Nelson
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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Jan van Eyck's Ghent Altarpiece is on any art historian's list of the 10 most important paintings ever made. Often referred to by the subject of its central panel, the Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, it represents the fulcrum between the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. It is also the most frequently stolen artwork of all time.
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Snatching defeat from the jaws of victory
- By Jody R. Nathan on 01-04-12
By: Noah Charney
What listeners say about Breaking van Gogh
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ashley Cox
- 04-16-18
Good Story but not Historically Accurate
Would you listen to Breaking van Gogh again? Why?
I would definitely listen to this again. The story is highly interesting covering all angles in which the picture wheat field with Cypresses came into existence.
What was the most interesting aspect of this story? The least interesting?
I knew virtually nothing about this topic and don't follow art or the art world but I was entertained the entire time. It was written very well with plots rises and suspension to keep you wanting to listen.
Have you listened to any of Jeff Cummings’s other performances before? How does this one compare?
This is the first for me.
Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?
I think the areas where he discussed Vincent Van Gogh and how his mental illness and lead poisoning was the reason for his ability to see color so vividly was so heart breaking for me. It made me realize that while we love looking at the art work we hate the reasons that inspired the art work and there's such a bitter irony there.
Any additional comments?
The only thing I didn't like about this book was that while it's discussing historical events the author has a highly emotional spin on everything. Many facts are listed as facts instead of emotional conjecture and that bothered me. The story was well written and presented but sometimes the conclusions were listed as facts when in reality we have no way of knowing and or no evidence. I wish the author had been more clear about this.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Cheryl L. Ring
- 03-14-18
Captivating!
Loved this book, the history was fact full and obviously authenticated by the author. A must listen for artists and art enthusiasts.
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- mary
- 09-15-17
Van No
As painter I bought this book for interest in Vincent Van Gogh. I have listened to this book four times. There is a lot of information. I will be buying a hard copy. I have learned a lot regarding how Vincent worked as a painter and his technique. There is a lot of information regarding the stolen paintings from World War 2. I would recommend this to anyone interested in painting and to all the Van Gogh enthusiasts.
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2 people found this helpful
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- david
- 01-19-19
Masterful insight to avoid Van Gogh fakes!
Enjoyed learning the art history of Van Gogh’s complex yet unique expression of his visual interpretation of color in the world he lived. James Grunvig, masterfully unvails a check list that can help the unexperienced collector authenticate a true Van Gogh from a fake. The reading has inspired me now to do another level of analysis and appreciation when purchasing collectible art.
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- Sarah
- 04-29-18
Fascinating Provenance
What I like most about this book is that it made me really look at both the paintings in a way I wouldn't have done before. I think the author is correct in his assertion that the Mets is fake.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Paul
- 05-09-18
Could have been good with an editor
The book becomes unreadable/unlistenable in the last two hours. While in the beginning the author presents a somewhat solid case in acceptable language, towards the middle the quality sharply drops off.
It’s like only half the book was edited. The second half is raging, chaotic, grandiose and arrogant in tone, states assumptions as facts, gives characters inner monologues that are not backed up but anything and overall reads like a clickbait article written on flashcards and then shuffled.
I caught myself mumbling „what?“ multiple times towards the end as the author found it necessary to point out that the titanic sunk in the same year as some event or - completely without context - suddenly disclaiming that he believes that all cases of looted WW2 will be resolved by 2045, which he then doesn’t back up or elaborate on with a single further word.
The reading is similarly bad, getting overexcited at times, stoically trotting on at others and mispronouncing even basic French and German terms do badly that they become incomprehensible.
In summary, unless your rally want to spend 4 hours of your life listening to something that can only be described as a crossover of angry conspiracy talk radio and a clickbait „you won’t believe what happens next“ article, give this one a pass.
The quality of the writing is a shame as the author initially seems to be making a good point, which is utterly lost in the last two hours of disorganized rambling.
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4 people found this helpful