Ansel Adams, Part Two

Now there is CONTROVERSY heating up over the supposed discovery of the early Ansel Adams negatives, with the administrators of his trust calling it a scam, and the owner of the negatives and his team fighting back.

Forgeries do sometimes work, in fact. Below is Han van Meegeren’s bogus “Vermeer” painting, which fooled even the specialists. I believe one of them called it “Vermeer’s greatest masterpiece,” which must have been humiliating in retrospect once the scam was exposed.

If I’m remembering the story correctly, the only reason van Meegeren’s forgeries were detected is that he was in serious trouble (with a possible death sentence) for selling “Dutch national cultural treasures” to Hermann Goering during the war, and the only way he could get out of it was by admitting that he had scammed Goering rather than selling him genuine treasures (and then proving it, I believe, by demonstrating his forgery technique to the authorities). One of the things he did was buy undistinguished paintings from Vermeer’s era, then scrape them clean and paint his own forgeries on top of those genuine pieces of period canvas.