The Thin Blue Period
I’ve little time for commentary, but I just stumbled across a fun fact regarding Pablo Picasso – from the wikipedia:
[Poet Guillaume] Apollinaire was arrested on suspicion of stealing the Mona Lisa from the Louvre in 1911. Apollinaire pointed to his friend Picasso, who was also brought in for questioning, but both were later exonerated.
Why has no one created a failed-pilot for a television show revolving around famous painters, falsely accused of art-related crimes, who operate as underground vigilantes in an effort to clear themselves?
I can see it now:
“I’ll run a spatter analysis,” says Jackson Pollock, deploying CSI-style UV lights.
“Maybe it’s just me,” Claude Monet replies, putting on sunglasses, “but I get the impression that this is MURDER. Seriously – look at those colours. Atrocious.”
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QoPWALM2riQ]
“The only thing killed here was my sense of aesthetics.”
“This week, a cryptic tryptic pits the team against a mad Dutchman in “Van Gogh-a-go-go”.”
:-DDDDD The idea is not bad at all, and I’m serious 🙂
By the way, as I might have mentioned somewhere else, the guy who actually stole the Mona Lisa lived ten minutes from where I live. He hid it by camouflaging it as the top of a coffee table in his living room, and when the police went to his home to investigate, he offered them a cup of coffee on that very table O__O
Ha! Now we just need to find a producer.
That’s a great bit of history – I must have missed it the first time you mentioned it. Brilliant hiding place.
“This week, a missing Zürich artist and a disputed paternity test baffle the team in the case of Who’s Your Dada?”
Oooooh my. Very nice.
I tried to find the story in English, but the bit about the table doesn’t appear anywhere (and the name is often mispelled as Perugia instead of the correct Peruggia, not to mention the fact that several sources say that he “rolled up” the Monna Lisa and kept it in a trunk (it’s painted on wood, for corn’s sake…)), all I found in English is this
http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/gangsters_outlaws/outlaws/major_art_thefts/index.html
That part of the story can’t be positively verified, of course, but I’ve spoken with some old people here who confirmed it as real as they heard it directly from members of Peruggia’s family.
I’d love to keep up the titles but this is about the extent of my art education:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7mmal0PMkmI&feature=related