Selects: Seven - No, Wait, Five - Mysteries of the Art World

27:54And they really don't know. It's just sort of one of those great mysteries of a disappeared painting. And my money is on a private collector probably has this thing stashed away. But you would also think that at some point somebody would talk. You would think so um and you know maybe they will eventually unless it's really stashed well some people think it was destroyed in that movie monuments men right uh they show the nazis igniting it with the flamethrower in a cave with a bunch of other art um and there you know there's a whole camp that says now this thing is it's gone forever so they did something to it because the nazis were known not just plunder but also destroy art as well which just one more reason to love them nazis Yeah, and I think this is oil on panel, so I don't think this could even be like rolled up in a tube and put under your bed or anything.

28:43Yeah, I would guess not. No, I didn't realize it was on panel, but that makes sense. But the state, the National Museum in Krakow bought the entire Princess Zartorsky collection from a private collector for 100 million euros back in 2016. And that, I know, and that included the rights to portrait of a young man in case it's ever found. and for now it's just they have the original frame hanging empty in the gallery. Yeah, it turns out that's a thing I didn't know was a thing. Empty frames in galleries. It's kind of sad. Yeah, it's sad. It's very poignant. It says, come home. Come home. We're leaving the light on for you.

29:23Come home. Just like Motel 6. That's right. I'm Tom Brokaw. We'll leave the light on for you. All right. Well, that means it's time for another break. and we'll be back right after this to talk a little bit about Van Gogh.

29:47New year, new goals, and in this economy, a better money plan is more necessary than ever. I am Matt. And I'm Joel. We are from the How to Money podcast, and every week we help you to spend smarter, save more, and make sense of what's going on out there. If you want 2026 to be the year you finally feel in control of your money, we're here to give you the tools and advice to help you make it happen. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, I'm Dr. Priyanka Wally. And I'm Hari Kondabolu. It's a new year, and on the podcast Health Stuff, we're resetting the way we talk about our health.

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32:22So, Chuck, before I launch into a Saka-Go-A-type tirade onto you, is that how you accurately pronounce his name? I don't know. It was from the filmmaker who dared not speak his name. It was from a Woody Allen movie. I think it was in the most problematic movie, Manhattan, when he's with Diane Keaton and some obnoxious person says Van, or I think it's Diane Keaton says Van Gogh, and he's, you know, he's incense. He's like Van Gogh, like how pretentious. So, okay, so instead we're just going to go with Van Gogh like everybody else, right? Yeah, sure. Okay. And we can cut all that out if we don't even want to talk about Woody Allen.

33:02That's fine. Sure, sure. I hear you. So Van Gogh was most, he was just such a sad, tragic figure. I feel for this guy so much after learning more about him. We should do an entire podcast on him if you ask me. Agreed. But instead here we're going to talk about his death because there is a mystery surrounding his death. He's very famous for having cut off his ear. He definitely did that. And I had always learned that he did it to impress a sex worker who he was enamored with. And he definitely did give her his ear after he cut it off. But that's not why he cut it off. He cut it off in a fit of angst, basically, after having an argument with his friend Paul Gauguin, who he was living with in Arles in the south of France.

33:48And he said, well, I'm going to make some sort of lemonade out of this lemon I just gave myself. And he took it to his, I guess, hopeful girlfriend. And I believe she was not that impressed with it. Yeah. So he suffered from definitely depression. There is speculation that he had bipolar disorder. Yeah, I saw that too. Was, you know, just sort of long suffering as an artist. He only sold one painting before he died in 1890 at the age of 37. And the story goes is that he shot himself in the chest with a revolver. But it gets a little more complicated than that. And in what year was the book? In 2011, there was a book written called Van Gogh.

34:35colon, The Life, written by Stephen, I'm going to say Mifa. Okay. And Gregory White Smith. And it seems like they sort of launched this idea, or at least really put it in the public forefront, that he was actually killed almost certainly accidentally by one of two boys, a younger gentleman that he was hanging out with that day. Right. So here's the thing. like there's a lot of circumstantial evidence that supports that theory that he was killed by two boys. I buy it. There's also, it's also circumstantially plausible that, you know, Van Gogh died by suicide as well. But even if you take his story and start digging into it and the statements that he made, supposedly made, apparently everything we know about it comes from the owner of the inn where he rented a room's 13-year-old daughter at the time, who was a witness to all this.

35:36But even if you take what he supposedly said, it still doesn't add up. That number one, he shot himself in the chest, and most importantly, that number two, the gun that he shot himself with could never be found. And instead of actually, you know, finishing the suicide, completing the suicide, he couldn't find the gun after he shot himself in the chest and just walked back to his room where he died after suffering 20 more hours. But still to the end, claiming that he had done this himself. Even if you take all that together, it seems like, no, there's something really fishy going on here. Yeah.

36:14So this bullet misses all of his internal organs very improbably because it deflected off his rib cage. And he walked, like you said, to the doctor who they didn't have a surgeon on duty, so they couldn't remove the bullet. He lived a total of 30 hours after the shot and died of infection, got to talk with his brother, was speaking to people. So he had every opportunity to say that these two boys that I was hanging out with, that I was drinking, and I say boys, I think they were maybe late teens, early 20s. No, they were 16. Oh, okay. I saw early 20s in another thing. Oh, yeah. But, you know, hanging out, getting drunk with them.

36:57one of these boys, René Sacretin, had a gun that apparently misfired a lot and he liked playing with this thing. He liked to play cowboy, supposedly. He did. And so it all just seems, and even his statement, he said, he didn't say, I shot myself. He said, do not accuse anyone. It was I who wanted to kill myself. Yeah, which is very peculiar as well. Yeah, for sure. It's ambiguous, I think, as far as like, because the idea is that maybe he was accidentally shot. And then after he was shot, he was like, this is kind of what I wanted all along. You know, I've been heading down this road toward suicide.

37:39And then now it's just done for me. So what seems to have happened is that this gun, possibly that it wasn't actually murder or any kind of premeditated murder, more like a manslaughter where Rene and his brother Gaston were messing around and accidentally— Basically, he had seen a Wild Bill Cody Wild West show the year before and became obsessed with it. So that's what he was doing with the gun and playing cowboy. And that they had accidentally shot him with this gun that was kind of, you know, known to misfire. So the thing was that the gun was never found. Renee went back to school like right after that, which was still in the middle of summer break from what I saw.

38:27And the town seems to have circled the wagons around these boys because, you know, Van Gogh was an outsider. He was not very well thought of. He used to get really drunk and argue with the locals in the cafe and everything like basically every night. And these boys came from like a good, well-to-do family. So for many years, like, that was just the thing. Like, it just happened. And then slowly, little by little, it seems to have trickled out some support for this idea. Like, no, like, Van Gogh wasn't anywhere near this field. He said that he had shot himself in. He was actually on the road to the Secretan's house.

39:05And then finally, years later, René Secretan said that, you know, he, it probably was his gun and that Van Gogh had somehow gotten a hold of it. It seems likely that he was shot by them, whether accident or not. Yeah, and these two authors, they put forth some other circumstantial evidence, like that the bullet went in at a weird angle that would not have been the angle if you shot yourself in the chest. That his more recent works were a little more upbeat and a little more positive, and that he was not in that kind of mindset at the time. and that he had recently even written his thoughts about suicide, that he thought it was sinful and immoral.

39:50And so they sort of use all this as evidence that he would not have done it himself and that it was, you know, they believe it was an accident. His last words, very sad, were, the sadness will last forever. He spoke to his brother, which that's tough. Yeah, it is. I really do want to do an episode on him. And I think Secretan came out in the 50s even and denied it, right? Like, finally, once and for all. He did. He did, but he also said that it probably was his gun and that somehow Van Gogh had gotten it. Right, but, hey, that ain't my fault. No, but also to backpedal and be like, it probably was my gun, because that was another thing.

40:28Everybody's like, where did Van Gogh get a gun? Van Gogh didn't have a gun. No one would have given Van Gogh a gun. Right. He was the guy who got drunk every night and had cut off his ear before. That was like, no one in town would have given him a gun. And so the fact that he even admitted that it was his gun is probably as close as Rene Sercuton ever came to confessing publicly about it, you know? Yeah, and it makes sense. What he said was do not accuse anyone. Like that really seems like he's trying to cover for these kids that he didn't want to get in trouble. Yeah, because if he wanted to die but was also he didn't want to die by his own hand, like this is kind of a lucky gift in a very strange way, you know?

41:11Yeah. I'm going to that immersive Van Gogh thing in July. Where is that? It is here in Atlanta. It's at the Pullman Yards. Oh, yeah. Over in Kirkwood where they shoot like every movie in Atlanta shoots there. Right. Yeah. So, yeah, it's supposed to be pretty cool. It's very neat. Sounds neat. I mean, like, basically they just make the stars come out whenever you come in. I think so. They come sit in this yellow chair. I think that's the deal. I think you go in and you are surrounded by projected art in different ways from what I can gather. Oh, I got to check that out, man. Thanks for telling me about it.

41:50Yeah, it looks kind of cool. All right, Chuck, you want to finish out talking about Hitler? Don't you mean Hilter? Did you notice that? Is he in there as Hilter? Oh, my gosh, yes, in the headline. In the headline. Did Hilter really do these paintings? Do these paintings? Who wrote that? I feel bad, but like, did Hilter really do these paintings? That's great. Oh, yeah, he did them. Yeah, Hilter did these paintings. So we're talking not about Hilter, but about Hitler, Adolf Hitler in particular. And as everybody knows, Hitler was a frustrated artist. Yeah, big time. You know, people have made a lot of hay about how possibly the world would be a totally different place had he been accepted into the Vienna Academy of Arts.

42:40And he came, I don't want to say he came close, but he made two different attempts in one year to be accepted. And they basically looked at his stuff and said, look, man, you have the skill of a draftsman. Maybe you should go into architecture, but you're not going to be an artist. And he said, architecture? That was a direct quote. But this was a huge deal for him. I think I read in Mein Kampf, I haven't read Mein Kampf, but I read an article by somebody who read Mein Kampf and said that he said it was like a bolt from the blue and that, you know, he was pursuing this dream that his father would, like, beat him out of.

43:24Like, his father enrolled him in a technical school. He's like, no, son of mine's going to be an artist. He would beat him up whenever he brought the idea up. And so finally, after his father died, And then he nursed his ailing mother until she died. He got up the gumption to, like, go and enroll in art school. And apparently he, being Hitler, who I guess had been fairly bonkers his whole life, just knew that he was destined to become an artist. So the idea that he was rebuffed not once but twice by this Vienna school, these people were, like, the guardians of what is art and what is not. and they were telling him what you got is not.

44:04That was a huge deal to him. It was a very big deal. And it's funny, it's just now occurring to me that there was sort of a similar thing with Manson's rejection as a musician by the music industry. I never really kind of really thought of that parallel. But in 1909, Hitler is traipsing around Vienna and he is selling watercolors copied from postcards. to tourists so if you've ever traveled to europe he was one of those guys that was down by the river uh the river bank yeah in a van selling these uh and literally copied from postcards so he did that for a little while made a little bit of money because you know if you look at his art it's it's way better than i could do it's you know it's okay but yeah like modern uh and it's it's hard to tell if modern art critics like so much goes into looking at a hitler painting and reviewing it Like it's really hard to kind of separate those things.

45:03But the general thought is that he had nothing exceptional about him at all. He was the kind of artist that would sell stuff down by the river to tourists. They were fine. He was capable. But they were copycat paintings. He was copying things. He had no point of view. He did this in 1913 as well in Munich, painting Munich cityscapes and landscapes and selling them to tourists. and then in 1914 got hauled in by the police, of all things, for failing to register for the military. Yeah. And then he went down and registered, and then they gave him a physical exam, and he failed it. They said it was too weak to fire a weapon.

45:48Yeah. So they arrested him so that they could humiliate him, basically. And then when World War I came around, he enlisted, and they say, we need everybody we can get, come on in. And he actually did fight. Yeah, even Hilter. Hilter did this army thing. Right. So when he rose to power Germany, one of the things he did was he had his works collected and destroyed. I'm not exactly sure what the thinking was behind that, I guess because he knew it wasn't very good and he needed to focus on his political career rather than his artistic career or have everybody else focus on it, but to no avail. Because I saw a 1936 critic or a critic wrote in 1936 that his style was prosaic, utterly devoid of rhythm, color, feeling, or spiritualism.

46:41And this was before he, or I'm sorry, or spiritual imagination. And this was before he had really become an obvious threat. This is 1936. So even back then, even without hindsight, people thought his stuff wasn't very good. So, yeah, he had his stuff destroyed. And it was kind of a footnote for a very long time that he was an artist and no one really cared after his death. Yeah, I mean, and that was one of the major reasons that he was such an art plunderer during the war and stole as much art as he could from real famous artists and famous paintings because he had all this backstory as a failed artist.

47:23And it was interesting. I did see that like one of his major, I mean, because he wasn't an utter failure at first. He had a backer early on, I think, who was a Jewish man. Yeah, Morgenstern. Yeah, which was really interesting. And there was, I don't know, man. There's a lot of speculation about what that all meant to him. and like people try and draw parallels to like some of the paintings. I mean, some of it feels like a stretch. Definitely like the, you know, the cold streets of Munich like were painted like clearly with a future cleansing in mind to make it look like this. That's a stretch.

48:06Yeah, some of that stuff seems like a stretch, but you could definitely read into the backstory at least, I think, with some accuracy. Yeah, and even if, like, you can't necessarily suss out, like, the future from his paintings, you can make a pretty strong case that his artistic ambitions being utterly crushed had some sort of driving force or impact on his psyche at the very least. Sure. Like, that and his later political career and dictatorship did not exist in a vacuum. I don't think you can possibly make the case that they were just unrelated in any way. No, I think any sociopath, you can look at their past and see the dots connected, you know?

48:49Yeah. So like you said, there was – this kind of just was the deal for a long time. And then like anything else, like people wanting to get original Charles Manson music reels, in the late 90s, early 2000s, there was a market for Hitler's work. I think in 2009, a British auction house, someone paid$150 ,000 for 15 early sketches and watercolors, including a self-portrait. And then in 2015, some unnamed investors paid$450 ,000 for a set of watercolors. I think there were 12 or 13 that survived. Yeah, the problem is because he didn't have a style of his own, that he was copying postcards, that he didn't have any formal training, and that he lacked a lot of creativity or any creativity it seems like.

49:44It's really hard to say this is a Hitler and this is a fake. And there's developed a really enormous market of fakes. because anybody who's like a passingly good artist in watercolors of streetscapes and landscapes could drum up something and be like, this is a Hitler. And it would be really difficult to say yes, it is or no, it's not. Yeah. What kind of a garbage human do you have to be to think, I'll do Hitler forgeries and try and sell them to garbage humans that want to collect them? Yeah. And it's not like these are even fetching like$10 million a piece. We're talking like you might get$10 ,000 for it for your Hitler forgery.

50:32Unbelievable. Wow. But totally believable. So that's the mystery of the Hitler paintings. Did he do this? Yeah. Did he do those paintings? You got anything else? I got nothing else. That was a good five. I think we have committed to doing a robust episode on the Gardner Museum heist because that's a good one. and that was on this list and way underplayed. For sure. So keep an ear out for that, everybody. And since I said keep an ear out for that, I think it's time for listener mail. Yeah, I'm going to call this middle names because we had a little discussion in our John Muir episode about how Emily and I and our friends, Justin and Melissa, one night were going by our middle names as a joke.

51:21and I had the theory that you have no emotional connection to your middle name if you don't have a reaction when you hear it said out loud. And I just meant sort of the non-dominant name. It didn't necessarily mean middle names because my brother goes by his middle name. Scott is his middle name and some people do that. It's a thing. And certainly Amy does. She said, I was listening to the show and at the end you were chatting about using middle names and how you don't have an emotional connection when you hear it. I have an interesting situation that everyone, everyone in my family uses their middle names.

51:53So I've always been called Amy ever since I was born, but my first name is Helen. This causes an interesting situation at airports and doctor's appointments where they refer to me as Helen, and I always have to remember that they're talking to me. Big fan of the show, kept me curious, and my curious spirit satisfied over the last three or four years. And it's such a comfort knowing there's always another episode to listen to. Best wishes from the UK. They're always so nice. And that is from Amy. Helen Amy. Thanks, Helen Amy. We'll just call her Amy, as is customary. Yeah, because we say Helen.

52:26She's like, who? Wow, I can't wait until they read my listener mail, says Amy. If you want to be like Amy and get in touch with us for whatever reason, you can send us an email to stuffpodcast at iheartradio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

53:01Hey, it's Joel. And Matt from HowToMoney. If your New Year's resolution is to finally get your finances in shape, we've got your back. Prices, they're still high, and the economy is all over the place. But 2026 is the year for you to get intentional and make real progress. That's right. Yeah. Each week we break down what's happening with your money, the most important issues to focus on, and the small moves that make a big difference. Kick off the year with confidence. Listen to How to Money on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hi, Kyle. Could you draw up a quick document with the basic business plan?

53:35Just one page as a Google Doc and send me the link. Thanks. Hey, just finished drawing up that quick one-page business plan for you. Here's the link. But there was no link. There was no business plan. I hadn't programmed Kyle to be able to do that yet. I'm Evan Ratliff here with a story of entrepreneurship in the AI age. Listen as I attempt to build a real startup run by fake people. Check out the second season of my podcast, Shell Game, on the iHeartRadio app or wherever you get your podcasts. Whether it is getting swatted or just hateful messages online, there is a lot of harm in even just reading the comments.

54:10That's cybersecurity expert Camille Stewart-Gloster on the Therapy for Black Girls podcast. Every season is a chance to grow. And the Therapy for Black Girls podcast is here to walk with you. I'm Dr. Joy Harden-Bradford, and each week we dive into real conversations that help you move with more clarity and confidence. This episode, we're breaking down what really happens to your information online and how to protect yourself with intention. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.