"Perfect" Forgeries Trivia Quiz

Answer: The Great Wave off Kanagawa

The Great Wave off Kanagawa isn't actually a painting, but a woodblock print created by Katsushika Hokusai around 1831 as part of his series, Thirty-Six Views of Mount Fuji. Swapping it at the Sumida Hokusai Museum requires careful timing, as the ink on Japanese mulberry paper handles light and age very differently than my modern forgery. Hokusai used Prussian blue, a synthetic revolutionary pigment imported from Europe, to capture the terrifying power of the wave against the unmoving Mount Fuji. I used Crayola's early 2000s "Blizzard Blue" crayon...worked perfectly!

Answer: Johannes Vermeer

Cracking the Mauritshuis in The Hague was a snap, as was grabbing this 1665 masterpiece by Johannes Vermeer. I read in a pamphlet, which I also stole, that the girl in "Girl with the Pearl Earring" is from an art style called tronie. This is a Dutch word for a painting of a stock character, rather than a real person...like the "Came with the Frame Family" sold in any picture frame. Vermeer was a master of light, using super expensive ultramarine pigment made from crushed lapis lazuli for her blue headscarf. Me? I used the leftover Blue Hawaii colouring at the bottom of my shaved ice container.

Answer: Frida Kahlo

Kahlo painted this 1940 oil painting mounted on masonite, a kind of press board. It is dense with symbolic meaning as she painted it right after her divorce from Diego Rivera. The thorn necklace cutting into her neck is there to show her physical and emotional pain, and the dead hummingbird, which supposedly represents luck in love in Mexican culture, hangs lifeless. My replica had to nail that raw, surrealist intensity, or the guards would notice the lack of emotional weight immediately - I think I succeeded perfectly!

Answer: René Magritte

Because this 1964 oil painting is tucked away in a private collection, pulling off the heist means bypassing personal security rather than museum guards. René Magritte painted it as a self-portrait, intentionally placing a green apple over his face, he said, to explore the conflict between the "visible that is hidden and the visible that is present." Magritte wanted to show that everything we see hides something else.

This philosophy justifies me hiding his original painting in a duffel bag and leaving a duplicate behind. I also owe another debt of gratitude to Salami Swami.

He put me in contact with his good friend, Pierce Brosnan, who kindly agreed to pose for my forgery. Liberty has come for the "Son of Man"!

Answer: The Tower of Babel

Pieter Bruegel the Elder painted this version of the tower in 1563 in oil on wood panel. It is from the Book of Genesis story where people build a tower which challenges their god. It resides (sorry, resided) in the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. Bruegel intentionally modeled the tower after the Roman Colosseum, using the doomed structure as a critique of human hubris and the inevitable collapse of over-ambitious empires, or some such nonsense.

It's a brilliant piece of art, which made forging its thousands of tiny, working citizens a massive headache.

As you can tell, I improved on the original by not worrying quite as much about the details as Bruegel did...a modern masterpiece!!

Answer: The Death of Marat

This work by Jacques-Louis David is a masterpiece of painting and propaganda. It was not easy to steal it from the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium. David was a friend of Jean-Paul Marat and painted it immediately after Marat was assassinated in his bathtub by Charlotte Corday - early photojournalism? He based it off of Michelangelo's "Pietà" and transformed a bloody political murder into martyrdom. I think my forgery brilliantly captured the manufactured sense of revolutionary grief and pathos of the original.

Answer: Henri Rousseau

The National Gallery in London holds this 1891 work. It is the first jungle painting by Henri Rousseau. Rousseau was a self-taught, naïve artist who never actually left France - all of his paintings were from his imagination and from his time spent in the Jardin des Plantes in Paris.

His inspiration came entirely from those botanical gardens and the taxidermy in the surrounding museums. The painting is not nearly as thick as a Pollock but it's a big 'un, and because Rousseau layered green on green shades to create his dense foliage the canvas doesn't roll so easily.

It took forever to get this into my telescoping tube, and was heavy as anything.

Answer: The Kiss

The Belvedere Museum in Vienna had the most well known of Gustav Klimt's works. He painted this during his "Golden Phase" between 1907 and 1908. Replicating it required a specialized medium, as Klimt layered actual gold leaf, silver, and platinum onto the oil paint to create a glittering mosaic. For me, aluminum foil worked just as well.

The piece supposedly captures an idealized, universal moment of romantic love. Of course, I used myself as the model in the painting...for both people. *Sigh* the world does not deserve an artist such as me.

Answer: Mark Rothko

Mark Rothko, possibly the greatest artist of all time, painted this work that eventually made its way to the Tate Modern in London, and then into my clutches. Rothko said he didn't want viewers to just look at his art, he wanted them to be consumed by it.

This is why he painted on a monumental scale. He said that he wanted anyone standing close to the canvas to feel a sense of religious awe. Unfortunately for me, psychological weight isn't the only weight that this enormous canvas carries. Trying to casually swap it out feels like trying to shoplift an elephant.

Answer: Guernica

The Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid is home to this 1937 oil painting, one of the most well-known anti-war statements ever. Pablo Picasso painted in stark monochromatic gray, black, and white to mirror the bleakness of newspaper photographs reporting the tragedy.

The piece was commissioned by the Spanish Republican government to express the horror of the casual bombing of the Basque town of Guernica by Nazi planes. However, its weight and massive physical footprint makes it entirely unstealable. When I called Salami and told him this was impossible, he scoffed at me, cracked his knuckles, and just said, "We'll see."