The art forger who tricked the Nazis - Noah Charney
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TEDEd Animation
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It was one of the strangest trials in Dutch history. The defendant in a 1947 case was an art forger who had counterfeited millions of dollars worth of paintings. But he wasn’t arguing his innocence— in fact, his life depended on proving that he had committed fraud. Who was this artist, and why was he on trial for his life? Noah Charney investigates the notorious Han van Meegeren.
Van Meegeren created a work that made real an unproven theory by a leading Vermeer scholar. This is one approach to what has been called a “provenance trap,” a means by which forgers pass off their works as originals by using so compelling a story about the history of the object that even experts are fooled—sometimes in the face of artworks that don’t really look anything like we would expect them to. Imagine you are a forger: what other approaches might you take, other versions of the “provenance trap,” to pass off a forgery and fool experts?
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Meet The Creators
- Educator Noah Charney
- Director Luísa Holanda
- Narrator Addison Anderson
- Animator Luísa Holanda, Felipe Urbanetto
- Compositor Gabriel Maia
- Art Director Luísa Holanda
- Storyboard Artist Luísa Holanda
- Hype Executive Producer Gabriel Garcia
- Hype Producer Taíla Soliman
- Music Gabriel Maia
- Sound Designer Gabriel Maia
- Director of Production Gerta Xhelo
- Editorial Producer Alex Rosenthal
- Producer Bethany Cutmore-Scott
- Associate Editorial Producer Elizabeth Cox
- Script Editor Alex Gendler
- Fact-Checker Jennifer Nam
