“The master forger”: The model and the painter – Times Online

How can a TV Portrait therefore also look: Man asks Germany’s most famous forger Wolfgang Beltracchi to paint celebrities. Episode one: Harald Schmidt

December 6, 2014 18:40 clock

Harald Schmidt sits Wolfgang Beltracchi model. | © ZDF and SRF, bb Endemol

Get to a picture of someone. This seems almost anachronistic when an entire industry is working on the perfect Selfie app. Nevertheless, it appears the longing in an image to discover the true self to be bigger than ever.

Several stations have tried this year to revolutionize the format of celebrity interviews or -Portrait. Benjamin of Stuckrad-Barre settled in Stuckrads Home Story Send unprepared to Lars Eidinger and Westbam home, Jenke Wilmsdorff established himself overnight at Margaret shrines Makers and Jan Ullrich and is in the series Kessler … is turned comedian Michael Kessler thanks to makeup and accurate observation in Matthias Steiner and Heino.

The most unusual idea but had the Swiss transmitter 3SAT. He hired Wolfgang Beltracchi currently counterfeiters clearance to paint celebrities in the style of famous artists. His first model. Harald Schmidt

Here, then take the megalomaniacal living German painter and the megalomaniacal German entertainer another. And already the first conversation is memorable.

Beltracchi: “Are you big!” – Schmidt, humorously: “Now comes the standard set: TV deceptive.” – Beltracchi: “No.” – Schmidt: “. But” – Beltracchi: “No, I know ‘She’s not on TV.” – Schmidt, in consternation: “Yes, but that size since you’ve had a guess …”

Just to see Schmidt speechless, it pays to the start of the five-part series The master forger to see. The concept you may well find dubious, a convicted forger must once more publicity celebrate his craft. But Beltracchi is a special case: in contrast to many other counterfeiters he is actually seen by many as an artist, maybe because he’s always so wiggled. “I have copied instead of images painted pictures that might have the painters painted” Beltracchi said in an interview with TIME. Perhaps this brash man with Jesus curls and Hawaiian shirts but also just a nice counter to the hated figure art elite with their millions in sales.

The program allows critical questions are not enough. An interviewer asks the off Beltracchi about whether he regretted his actions (he does not), whether his victims suffering do (what sacrifices?) And if someone did not apply to him as a victim, just because he was rich (yes, he finds ). Of course there is no other side is heard. Beltracchi will eventually serve primarily as an amplifier of his opponent.

This is possible in the case of Schmidt exceptionally well. Mainly because the painter any hero worship is missing. “All the better if you do not know,” he says. “I do not want the actor to paint, but the people.” – Schmidt: “What is always …” – Beltracchi: “That we surely will.”

So what you see in the almost 30 minutes in which Schmidt painted in the style of Otto Dix is? As the balance of power of painters and the portrayed during the model sitting developed. A nearly forgotten form of self-exposure is staged there. Last Marina Abramović had led the way in their performance The Artist is present in the New York MOMA. She sat all day in a chair and saw her changing Compared to a call. Many thought not of that, some burst into tears.