Waldemar's story is as inspiring as the art that inspired him, and must make us appreciative at having overcome more privileged upbringings to also become diligent and productive.  The talents of many artists arose from cauldrons like the one he experienced.

At first glance, Plenty and Progress seems to embody the affluence evoked by its title: Titchner's sculpture is spectacularly glossy, bursting with a vibrant red reflected within its own mirrored surfaces. Yet a close inspection reveals that the apparent plenty is only surface deep. The sculpture isn't precious metal but stainless steel, a material of austerity, while the circularity of the work seemingly resists any notion of linear progress. The work invites the viewer to consider the issues raised, without providing any conclusions of its own.

I wonder if Michelangelo and Raphael's tondi also resist any notion of linear progress. The last sentence is a classic of the genre.

I wonder what the Guildhall Art Gallery paid for the Mark Titchner 'sculpture' - it's ironic that you should blog it on the very day you also report the export ban on the Benjamin West from St Stephen's Walbrook - which should surely go to the Guildhall if it isn't going back into the church.

On another topic, with respect to contemporary art such as Peace and Prosperity I prefer the old maxim "res ipsa loquitur" to the Guff that critics compose from their basket of jargon blocks.

Three daunting facts confront anyone interested in buying one of Amedeo Modigliani’s distinctive elongated portraits. They tend to have multimillion price tags; they are a favorite of forgers; and despite an abundance of experts, no inventory of his works is considered both trustworthy and complete.

Christian Parisot, for instance, the author of one catalog and the president of the Modigliani Institute in Rome, is due in court this week in Rome on charges that he knowingly authenticated fake works.

Marc Restellini, a French scholar compiling another survey of Modigliani’s work, jettisoned part of his project years ago after receiving death threats.

And even those who swear by a listing of 337 works created by the appraiser and critic Ambrogio Ceroni acknowledge it has significant gaps. The effort to establish an authoritative record of Modigliani’s work “resembles nothing so much as a soap opera,” Peter Kraus, an antiquarian book dealer, wrote in an essay published a decade ago.

As in the latest case, the decision often rests with an artist’s descendants, who are indefinitely allowed to exercise the “moral rights” of their forebears under French law. Similar committees decide whether works apparently by Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray are genuine. Yet, as Valentin puts it, “The children, grand-children or great-grandchildren of an artist are not necessarily the best experts.”

Mould argues that the system ought to be reformed. “The son of a brain surgeon is not someone you would trust to work on your brain,” he says. “After all, they hold a very powerful right: they can turn something bought for £5 in a flea market to £1 million. Conversely, as in Martin’s case, they can turn £100,000 to nothing.”

Why do the committee not let this one go? I cannot think of it's relevance to British history or find it to be an exciting example of portraiture to make it's mark in a UK national collection. The public lost out by by the cancellation of the Lichtenstein show.

Fakes are nasty things but they do have educational benefits. As murky artefacts they testify to society’s heroes and its villains. But we are hardly going to destroy all those fake medieval splinters of the True Cross, or bin all those phony metatarsals of St Barnabas because they confuse our understanding of Christianity.

It is also important to know thine enemy. Identifying fakers requires knowing their traits and identifying a corpus of works of reference, like the fascinating oeuvre of Van Meegeren the Vermeer faker in wartime Amsterdam – another artist we outed in a former programme - whom we can now with retrospect see added a touch of early Hollywood to his 17th century religious personages.

And what will this do to those who may well have works by Chagall which, for whatever reason, have failed to make the art history books to date? If I owned a would-be Chagall I would now not think twice, but three times or more before sending it to Paris. Ugly acts like the one proposed by the Committee can have the effect of damaging the progress of art history.

It might be said that the right of an artist's descendants to destroy a work that they consider to be a fake is closely related to their right to enjoy an income from the sale of genuine works for 70 years after their ancestor's death - the so-called Droit de Suite, which the EU has now forced the United Kingdom to adopt as Artist's Resale Right.  Do you see where this is leading....? 

Presumably only the signature makes the painting a fake.  Maybe that could be taken off?

I totally agree with your discussion on destruction of fakes. In order to avoid further circulation of the work would not be sufficient for the committee to publish online a catalogue of ascertained “fake” pictures, and maybe put a big “fake” rubber stamp on the back of the work?

Circa 1989 a friend/acquaintance was working in a London gallery and someone walked in and offered her a Chagall picture. She bought it for about £1000 and discovered that the only way to verify it was to send a photo to an expert in Paris, France. The expert contacted her and requested that she should bring it to him for further verification etc. In due course she and her husband went to Paris, whereupon the Gendarmerie appeared and explained that the artwork was fake and that it would be destroyed. 

Indeed, when is a painting a fake and when is it in the style of an artist or a copy.  Our museums are replete with paintings described as "school of" or "after".  Should all student and studio copies be burned as well.  A fake Vermeer could be an original Van Meegeren, who was an accomplished artist whose Vermeer style paintings enjoy a good market now.

I watched last night’s program with interest. I have a book on Chagall and out of interest I turned to the index to see if the dancer’s name Kawarska appeared. It was not there but I immediately saw the name Karsavina, Tamara. I turned to the page and was surprised to see that indeed she was a ballet dancer (in fact I have since learnt that she was extremely famous, the original firebird). Now I also saw that Chagall was in St Petersburg studying under Leon Bakst in 1908-1909 or thereabouts and that therefore it is very likely that Chagall had contact with Karsavina. So could it be that the name Kawarska is just a garbled version of Karsavina?

Another point is to do with the phthalocyanine question. It was brought into commercial use in the 1930’s but again I was interested to learn from the internet that it was discovered in 1907. It would be worth researching into whether it could have been available to Chagall as early as 1909-1910.

You and the team were great as always , though I think once you saw their stair carpet and realised someone had designed that interior , the game was up !

but £100,000..amazing !  I know zero, but the eyes the eyes..so wrong..

Cracked Egg (Magenta) plays with the fragile nature of the egg to explore themes of the ephemeral and the eternal. The fragments of shell emphasize the fusion of opposites, appearing simultaneously organic and synthetic, fragile and resilient. To contrast the vulnerability of the eggshell, Koons managed to perfect casting techniques that result in a mirror-sheen surface that is virtually indestructible. As the artist explains, “I was interested in the dialogue with nature and aspects of the eternal, the here and now, the physical with the ephemeral... the symmetrical and asymmetrical, a sense of the fertile …” 

The Koons Cracked Egg guff would have been even better if they had used "dialogue" as a verb.  Such a missed opportunity on their part.

Reminded by your piece on Koons of this (below) from Lear.  As is often the case, the Fool is wise: as he says earlier in the same scene, 'Truth's a dog must to kennel; he must be whipped out....'  It's worth noting that, were one available, you could buy a First Folio for significantly less than a Koons 'Egg' (cracked or not).

King Lear Act 4 Scene 1

Fool; Give me an egg, nuncle, and I'll give thee two crowns.

KING LEAR; What two crowns shall they be?

Fool; Why, after I have cut the egg i' the middle, and eat up the meat, the two crowns of the egg. When thou clovest thy crown i' the middle, and gavest away both parts, thou borest thy ass on thy back o'er the dirt: thou hadst little wit in thy bald crown, when thou gavest thy golden one away.

Tim's Vermeer is a film about a man who totally fails to paint a Vermeer.

That's right – fails. This is not how the acclaimed cinema documentary by American TV magicians Penn and Teller bills itself or how it has been received by reviewers. Inventor Tim Jenison, we're told, set out to discover how the 17th-century artist used optics, hoping to prove his theory by painting his own version of Vermeer's The Music Lesson. The result, we are told, is almost uncannily convincing – Tim uses simple technology to create a perfect Vermeer.

At the risk of offending the education secretary, I have to quote Blackadder here. It's a brilliant theory, with just one tiny flaw: it's bollocks.

Tim's painting does not look anything like a real Vermeer. It looks like what it is: a pedantic and laborious imitation.

Thanks for posting the article about Tim's Vermeer earlier today. I'm glad someone has finally had the guts to refute Tim's claim of discovering Vermeer's 'secret'. As an artist trained in the traditional crafts of painting, drawing, carving and gilding I went into the film as an open-minded skeptic, looking forward to some solid circumstantial evidence that Vermeer may have used such a device - I left the cinema with a huge grin on my face. What Tim was suggesting is laughable both from a technical and practical perspective. The film was full of contradictions and cryptic messages. Had Tim or any of those involved in the project actually bothered to research the methods of Vermeer or consulted an artist who studies and works in a similar manner to the old masters, obvious flaws would come to light. I'm glad Jonathan Jones attempted to take apart the theory, however his article unfortunately didn't touch on the facts that completely disprove Tim's idea. I've wanted to write an article based on fact, but unfortunately I'm no journalist, I'm a young artist, so I have no idea what I would do with it!

The film was full of contradictions and historical errors from the very start. Tim and his pals claimed that Vermeer didn't make use of underpainting or 'dead colouring' - well he certainly did make use of it! All scientific and forensic tests of Vermeer's paintings show a monochromatic layer where Vermeer would have identified tone, lighting and composition. One of the better examples of this is ironically, 'The Music lesson', the very painting Tim was 'copying'. The National Gallery has a good article on Vermeer's technique here. Why on earth would Vermeer be painting a monochromatic underpainting if he was using a mirror? Had he used Tim's device, he would have to turn the colour reflection from the mirror into monochrome! It makes no sense whatsoever! 

Vermeer, like all masters, used glazes, the application of thin paint to give subtle transitions in colour and tone. The application of paint in this manner gave works a degree of transparency and depth.  Using a mirror, the artist would be expected to mix the exact colour and paint with it. Working in a single layer in this way shows inexperience and a lack of understanding. Vermeer used glazes, so a mirror cannot have been used.

Tim also compared an early Pieter de Hooch with a later Vermeer in the hope it would 'prove' Vermeer had a secret. I was surprised that the directors had the guile to compare a work by a developing artist with a masterful painting by Vermeer at the peak of his ability. Incredibly distasteful considering Pieter de Hooch's later work can rather easily be mistaken for a work by Vermeer by an untrained eye.    

Tim and his team apparently didn't use artificial light. I'm incredibly skeptical about this. Light conditions obviously can change in a second. If the sun disappeared behind a cloud would Vermeer be forced to drop his brush? Well if he was using a mirror, then yes. It's simply impractical! Had Vermeer used a mirror, he would have had to be able to control the sun, the seasons and the clouds. Perhaps he did have a secret after all? Tim didn't once mention the use of natural light once he sat down to paint - presumably he realised it was impossible and resorted to using artificial lights. 

He clamped the heads of his models? Seriously? Need I say more? I could go on, but thankfully I'm not having to prove to you that the idea is heavily flawed.