Author: Lucas Reilly

Approximately $64 billion is spent on art every year. It’s estimated that anywhere from 2 to 50 percent of those pieces out there are counterfeits. Here’s how experts spot the fakes.

1. TAKE A CRACK AT READING THE CRAQUELURE.

Craquelure—the web of fine cracks on old paintings—is unique to every work of art. For centuries, forgers faked the phenomenon by splintering their paintings with solvents, pencil sketches, formaldehyde, and frozen beeswax. (One time, the forger Han van Meegeren aged a fake Vermeer by baking it in a pizza oven.) Today, many museums keep a thorough record of what a painting’s cracks look like, and scientists use Reflectance Transformation Imaging to create a “topographic map” of the original’s cracked surface [PDF].

2. POINT OUT FAKES WITH NUCLEAR FALLOUT.

There were approximately 2000 nuclear bomb tests between 1945 and the Nuclear Test Ban treaty in 1963. Those explosions soaked our planet in radioactive isotopes—particularly cesium-137, carbon-14, and strontium-90—and contaminated the world’s soil, including the flax and linseed oil used in modern paint. The result? Most paintings created after 1945 contain these isotopes. With the help of a mass spectrometer, scientists can examine a painting to see if it has too many of these radioactive atoms. The technique proved that one of Peggy Guggenheim’s favorite paintings, an abstract piece attributed to Fernand Léger and supposedly painted in 1913, was actually made years after Leger’s 1955 death.

3. REMEMBER THAT TREE RINGS DON’T LIE.

Painters such as Rembrandt and Holbein loved painting on wooden panels. Like all things wooden, those panels contain tree rings, and experts can examine those rings—a method called dendrochronology [PDF]—to double-check the work’s authenticity. (How? Over periods of nice weather, trees grow thick and healthy rings. When weather is rough, rings thin out. Experts can compare and match the pattern of weak/healthy rings to known tree samples to determine the wood’s age and origin.)

4. PEEL BACK THE LAYERS WITH INFRARED RADIATION.

Painters usually draw sketches on the canvas before getting to work. Experts can see these covered-up scribbles with infrared reflectography, a technique that fires wavelengths of radiation into the artwork to reveal what’s hiding under coats of paint. In 1954, art historians discovered a second copy of Francesco Francia’s The Virgin and the Child with an Angel. Decades of controversy soon followed, with the general consensus being that the copy in London’s National Gallery was a 19th century forgery and the version now in the Carnegie Museum of Art was the real one. In 2009, infrared reflectograms helped pinpoint the fake: The forger had sketched the National Gallery’s painting with graphite, a material that wasn’t available during Francia’s lifetime.

5. SEE THROUGH THE SURFACE WITH AN X-RAY.

Even traditional x-rays can unearth a painting’s hidden underbelly. For years, curators at the Fogg Art Museum believed their Portrait of a Woman was made by the great Francisco de Goya. But in 1954, an x-ray revealed that a different portrait was hiding beneath the surface! More analysis showed that the buried painting contained zinc white paint—a pigment that didn’t exist when Goya was alive. Busted.

6. LOOK FOR FISHY PIGMENTS WITH LASERS.

In 1923, the forger Han van Meegeren successfully passed his fake The Laughing Cavalier off as a work by the 17th century Dutch portraitist Frans Hals. Experts later realized they had been duped when, using x-ray diffraction, they discovered the painting was dabbed with synthetic ultramarine paint, a pigment invented 162 years after Hals died [PDF]. Today, art historians use Raman spectroscopy to detect these out-of-date pigments. (To oversimplify the process, the technique involves firing lasers at a pigment. As light scatters off the paint, the machine picks up each pigment’s unique chemical fingerprint.)

7. SPOT FRAUDS WITH UV LIGHT.

In 1989, the FBI arrested Robert Trotter for forging the works of 19th century American still life painter John Haberle. The Feds nailed Trotter thanks to good old fashioned UV light [PDF]. That’s because a shower of UV light makes the varnish on old paintings shine. Newer paintings, however, don’t fluoresce as much, and they often emit an uncanny uniform glow. Trotter had coated his fakes with a copal varnish, which, under UV light, created a sheen that looked good to an amateur, but to a professional was too consistent for a 100-year-old painting.

8. EMBRACE YOUR INNER SHERLOCK HOLMES.

Before we had fancy machines to catch fakes, curators used the Morelli method. Giovanni Morelli was a 19th century Italian art critic who had a knack for authenticating paintings with his naked eye. He knew that artists followed formulas when painting tiny details such as ears, eyes, or fingernails, and he believed if an art critic memorized an artist’s habits for painting these body parts, he or she could determine who held the brush. (Morelli was a doctor by training and believed identifying art through trifling details was parallel to diagnosing a disease.) Incidentally, Morelli knew Arthur Conan Doyle’s uncle, and it’s possible that his ability to pinpoint tiny telltale clues inspired Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.

9. DON’T FORGET: TYPOS TELL ALL.

For 17 years, Shaun Greenhalgh forged everything from fake Gauguin sculptures to 3300-year-old Egyptian statues in his backyard shed, aging his “ancient” artworks with tea and clay. He fooled countless art lovers and museums until 2006, when Scotland Yard came knocking. His big mistake? Experts at the British museum discovered three of his cuneiform scripts were littered with spelling mistakes. (To Greenhalgh’s credit, the Victoria and Albert Museum was so impressed with his forgeries they included his fake works in an exhibition in 2010.)

BONUS: ONE GREAT PARTY FACT ABOUT MICHELANGELO

Did you know that Michelangelo started his career as an art forger? In 1496, the 20-year-old forged the sculpture of a centuries-old sleeping Cupid, buried it in acidic dirt to make it look old, and sold it as an “antiquity.” He pulled off the charade so well that when the buyer realized it was a fake, he wasn’t even that mad: Michelangelo kept his money and news of the fraud catapulted him to fame.

Reporting by Sam McPheeters, Lucas Reilly, and Jennifer M. Wood.

Last night, New York City’s Metropolitan Opera premiered an opera composed by a woman. The last time that happened, it was 1903. Here’s the story of the feisty (and eccentric) composer-turned-suffragist who broke that musical glass ceiling 113 years ago.

Hundreds of women were walking by twos and threes down London’s main thoroughfares when the riot erupted on March 1, 1912. At precisely 5:30 p.m., the line of ladies stopped along Westminster’s busiest roads—from Piccadilly to Regent Street—pulled hammers and rocks out of their handbags, and began smashing the windows of shops, department stores, and political offices that opposed a woman’s right to vote. The mass riot, coordinated by the militant suffragette Emmeline Pankhurst, had begun.

“Never since plate glass was invented has there been such a smashing and shattering of it as was witnessed this evening when the suffragettes went out on a window-breaking raid in the West End of London,” The New York Times reported the following day. By night’s end, 148 women had been arrested.

Ethel Smyth was one of them. She was jailed for hurling a rock through the window of Lewis Harcourt’s home—Harcourt was an avowed anti-suffragist and the Secretary of the State for the Colonies. When Smyth’s friend, the musician Thomas Beecham, visited her at Holloway Prison, he stumbled upon a remarkable scene: Dozens of suffragettes had rallied together in the prison yard to sing.

Long, long—we in the past / Cowered in dread from the light of heaven / Strong, strong—stand we at last / Fearless in faith and with sight new given. / Strength with its beauty, Life with its duty / (Hear the voice, oh hear and obey!) / These, these—beckon us on! / Open your eyes to the blaze of day.

Above the courtyard, Smyth stood in her jail cell and proudly listened to the women below. They were singing “The March of Women,” a piece she had composed two years earlier as the anthem for the Women’s Social and Political Union. Smyth grabbed a toothbrush, reached her arms beyond the bars of her prison window, and conducted the chorus below.

Few moments define Ethel Smyth better. She was a feisty, and sometimes radical, activist for equality, whether it was in the voting booth or in the male-dominated world of classical music. She was a talented, and fiercely independent, musician—one of England’s most successful turn-of-the-century composers. Not only did she break the glass windows surrounding anti-suffragist politicians, she also cracked the glass ceiling of one of America’s most illustrious concert halls: The Metropolitan Opera.

Ethel Smyth always had a defiant streak. Born in 1858, Smyth grew up in Kent, England, where she hunted, hiked, and mountain climbed. According to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, she also enjoyed “unladylike” activities such as tennis, golf, and bicycling. (A lot of people freaked out about women riding bicycles back then. Consider this gem from an 1891 Sunday Herald: “I think the most vicious thing I ever saw in all my life is a woman on a bicycle … I had thought that cigarette smoking was the worst thing a woman could do, but I changed my mind.”) The adult Smyth must have been a double whammy: she bicycled and smoked cigars.

However, little is audacious about her musical upbringing. At age 10, she started composing hymns and chants and learned how to play the piano. Her keyboard studies were short-lived. Two years later, she accidentally injured her left hand with a knife, ending her piano career. But it didn’t matter. She was hooked on music. She studied composition throughout her teens and, ignoring the demands of her father, a stern military general, she left home in 1877 for Leipzig, German to study music at the conservatory.

That was short-lived too. Smyth found conservatory life dreary. After one year of school, she left to study privately with the composer Heinrich von Herzogenberg. Through that relationship, she met and studied with Johannes Brahms—who for some reason nicknamed her “The Oboe”—and met musical luminaries such as Pytor Tchaikovsky, Edvard Grieg, Antonin Dvořák, and Clara Schumann.

For the next decade, Smyth slowly carved a name for herself in Leipzig by writing lieder (German lyrical poems meant for a solo voice and piano), piano music, and short violin sonatas. In the 1890s, she returned to England and composed what many consider her orchestral masterpiece: “Mass in D.” The playwright Bernard Shaw was fascinated by the piece, later calling it an antidote for sexism. “It was your music that cured me for ever of the old delusion that women could not do man’s work in art and all other things,” he said.

With that, Smyth’s friends begged her to take the next step. She needed to write an opera.

Classical music today has a reputation for being homogenous. The repertoire is rife with white European men, most of them dead. Contemporary composers—both men and women—must compete for space in every program against a centuries-old lineup of deceased, crowd-pleasing masters. It’s not much better on the podium. Only about 11 percent of America’s major symphony conductors are women. And in the opera world, the 50 most performed works? All by men. More than 500 operas by women exist today, but it’s hard to find a major opera house that will produce any of them.

It wasn’t always this way. One of the first operas ever written, the comical The Liberation of Ruggiero, was composed by a woman, Francesca Caccini, in 1625. As Elizabeth Davis explains on Classic FM, Caccini was one of the best paid musicians in all of Tuscany. A century later, Italy’s Maria Teresa Agnesi, who composed six operas, was one of the most popular musicians in the country. During the 19th century, Princess Amalie of Saxony was among the most prolific opera composers in Europe, writing 14. Countless more talented women filled salons and concert halls with their music.

That may be because, for about two centuries, concert halls featured works by living composers. But as the 19th century wrapped up, that changed: A canon of male operatic “geniuses” formed, including Scarlatti, Mozart, Donizetti, Rossini, Wagner. As opera houses resurrected the works of dead composers, living writers were pushed to the fringes. The problem was especially severe for women.

None of that deterred Smyth. It motivated her. Between 1899 and 1901, she began work on her second opera, Der Wald, and she was hell-bent on getting it produced—if not for her sake, for the women who followed her. “I feel I must fight for Der Wald,” she wrote in a letter in 1902, “because I want women to turn their minds to big and difficult jobs, not just to go on hugging the shore, afraid to put out to sea.”

A one-act, 75-minute German-language opera, Der Wald is set in a tranquil forest of cypress trees during the Middle Ages. The woods are full of nymphs and woodland-living spirits who sing about the insignificance of humanity in the face nature. The show includes witches and a woodcutter and a man with a pet bear, and like all good operas, somebody dies at the end.

Der Wald premiered in Berlin on April 9, 1902 and received some hisses from the crowd. But in London, it broke attendance records. Across the pond in New York City, the Metropolitan Opera agreed to give Smyth a shot.

The first performance in New York was a hit, financially speaking. The show earned the Met $10,390.60, making it highest grossing production all year. The New York World said the performance “stirred the blood with clangor of brass, the shrieks of strings, the plaint of wood winds…” When the curtain fell, the audience roared their unyielding approval for 10 to 15 minutes. Smyth took seven curtain calls and left the stage, The New York Times noted, with “flowers by the cartload.”

Most critics gave it a thumbs down anyway. They griped that the music was too beefy for a woman composer. It was like Wagner took HGH injections. “This little woman writes music with a masculine hand and has a sound and logical brain, such as is supposed to the especial gift of the rougher sex. There is not a weak or effeminate note in Der Wald, nor an unstable sentiment,” The Telegraph said. The New York World concurred: “Her work is utterly unfeminine. It lacks sweetness and grace of phrase.” The New-York Commercial Advertiser complained that Smyth had tried too hard “to take the sex element out of her work” and, by compensating, had surpassed “in masculinity anything that a man might do.” The New York Times simply called it, “a disappointing novelty,” lamenting that, “it is difficult to find much import in this sophisticated Grimm’s fairy tale.”

Smyth was undaunted. She continued writing operas and found a cause in the women’s suffrage movement. She composed a satirical choral work called 1910, which her obituary called a “grotesque symphony of suffragettes, anti-suffragettes, and the hullabaloo of a Parliament Square riot.” She also wrote the aforementioned “The March of Women,” which became the rallying cry for the suffragette cause. She befriended the activist Emmeline Pankhurst—who encouraged fellow feminists to fend off police with jiu jitsu—and spent the next few years protesting, and getting arrested, by her side. (She’d spend two months in prison for chucking that rock through Lewis Harcourt’s window.)

The March of the Women (Shoulder to Shoulder) from Wild Love Music on Vimeo.

Smyth may have been Beethoven reincarnate, too. During her activist years, her hearing deteriorated. (She coped with the oncoming deafness by visiting Egypt, playing a lot of golf, and writing a comic opera called The Boatswain’s Mate.) During World War I, she worked as an X-ray nurse in a military hospital. And yet, despite losing her hearing, she continued conducting and writing music. And memoirs. She defied taboos and wrote openly and earnestly about her attraction to women, while late in life she scribbled a play about her close friend (and crush) Virginia Woolf. Woolf was amazed by Smyth’s talents, remarking, “How you do it, God knows.”

In 1922, Smyth was honored with the title of Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire. All the while, she continued to not give a hoot about what anybody thought of her. Her eccentric wardrobe mirrored the official colors of the Women’s Social and Political Union: “She would don a tie of the brightest purple, white and green, or some hideous purple cotton jacket,” Pankhurst recalled. Put lightly, Smyth stuck out in a crowd.

In 1934, a special concert of Smyth’s music was played at Royal Albert Hall in London. The Queen attended and led the applause. Sadly, Smyth was so deaf that she couldn’t hear the music or the ovation. By her death at the age of 86 in 1944, Dame Ethel Smyth had written 10 books, a concerto, countless orchestral works, and six operas.

In the United States, Ethel Smyth continues to stand out in musical circles for Der Wald, though not necessarily for the best reasons. Not only was she the first woman to have an opera produced at the Met, she was also the last. Until now.

Yesterday, on December 1, 2016, the drought ended. After a 113 year dry spell, the Metropolitan Opera produced its second opera by a woman: L’Amour de Loin, by the Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho. The work, which first premiered in Salzburg, Austria, in 2000 has been praised by The Guardian as “luminous but inescapably dramatic.” (The Met’s staging, a dazzling sea of 28,000 LED lights, looks equally dramatic.) The performance is being conducted by Susanna Malkki, just the fourth woman to command the Met orchestra in the organization’s 136 year history.

“It just shows how slowly these things evolve,” Saariaho recently told The New York Times, remarking on the gap. “But they are evolving—in all fields and also in music.” It’s true. The United States alone is now home to a growing Mount Rushmore of incredible female classical music composers: Jennifer Higdon, Julia Wolfe, and Ellen Zwilich have all won the Pulitzer Prize for music. Joan Tower, a giant in the profession, has earned three Grammys.

As for the current production of L’Amour de Loin, there will be seven more performances this December. If you pass through New York, treat yourself with a ticket. After all, Ethel Smyth didn’t go around smashing those glass windows and ceilings for nothing.

Today would have been Mark Twain’s 181st birthday.

Thomas Edison once said, “An average American loves his family. If he has any love left over for some other person, he generally selects Mark Twain.”

Edison and Twain were close friends. In 1909, Edison visited Twain’s estate in Redding, CT and filmed the famous author. The silent footage is the only known recording of Twain in existence. It first appeared in a 1909 production of Twain’s “The Prince and Pauper,” and it shows Twain wearing his trademark white suit, puffing a cigar. Twain would die one year later.

If you’re looking for similar recordings of Twain’s voice, don’t hold your breath. In 1891, Twain tried to dictate his novella, “An American Claimant,” into a phonograph, but he gave up after burning through 48 wax cylinders, now lost. Later in 1909, Twain read his stories into a phonograph at Edison’s laboratory in New York. Those recordings were destroyed in a fire in 1914.

The world’s national anthems are a delightful mixed bag of patriotism, poetry, and the peculiar. While some of these verses rarely receive airtime—and there’s always risk that something is lost in translation—each lyric is like a postcard, rich with details about a country’s history and culture. Enjoy!

1. AUSTRIA: WE HAVE HAMMERS

Land of mountains, land by the river,
Land of fields, land of cathedrals,
Land of hammers, with a promising future!

Land of Mountains, Land by the River (Hammers are a symbol of industry.)

2. ARGENTINA: ALERT THE ZOMBIE REVOLUTIONARIES 

The Inca is roused in his tomb
and fire is rekindled in his bones,
on seeing his sons renewing
his homeland’s former splendor

Himno Nacional Argentino (Canción Patriótica)

3. GABON: NO SORCERERS ALLOWED

Yes, may the happy days dreamed by our ancestors
Come for us at last, rejoice our hearts,
And banish the sorcerers, those perfidious deceivers
Who were sowing poison and were spreading fear.

The Concord

4. COLOMBIA: METAL BAND NAME #1, “A CONSTELLATION OF CYCLOPS”

Thus the motherland is formed,
Thermopylaes are bursting forth;
a constellation of cyclops
its night brightened.
The trembling flower
finding the wind mortal,
underneath the laurels
safety sought.

Himno nacional de Colombia

5. SENEGAL: METAL BAND NAME #2, “LION’S FROTH”

Senegal, you the son of the lion’s froth,
Sprung from the night to the gallop of horses.

Pluck Your Koras, Strike the Balafons/The Red Lion

6. PARAGUAY: WE ARE ROME!

A new Rome, the Fatherland shall proudly display
Two leaders of name and valor
Who, rivals, like Romulus and Remus
Divided government and power.

Paraguayans, The Republic or Death

7. ROMANIA: NO YOU’RE NOT, WE’RE ROME!

It’s now or never that we prove to the world
That in these veins still flows Roman blood
And in our hearts for ever we glorify a name
Triumphant in battles, the name of Trajan.

Wake Up, Romanian!

8. BANGLADESH: LET’S PLAY IN THE DIRT

O mother! The fragrance from your mango groves makes me wild with joy,
Ah, what a thrill!

My Golden Bengal

9. HONDURAS: SHOUT OUT TO FRANCE

It was France, the free, the heroic,
Which in its dreams of centuries slept,
Awoke irate to life
At the virile protest of Danton:
It was France, who sent to the death
The head of the consecrated King,
And which built up proudly at its side,
The altar of the goddess of Reason.

National Anthem of Honduras

10. ANDORRA: WE <3 FRANCE (OR AT LEAST THE FRANKS), TOO

The great Charlemagne, my father,
liberated me from the Saracens
And from heaven he gave me life …
I am the only remaining daughter,
of the Carolingian empire

The Great Charlemagne

11. ALGERIA: SCREW YOU, FRANCE!

O France,
Past is the time of palavers
We closed it as we close a book
O France! The day to settle the accounts has come!

The Pledge

12. FRANCE: DON’T MESS WITH US

Tremble, tyrants and you traitors
The shame of all parties,
Tremble! Your parricidal schemes
Will finally receive their reward!
Everyone is a soldier to combat you
If they fall, our young heroes,
The earth will produce new ones,
Ready to fight against you!

The Song of Marseille

13. CABO VERDE: MOTIVATE YOURSELF WITH THIS BEAUTIFUL TRUTH

Hope is as big as the sea
Which embraces us

Song of Freedom

14. ARMENIA: DEMOTIVATE YOURSELF WITH THIS DEPRESSING TRUTH 

Death is the same everywhere,
A man dies but once,
Blessed is the one that dies
For the freedom of his nation.

Our Fatherland

15. KIRIBATI: LET’S MAKE THIS THE ANTHEM FOR THE PLANET, PLEASE? 

Stand up, People of Kiribati!
Sing with jubilation!
Prepare to accept responsibility
And to help each other!
Be steadfastly righteous!
Love all our people!
Be steadfastly righteous!
Love all our people!

The attainment of contentment
And peace by our people
Will be achieved when all our hearts beat as one,
Love one another!
Promote happiness and unity!
Love one another!
Promote happiness and unity!

We beseech You, O God,
To protect and lead us
In the days to come.
Help us with Your loving hand.
Bless our Government
and all our people!
Bless our Government
and all our people!

Stand Up, Kiribati