Displaying items by tag: biography

The troubled life and demise of Vincent van Gogh follows a well-known trajectory: the precocious genius, the art world's indifference, the onset of angst and madness, and then, tragically, his suicide at age 37.

Or so we thought. But according to the groundbreaking research of Pulitzer Prize-winning biographers Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, the painter didn't shoot himself: he was killed. When they first exposed this theory in their 2011 biography "Van Gogh: The Life," it was viciously attacked and contested. Rewriting history is not an easy task.

Deborah Solomon has been desperately trying to outrun the truth ever since American Mirror, her biography of my grandfather, Norman Rockwell, came out last November. But the truth is catching up with her.

Solomon's biography is one of the biggest non-fiction literary snow jobs in the last 50 years -- it makes the James Frey memoir debacle look like child's play. At least Frey took liberties by embellishing his own life, not defaming one of America's most beloved painters. Deborah Solomon doesn't just bend the truth, she breaks it. Many people are aware of the controversy, but few know and understand how Solomon has falsified almost every source she could get her hands on. This is not about differing opinions -- this is about an art critic who went out of her way to falsify, misquote, omit, distort and mischaracterize news stories, obituaries, my grandfather's autobiography (My Adventures As An Illustrator), his journal, my grandmother's letters, an insurance letter, a New Yorker article, and many other sources.

A federal judge has dismissed a lawsuit brought against The New Yorker and one of its writers by Peter Paul Biro, a forensic art expert. Biro was the subject of a 16,000-word article about art authentication and the process of matching fingerprints on paintings to the artists who created them. Biro claimed that the article, which was published in The New Yorker in July 2010, left readers with a negative impression of him and his work.

Judge J. Paul Oetken dismissed the case saying that the writer, David Grann, did not act “recklessly” or vilify Biro. The ruling, which was released on Thursday, August 1, 2013, applied to Gawker Media, Business Insider, two additional websites and a biography of Jackson Pollock published by Yale University that mentioned Grann’s New Yorker article.

Biro’s lawyer, Richard Altman, said that they plan to appeal the court’s ruling.