99% Invisible - 347- The Many Deaths of a Painting

Episode Date: March 27, 2019

When Barnett Newman’s painting Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow and Blue III was placed in the Stedelijk museum it was meant to be provocative, but one reaction that it received was so intense, so violent, it set off a chain of events that shook the art world to its core. The Many Deaths of a Painting

This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars. Barbara Visser was 9 years old the first time she saw it. She was on a school field trip to the Stadelic Art Museum in the center of Amsterdam. I guess it's about 1975. One could say it's the heyday of that museum. They were really at the forefront of modern and contemporary art. The Stadelic was built to impress. There was a huge stairway leading up to the light in a way, a bit biblical, a stairway,

not to heaven, but almost to heaven to the whole of honors. The Hall of Honors displayed some of the museum's finest paintings, but one in particular dominated the room. The tour guide led Barbara in her class over. And this painting, it struck me like lightning and not in a positive way. Which he saw was a massive canvas, nearly 18 feet wide and 8 feet tall on the left side a small strip of blue on the right a Small strip of yellow But the rest of the surface was painted entirely red this majestic fire truck red and

It kind of annoyed me. I It's really I I didn't know what to look at, where to stare, what to do with it. And the only thing that the guide shared with us was the title. And the title is a question. Who's afraid of red, yellow and blue? And I got very angry. I ran out of the museum. I sat on the steps and was determined not to go in again. The full title of the painting Barbara saw that day is Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 3

by the American post-war artist, Barnett Newman. Producer John Feseo brings us this tale from the galleries of Amsterdam. Usually, you walk in a museum, you see a painting, you think about it for a moment, maybe feel something, and walk away. Not this one. This was a painting that would produce such strong reactions in people that they did more than just think about it.

In the end, Barbara got off easy. She only struggled with the painting her entire life and made a feature-length documentary about it. It's called The End of Fear and Inspire This Story. And this story is about a reaction the painting received that was so intense, so violent. It set off a chain of events that shook the art world to its core. It wasn't easy art, to say the least.

But first, why this painting? The problem of the subject became very clear to me as the crucial thing in painting. Barnett Newman was a late bloomer. A substitute art teacher turned, art critic turned artist. He didn't have his first solo show until he was almost 45. He was this portly Jewish guy with a big friendly mustache who wore a lot of bow ties and went by the nickname Barney. And he quickly became the de facto spokesman for a new art movement called Abstract Expressionism. A painter is a kind of choreographer of space and creates kind of a dance of elements of forms.

Abstract Expressionism came out of New York after World War II. The movement produced painters like Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Helen Frankenthaller. Artists known for big canvases full of wild colors, shapes, and splashes of paint. Like many abstract expressionists, artists, Newman struggled with what to paint in the aftermath of the war. After all, what could you paint after the Holocaust? After Hiroshima? What are we going to paint?

For Newman, answering this question required ignoring all of art history and starting from scratch, he began making large paintings, big, even by abstract expressionist standards, often filling the entire wall of a gallery. These paintings were physically big, and they felt even bigger. They featured very few colors, usually one solid hue, broken up by a few vertical stripes. But whatever you do, don't call them stripes. I did not decide to say to myself, I'm going to paint stripes.

Newman preferred to call them zips. I feel that my zip does not divide my painting. I feel it does the exact opposite. It unites the thing. It creates a totality. In 1967, Newman finished what would prove to be one of his largest paintings, who's afraid of red, yellow, and blue. Three.

It was the third in a series. The title was a reference to who's afraid of Virginia Woolf. A landmark play, later a movie, starring Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton, about a relationship full of miscommunication. Be careful, Martha. I'll rip you to pieces. Accusal. You are not enough.

You happen to guts and vitriol. Total total. In a sense, this big red painting with a slender zip of blue on the left and a slender zip of blue on the left and a slender zip of yellow on the right was Newman's way of saying, this is what a painting can do. But what was the painting doing exactly? Barbara Visser says that when the state-elect museum acquired who's afraid of Fred Yellow and Blue 3 in 1969, a lot of people did not like it.

Actually, let's go with despise. People despised it. At the time, people would write really long and elaborate letters to say how much they hated this painting. The painting evoked a common complaint about abstract art, which is to throw your hands up and say, why is this art? I paid to see art, damn it, not red paint on a canvas. Anybody can do that. There was one woman who expressed that it really nauseated her and it really, literally made her sick. She felt it would better be hung out of sight,

somewhere in the coach's... the coach check. In 1986, the painting was the centerpiece of an exhibit called The Grand Parade. La grande parade is precisely what they said to be. The purpose of which was to raise exactly this question of what a painting is or isn't. But a feisty update from the high points. is exactly this question of what a painting is or isn't. And that's when the negative opinions of who's afraid of red, yellow, and blue three were taken to a whole new level. At the time, Barbara was in art school. Somehow in the corridors of the school, people whispered,

how did you hear it? Something happened at the Stadley Museum. You couldn't really verify it. I was on my way to the Stadley Museum for a meeting. Petra Tinkata, an artist and educator, walked into the Stadley Lake that afternoon. Once there, she headed to the gallery where who's afraid of red-yellow three was hanging. And then I came upon that room and there I saw this painting of just a start.

An attendant stood in the corner to petrified to move. The painting had just been attacked. And the man who did sitting quietly on the bench had stabbed the painting with a box cutter, tracing a series of long slashes through the very center of the canvas. The canvas had lost its tension and sagged, turning the cuts in the lopsided smiles and exposing the white wall behind. Petra took it all in. And I saw it in a blink and then I ran away. She went to find the museum's curator.

And I screamed, the painting is destroyed. It's murder. I screamed, the painting is destroyed. It's murder. I remember I got a call and I think it was in a weekend. And I was at home. Icebrown, Humelin is an art conservation expert in the Netherlands. And even though he didn't work at the Stadelic, he was called in that day, along with the police.

The director was there and a lot of people were around at least 20 people were around and there was a lot of tension. The painting was laid out in the middle of the gallery. They had it on the ground already, face down. Could you see the slashes? Yes, from the backside, of course. The slashes, when added up together, measured nearly 50 feet long. Petra and Isbrand couldn't quite believe it. That's all I remember of the day.

They're so awful. The attacker's name was Herard Jan Van Bladren. ["Why did he do it?" I didn't ask him. ["He was 31, unemployed, living with his parents, Why did he do it? I did ask him. He was 31, unemployed, living with his parents, and he was a painter himself, although not very successful. Barbara looked into his past.

I haven't seen his, his, his, his early work before he attacked the painting, but I know that his action was regarded by him as an artistic gesture. Von Bladerin came from a school of thought that valued things like landscapes and figures. He hated abstract art and saw the painting as a kind of cultural provocation. And one of the main arguments that his lawyer made in his defence was that the provocation that the work inevitably is called for an action and got one.

Even as one Bladrin was being sentenced to five months in prison, he stood by his actions as a defense of artistic values, and many people in the Netherlands agreed. They sent letters to the state-elic. This so-called vandal should be made the director of modern museums, Red One. He did what hundreds of thousands of us would have liked to do, red another. Do you think that this painting was designed to upset people? That's an interesting question. I think the provocation was not the first intention of the work, but I do think that a title

like that, because it's a question, demands an answer. The painting was meant to challenge you, although by all accounts, Newman who died in 1970 would have been horrified by what happened. While Van Blader and Satin prison, the canvas of whose afraid of red yellow and blue three remained in tatters. Icebron and other experts wondered if it could be restored. Their initial prognosis was grim. All paintings, damage paintings can be tweaked. But you don't know what the result will be.

And in this case, of course, I realized that this would be an enormous job, or maybe an impossible job. These things look like anybody could do it. That's not the case. It's not. Carol Mankusi-Ungaro from the Whitney Museum is one of the leading experts in the field of art conservation. The terminology in America is conservation, not restoration. Okay, good to know.

Carol has pioneered techniques for restoring work by modern and contemporary artists. She's worked on several paintings by Barnett Newman. I've been in this business for a long time, 40 years, golly. She says that there are set rules that conservators must follow when repairing a painting. And reversibility is a carnal rule of conservation. We make every effort to not use any material that cannot be removed or reversed in the future. For example, if conservators add paint to a canvas, they want to make sure that paint can be dissolved and removed later. They do this in case the artwork needs to be retouched again in the future.

Conservators also try to preserve as much of the original material as possible, touching only the areas that need treatment. And they really study the artists and look at their past work. In order to get a sense of what the artist was trying to achieve. With these rules in mind, the Stadelic phoned up practically every conservator in Europe as they tried to figure out how to repair who's afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 3

and its 50 feet worth of slashes. They held conferences with the best people in the business and they couldn't really agree on what was the best way to do it. The biggest challenge, perhaps counterintuitively, was the very simplicity of the painting. The busy texture and detail of a Picasso or Rembrandt often helps mask the repair work. But Newman's canvas was mostly just one big swath of uniform color. Any sign of repair, however minor, would be sure to stand out. So most conservators were too scared to try.

Nobody wanted to burn their hands on it, as we say. But someone finally came to the rescue. Daniel Goldvier was a conservator based in New York who had worked with Newman while he was still alive. They approached him, Daniel Goldreyer, and asked whether he was fit to do it. He was very optimistic. He said he could mend it with 98% success.

This is 98% restorable. I'm Daniel Goldryer. Goldryer promised that when he was done, the slashes would be virtually invisible. The officials at the Stadalic breathed a sigh of relief, and in 1987, who's afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 3 was rolled up, put in a narrow coffin-like box, and carried solemnly down the steps of the museum.

Then it was shipped off to Goldriar Studio in New York. From that time on, the state like didn't hear much about it. Goldriar said, this is not a small job, so please leave me to do the job. A year past, then two, then three. Eventually the museum is like, oh, what's up with our painting? He said, we're doing fine, we're doing fine. We'll keep you posted. Another year passed, they asked again.

Finally, four and a half years later, Goldroyer unveiled the painting. And when the museum director, a guy named Vim Beeren, came to inspect his work, there was no sign of the slashes. The damage had been erased. Who's afraid of red, yellow and blue, three was headed back to Amsterdam. Shortly after, it exhibited again, the press is invited. The bire speaks of the return of the lost son. They try to make it a very festive moment.

But on that first day back, visitors to the museum began to notice something. To keep people from getting too close to the painting, the museum had installed a low fence. One guy there, a conservator who didn't work for the museum, decided to hop it. He really wanted to smell the work, you know, not just look at it from a distance. And he looked at it and he said,

I'm not seeing what I saw before. This is something else. Icebrand was there that day too. I immediately recognized it also. It was like a wall, a lot of paint wall, you know, dull, no tension. Yes, the slushes had been repaired and yes, the surface was still red, but before there had been depth to the red, a shimmering quality. That was all gone. How did you feel? Incredible, disappointed, and, uh, well, set.

Very set. Very set. Yeah. Did you feel like the painting had been ruined? Yes. Yeah sad. Very sad. Yeah. Did you feel like the painting had been ruined? Yes. Yeah, a ruling kiss. At first, the museum tried to deny it. The director was like, what are you talking about? It looks good as new. But everybody else was like, dude, come on.

The City Council of Amsterdam, which owned the museum and technically owned the painting, sent it to a forensic lab to figure out what gold-riar had done. Now, in the lab, they made cross-sections of the layers of paint, because usually a painting, especially in oil painting, it's not one layer, it's many different layers. Like the layers in the ground, you know? like archaeologists use these layers in the ground. You see all the paint layers under the microscope. They took these tiny samples from the red part of the painting and compared them to earlier samples that ice brand and the others had pulled off the gallery floor.

The day the painting was slashed. And then it was very, very, very clear that there were four layers of paint on top of the original ones. And the four layers of new flat dull paint didn't just cover the areas that had been slashed. Gold-Ryre had painted over the entire red part of the canvas. So basically the whole painting. And Gold-Ryre hadn't used oil paint, which is what Newman had used. He'd used a type of acrylic paint known as Al-Qaeda. What you use for house paint? House paint.

This dries this house paint very hard in 10 years. It becomes very hard and very impossible actually to take off. And that's not all. There were also splatters of red paints on the blue and yellow zips at either side of the canvas, which indicated that gold-ryer had used a paint roller. Gold-ryer had rolled over the entire canvas of a 20th century masterpiece with house paint. Who's afraid of red, yellow, and blue-three have been murdered? Again.

Theories abound as to what went wrong in that Long Island studio. Maybe Gold-Ryre bluffed his way into the job, realized it was a nearly impossible task and panicked. Not everyone felt he'd ruined the painting. Burnett Newman's widow, for instance, thought he did a good job, although she hadn't seen it in good lighting. Publicly, Goldriar insisted he hadn't painted over the canvas.

He said he had pinpointed the damaged area with two million tiny dots. He said I did not overpaint this painting. Yeah, that was really a lie because we could prove it. Even though they'd just proven all this, the statelic was in a bind. Because the museum's director had signed off on the restoration, gold-riar suit for defamation, and the museum settled. The whole affair cost over a million bucks, and to this day, they're stuck with a damaged painting. And they can't really talk about that damage. That was part of the settlement. But fortunately for us, Carol Mungusi-Tungaro from the Whitney can talk about it.

When you look at a work of art, it's primarily a flat color. When you look at that work of art cold, you kind of say, well, what are you talking about? It's just one flat color. You know, anybody can do that. Just repaint it. You know, what's the big deal? That might have been what Goldriar was thinking.

The fact is, Barnett Newman did sometimes use paint rollers in his work. But he didn't use a roller for this painting. Again, these things might look like anybody can make them, but Newman's process was complex. He worked his surfaces so well that you're never aware of a brushstroke. You're never aware of a roller pattern. He worked those surfaces so the only thing that you saw and the only thing you

remember is the color. In a way, Goldriar's restoration of the painting, this second murder, was even worse than what the slasher had done. Because he didn't even acknowledge the painting. If the forensic analysis is correct, then he just rolled over it, like it was the side of a tool shed, and then lied. The slasher was at least responding to the painting. There was some honesty there. Which makes what happened next so ironic and maybe inevitable. In 1997, 11 years after the slashing, Van Bladeren, the slasher, found out about the botched restoration of who's afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 3.

Apparently, he too believed that the painting had been robbed of its original power, even if he had hated it, So he called the museum. He was put through to the new director, a man named Rudy Fuchs. Fuchs recorded the call. The attacker tells Fuchs that what he did in 1986, he would do that again to the restored painting. Should I cut it up again? The slasher asks.

Obviously not, Fuchs replants. But it's been totally fucked up, the slasher says. That's your opinion, says Fuchs. For a moment it's quiet and he's apparently thinking about that, then he says, okay, okay, I know now what to do. And really, Fuchs answers, well, I wouldn't do what you think you have to do. And then the conversation ends. After this phone call, Van Bladerin returns to the museum. He enters unrecognized.

And he looks around for who's afraid of red, yellow and blue three. But the painting is not on display at that moment. He came to the museum with very clear intentions, and it must be hard for him not to find that work. So instead, he goes and finds another painting by Barnett Newman, a large blue painting with a white zip down the middle called Cathedral. That's another moment in my life I will never forget.

Rudy Fuchs, the museum's director, called Carol Mankousi-Ungaro right after it happened. You know, it was a phone call from Rudy Fuchs, director of Schedler. Look, that was a big deal. So I immediately went to my office to take the phone call. And he told me that Cathedral had been slashed and I swear the hair on my arms just stood up. I could not believe that it had happened and it was the same person. For the second time, Hierard Jan Van Bladerin had attacked a Barnett Newman painting with a knife. When he was done, he threw a packet of pamphlets on the floor that contained rambling, incoherent writing.

The other sad aspect of it was the slash marks were exactly the same. They were so similar to the earlier attack that it became known as the artist's signature, the Flasher's signature. At his second trial, Von Blatteren was declared mentally unfit and sent to a psychiatric institution. Von Blatteren's attacks may have been motivated by mental illness, but in the era of public art, they're part of a long, sad history of vandalism. Picasso's Guernica was spray painted in the 70s. Acid has been thrown at Rembrandt's. Two Michelangelo sculptures have been attacked with hammers.

Numan's work in particular has been vandalized multiple times, and these weren't artistic gestures. Remember, Numan's a Jewish artist. Who's afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 4, the sequel to Who's Afraid of Red Yellow and Blue 3, was struck and spat upon in Germany. Because the attacker said, it bore a mocking resemblance to the German flag. A Newman sculpture at a museum in Houston was spray painted with swastikas in 1979.

And just last year, someone poured white paint into the reflecting pool surrounding the same sculpture and left behind white supremacist leaflets. If you're keeping track, that's four Barnett Newman works to face a total of five times. Six, if you include Daniel Goldryer's botched restoration. And those are just the ones we know of. The Barnett Newman Foundation refused to speak to me for this story because they have a really legitimate fear of copycat vandalism. Sure. I think that's right.

And, you know, maybe I shouldn't have agreed to talk to you for that reason. I'm concerned now. I hadn't thought about it myself. Carol almost made a break for it during our interview. I have to ask you a question. Yeah. How would you feel if after reading this, somebody went and slashed a painting? Oh.

I would feel terrible. That would mean we failed. I know. Yeah. Because our paintings are so vulnerable. They're just out there in galleries. So I'm here at MoMA, the Museum of Modern Art in New York. It's a Friday night, it's really busy in here.

When I was at MoMA recently, I saw this Barnett Newman painting titled, Veer Heroicist Supplements. The title of this painting translates to Man Heroic in Sublime. It was the size of a billboard. It looks a lot like who's afraid of Red, yellow, and blue, three. It's like red with a couple of streaks of like this purplish color and this orange color and this whitish color, but mostly red, mostly hugely red, like this one solid wall of red. The painting didn't provoke me, it didn't make me angry, like it did so many others.

And it didn't look simple either, like something you could just roll over with a paint roller. He was towering, impressive, dense. You just get up close to this thing, you really get lost in it. For a moment, I think I felt this feeling that I'd heard Icebrand talk about. Something that Newman tried to achieve in his work. Tested to do with the sublime. And the sublime experience is when you are alone in the deserts, in the night, and you see all this, you know, the enormous sky, and you feel very tiny.

You feel overwhelmed by it. This is a kind of feeling everybody knows, I think. It's just really overwhelming, to be honest. A painting is more than just a painting. It's more than the materials and the technique. It's the feeling it evokes in you, the viewer. And when you damage or destroy a piece of art, that's what you lose. That's the crime, that's the real crime. Diminishing the painting's power.

Yes. The experience of it. After Cathedral was attacked, both Icebrond and Carol advised on its restoration and the museum spared no expense. The canvas was stitched together with surgical sutures and orthodontic wire on a specially built table. Four painstaking years later, it was unveiled.

It's not perfect. If you know where to look and look closely, you can see the scars, but the impression survives. The painting can still take your breath away. Cathedral is currently on display at the Stadelic, but not who's afraid of red, yellow and blue three. It's a painting that is very close to everyone's heart at the museum and in Amsterdam.

Yet we do all agree now that it's not what it used to be. The painting is sitting in a storage facility at the edge of town. It's too big to fit into the normal places that are reserved, so it stands by itself, kind of lonely against the wall. It waits there, hoping for a day when future conservators might be able to undo what was done to it. To remove the layers of paint and get to the original experience, the one the artist created, still sleeping underneath. John Feseel talks to me more about the coolest job in the world, after this. While he was working on this story, our reporter John Fassil really fell in love

with art conservation. There was a point in every conversation that I had with a conservator while working on this story where I'd be like, this is the coolest job. Like there is no better job than this. In fact, you can hear one of those moments in my interview with Icebrand. Yeah, I think you have maybe the best job in the world.

It sounds like a fantastic profession, I think. Daily, I enjoy it. Why do you like it so much? Why were you so enthralled? Well, conservators are sort of this hybrid of an artist, or they would probably say an artist's assistant, and one of those forensic scientists from CSI. So, first, you really have to think like an artist to try to preserve what, as Carol says,

the artist was trying to achieve with their work. And she actually spends a lot of her time interviewing living artists when she's restoring their work. She's built an archive of these interviews you can access online called the Artist Documentation Program. And they're just audio recordings of her interviewing artists about their process. But in addition to getting inside the mind of the artists, you also have to know chemistry and all this hard science stuff about the composition of materials that artists use. And there's some really far out technology

that they employ. And they're able to work miracles. And what kind of technology are we talking about? Let's start with imaging techniques, like photography. They have technology that allows them to see below the surface of the painting. Like the layers underneath the painting that Icebrown talked about in the story, infrared

reflectography, I'm not going to get too technical on you. They also bring paintings to hospitals to have them x-rayed. And that's not the only way this field overlaps with medicine actually, the conservators who stitched cathedra together in the Netherlands. They were actually trained at the hospital to do that. I talked to another conservator who had been a pre-med student before going into this field. So they're able to see below the surface of the painting using special types of photography and just plain old X-rays.

They're also able to determine what elements are in the painting, like in the paint layers. So they have this thing, it sort of looks like a grocery store scanner, and they can scan all over the painting, and it'll identify the elements, like here's zinc, here's coalball. They can basically map the surface of the painting down to the atom in terms of the elements that are there. And they're also able to see, too to how the painting will fade over time. They have these tools that can measure and artwork sensitivity to light and project how it

will fade. So they can not only see under the surface of the painting and really inside the painting. They can also see into the future of that painting. Wow. Wow. Yeah. That's so cool. How do you use that information when you're trying to conserve a painting? So you can determine how much light it can be exposed to.

Like, for instance, if you have a painting that is especially light-sensitive, you want to know not to place it like maybe in like the bright lights of a main hall or maybe design special lighting so that it doesn't fade the painting faster. Oh, so they're like trying to save a painting before it needs to be saved through these

steps of methods. Right, trying to save a painting before it needs to be saved. So in the case of this story, where gold-riar applied a bunch of this red paint in the effort to fix the painting, which a lot of people objected to, how would you go about removing paint from a painting without removing all the paint from a painting? If you really wanted to put it back to where it originally was. So very carefully. There's a couple different ways they remove stuff from the surface of artworks.

It's been added there that they don't want. Like they use emulsions and gels that dissolve material added to the surface of the artwork, but these are gels. They're like kind of viscous, you know, so it's not liquid, it doesn't run. And they're able to keep that really contained. They also use this stuff. I don't think it's been used a lot,

but it's probably the coolest thing I've heard about while researching this story. They use atomic oxygen. What I'm about to say doesn't make sense, but it's literally oxygen from space. It's an elemental form of oxygen that does not exist in the earth's atmosphere. You only find it in low earth orbit.

This technology is actually developed by NASA because atomic oxygen is like, they were studying corrosion on satellites in the International Space Station. And they basically either use like an airbrush and like have it very close to the painting or they put the piece of art in a vacuum chamber and pump in this stuff.

It's really good for removing soot from fire damaged paintings. You can actually see some photos online of paintings they've restored that had been in fires, and it's pretty mind-blowing, actually. Like the before and after, it's like you have a picture of a blackened ruin painting, and on the other, you've got a completely restored work.

The atomic oxygen was always used to, most famously, to restore this painting by Andy Warhol called Bath tub, which is just a painting of a bathtub. And somebody at a party at the museum had kissed it, so there was a lipstick mark on it. They were able to remove it using atomic oxygen. And all these cases, conservatives had basically given up hope on those paintings.

They were like, these are never going to be restored. So with all this new technology, is it possible they could go back to really restore who's afraid of red, yellow, and blue. Number three, the way that you would really want it to be restored. Yeah, so the answer is maybe. Yeah, near the end of my reporting, I talked to a journalist in the Netherlands who had written a book on the state like his name was Yim Lemuré, he's a great resource. And a couple years ago, he was able to get the full results from the forensic lab analysis of who's afraid of Red Yelene Blue-3, the one that had determined that Goldriar had overpainted

it. So he was able to get the full thing released. And what the report showed, according to him, was that gold ryer had used several layers of varnish, which is like this clear kind of like a resin, that he used several layers of varnish before painting over the canvas. So theoretically, because he did that, the layers of paint above the varnish could be removed.

Oh, what? So it is possible. Yeah, maybe not right now, but it is possible. I talked to Carol Mancusi-Yongaro from the Whitney about this, and she kind of agreed. I don't know. I don't know. I do know that I've seen my profession grow

and our ability to do things that one time we couldn't do. I believe that there may be procedures that we can do in the future that might be able to reverse this. So one day maybe, and I really hope the statelic is doing everything they can to see whether the painting can be restored because it'd be great to have it back. Absolutely. Well, cool. Thank you so much, Sean.

Thank you. 99% Invisible was produced this week by John Fassil and edited by Joe Rosenberg. Mix and Tech Production by Sheree Fusef, Music by Sean Rial. Katie Mingle is our senior editor, Kurt Colstad is the digital director. The rest of the team includes senior editor, Gila Nehal, Avery Trouffleman, Emmett Fitzgerald,

Taren Mazza, Vivian Lee, Sophia Klatsker, and me Roman Mars. Additional reporting for this story is from Boatah, Jelima Boatah is an audio producer in the Netherlands who also helped us on our series about the Belmer Mirror. So he's our man in Amsterdam. Thank you Boatah. Thanks also to Jim Lamaray, Hansen Hortageger,

John Wakefield, and Matt Scopeck. We are a project of 91.7KALW in San Francisco and produced on Radio Row in beautiful downtown Oakland, California. 99% invisible is a member of Radio Topia from PRX, a fiercely independent collective of the most innovative shows in all of podcasting. Find them all at radiotopia.fm. You can find the show in joint discussions about the show on Facebook. You can tweet at me at Roman Mars and the show at 99PI orc. We're on Instagram, Tumblr, and Reddit too. But if for some reason you're having a hard time picturing those Barnett Newman paintings,

we got you covered at 99pi.org. video to be on. From PRX.