![]() “The writer of the article was not aware that the painting did not exist,” Alberda told me over email.īut did the painting exist? Van der Most still couldn’t say. He contacted a Dutch journalist, Lex Boon, to help him with his inquiry. ![]() One night, scrolling through Instagram photos tagged #diriyah, Boon found a post of the very same photograph of the Diriyah Starry Night. The photographer, Nouf Yarub knew nothing about its origins, but could confirm that there was, in fact, a painting. She was happy to share the contact details of the client who had commissioned the shoot. His name was Dr Meshal Al-Harasani.īoon, the Dutch journalist, who has a cheerful demeanour and a nose for oddball stories, struck up a correspondence with Al-Harasani. According to Boon, over WhatsApp, Al-Harasani explained he was managing communications about the painting, which was owned by a friend of his. Al-Harasani said that the artist was a Dutch man named “Jeroen” – perhaps not Van der Most after all. As if to smooth things over, Al-Harasani said the princess wanted to send Boon a gift. Weeks later, a picture frame – glass smashed – arrived, containing a black and white photo of Diriyah. In return, Van der Most sent Al-Harasani an AI-based artwork of a bunch of flowers, Arabian Bloom. It was never collected from the depot a month later it arrived back in the Netherlands. Al-Harasani had seemed interested in Boon writing an article about the painting, but when it became apparent this was not going to happen immediately, the conversation trailed off – until, some months later, when Van der Most received an invitation to speak at a conference in Saudi Arabia. On 31 October 2021, Van der Most flew to Jeddah, with Boon in tow. As he stepped off the plane, the hot, dry air transported him back to his childhood living in Oman, where his father worked for an oil company. “We had no real plans,” said Van der Most. “Or any idea whether we would hear from Meshal.” But soon after their arrival, the pair were swept up in a gleaming Cadillac and taken to meet Al-Harasani at his office. Van der Most nodded along, playing it cool. “I was like, what the fuck is this? Is he bullshitting? Is this actually going to happen?” But, as he told me, he was “exploding” inside. The following evening, Van der Most told me, he and Boon arrived at Al-Harasani’s villa. After a long dinner, they were finally invited to a room upstairs. ![]() There was a large black suitcase on the floor. The case was a nice touch, Van der Most thought, as he unclipped the gold catches and lifted the lid. The painting he had travelled across the world to see lay there, resplendent. The deep blues and swirling colours filled the room. Van der Most broke his gaze from the painting and took a breath: “So can I sign?” The physicality of the work was finally apparent, the grooves of the brush strokes and the crests and valleys of the thick oil paint. Van der Most crouched by the case, took out a brush and, in the bottom left corner of a multimillion-pound artwork he didn’t make, slowly marked out four letters in black paint: MOST. ![]() The fake Diriyah Starry Night was now his the Saudi Gazette report made real. Van der Most had an artwork, and Al-Harasani, it seemed, had an artist. Van der Most’s plan was coming together as he’d hoped. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |