Seeing that the people had never heard the name Wolfgang Betletsch, Padgio told his story, and everyone was shocked to hear it.

Is there such an awesome character in the world?

Wolfgang Bertletsch, originally called Wolfgang Fisher, later followed his wife's surname, and the surname was Bertledge.

In fact, all over the world, whether in Asia, Europe or the United States, there is a custom of women changing their husband's surname after marriage. For example, in ancient China, women would add their husband's surname before their own surname after marriage, and this custom is still preserved on Hong Kong Island today. The main reason why women take their husband's surname is also due to the low status of women.

European and American countries talk about the high status of women all day long, in fact, it is the same, such as Hillary, her full name is Hillary Diane Rodham Clinton, where the surname "Clinton" comes from her husband.

However, in recent years, this tradition has been broken by the Stars and Stripes, and many couples have linked their surnames as their own surnames, and some husbands have even begun to take their wives' surnames. Nowadays, there are four choices for couples in the Stars and Stripes to get married: the wife takes the husband's surname, the husband follows the wife's surname, the husband and wife have the husband's surname first, and the husband and wife have the wife's surname first. Oh, and there are those who simply don't change their surnames.

Of course, this is the country of stars and stripes, and Europe generally follows the husband's surname. There are people like Wolfgang who follow their wife's surname, but there are really not many.

But one thing is certain, those men who change their wife's surname. That's all about marrying a strong wife. Wolfgang is no exception. Who made him poor?

Wolfgang's father turned out to be a painter and restorer of churches. Usually copy the paintings of famous masters such as Rembrandt, Picasso, Cézanne, etc., and sell them at low prices to supplement the family. His father was very good at imitation and very detail-oriented, but he really didn't go on the road of professional counterfeiting.

Growing up in such an environment, Wolfgang naturally fell in love with painting. However, his skill tree was clearly a bit off------ at the age of fourteen he painted his first 'forgery' with his father's paints----- Picasso's 1903 work Mother and Son.

Three years later, Wolfgang enrolled in an art school in Aachen to study painting, but was expelled shortly after for skipping too many classes.

It was the 'Hippie Era', and Wolfgang became obsessed with hippie culture and became a hippie with long hair, riding a big harley, and being a drug addict. He began his life of traveling in Europe, and traveled all over Europe.

But it also takes money, doesn't it? He made a living by selling fakes during this journey.

In fact, Wolfgang made a name for himself in the art world early on, and three of his works were shown at a well-known art exhibition in Munich in 1978. It stands to reason that he would become a promising painter. But what this guy prefers is this kind of wandering marginal life.

Because of his exquisite painting skills, his customers were so impressed with him that some people were complacent that they were buying the real thing, which also made Wolfgang see business opportunities and experience fun, so he and his wife made it their life's work. Of course, he is not the same as Mark A. Landis, and the purpose of these two is the same from beginning to end: money!

In order to concentrate on professional creation, they spent several years studying the history of European art, and sold some paintings to copy and restore, so that later, just by looking at the works, they could clearly know the genre and age, because they had a clear understanding of each painter's brushstroke technique!

These two can be said to be faking with their lives. Wolfgang worked hard to study art history and improve his painting skills. Before each painting, I would carefully study the artist's materials, go to the artist's place of residence to collect style, and try to blend in with the scene when the painter was painting at that time.

The result is a 'perfect fake'.

In order to increase credibility, the couple went to the flea market when they had nothing to do, looked for a picture frame that matched the age of the fake, and then broke down the picture frame and put the frame dust into the fake to add a sense of age.

He found frames and canvases corresponding to the age of creation, and the source of the seal behind the frame had to be in line with the artist's personal experience, and he also made a special oven to accelerate the aging of the picture and form a reasonable fracture layer.

He would grind the ore himself to make the pigments that matched the characteristics of each era and painter, including the age of the canvas, the degree of dryness, the dust and even the smell accumulated on the old paintings, all of which were on his mind!

With the identification community gradually armed with science and technology, the emergence of X-ray, chemical analysis, electron microscope and other instruments has made it more and more difficult to fake, and many famous paintings are difficult to hide.

But as the saying goes, 'the road is one foot high, the devil is one foot taller', and when the Wolfgangs realized the problem, they also came up with a solution----- they would send some samples of the paintings to a private laboratory for chemical analysis to determine whether they matched the age of the corresponding creation. If any of the raw materials were analyzed to have been born later than the original age of the painting, he would remove it!

Especially after the birth of their daughter, these two may have joined forces to enter the art circle with years of practice in order to earn 'milk powder money' for their daughter.

One is responsible for forging paintings, the other is responsible for making up stories to fool people into buying paintings, and in the art world, it is like a fish in water, and one by one the fakes flow into the market, in exchange for a large amount of money.

For him, there is no difference between Leonardo da Vinci, Rembrandt, and Picasso, and he can paint almost any famous painter! An artist's wife once bought his forgeries and mistakenly thought that her collection was made by her dead husband. It can be seen that his skills are superb!

And his wife Helena is not an idle person, the first time she sold a fake painting to a high-end auction house in Krond City!

In order to sell her paintings, Helena also used all kinds of means. She grafted the experience of a well-known Jewish art dealer onto her grandfather, whom she had rarely met, claiming that her "grandfather" had escaped Nazi looting and had hidden a large art collection that she had inherited.

To add credibility, Helena dressed in vintage clothes, disguised as her grandmother, sits in a chair in an old-fashioned pose with Wolfgang's paintings next to her. Old photos are taken with an old-fashioned camera, and after the photos are taken, they are post-produced, and in short, everything related to it, is worn!

In Helena's words, 'You have to have a good story to buy a painting for a million!'

These two people are together, they are invincible, and no one knows how much money they made by cheating. According to speculation and judgment, there are probably more than 300 forgeries of Wolfgang, and the price cannot be estimated.

People only know that fourteen of these paintings, which are 100% certain to be forgeries, sold for a total of 500 million!

Of course, the reason for the high price of the counterfeits he sells is that not only is there a good story, but Wolfgang's counterfeiting skills are simply too high. From the Renaissance to the present, he has been able to imitate the style of more than 100 great painters, and even well-known auction houses such as Sotheby's and Christie's have been fooled and auctioned his paintings.

The most unique thing is that he does not simply copy, but paints completely new paintings according to the styles of different painters. He then claimed that the painting was lost by the painter.

You can't make an exact copy of a painting, and a copy can never be the same as the original. ’

Even the legendary paintings that have been lost for a long time can be painted according to the painter's style. In his own words: 'If the masters had time, they would have painted such a picture, but they didn't have time, so I painted it for them.' ’

He imitated one of the paintings "The Forest" by Max Ernst, the soul of Dadaism and surrealism, and the buyer insisted on buying it at a high price after knowing that it was a forgery. Because he felt that if Ernst had really painted this painting, it would have been the best of all his paintings!

And their paintings, almost without a miss. It can even be said that if it weren't for a lazy moment, the couple would still be using the money earned from forging famous paintings, living in villas, holding private parties on yachts, and covering their mouths and stealing fun in front of famous paintings in the world's major well-known art museums.

It was 2006, and the Germanic abstract painter Heinrich Cumbendonck's Portrait of a Red Horse set a record for Cumbendonk's work at auction for 2.8 million euros, causing a sensation in Europe.

It was only after Cambendonk's death in 1957 that his fame gradually rose and he fetched a lot of money in the art market. However, the number of his works is not historically known, so it is considered a good object for forgery. Therefore, the appraisal of his works has always been the most important and the most important.

Two years later, Nicholas Istov, an expert in scientific analysis and painting in the Eagle Nation, discovered that the paint contained titanium dioxide, which was supposed to have been created in 1914, and titanium dioxide was only invented in 1916.

It was the two-year gap that Portrait of a Red Horse was identified as a fake, making it the largest fake painting auction ever sold in the Western art world, causing an uproar among collectors, galleries, auction houses and museums.

What's even more terrifying is that as this matter ferments, the number of fake paintings snowballs, and more and more paintings that were once considered 'authentic masterpieces' have been confirmed to be fakes.

For a while, all the museums were panicked, for fear that the famous paintings in their collections were also fakes.

As the culprits of this matter, Wolfgang and Helena also quickly entered the police's field of vision, and after a period of time, the crime of 'male and female' was finally announced to the world!

In 2010, this pair of forgery masters who made the art circle frightened were arrested by the police.

But what happened next was still very dramatic。。。。。。