THIS JUST IN:
The Hungarian born artist Francois Fiedler spent his whole career toiling in relative obscurity on the outskirts of Paris, France, overshadowed by his contemporaries Pablo Picasso, Joan Miro, Marc Chagall, and Cesar Baldaccini.
It has long been assumed in the art world that Fiedler's works would never break through the ceiling that these other artists had achieved in their careers, but in a shocking development that rocked the art world, a previously unknown work by the artist was rediscovered at a swap meet in Biloxi, Mississippi.
From there the story gets quite weird. The woman who acquired the piece for next to nothing started researching the signature on it, which led her on a wild goose chase. She decided to bring the piece to Antiques Roadshow, but her car ran out of gas on the way there.
One day she showed a photo of the piece to her hairdresser while getting a perm, and the hairdresser said "You should take that to the Smithsonian and find out what they have to say". She fired the hairdresser right there on the spot and walked out with perm solution still on her head. She's been wearing a wig ever since.
Finally an online search brought her to Wikipedia, where she learned that Fiedler was in fact a "B level" artist who would never amount to anything. Undaunted, she moved forward knowing that Wikipedia is highly suspect as a source of accurate information on anything other than sports statistics and finding the years of production of your favorite models of cars.
The painting then sat for years gathering dust in the corner of her apartment until one day she had an epiphany - "Why not make an InstaGram reel about it and just see what happens?". Unfortunately she didn't have a smart phone, so this idea died on the vine.
In a fit of desparation she took the painting to the outskirts of town and blasted it full of holes with her shotgun. She left it to rot away in the elements and returned home, never to see it again.
Several months later a farmer who had to take a leak stumbled upon the painting while pissing in the wind. Luckily the painting was upwind at the time, so he gathered it under his arm and trudged back to his truck where he tossed it in the bed.
On the way home he forgot about the painting because he saw Marylou walking down the street, and it ended up in the bed of the truck for several more months.
One day he was cleaning out his shed in prepartion for a run to the dump, and as he was tossing things into the truck the painting once again caught his eye. He briefly considered tossing it out along with the old broken TVs and dried out paint cans, but something told him to put it in the back window of the truck instead, wedged between the window and the rifles in his gun rack. Are you starting to notice a trend here?
With his truck all loaded up he set off for the dump, only to get pulled over by the sheriff for having his vision obscured by the painting. He didn't have a passenger side mirror after all. Now being good friends with the sheriff, this encounter didn't go nearly as badly as you might imagine.
Seeing as how the painting was full of holes, our protaganist made the point that he could see right through the holes in case of emergency.
The sheriff countered that while it was true that the holes offered some amount of visibility, they in no way could have been part of the artist's original plan for the piece. He had noticed the "Fiedler" signature on the back, and he knew that Fiedler's whole jam was to let his works spend time out in the elements and let nature run its course, bring them back into the studio, work them some more, return them outside, and continue this routine until he was satisfied that the piece was finished.
He went on to state that France has very strict gun laws, so it was highly unlikely that the holes were original to the piece. Since this shed no light on how the holes got there in the first place, the sheriff surmised that neither could they pass enough light for the farmer to possibly see through them in his rear view mirror.
Knowing he had lost the argument, the farmer offered the sheriff the painting as a bribe, which he reluctantly accepted. They had been friends a long time, and the sheriff knew how tough things were on the farm and how money was scarce in these parts.
When he got back to the station the sheriff tossed the painting into the pile of confiscated goods and forgot about it.
Then one day a young deputy named Susie was going through the pile of confiscated goods and saw the painting. The town hadn't had a public auction in many years, and this got her thinking that perhaps finally having another one was the perfect way for her to make her mark amongst the townfolk.
She called the town crier to ask if he'd emcee the auction and he said sure thing. She had some posters made and posted them in the laundromat and the library and the feed store, and the event soon became the talk of the town.
And when that fateful day finally came, the buzz around town was all about who would be the winning bidder for the old saddle that had been used by Jimmy The Slacker in his unsuccessful attempt to rob the Countryside Bank on horseback.
As the auction rolled on nobody gave much thought to the poor tattered painting - except for Benjamin McTaggart. He thought it would look great over the entryway to his barn, so when it crossed the block he hollered "I'll give this year's whole crop of beans for that!" Since nobody else placed a bid, the painting was now his.
After the auction was over and the Sheriffs Department had settled up with everyone, their bean counters tallied 36 million beans amongst the proceeds. The painting has been hanging over McTaggart's barn ever since.
