In 1964 four paintings by a previously unknown avant-garde French artist named Pierre Brassau were exhibited at an art show in Goteborg, Sweden. Art critics from Swedish papers praised the works. For instance, Rolf Anderberg of the morning Posten wrote: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

However, one critic panned Brassau's work, suggesting that "Only an ape could have done this."

As it turned out, the latter critic was correct. Pierre Brassau was, in fact, an ape. Specifically, he was a four-year-old West African chimpanzee named Peter from Sweden's Boras zoo. More >>>

On February 5, 1952, a small ad ran on the theatrical page of the Washington Post offering the services of a company of "ghost artists": "Too busy to paint? Call on the Ghost Artists? We paint it, you sign it."

The idea of ghost artists caught the interest of the media, and a report about the company went out over the wire services and appeared in newspapers nationwide. The ghost artists were said to be earning lucrative fees from executives who wanted to impress their friends. Satisfied clients included military men, government officials, doctors, businessmen, and a Wall Street broker who commissioned an entire exhibition in order to break into "arty circles." More >>>

In November 1946 the Los Angeles Art Association included a painting titled "Three Out of Five", by a previously unknown artist, Naromji, in an exhibition of abstract art. The work hung beside works by well-known modern artists such as Helen Lundeberg and Stanton Macdonald-Wright, and it was given a price tag of $1000. But the Art Association was embarrassed when, at the end of the month, the publicist/prankster Jim Moran revealed that he was the true author of the painting. Naromji was Moran spelled backwards, with a 'ji' "added for confusion." More >>>

The illustrator Hugh Troy was frustrated by the crowds at New York's Van Gogh exhibit, which made it hard for art lovers such as himself to view the works. He was also convinced that most of the people were there out of lurid interest in the man who had cut off his ear, not out of a true appreciation for the art. To prove his point, he fashioned a fake ear out of a piece of dried beef and mounted it in a velvet-lined shadow box. He snuck this into the museum and stood it on a table in the Van Gogh exhibit. Beside the box he placed a sign: "This is the ear which Vincent Van Gogh cut off and sent to his mistress, a French prostitute, Dec. 24, 1888." More >>>

In 1924 Paul Jordan Smith, a Los Angeles-based novelist and Latin scholar, painted a blurry picture of a South Seas islander holding a banana over her head. He intended the picture as a spoof of abstract styles of modern art such as Cubism, and as a joke he entered it into an art exhibition. He claimed it was the work of the Russian artist Pavel Jerdanowitch (a name he had invented), the founder of the Disumbrationist School of Art (another invention of his). Smith used the foreign name because he figured that painters with exotic names were always a bigger hit with critics. More >>>

The French painter Paul Chabas completed "September Morn" in early 1912. The painting shows a young woman demurely bathing nude by the edge of Lake Annecy in Haute-Savoie, France. When Chabas showed it that year at the Paris Salon, it won a gold medal of honor. Critics praised it. But when copies of the painting made their way to America, it provoked a bitter controversy there about nudity, art, and public morality. Thanks to this controversy, September Morn became one of the most famous and popular paintings of the twentieth century. It sold millions of copies and was reproduced on a wide variety of merchandise including umbrellas, suspenders, postcards, candy boxes, cane heads, and watch fobs. The painting is often cited as an example of "success by scandal."

But in an ironic twist to the September Morn story, the publicist Harry Reichenbach later claimed to have started the controversy by complaining to moral censors about the indecency of the painting. He didn't actually feel the painting was indecent. He was cynically manipulating the self-righteous moralists in order to sell copies of the painting. It was an early example of a marketer staging a phony protest for the sake of publicity. More >>>