Did you know that a priceless work of art was once destroyed by an overzealous dorm
master? Walter Chrysler, Jr., the son of the Chrysler corporation founder, was active in
the arts for his entire life. As an adult, he helped develop the collection at the Museum
of Modern Art in New York City. But it was a piece he purchased as a teen that got him
into some hot water at boarding school.
At 14, Chrysler purchased a small painting that featured a nude woman and proudly displayed
it in his dorm room. Chrysler’s dorm master apparently found the work obscene, and took
the liberty of destroying it. Unlike the vast majority of naked pictures you might find
in a teenager’s room, though, Chrysler’s nude was actually painted by Auguste Renoir.
Hi, I’m Erin McCarthy, editor-in-chief of mentalfloss.com, and welcome to the List Show
from my living room. That regrettably removed Renoir is just the first of 16 priceless things
we’ve lost forever. For-ev-er. FOR. EV. ER. [shake out of it] Let’s get started.
2. While we’re talking art, let’s talk about the sad fate that befell a Pablo Picasso
painting dubbed Le Peintre [Le pahn-tre]. (Incidentally, Picasso used that title, which
translates to "The Painter," for multiple pieces, so if you’ve seen a different Le
Peintre hanging in a gallery, that’s why.) In 1998, the painting we’re talking about
was being transported via the cargo hold of a SwissAir jet. Tragically, the plane crashed
off of the coast of Nova Scotia, killing all 229 people on board. Though much of the cargo
was eventually recovered, the only trace of the $1.5-million-dollar painting ever found
was a 20-centimeter scrap of canvas.
3. Switching gears to a different kind of art, we have Ernest Hemingway’s lost works.
In the fall of 1922, Ernest was living in Paris as a correspondent for the Toronto Star.
In November, he traveled to Switzerland, to cover the Lausanne [lOZE-ahn] Conference,
and asked his wife Hadley to take the train and join him. She agreed and packed all of
Hemingway’s manuscripts so he could show them to a new colleague. Upon boarding the
train, Hadley stowed her bags and went to purchase some water. When she returned, the
bag containing all of Hemingway’s manuscripts, including the carbon copies, was gone.
When Hadley arrived in Switzerland and broke the bad news, Hemingway purchased a ticket
to Paris and went to their apartment to verify that all of his work was gone. As he would
later recount in A Moveable Feast, “It was true alright and I remember what I did in
the night after I let myself into the flat and found it was true.” What did you do?!
Damn you, Hemingway, and your terse, elliptical style!
4. As sad as the Hemingway thefts are, it’s an earlier incident that has been called “the
greatest crime in literary history.” Before his death, Lord Byron wrote a memoir that
was supposed to be pretty juicy, revealing scandalous details about his tumultuous marriage
and alleged affairs — in short, a sure-fire bestseller. But upon his death, his three
closest friends, including fellow poet Thomas Moore, got together and tossed the whole manuscript
into the fire. Why? The trio argued that they were preserving their friend’s reputation
and protecting his family, but historians think they may have had other motives: jealousy
and their own self-interest. For example, one of the men involved, Byron’s longtime
friend John Cam Hobhouse, was a Member of Parliament — and presumably didn’t want
his reputation sullied by his association with the salacious details. Whatever the motivation
was, what was no doubt a fascinating memoir is now lost to the ages.
5. Let’s stay in the arts, but switch to the silver screen to discuss a silent movie
that will likely remain silent in more ways than one. Before they created some of the
greatest comedy flicks of all time, the Marx Brothers made their feature film debut in
a movie called Humor Risk. While it would be fascinating to get a glimpse of the iconic
comedians so early in their film careers, it doesn’t appear we’ll ever get the chance.
According to Groucho Marx, Humor Risk disappeared after the premiere, perhaps at the hands of
Groucho himself, who was allegedly disappointed with the poor reception it received. Another
tale says the movie was left in the screening box overnight and accidentally thrown out
the next day.
6. In the same decade—that’d be the 1920s—paleontologists made a huge discovery in the caves of Zhoukoudian
just southwest of Beijing: a number of teeth and bones that belonged to a previously unknown
species of hominid. They dubbed their find Sinanthropus pekinensis, now classified as
homo erectus pekinensis, but better known as Peking Man. Throughout the 1930s, paleontologists
continued to uncover Peking Man fossils at the site. When Japan invaded China during
the second Sino-Japanese War in the late ‘30s, authorities worried about the safety of the
priceless fossils and a plan was devised to ship them to the United States for safekeeping.
In 1941, 200 fossils were packed into boxes for Marines to take back to the States — and,
as far as we know, that was the last time anyone saw them. No one knows where Peking
Man ended up, but there’s no shortage of theories. Some think the fossils were intercepted
and stolen by Japanese soldiers, who either took them back to their country or dropped
them into the ocean. Others think the Marines did take the fossils to the United States,
but that the U.S. has quietly taken possession of them. The most recent theory is that the
fossils are buried under a parking lot in China, which was, at the time, a U.S. military
base. Despite many investigations, Peking Man has never reappeared. Maybe he’ll turn
up again in another half-million years?
7. Priceless treasures going missing under suspicious circumstances is a fairly common
wartime experience. The Amber Room is one of the most famous examples of wartime looting
— and its mysterious disappearance is a historical mystery that has yet to be solved.
Often referred to as the Eighth Wonder of the World, the Amber Room was a gift from
Prussia to Peter the Great in 1716. The “room” was really a series of panels that were semi-permanently
attached to the walls of an existing room; they were shipped to Russia in 18 large boxes
and were ultimately installed at Catherine Palace, near St. Petersburg. After renovations
were complete, the Amber Room covered 180 square feet in six tons of amber and semi-precious
stones — and did I mention that each panel was backed in gold leaf? At one point, historians
estimated that the room would’ve been worth about $142 million in today’s dollars. So
you can see why it was such a tempting target for Nazis to loot.
Curators of the Amber Room knew it was in danger, so they attempted to hide it under
wallpaper. It... didn’t work. Nazi soldiers stormed the palace, tore the Amber room down
in about 36 hours, and shipped it to Königsberg, Germany, where it was reassembled in the castle
museum. As WWII neared its end, the museum’s director packed it back up into crates, worried
that the Amber Room would suffer the same fate in Germany that it had in Russia.
The castle was severely damaged by the end of the War, and the Amber Room may have been
destroyed, because it disappeared without a trace. Almost. In 1997, German art detectives
were tipped off that someone was trying to sell a piece of the Amber Room. They raided
the location in question and did, indeed, find one of the mosaic panels. But the guy
who was selling it was the son of a deceased soldier who likely stole it during the war,
and he had no information as to the whereabouts of the rest of the room.
Thanks to YouTube commenter Billy Smith for letting us know about the Amber Room. If you
want to be featured in our next episode of The List Show, leave us a comment below about,
drumroll, please...farts! That’s right, we are a high-brow channel, and our next episode
is all about flatulence. Leave us your favorite fart fact- or your favorite euphemism for
passing gas down below...in the comments, I mean.
8. Now let’s rewind to 1964, when a 17-year-old kid named Steven Spielberg enlisted his sister,
his friends, his mother, and his high school marching band to help him create his first
feature-length film, a 135-minute movie called Firelight. Sometime after its only public
screening, for an audience of about 500 people, Spielberg loaned a few of the film reels to
a producer to show off his skills. When he went back to the producer’s office to retrieve
the film, the producer had been fired and the reels were nowhere to be found. Though
most of the movie is lost to history, about 3 minutes and 50 seconds of grainy footage
can be found online today. Spielberg has said that the early film helped lead to Close Encounters
of the Third Kind, so maybe all was not lost, after all.
9. Wherrrrre’s Johnny? (Sorry.) Opportunities to see late-night host Johnny Carson at the
beginning of his three-decade run on The Tonight Show are pretty limited: Less than 1 percent
of the footage from 1962 to 1972 has been accounted for. Back in the day, tape was expensive,
so it was common practice to record over it for other projects; the original TV recording
of the first Super Bowl met a similar fate, although a grainy, home-recorded copy later
emerged. In 2012, an archivist discovered a single reel of Tonight Show footage dating
from 1963, but the vast majority of the show’s early run will likely never be seen by anyone
again. Bet Carnac the Magnificent didn’t see that one coming.
10. If you want to get into the truly priceless, it’s hard to beat natural landmarks that
took thousands of years to form. The Old Man of the Mountain was a series of granite ledges
that strikingly resembled a rugged profile set in the face of the White Mountains of
New Hampshire. The Old Man became famous — Daniel Webster wrote about him, Nathaniel Hawthorne’s
short story "The Great Stone Face” is said to take inspiration from him, and he appeared
on official New Hampshire State… everything, including the state emblem, state license
plate, state quarter and state route markers.
However, after a long and fruitful life, the Old Man of the Mountain collapsed down the
mountainside in 2003. No foul play was suspected, but New Hampshire mourned the loss of their
patriarch nonetheless.
11. Montana knows just how New Hampshire feels. In 1997, the state lost the Eye of the Needle,
a distinctive, 11-foot landmark akin to the famous arched rock formations in Utah’s
Arches National Park. Meriwether Lewis even described the area in his journals chronicling
the Lewis and Clark Expedition, so it was especially upsetting when the Eye of the Needle
was found, completely eyeless, in May 1997. The collapse was originally blamed on teenage
vandals, but after a more thorough investigation, some researchers said the damage was likely
caused by natural erosion. No definitive cause has ever been found, so the destruction of
this priceless landmark may always remain a mystery.
12. Then, there’s the time we put a stop to nature’s stunning beauty on purpose.
Guairá Falls at the border of Brazil and Paraguay was an incredible display of waterfalls
with a total drop of 375 feet and a roar that could be heard 20 miles away. To put it in
perspective, it’s said that Guaira Falls had twice the flow rate of Niagara Falls,
which equates to more than 6,000 tons of water per second. Some estimates put the flow rate
more than two times higher than that, a truly staggering display of power. When the 4.8
mile Itaipu [E-tay-poo] Dam was erected, though, it completely submerged the Falls. To be fair,
the dam does provide about 75% of the electricity used in Paraguay and over 10% of the electricity
used in Brazil, so it’s not hard to see why the decision to build the dam was made.
On the other hand: pretty waterfalls!
13. Waterfalls are one thing, but how about the virtual disappearance of an entire island?
That happened in Hawaii in 2018. It wasn’t one of the big 6, but the 11-acre East Island,
a breeding ground for threatened species such as the Hawaiian monk seal and the green sea
turtle. Hurricane Walaka decimated the low-lying island. Although researchers expected East
Island to erode slowly over the course of the next century, they were floored when it
happened literally overnight.
14. The Library of Congress has been burned not once, but twice. The first time was in
1814 when the British burned much of Washington, taking out 3,000 volumes in the Library of
Congress. Thomas Jefferson helped rebuild the Library’s collection by suggesting that
Congress purchase most of his personal library, which amounted to over 6,000 volumes. Had
Jefferson still been alive in 1851, he may have regretted that decision — thanks to
a faulty chimney flue, the Library of Congress burned again, destroying tens of thousands
of books, including two-thirds of the Jefferson collection. Many of the lost Jefferson volumes
were replaced by other parts of the Library’s collection and generous donations, but none
of them have the cachet of being hand selected by Thomas Jefferson himself.
15. Still, that loss is nothing compared to the loss of virtually the entire written record
of Maya history. It’s a tragic example of colonizers destroying native culture. In the
mid-1500s, Spanish priest Diego de Landa deemed Maya statues, books and papers “superstition
and lies of the devil,” and proceeded to almost single-handedly destroy 5000 religious
images and over two dozen works in just one town. The decimation wrought by De Landa and
other Europeans was so complete that only four original pieces, the Maya Codices, are
known to exist today, along with some poorly preserved fragments that are generally unreadable.
Maya scholars compare the act to the burning of the Library of Alexandria—we still don’t
know what knowledge was lost.
16. For 1500 years, a set of colossal, hand-carved Buddhas stood sentry over the Bamiyan Valley
in Afghanistan. Records show that the 175 and 120 feet tall Buddhas were covered in
plaster and gems in their earlier years, but by the time the Taliban got to them in 2001,
they were simply incredible works of sandstone sculpture — but that didn’t stop the Taliban
from destroying the priceless works. Despite pleas from art historians around the world,
the Taliban demolished the ancient Buddhas over the course of 25 days, forcing prisoners
to place explosives in holes drilled into each statue. Although there have been talks
of rebuilding the Buddhas, either from scratch or using the pieces that were later salvaged,
nothing has come to fruition yet — and no replacement can come close to the cultural
and historical value of the ancient originals.
On the plus side, sometimes things that might have been lost forever do turn up again. As
of 2002, there were only six surviving American Indian objects that could be positively identified
to have been acquired during Lewis and Clark’s famous expedition in the early 1800s. Then,
in 2003, two collection assistants at Harvard’s Peabody Museum were photographing items in
the Oceania storerooms when they discovered a grizzly bear claw necklace that had been
mislabeled. Further research revealed that the necklace had been acquired by Meriweather
Lewis and William Clark on their exploration of the American West, and that it had effectively
been missing since it was mislabeled in 1941. Next time I lose my keys I’ll make sure
to retrace my steps and then call the Peabody Museum’s Department of Oceania.
Don’t forget to leave those sweet-smelling facts about farts in the comments for a chance
to be featured in our next episode. That’ll be up June 17th, but don’t forget to check
out a new episode of Misconceptions next Wednesday, the 10th. We’ll see you then!