With VertiGhost, Hershman Leeson addresses the fake painting from the Hitchcock film and ties it to Amedeo Modigliani’s painting Pierre-Edouard Baranowski(ca. 1918), a work at the de Young that has for years been plagued with questions about its authenticity. A video produced as part of the project will feature interviews between Hershman Leeson, who is based in San Francisco, and an art historian, a conservator, and a psychiatrist. “What interested me was the context of Vertigo, which was shot [at the Legion of Honor],” Hershman Leeson, who was profiled by this magazine earlier this year, said by email. “I was interested also in untold stories of paintings, like the painting under painting, as an ‘undercover’ idea. . . . The 15-minute video is really about the ‘ghosts of history’ that refuse to rest until their stories are told.”…
The Guardian