HOW TO FORGE A CAREER THE ART OF THE FAKE...
Before ‘fake news’, Donald gloated about another fake
DONALD Trump has found himself at the centre of yet another fakery row. This time America’s ubiquitous president has found a new audience to mock him, that of the art world. Encased in a heavy gold frame on the wall of a drawing room in Trump Tower is a painting called Two Sisters, purporting to have been painted and signed by the French impressionist Renoir.
‘That’s an original Renoir. Worth $10million!,’ Trump told his biographer Tim O’Brien, according to a Vanity Fair interview. But the fly in the oil paint is that the Art Institute of Chicago claims to have held the original Renoir since 1933. Which begs the questions: where did Trump’s version come from? And who painted it?
Art forgery is no new phenomenon of course. It’s as old a practice as art itself; even Michelangelo dabbled in fakery in his early career. But strangely, little significance is placed on the artists behind the brushes of mimicry.
In 2006, a large, guileless-looking, middle-aged man and his octogenarian parents were led from their small Bolton council house, having committed one of the most prolific art cons in history.
THE art world listened in disbelief as introvert Shaun Greenhalgh was described as a master forger who, along with his elderly parents and brother, had been running a lucrative forgery racket out of their garden shed.
Shaun was the artistic talent behind the operation – he began copying masterpieces as a teenager – while his parents, George and Olive, sold his wares to auction houses. The fakes were so accurate that they ended up in some of the most prestigious galleries in the world, such as Tate and the Victoria and Albert Museum. Shaun served four years in prison while George and Olive received suspended sentences for their role.
Most unusually though, money didn’t seem to be the driver for this family of con artists. Having swindled at least £1,000,000 from various institutions over a 17-year period, they remained living in their small and fairly squalid-looking council house.
Nor was financial gain a motivation for American forger Mark Landis. Also a socially awkward introvert, Landis is so unassuming and softly spoken that it seems completely outlandish that he could be responsible for thousands of forged artworks over a period of almost three decades. His works have inadvertently been hung in major galleries across America.
Landis dressed as various characters – including a Jesuit priest named Fr Arthur Scott – in order to gain access to gallery directors; almost all of whom it seems he fooled. But unlike the Greenhalghs, Landis didn’t profit from his exploits. He didn’t sell his forgeries, but donated them as genuine works. No money ever changed hands.
The artist simply wanted his works to be hung and admired and to carry the same import and respect that the originals had – and he wanted his parents’ names to be noted as the donors.
Suffering with schizophrenia and living alone, Landis’s overwhelming love for his late mother, in particular, is tangible in its rawness in the documentary, Art And Craft. In fact, he credits this love with beginning his journey into deception: ‘I gave a picture to a museum in the memory of my father which I hoped would please Mother. Everyone was so nice that I was soon to get into the habit of donating pictures to museums. Being treated so nicely by people was something I was unfamiliar with and I liked it very much.’
In some cases, Landis donated up to seven copies of the same work to separate galleries, meaning that up to seven galleries at once believed they were in possession of an original masterpiece. Multiples of a watercolour in the style of Paul Signac were donated to various galleries, for example, as were line drawings in the style of Matisse. Landis’s works still hang in unsuspecting galleries; he gifted so many over 30 years that he says he simply cannot remember them all. So, if so many experts can be duped, maybe Donald Trump can be forgiven for being hoodwinked over his Renoir copy.
Not all forgers are tortured, introverted artists without the confidence to carve out their own style though. Brash and brazen German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi is a larger-than-life character who sold his forgeries for thousands and sometimes millions of euro. Finally caught out by his use of titanium white in a painting posing as an original by Heinrich Campendonk (a colour which did not exist in 1915 when the paint- ing was purported to have been created), Beltracchi maintains he was not simply forging works for financial gain. In fact, he never ‘copied’ paintings as such. The German artist spent years honing his craft of mimicking the great artists – something which his father did for a living, but in a legal manner. The younger Beltracchi would then paint ‘original’ paintings in the style of famous painters. The forgery part occurred only when he signed their signatures on the paintings and not his own.
Beltracchi’s wife Helene acted as a wealthy heiress as she travelled the world donating these ‘original’ works. The artistic Bonnie and Clyde even mocked up their own sets to take seemingly-vintage photos of Helene dressed as her own grandmother to ‘prove’ provenance of Beltracchi’s paintings.
Two of these cons (Greenhalgh and Beltrachi)led to jail sentences, and all three resulted in goodness knows how many fake masterpieces still hanging in galleries and homes to this day. For all we know, we may all have enjoyed gazing at a forged version of what we thought a masterpiece. Which begs the question: if these paintings are as entrancing and inspiring as the originals then does it really matter that they are fake?
Well yes. Of course there’s an entirely legitimate argument for not embracing art forgers. In this digital age of continuous plagiarism and intellectual property theft, there is a lot to be said for keeping sacred the copyright and integrity of art.
But there are also monetary reasons behind the art world’s refusal to hail the forgers for their notable talents; works of art, above all other desirable objects, are unique, making them more valuable.
It stands to reason that painters could replicate their own works but they choose not to compromise the integrity of their work. So accepting the work of forgers, even as a kind of ‘protest art’, risks flooding the market with cheaper, but almost indistinct versions of the original. Just look at the huge industry behind counterfeit designer handbags. Who’ll pay full whack if they can avoid it?
Author of The Art Of The Con, Anthony M Amore, argues that part of the reason that gallerists, curators – and US presidents presumably – continue to be fooled by forgers is down to their own participation. Regarding forgeries by Michelangelo, he says of the victim of the con: ‘The innocent Cardinal Riario wanted so badly to believe that he had come upon a truly special piece, something that perhaps no one else had found, that he was easy prey for Michelangelo’s fake.’
Perhaps someone like Donald Trump ‘wants so badly’ the bragging rights that come with owning something ‘priceless’ that he never had his Renoir adequately examined. A man with golden elevators and golden taps and golden hair; maybe he, too, is easy prey for any forger worth his salt. And while it remains to be seen whether The Donald will bother tracking down whoever it is who forged his Renoir, we should hope that he does because you can bet your fake Chanel that the artist responsible for fleecing America’s least favourite president since Nixon will go down in history, one way or another.