Master forger Max is now a picture of innocence
With a book and a movie of his colourful life underway, the notorious art faker says he’s strictly ‘ legit’ these days
HE’S JUST finished a Banksy and is putting the finishing touches to a Caravaggio which is propped up on an easel in the colourful sitting room at his flat in Haywards Heath. There’s a Cassius Coolidge on the wall and an L S Lowry by the mantelpiece, but it is Max Brandrett himself who dominates the space with his trademark sunglasses, gold rings and an art- deco- style watch.
“I’ll fake anything,” he declares in a Cockney accent straight out of central casting. “These days I’m legit but I’m still classed as one of the best in the game.”
For the past 60 years Max has been copying some of the greatest artists of all time.
He painted a portrait for the notorious Kray twins in 1967, conned some of the country’s most knowledgeable art dealers, spent three years in total behind bars and was subsequently hounded by the fraud squad.
“They still send me a Christmas card every year,” he jokes. “I’ve done three stretches inside, but I’m good as gold now.”
Now a biography of his life is being written and a film is in production. And Max, 74, is still painting.
“These days I’m not forging, I’m copying, but I still get obsessed with it. I’m following the same strokes, the same lines that this old master laid down hundreds of years ago. Whatever’s in front of me, I’ll copy.”
MAX will spend about three or four days on a Jack Vettriano, but says the old masters take a lot longer – maybe a week or two. He loves Coolidge, the American artist best known for his paintings of dogs playing poker. “I love the detail in them, but I’m not keen on the Picassos because – I’m going to be honest – I don’t find them challenging enough.
“But you name it, I’ll paint it,” he says, pointing out the subtle, but important, distinction between being a copyist and a forger. “Today I’ll put ‘ Max Brandrett after Banksy’ on the back, rather than passing it off as an original.
“Painting is pleasure, but I still miss the buzz of the auction rooms,” he admits. “In my day, when
I was working with the master art forger Tom Keating, we used to go in like father and son with our poloneck jumpers and leather jackets.
“And we’d go ‘ Hello Sir, got a couple of smudges ( slang for paintings) in the car. Would you have a look?’
“We used to put two good paintings among what we called potboilers. The auctioneer would be looking through them with authority,” and here Max breaks into an upper class accent, “‘ Oh yes, that’s quite interesting’, he’d say.
“I’d have done a lovely painting of shipping off Dover. I’d ask, ‘ Can you tell me about it?’ And he’d say, ‘ It’s probably Norwich School.’ And I’d say, ‘ Oh was it painted in Norwich?’
“Or he’d pick out a pen- and- ink and I’d say, ‘ Oh, you like the blackand- white one’.”
Max’s chutzpah and faux naivety paid dividends, for a while. “After all that, we’d go into the auction and bid on our work to get the prices up.
“On one occasion, we were up to about £ 2,500 and the successful bidder came over and apologised I’d missed out on the painting. It was hard to keep a straight face.”
The son of a “travelling con man on the race courses”, who also painted horses for pleasure, Max learned to paint as a Barnado’s boy. His early childhood was one of restless poverty in a basement flat in Brighton.
“I thought Weetabix was a main meal,” he says. “One day this guy arrives, who looks like an official park- keeper, and takes my halfbrothers and me into care. My mum didn’t want us to go, but it was the making of me.”
He stayed in the children’s home for 12 years and it was there he
started to show an interest in, and talent, for painting.
Soon he had his first set of oil paints, but there was no art tuition available so he learned his technical skills and copyist’s technique through trial and error.
At 15, he was sent home but was beaten up by his mother’s new boyfriend and ran away to London.
He tells of convincing a hotel concierge he was an orphan in need of a room for the night, then leaving the next morning with pocketfuls of coins pinched from the gas meters in guests’ rooms. It is another colourful anecdote, but the swagger masks real desperation.
Soon Max had answered an advert looking for circus hands and for a while travelled the country looking after a troupe of performing elephants. He can still reel off their names, a detail he uses as a party piece to “prove” the story.
When he returned to London, he set up a stall selling landscape paintings in the Portobello Road and was spotted by a former associate who persuaded him to help create convincing forgeries to pass off as genuine in the art world.
At the height of his success, he met the Kray twins and was asked to paint a portrait of their mother.
“When I’d finished it, I met them in the Duke of Lonsdale pub. Ronnie stood up and said, ‘ You got the smudge there, son?’
“I pulled it out of the bag and it went all quiet. And I thought ‘ God, he doesn’t like it’.
“Then he says to Reggie, ‘ It’s mum’s eyes, he’s got it’.
“I had a shandy, and they were talking about it and Reggie says, ‘ Give him a two’. And I thought he meant two quid, but he meant £ 200, and in 1967 that was like giving you a thousand. I couldn’t believe it, and I couldn’t get out quick enough.
“I’d hit the big time, but it was getting too much. Once I went for dinner at a country house and one of my paintings was on the wall.” He pauses, dramatically: “Soon, the fraud squad were on to me.”
In the early 1970s, while serving four months of an eight- month sentence for forgery, Max was still making money. “I got nicked but my associate didn’t. I was doing Samuel Palmers at the time and on visiting times in Dorchester ( prison), a low- risk category, my associate – who I’ll call Mr X – would bring three or four rolls of old paper up his sleeve and slip them to me as we shook hands.
“The paper would come from old library books. In my cell I kept some of my own art, so when the governor came round and would say, ‘ I hope you’re not doing any of those fakes’ he wouldn’t see the Palmers I was working on.
“I’d slip them back to my associate, he would frame them up, and they would hit the auction rooms.”
A few years ago, Max was nearly in serious trouble again, this time with the online auction house eBay.
“I saw an advert to ‘ paint your own ducks’. There were three of them in a kit for £ 12.
SO I faked them up to look like Beswick ducks – like the set that Hilda Ogden had flying across the wall in Coronation Street. “I sold them for £ 385 each. Then I got a call from someone at eBay who said ‘ We think these are fakes.’ I replied, ‘ I never said they weren’t!’
“Forging is a dangerous game now, with cameras and X- rays to detect fakes. Three stretches in the nick says it’s not a good idea, is it?”
There is a wistful tone to his voice as he picks up his mahl stick ( a pad to support the hand holding the paintbrush) and applies another delicate brush stroke.
“It’s like drugs. If I see an old canvas, I go all twitchy and get withdrawal symptoms. I told the judge as much.”