The Art Forger (4 page)

“Sounds interesting,” he murmured, working his way down my neck.

I pushed him away. “Does it? Interesting how? What do you see?”

Isaac groaned. “Claire . . .”

“Work with me here.” I jumped up and went over to an empty easel. “Got a clean canvas?”

“No.”

“Don’t be ridiculous.”

“I don’t feel like painting today.”

I walked to the oversized drawer under a wall of shelving—Isaac’s studio, unlike mine, had been designed by an architect and built by a master carpenter—and pulled out the largest canvas. It had been sized and was ready to accept paint, so I put it on the easel. “What color do you see?”

“Claire . . .”

“Time as the fourth dimension,” I said. “A running river, the future ahead, the past behind, yet all existing simultaneously. What color for the underpainting?” I grabbed a can of turpentine and began poking around his paint tubes. “Raw umber? Sienna?”

Isaac shook his head.

“I see movement,” I continued. “Thick paint flowing, always flowing, over and under itself, forward and back. Wet-on-wet. Scraping through the layers of paint to reveal what’s underneath, scraping through the layers of time. All there, but above and beneath each other, some seen, some almost seen, some overwhelmed and hidden by another layer of time.”

Isaac came over to the easel and took the turpentine out of my hands. “It’s a charming idea, but it’s not going to happen. You’ve got the will, but I don’t.”

“Let’s start it together,” I begged. “Let’s just do the underpainting. See where it goes, how it affects you. Maybe once you get into it, it’ll take off.”

Isaac kissed me on the forehead. “I don’t have the will to fight you either.”

So I began to paint, using Isaac’s brushes, Isaac’s oils, Isaac’s series, and Isaac’s style. He would correct me now and then. Show me how to use his impasto technique to put down thick swatches of paint with the entire brush. How to use wide, powerful strokes, how to get my whole body behind it. How to apply wet color on top of wet color and then scrape through the top layers to bare the ones beneath.

In many ways, it was the opposite of what I did, how I painted, but I loved the freedom of it, of working with Isaac. Of being Isaac. We did this together almost every day for over a week, me painting and Isaac mostly reading or napping, occasionally giving me an instruction.

“What would you think, Saac,” I asked one afternoon, “if we added in painting style as another level of time?”

He shrugged.

“You know, like going from the classical wet-over-dry to the contemporary wet-over-wet? Maybe some representational flowing into abstraction?” I waved my brush at the canvas. “Like here, through the layers of the artistic time?”

Again he shrugged.

So I diluted his paint with turpentine and proceeded to apply a series of thin layers of paint, zapping the moisture between each application with the hair dryer I kept in his bathroom. In the end, the lower right quadrant was covered with crescents of highly glazed, representational, and abstracted hourglasses floating through time.

When the painting was finished, Isaac squinted at the crescents and grumbled that they looked more like me than like him. Then he signed his name and took another nap.

Four

It comes as no surprise to me when I have trouble sleeping that night. Especially after my nightmare about being chased through Markel G by people wearing menacing, feathered Mardi Gras masks. As I raced into the back room, wondering when the gallery had moved to New Orleans and searching for an exit I couldn’t find, I noticed that although all the paintings on the walls were mine, there was someone else’s name on all the little white cards. Which scared me way more than the masked marauders.

At about three a.m., I give up on the tossing and get up. I make a pot of coffee and wander over to my computer to play some solitaire and check my e-mail. A subject line jumps out of my inbox: “
ArtWorld
Trans Contest Winners.” My heart pounds and my stomach clutches. Shit. I want this bad. Need this bad. My hand hesitates over the keyboard. I click and shut my eyes.

When I can bring myself to open them, I scan down the screen for my name. No Roth. I page down to see if there are any more lists. No more lists. The familiar sick feeling twists my insides. I don’t know whether I didn’t win because of Isaac or because my submissions weren’t any good. And I don’t know which is worse.

ArtWorld
is to the arts what the
New Yorker
is to literature, and their judges are luminaries in the field. Luminaries who have been blackballing me—as Markel so aptly put it—since Isaac died.

I page up to see who won. “Shit,” I say out loud and throw my cell phone at the couch. It misses and breaks into two pieces on the floor, as it always does when I throw it. That’s how it broke into two pieces in the first place.

But I don’t care. This is almost worse than losing. The winner is Crystal Mack. Crystal, who sold three OTC paintings at the
Local Artists at Work
show at Markel G to a bunch of rich suburbanites who wouldn’t know a print from an original oil. Crystal, that no-talent phony in her trendy new clothes, sucking up to all her trendy new friends at the Oak Room. Crystal, who is going to elevate insufferable into a completely new realm. I delete the e-mail then remove it from my trash bin to make sure I never see it again.

Fuck her and her derivative pastels.

I think of Markel’s offer and imagine Crystal’s face as I tell her about my one-woman show at Markel G: disbelief, followed by anger, followed by raw, overpowering jealousy. Even in her deluded imagination, she has to see herself as years away from her own show. It would be sweet. Tequila shots would be flowing at Jake’s. Probably for a month.

What if I did do it? What if it all worked out, and Markel and I did something good? What if I did get my own show? All of my windows, standing proud on the walls of the real Markel G. Me standing proud in the middle of them. All the little white cards with
my
name writ large. Lots of red dots denoting sales. No feathers.

Although I’m a professional copier and have studied and mastered the techniques needed to create the illusion of authenticity, aside from a single Repro class, I’m no expert on actual forgery, about the ways to mislead experts, about how it all works. I hesitate, then Google “how art forgers make money.”

The first article is titled, “Art Forgers Cash in by ‘Russifying’ Cheap Works.” Forgeries of Shishkin and Malevich are big, as is transforming mediocre nineteenth-century European landscapes into Russian paintings. Exactly why or how the latter is done isn’t explained, but evidently the gullible nouveau-riche types can’t get enough of it.

There’s a post on the story about a dealer named Gianfranco Becchina who, in 1985, convinced the J. Paul Getty Museum to pay him almost $10 million for a forged Greek statue he claimed was from the sixth century
BCE
. The Getty hired antiquities experts, geologists, lawyers, and authenticators who used every high-tech technique, from electron microprobe to mass spectrometry, to verify Becchina’s claim. Everyone was fooled, and the museum purchased the fake.

And then there’s John Myatt, who pulled off what is considered the greatest art con of the twentieth century by painting and selling over two hundred “undiscovered” works by well-known dead artists. But the con isn’t the best part. It turns out that after a short stint in jail, Myatt established a successful business selling his forgeries as forgeries at between one thousand and ten thousand dollars a pop. In 2005, he had a one-man show at the Air Gallery in London, appropriately called
Genuine Fakes,
which had people lined up for blocks.

Probably the most brilliant of the bunch was Han van Meegeren, a frustrated Dutch painter who spent six years in the 1930s formulating the chemical and technical processes needed to create a forgery that would hoodwink the dealers and critics who refused to recognize his genius. He used toaster parts to create an oven to bake his canvases and was a stunning success. He made a fortune until one of his “Vermeers” was found among postwar Nazi loot, and he had to prove he’d forged it to avoid charges of treason for selling a Dutch national treasure to the enemy.

My favorite, though, is the story of Ely Sakhai, a minor New York gallery owner who made over $3 million buying up middle-market paintings—minor works by major artists that sell in the five-figure range—and hiring artists to forge them. He then turned around and sold both paintings as the original to double his profit. The fakes, along with the actual certificates of authenticity, went to Japanese collectors; the real ones were sold through New York auction houses. He got away with this for years until, in May 2000, the unsuspecting owner of a phony Gauguin decided to sell his version through Sotheby’s at the same time Ely consigned the original to Christie’s. Poor, clever Ely Sakhai. Caught with nowhere to hide. And he had such a good thing going.

But the most important thing I learn is something I already knew but had somehow overlooked. There’s no crime in copying a painting—obviously, as this is how I make the money I dutifully report to the IRS every April—the criminal part doesn’t come until a copy is put up for sale as the original. Ergo, the seller, not the painter, is the crook.

O
N ITS MAPS
and brochures, Boston’s MBTA calls the Silver Line a “line” so that riders will equate it with the city’s Red, Green, Blue, and Orange Lines, all of which are subways. While the name is obviously just a marketing ploy, it’s incredibly annoying to anyone who takes the Silver Line. That’s because the Silver Line is a bus. A bus primarily serving poor, minority areas.

Rik’s ex-boyfriend Dan is an urban planner, and he says in the transportation field it’s officially called BRT: bus rapid transit. As I sit on this BRT, headed for Beverly Arms, stopped in traffic and sweating as the hot summer sun burns through my window, I’m not fooled either. It’s a bus and rapid it ain’t.

Beverly Arms, like the Silver Line, is a misnomer at best, a spiteful cruelty at worst. The name makes me think of my great-aunt Beverly, whose huge bosom I loved to snuggle in when I was a little girl. Unfortunately, this Beverly is a juvenile detention facility for boys who have committed a crime for which, had they been adults, they’d be in a state prison. Someday, most of them will be.

I’ve been teaching art classes there on and off, usually once a week, for almost five years. It started in grad school as part of a community service requirement, and after graduation I stayed on. The kids like the class—and me—because it gets them out of afternoon chores. I’m a sucker for being liked.

Beverly Arms has all the style and warmth of a Soviet-era gulag: blocks of colorless concrete interrupted by identical rows of tiny, sealed windows. The good news is that the windows don’t have bars. The bad is that the wire mesh shrouding them is so thick that barely any light seeps inside. Bars would be better.

When I finally get there, I’m run through my paces, akin to an airport security check on a Middle Eastern man with a suspicious visa. When that part’s over, I have to answer a series of questions that the guard already knows the answers to, as he’s grilled me at least a hundred times before and is holding my driver’s license in his hand. I used to try to joke with him about this, but it failed miserably, so now I wait for each question and give him the answers he already knows in a patient monotone. Sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face.

“Claire Roth.”

“173 Harrison Avenue, Boston, Massachusetts.”

“Art teacher.”

“Arthur Marcus, Director, Art DYS.”

“Green East.”

He checks his notes and glares at me as if I, too, have committed a crime. “GE 107,” he barks. That’s the room I always use. Maybe the kids would do better if someone in this place actually had a sense of humor.

I wend my way through the serpentine corridors, contending with a countless number of thick, heavy doors. Press the button, look up and smile at the camera, wait and hope that whoever’s running central unit today isn’t a jerk. In the past, I’ve waited up to ten minutes to be buzzed in, and I can only imagine the satisfaction at central as they watched me shifting from foot to foot.

I found out the hard way that they can both see and hear you. One afternoon, when I first started coming here, I made the mistake of muttering something under my breath about the asshole who wouldn’t open the door. Not very smart. Turns out the asshole is the great and powerful Oz behind the Beverly Arms curtain, and she never forgets a slight. I hope she’s not in charge today. The buzzer sounds, and, relieved, I pass through the door, which slams and echoes behind me. I’m stopped in twenty steps by yet another door.

As I head into the last leg of my trip to GE 107, I would be happy to be accompanied by the great and powerful Oz. I walk through the isolation unit, my eyes forward, and try to block out the screams of the angry boys being held in the cells lining the hallway. Some are detoxing, and others are “beefing” with each other through the cracks at the bottoms of their doors, continuing the fights from the streets that got them on this hallway in the first place.