The Forgery of Venus (15 page)

“True enough, but you realize there’s a substantial
closed
market for artwork. There are any number of people who want to own old masters and Impressionists, far more than the honest market can supply, because, obviously, most of the works are in museums already, and the old masters are, well, dead—there are no more in the pipeline.”

“Interesting. What did you make of the man himself?”

“Charming. Cultivated. He knew a great deal about pictures, and not just as a dealer. He truly loved the work. One would think that the stories were true, that he had held on to the remainder of the Schloss paintings.”

“Schloss? I never heard of him. Modern?”

“No, he was not a painter. Adolph Schloss was a broker for department stores and purveyor to the Russian imperial court. He was a fabulously wealthy Jew, a French citizen, who assembled what was probably the finest collection of Dutch old masters in private hands, back around the turn of the twentieth century, just the sort of paintings that Hitler and Göring liked best. To make a long story short, the Nazis seized the three-hundred-odd paintings in the collection and shipped them to Munich, and stored them in Nazi party buildings there. Hitler was planning a vast art museum in his hometown of Linz, and this depot was where they stored the things they were going to stock it with.

“In April 1945, the Allies entered Munich, by which time the col
lections had been thoroughly pillaged by various Germans with access to it, and later the Americans did some light pillaging of their own. The Schloss family eventually recovered one hundred and forty-nine of these paintings, with the rest scattered or lost. Evidence presented at the elder Krebs’s trial showed that he worked at the Munich depository in the winter of 1944 and that he left the city with two vans and a military escort in January of 1945. We have no idea what happened to those vans or what was in them. Old Krebs never talked and young Krebs has always denied knowing anything about any stolen old masters. In fact, he always dealt in more modern pictures when he was becoming established.”

Here he stopped and appeared about to say something else regarding Krebs, but what came out was, “But now let’s look at the Bellini.”

We entered the church and I found, almost without willing it, that I had dipped my finger in the marble stoup of holy water at the door and crossed myself.

We stood in silence in front of the altarpiece for a long time, until Maurice sighed deeply and said, “Quite aside from its quality as a work of art, this makes me feel better about my present decrepit age. He was seventy-five when he painted it, can you imagine? Do you know his
Nude with a Mirror
?”

“I saw it when I was a kid, in Vienna.”

“His only nude, and he did it when he was
eighty
-five. Marvelous painting, and at eighty-five!”

“I guess he figured it was safe by then.”

“Indeed. Sadly safe. But now this…how can one do that? To paint the very air around the figures. There is the whole of the Renaissance in one painting. You could with justice say that Giovanni Bellini started the Renaissance in this city, at least in painting, and carried it through decade after decade—incredible! He started painting like Giotto and ended like Titian, who of course was his pupil, as was
Giorgione. And always deep, deep thought from a lost age underlying the contemporary style. So he shows us the Virgin and Child all the way back at the rear of the niche, and no one is looking at them. The angel is sawing away at the viola and she and saints Peter and Jerome are facing us, not the Virgin, and saints Lucy and Catherine there in the middle distance are also lost in contemplation. Whatever was he thinking? In nearly every other altarpiece in the world, the Virgin is the center of attention for all the other figures, but not here.”

“Maybe they’re just thinking about her. It’s a study of contemplation, an example to us who can’t see the Virgin at all.”

“Yes, that’s a good reading. And the art-historical subtext is that if you’re a true artist, like Bellini, you must keep at it and keep your spirit open and the art will feed you, if you let it. Lotte tells me you had some trouble in New York.”

“What did she tell you?”

“Oh, no details, but she suggested that you might be wise to seek the services of a psychiatrist.”

“And this is the reason you looked me up? To check out if I was really nuts?”

“Only partially,” he said with a disarming smile. “And I shall be happy to report you seem perfectly sane. Are you doing any of your own painting, by the way?”

“I don’t know, Maurice—sometimes I think, What’s the point? What does work of my
own
mean anymore? I look at this thing and there’s a whole coherent culture embodied in it. The illusionistic space; the theatricality, like a stage set; the atmosphere…like you said, he’s learned how to paint air, and he can do it because the art and technique are in service of something greater than the artist. But now there’s nothing greater than the artist—the artist is
it
. And the critics and the investment potential. If I did something like this, except as a parody, it would be called kitsch. And it would
be
kitsch.

We don’t believe in the Virgin and the saints anymore, or at least not the way Bellini did. Our icons are blank and the only religion we see in the galleries is irony. I can do irony fine, but it makes me sick.”

“Yes, but my dear man, there is a flourishing school of modern figurative painting, what Kitaj called the school of London—himself, Bacon, Lucien Freud, Auerbach. If you want to paint that way, why not do it?”

“But I
don’t
want to paint that way. Gin up a little individual style and sell it to fools? I want to paint like
this,
I want to paint in a culture that
transcends
the art that expresses it. And all that’s gone.”

He nodded gravely. “Yes. I take your point. And I don’t have an answer to your problem. Still, we’re standing here and we are having a certain experience. Neither of us, I think, are believers in the sense that Bellini was, and yet we are at this moment under his spell. Is it only admiration for his bravura? Are we merely worshipping his art?”

“Or we’re being drugged. You know what Duchamp said about art.”

“Yes, ‘As a drug it’s probably useful for a number of people, very sedative, but as a religion it’s not even as good as God.’ An interesting man, Duchamp, probably the major influence on the art of the past century, after Cézanne, even though he produced very little work. I met him once, you know.”

“Really?”

“Yes, in New York. I was in Greenwich Village and I wanted a coffee and the shop only had one free chair, so I asked the old man sitting there if I could use it. He had a chessboard in front of him, and he said I could sit there if I would give him a game, so I did. It was only after I sat down that I realized it was Duchamp.”

“Did you win?”

“Of course not. He was an international grand master. We played three games, and he won the last while spotting me two rooks. We
did not, unfortunately, discuss art. I talked about what I have just been telling you, my work in the art recovery effort, and when I told him that there were dozens of masterpieces that had gone missing, do you know what he said? ‘They are the fortunate ones.’ Everyone thought he’d given up painting entirely, but when he died they found he’d been working on the same painting, a representational nude, for the last twenty years of his life. One looks at it through a peephole.”

“What did he think of his artistic progeny?”

“I wish I’d thought to ask him, but from what he wrote I gather he didn’t have much use for pop or conceptual art. As I imagine these people, the Virgin and the saints, would not have had much use for what the Catholic Church became after their time. We are a bunch of silly monkeys after all, but what an astounding miracle it is that we can also make and enjoy things like this. After the kind of life I have led…you know, there are people who believe that after what Europe has done to itself in the twentieth century, that vast catastrophe, we can no longer have poetry, have art, that this is all meaningless
merde
because it leads to the death camps. They have a point, I suppose, but, as I was saying, after the kind of life I have led, here I am, in a church, looking at Bellini. Another kind of miracle, perhaps.”

I didn’t know what to say to that, and after a moment he plucked his sleeve back and looked at his watch.

“And now, unfortunately, I must go. I have a meeting at four—at the Gritti, of all places. It’s part of the perpetual EU
pagaille
about how to save Venice and its treasures from the rising waters.”

“I hope you succeed,” I said.

“Perhaps we will, or perhaps one day there will be fishes swimming through here nibbling at the painted saints.”

We went outside and found it had stopped raining. Winter sun struggled through the thinning clouds, lighting the facades of the
church and the surrounding buildings with dramatic effect. Maurice looked about the
campo,
beaming in delight.

“Now we are in a Canaletto ourselves,” he said, and we embraced. Then he held me by the shoulders at arm’s length and looked me in the face.

“Chaz, I don’t know the extent of your involvement with Herr Krebs, but I would urge you not to get in any further with him.”

“Why? I thought you said he wasn’t a crook.”

“No, I said he had never been caught. It’s not the same thing. But whatever his legal status at present, he is not a person you wish to know. Please take my word for this.”

I
finished the ceiling just before Christmas and Castelli threw a party for the unveiling of the work. My patrono, I found, looked just like one of those cutthroat condottieri who ran Italy in the quattrocento, a shark face in Armani, and came with an entourage of shady remoras and a blond sweetie twenty years younger who wasn’t Mrs. C. Trailing discreetly along, and looking like he fit right in, was my old pal Mark Slotsky.

So, shitloads of champagne, and later a gigantic seven-course meal under my fresco, a couple dozen rich people, jeweled women, politicians, and so on, and business fascist types. Zuccone informed me that the real Venetians had been invited but declined; all those Golden Book families weren’t going to show up to gaze on Castelli’s fake Tiepolo. I wasn’t invited either. They set up a table in a dusty room near the kitchen for the help, of which I was one, because it was a restoration; the artist was Tiepolo, and he was dead. I mean, you wouldn’t expect the plasterers or the scaffold guy to be in there with the fucking
patrono.

And you know, I didn’t feel bad about it at all, I felt great, maybe for the first time in my life I felt I was where I belonged. Guys slapped me on the back and kissed me, all like that. We had a great time too, had the same food, and maybe better wine, courtesy of Zuccone, and got drunk and noisy. It was like the M
arriage of Figaro:
the real life, decency, honesty, was below the stairs.

Toward the end of the evening, Mark came in and went through
an elaborate and, I thought, totally phony apology about how it was outrageous I hadn’t been seated in the frescoed hall, and I was like, it’s okay, Mark, I’m having a great time with the
paisans,
and then he kind of leaned close and said, “Castelli was real impressed with what you did, amazed really, he had no idea anyone could work like that, I mean it’s fucking perfect, that fresco, you can’t tell it from a Tiepolo except it’s so fresh and clean.”

And I said, “Does that mean I’m getting paid?”

He said, “Absolutely, the check’s in my account as we speak. But listen, Chaz, this is just like the very beginning. Two hundred grand is chump change compared to what you could be pulling down with the right connections.”

“Bigger ceilings?” I said.

“No, there’re guys here tonight who—” And then he dropped his voice even lower, like there was anyone in the room who could speak English worth a damn, and he asked me, “How would you like to make a
million
bucks?”

Well, that got my attention. I said, “Who’s going to pay me a million dollars? And for what?”

“Werner Krebs. He’s here. He loves your work.”

And here I thought about what Maurice had said about the guy, he’s shady but loves art, something different from the usual art hag, and different also from a vulgarian semigangster like Castelli, and I decided that despite what Maurice had said, I
did
want to know him.

So I said, “Okay, let’s go.”

“No, not now—tomorrow. Have you got some decent clothes?”

I said no and asked again what Werner was going to pay me a million dollars for, but he said, “You’ll talk to the man, we’re on for tomorrow. But we need to get you cleaned up.”

He actually bought me an outfit the next morning; we went down to San Marco, Armani for the clothes, shoes at Bottega Veneta, the
works, and a barber near the Danieli Hotel who eyed me carefully, like a fresco guy checking a decayed ceiling, and gave me a haircut, face steam, and shave. Then we took the Hotel Cipriani’s private launch over to Giudecca and Krebs’s suite there. Mark had been doing nervous chatter all morning, but when he got onto the boat he clammed up. I thought he was seasick, but in retrospect I think he was just nervous. Or scared.

I was scared too, but not of Krebs.

While we were on the boat it happened again: I was looking out over the lagoon back to the city, enjoying the feeling of being out on the water again and the terrific if overdone view, and I sort of blinked and saw that the Riva degli Schiavoni was crammed with ships, caravels and cogs and lateen-sailed tartans, and the near distance was full of small craft, and there was black smoke making a smudged cloud over the Arsenale. And there was no engine sound anymore, and I’m on a galley, up on the poop under an embroidered awning, and I’m dressed in black with a ruff; there are other similarly dressed men standing around on the deck, and one of them is speaking to me, Don Gilberto de Peralta, the Spanish ambassador’s majordomo, who is serving as my cicerone on this, my first visit to Venice, and we are not heading away from the city but toward it, toward the Molo in front of San Marco, and he’s telling me about the Tintorettos and Veroneses in the Sala del Gran Consiglio. I am staring past him at the glittering pile I can just see through the masts of the ships, my heart soaring in my breast. I can barely believe I am in the city of Titian and the other masters; my eyes are hungry for the sights promised me. And now the galley touches gently against the quay and our party descends and assembles at the gangway; the smoke from censers burning to cover the stench of the slaves below blows heavily across our faces, but we can still smell them, the wretches. There is a delegation waiting for us, for I am traveling with Don Ambrogio Spinola, Marqués de los
Balbases, captain-general of the Catholic armies fighting the heretics in the Low Countries, who has been graciously kind to me throughout our voyage from Barcelona. And he steps off first, of course, and then some of his train, and then me, onto the soil of Venice at last.

And I did step onto a pier, but it was the Danieli Hotel’s, and I staggered like a drunk and would’ve fallen if Mark hadn’t grabbed my arm. He said, “Christ, man, you should’ve told me you got seasick. I would’ve slipped you a Dramamine patch.”

“I never get seasick,” I said.

“Then it’s something. You’re white as a sheet. Are you okay to do this?”

I lied that I was fine. I was the last thing from fine; I was thinking, It’s been weeks since I had any salvinorin and now I have a salvinorin trip, and maybe I’ll wake up in the Gorgeous Loft of Terror again and this whole Venice thing will have proved to be another psychotic break, and it was only with difficulty that I was able to put one foot in front of the other and walk with Mark into the lobby of the hotel.

Krebs had taken the Dogaressa suite. Pale, overstuffed furniture, Oriental carpets on the floor, a view through high, narrow windows of the tower of the Doge’s Palace in St. Mark’s. I’ve heard about this place, probably the most expensive room in Venice, three grand a night in euros or something like that, and here was the man himself, trim, dark suit, handmade shoes, five-hundred-dollar tie, a big cigar. He’s got that tanned, slick, plastic skin you only see on really rich men, like a Kewpie doll, smooth, all the blemishes and sags of old age expertly removed—he was over seventy, I knew, but he looked fifteen years younger. Short, silvery hair in a fringe around a bald dome—he must’ve passed on the hair implants. Gave me a look, like a man buying a dog, up and down.

I looked at him the same way: the impression of power, ruthlessness, something you don’t see in your average bond trader, and which
I recognized well, having just been in conversation with Captain-General Spinola, back in the seventeenth century. Our eyes met, and a smile formed on his face. A little shock now—he was genuinely glad to see me.

Introductions by Mark, a gentle, dry handshake, not a macho gripper, doesn’t need to, obviously. I saw my old pal Franco was there; I thought he worked for Castelli, but no, unless it’s a loan, like regular people lend tools: here’s my muscle guy and driver, enjoy! We sat deep into the soft couch, he plopped into the armchair opposite, cigars offered, Mark takes one, a Cuban Cohiba, of course; I choose a glass of Dom P. served by Franco, a man of many skills, it seems. Mark starts a little chatter, pleasantries, how was the trip, what a nice room, etc., silenced by a look. He just wants to talk to me.

So—compliments on the Tiepolo, intelligent questions about how we did it, then the talk moves to art, the old masters, who do I like, their virtues and faults. What have I seen in Venice? Not much except Tiepolos, I’ve been busy. A shame, he says, and tells me what’s worth seeing: the Veroneses in the palace, some things at the Franchetti Gallery in the Ca’ D’oro, Titian’s
Venus at Her Mirror,
don’t miss the paintings in San Sebastiano, a good place to get away from the tourists. We talk about there being no major museums in Venice, because Venice
is
a museum, the old Venetians didn’t buy pictures from anyone but the local boys, as a rule, and they kept them in their palazzi. He talked about this for a while and seemed to approve of my responses.

I was still a little rocky from my boat ride as Velázquez, but I was feeling the influence of the wine and the flattery. I don’t have much experience with wealthy collectors praising my work and being interested in my views on art, so I was yakking away. The guy knew traditional painting up the ying-yang, just like Maurice described; he seemed to have seen practically every important painting in the world
at least once, not only in museums but in all the major private collections too. Encyclopedic, really; he makes even Slotsky look like he just got out of Art History 101.

After a while he raised the subject of Velázquez. He said no one painted like Velázquez, incomparable, not the images so much, but the technique. So I talked about the technique, the palette, the brushwork. I said I thought it was because he didn’t care, he didn’t care about the painting, it wasn’t work to him, his self-worth wasn’t derived from it.

“How do you know that?” Krebs asked.

I said, “It’s obvious. Look at his life: he spent all his real energy climbing the greasy pole, collecting offices, shouldering his way into the aristocracy. He had a great gift and he used it, but it was like he found a box of treasure somewhere, it flowed
through
him, but it wasn’t him. And he wasn’t driven, he had a sinecure for life, which was why he did fewer paintings than any artist of comparable stature besides Vermeer.”

I saw something interesting then: his focus on me seemed to increase, his blue eyes got sharper and hotter, and I found I wasn’t just spouting art history stuff, or even my own opinions, I was talking from direct knowledge, like I’d actually felt those feelings about Velázquez’s art. Which, of course, I had, in the drug mania, but it was weird all the same that it came through and that he could spot it.

After I ran down on this theme a little, he stood up and said he’d like to show me something. I got up and so did Mark, but Krebs made it clear by a gesture that only I was invited. I followed him into the bedroom of the suite. There was a display easel set up there with a small painting on it, maybe thirty inches by a little less, and he asked me to take a look at it.

I looked: it was a portrait of a man in black velvet with a small ruff, fleshy face, mustache, and spade beard, his hand playing with a gold
chain around his neck, a look of comfortable sensuality. The paint was thin, the fine canvas almost showing through, the brushwork free as a swallow in the skies, the palette simple, not more than five pigments. I’d never seen a Velázquez outside a museum. Nor had I ever seen a reproduction of this painting. It was a fucking
unknown
Velázquez, propped up on an easel in a guy’s hotel room. Sweat popped out all over me.

So after a while he said, “What do you think?”

I said, “What do I think? I think it’s a Velázquez, it looks contemporary with the ones of Cardinal Pamphili and the Pope, probably from the 1649 trip to Rome.” He seemed to be waiting for something else, so I said, “I never saw it before.”

He nodded and said, “That’s because it’s one of his lost paintings. It’s a portrait of Don Gaspar Méndes de Haro, Marqués de Heliche. An interesting face, wouldn’t you say? A man who gets what he wants.”

I agreed and asked him how he’d gotten the painting. He didn’t answer directly. Instead he asked me, did I like museums? I said I liked them fine, I’d spent hundreds, maybe thousands of hours in museums, that’s how you got to look at originals.

“Yes,” he said, “that’s one way, but do you
like
them, do you enjoy that they’re only open at certain hours, really for the convenience of the bureaucrats and the little stuffed men in their uniforms, do you enjoy the packs of whey-faced tourists shuffling endlessly through the halls, being exposed to art so they can say they saw something they can’t possibly comprehend? Wouldn’t you like to have all day to contemplate a painting, this painting perhaps, at any hour of the day, all by yourself? Like Don Gaspar did with this one, or as he did with Velázquez’s
Venus,
or as Phillip the Fourth did with the other paintings this man did for him? Wouldn’t that be fine?”

I agreed it would be fine, but that it was like wishing you could
swim like a fish or fly like a bird, a useless desire, and then his eyes heated up and he said, “Not at all.”

He pointed to the portrait. “Do you think
that
man would ever think of allowing his swineherds and scullery maids into his gallery to gawp at his
Venus and Cupid
?

I laughed and said, “Probably not, but he’s long dead; things have changed.”

“Not as much as you think, perhaps,” he said. “There are still men like that, and I am obviously one of them, because this picture will never hang in a museum. As for the others, let’s say that they are men of great wealth, power, and discrimination, with private collections of which the world knows nothing. These are the men I deal with, Wilmot, and I assure you it is very profitable to do so.”

I didn’t get what he meant, so I said, “You might be right. I wouldn’t know, not being an art dealer.”

“No, you are a painter, and a painter as gifted as Velázquez in your way. I mean to say, if I asked you to paint
me,
in just that style, I have every confidence that you could do it.”

He gave me an inquiring look, and I said I probably could. He said, “When I saw that ceiling you painted, I was astounded. Because you know, it was
better
than Tiepolo, lusher, more lively, but still identifiable as his. Do you know, I have been following your work for many years.”