Caveat Emptor (22 page)

As I studied the various shades of patina, I also noticed that the surface of each painting displayed a quarter of an inch or so of clear, nonyellowed varnish around its perimeter. This was because the very edge of the painting was covered by the overlay of the frame, thereby shielding it from the ultraviolet rays of natural light that oxidize and yellow the varnish.

By studying the unpainted canvas that was folded around and tacked down over the edge of the stretchers, I saw that the canvas had been preprimed with gesso by some mechanical method, perhaps by spraying.

Many of the paintings displayed a small patch or two on the back of the canvas—crude repairs made years ago to patch up a puncture or tear. When I turned the painting around, I could see discolored paint that had been applied over some filling material. After I used several rolls of film and filled a pad with notes, I felt I had an excellent understanding of the forensic and aesthetic effects of age on nineteenth-century American paintings.

While I was in town, I tried to avoid Sandy, but it was impossible. He'd find me at Paul's and start angling for another painting. “After that Miami business,” I told him, “forget about it!” Still, he persisted, and persuaded me to come to his house to see some antique frames he wanted to sell. After we'd finished our business, we got into his BMW and began backing out of his driveway when suddenly there was a deafening bang as the back of the car leaped up in the air and came down with a thud.

“What the fuck was that?” I yelled at him, convinced a bomb had exploded under the car. When we jumped out and looked underneath, we saw black oil gushing out of the bottom of the car and a huge puddle forming. The next day, the local BMW mechanic gave Sandy the bad news: “You sheared a pin off your rear end and blew the housing open,” he told him. The bill was thirty-two hundred bucks. Sandy almost passed out and begged me for another chance. Feeling sorry for him, I relented and gave him a “Peto” and a “Walker” I had at Jimmy's. I warned him to behave himself, and he assured me that he had some dealers lined up in the city and that everything would be okay.

With my research finished at Jimmy's, José and I spent the next few days in the city staying at the Alray, right back in our old neighborhood. We'd shop during the day, meet friends for lunch at Gino's, and go out on the town at night with Alexandra and her friends.

Before heading back to Florida, we drove up to Nyack to see how Sandy was doing and to say goodbye to Paul and Jim, but Jimmy was fit to be tied.

“That fucking nincompoop Sandy!” he yelled. “Do you know what that idiot is doing?”

“What?” I asked, turning white.

“He's going around to dealers posing as my nephew!” Jimmy was so mad, he could hardly get the words out. “And telling them he's helping me sell off some pictures!” When he calmed down, Jimmy explained that he'd gotten a call from a dealer he knew, warning him of the impostor.

This was the last nail in Sandy's coffin. That afternoon when he finally showed up at Paul's shop, I let him know, in no uncertain terms, that his days of selling pictures were over and that from that point on he was persona non grata.

Back in Florida, I was ready to proceed to the development stage of the operation. The next challenge was to reproduce the effects of age I had observed on Jimmy's paintings on modern fakes painted on canvas—and that sent me back to the drawing board.

To make a fake antique painting, you have to start with a real antique painting, so the first order of business was to comb through the local antique shops for antique American paintings of minor value. Dealers were delighted to sell me paintings that they'd had lying around for years, ones that looked as though they'd been painted by lunatics.

Most of the paintings I studied at Jim's had been executed with very little paint thinned out with linseed oil, a technique common to nineteenth-century painting. In fact, when such a specimen is held at an angle to the eye, one can clearly see the weave, or “nubs,” of the canvas, as though the picture had been painted with nothing more than watercolor.

In short order, I had assembled the most horrific collection of paintings imaginable—but they were nonetheless perfect for my purposes. The stretchers and canvases were all American, thinly painted, and from the correct period. Some even displayed the original manufacturers' labels.

The primary challenge for me was to remove the original painting, resurface the canvas with a coat of gesso, paint another picture on it, figure out a cracking method, and apply a genuine-looking patina.

My objective was not to
simulate
the effects of age on my paintings but rather to
duplicate
the effects of age. If one understood what caused an effect such as cracking, I reasoned, it might be possible to make the same effect occur in an accelerated time frame. Cracking, I came to understand, was caused by the effects of stress building up between the different strata of an oil painting undergoing physicochemical changes. External factors—such as temperature change and humidity, which cause expansion and contraction, and even physical trauma—act as catalysts in the formation of cracks. I needed to set up all the conditions that contribute to that end, and then figure out a way to make the process occur quickly.

I could not accept the long, complicated, and unreliable methods devised by forgers of the past. I intuitively believed that the answer would be found easily. After all, I reasoned, I had achieved the impeccable cracks I had created on academy board by a simple process that I had discovered by accident.

Some facts I knew for certain. The older canvas gets, the more it dries out. The more it dries out, the more brittle it becomes. The more brittle it becomes, the more conducive it is to the formation of cracks. But the question remained: why the characteristic pattern? And how could I ever induce a process to follow a pattern? Then it occurred to me that many indiscriminate reactions in nature manifest themselves in patterns. For example, dried-up riverbeds crack in a certain pattern. Therefore, I reasoned, perhaps if all the conditions were met to produce cracks, the patterns would form automatically.

Acetone is one of the strongest common solvents. It's used by many restorers to break down the discolored varnish on antique paintings. It easily dissolves the varnish, but shouldn't—at least in theory—attack the antique underlying paint, because oil paint becomes “technically hard” or insoluble after twenty-five years. However, this doesn't always hold true. If used undiluted, acetone can, after some time, begin to break down oil paint even though it's technically hard. Therefore, the prudent restorer will usually dilute acetone with mineral spirits to weaken its action.

I discovered that the prolonged use of acetone would remove most, if not all, of the original paint. I developed a method of laying paper towels all over the surface of the painting and then pouring acetone directly over them until they were completely saturated. The paper towels acted as a sponge and held the acetone in place rather than letting it evaporate. After hours of this treatment, even the hardest paint began to dissolve. Fortunately, the undercoat of gesso, which is made up of powdered gypsum and water, is not affected by any solvent in the ketone group. The result, after the antique paint was removed, was an antique canvas that looked as though it had never been used.

It was a tempting idea to simply brush on a thin coat of Jory's special gesso, paint a picture over it, heat it up in the sun as I did the academy boards, figure out a way to stress the canvas, and produce cracks. The problem with that, however, was obvious. The gesso originally applied in the nineteenth century was rolled or sprayed on by some sort of method that produced a perfectly even and extremely thin coat. Most importantly, the weave of the canvas could be clearly seen when examined carefully. An application like that simply wouldn't be possible with a brush. It would leave telltale brushstrokes over the original gesso and alert the trained eye to a false layer.

I reasoned that if I could reformulate my gesso to a consistency thin enough to spray through a gun, I should be able to achieve a perfectly even coating while preserving the texture of the weave pattern.

I mixed up my gesso with the rabbit-skin glue as usual, but the first couple of tries produced a coating too thick, completely obliterating the canvas pattern. Eventually I got it thin enough and could see the weave of the canvas after it had been sprayed on and dried. When I heated up the canvas in the sun, it became extremely stiff and brittle. Then I used a soft rubber ball to apply pressure to the canvas, and instantly a perfect spiderweb pattern of cracks formed!

I concluded that by applying another stratum of gesso on top of the old canvas, and creating stress within the strata by the use of heat, all the conditions necessary to produce natural cracks were set in place. Finally, the simple application of some gentle pressure acted as the catalyst to release the stress and produce the cracks.

Meanwhile, as word spread from local art collectors and dealers about the fine restoration work we did, we began to get calls from museums throughout the state, including the Ringling Museum in Sarasota and the Norton Gallery in Palm Beach. We were swamped with work, and the studio looked like a museum storehouse. We established a daily work schedule, arriving at the studio every morning at eight and eating breakfast in the café. Then I would work on my fakes until noon while José took care of calls, customers, and paperwork for the business. Lunch was served to us by arrangement with the café at a table in the courtyard. The afternoons were spent on restoration jobs.

I spent weekends at Dr. G's estate in Miami. Almost every trip included a dinner party in one of the Grove's best homes, or the doc himself would throw a lavish poolside party. These affairs often put me in contact with art collectors and new clients, but the doctor insisted that I give him first shot at any paintings I turned up. I didn't want to abuse his hospitality, especially since he gave me a set of keys to the Rolls and another for my own room at the estate, so I thought it only right that I not sell him more than fifty grand worth of paintings a year.

This worked out fine, and he couldn't wait to buy another “Peto,” “Buttersworth,” or “Walker.” And now my recent technical breakthroughs enabled me to expand my repertoire and fulfill his wildest dreams. Soon I was turning up paintings by Antonio Jacobsen, another nineteenth-century marine artist; Severin Roesen, a German-born American still-life specialist; Levi Wells Prentice; and other assorted early-American painters on a weekly basis.

By 1979, José and I were fully established in business. The studio attracted all sorts of characters. A few of them were professional pickers who hunted through junk shops and antique markets in the hopes of finding a valuable painting. One in particular, Mr. X, was an old hand who roamed the East Coast from Maine to Miami and had great success at it. Whenever he came in with another of his finds that needed some attention, we'd talk shop, and eventually we became friends.

One day over lunch in the courtyard, he mentioned that he frequently came across worthless nineteenth-century paintings in the fifty-to-hundred-dollar price range. In fact, he mentioned that he was sometimes called to private homes “in the sticks” where he might run into a dozen of them. Other times, he would have to buy a group of pictures, all junk, in order to get one “sleeper.”

Finally, one day, I showed him examples of my work. I told him I only did it as a hobby, but had a great need for worthless antique paintings. He was smitten on the spot and promised me that if I would sell or swap him some of my work, he would bring me worthless nineteenth-century paintings and frames “by the truckload.” So I showed Mr. X exactly the kind of antique paintings I was looking for, and agreed to sell him pictures outright for cash or swap with him when he got together a collection of junk.

José and I were working at a frantic pace, and on one of our trips to New York we were met with sad news. Paul had just been taken ill and was in the hospital. It turned out to be cancer, and the doctors said it was hopeless. He eventually got out of the hospital and back to his condo in Nyack. José stayed and helped him for a while, but not long after that trip, we got the news that Paul had died. It was a blow to everyone.

Sandy, we heard from Jimmy, was beside himself, not from grief but rather from self-interest. Sandy's world was steadily crumbling around him, especially so since he was cut off from any further dealings with paintings. And Jimmy forbade him to come around anymore. Now Paul, the only person in the world who would still give him any employment, was gone!

According to Jimmy, Sandy appeared to be losing his mind. Jimmy heard through the Nyack grapevine that Sandy had gone from deep depression to a state of euphoria in which he announced that he and his dogs were moving to Colorado, where they were all going to “live in a canyon.” Sandy invested the last of his money in a 1960s Volkswagen camper with an open back. It looked like a cross between a pickup truck and a bus. It was said you could see flowers and peace symbols bleeding through a faded paint job. Sandy, witnesses reported, attached a wood framework of two-by-fours across the open back and then stretched an old canvas tarpaulin over the framework as a cover. Here he imagined his beloved dogs would ride in comfort on an old, dirty mattress while he piloted the contraption in the tiny cab.

Supposedly the last anyone ever saw of Sandy, he was headed west out of Nyack late one afternoon. Sometime later, word got back to town that he had never made it past Passaic, New Jersey, where a terrific thunderstorm blew the top right off the back of the VW, panicking the dogs. Sandy, viewing this through the mirror, lost control and slid into a mud-filled drainage ditch where Sandy, Kook-a-poo, and Pook-a-noia were stranded for the night.

For us, Paul's death was the closing of a chapter. I still visited Jimmy and always kept a stash of paintings at his house. But if I wasn't working at the Florida studio, I spent most of my time in Miami or New York City.