Caveat Emptor (5 page)

Three days before they rolled into Mazatlán, Tony and Barbara had driven to a lovely secluded beach. They put their bankroll in the glove compartment and went to swim in the nude. While they were frolicking, everything in the car was stolen. The bandits left them fifty bucks on the driver's seat, presumably to help them “make it through the night.” They needed money immediately. Tom and I wired them a few hundred dollars, and they were on their way back home.

When they returned to New York, they settled into a five-story walk-up apartment on East Fifteenth Street. The FBI paid periodic social calls on Tony's family, hoping to nail him there. Gradually their interest dwindled. It was a piece of irony that the agent investigating the Lake George robbery had his office only a couple of blocks from their apartment. Tony actually called the guy from a pay phone once, trying to convince him that he hadn't done it!

One day in 1969, I was at an Upper East Side café with Tony when he suggested that we go to the Parke-Bernet Galleries (which later became Sotheby's) and take a look at a collection of European artworks on display, where he suspected he might see some of his stolen loot for sale.

Outside, a number of chauffeured limousines, some double-parked, marked the entrance to the galleries. I hadn't even been aware that it was an auction house. I followed Tony, and we took the elevator to the second floor. The doors opened, revealing rooms filled with dazzling artwork.

This was my first glimpse of the moneyed of the art world. They were out in force, leisurely cruising the salesrooms. Women dressed in haute couture spoke in hushed tones. One, with a Yorkshire terrier draped over her arm, chatted with a friend who was considering an eighteenth-century game table, while impressive-looking men, impeccably dressed, studied beautiful paintings hanging on the walls.

Thanks to Tony, this experience proved to be a breakthrough for me. I bought some expensive clothes and returned frequently to study antiques and paintings, mingle with the art snobs, observe their mannerisms, and watch the sales. Most of all, I was fascinated by the atmosphere of the salesrooms. The silver-haired auctioneer in his pin-striped suit, flanked by his spotters, reminded me of a croupier at Monte Carlo. The room was invariably charged with excitement and glamour, as fashionable young ladies took bids over the telephones. I was struck by the ease with which items selling for tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, passed before my eyes. What I wouldn't give to be the owner of a couple of those pieces, I thought, and wished I could be part of this rarefied world.

My interest in early European furniture, which had begun as a result of visits to the Met with Tom and Tony, had by now developed into a genuine passion. And, better yet, it would pay off as well. I discovered from my visits to Parke-Bernet that they held sales featuring examples of this furniture. I bought catalogs, attended the sales, and learned as much as I could about the market for these items. I also made the acquaintance of several dealers who specialized in this area. Soon, I was scouting the country antique shops, hunting for early furniture. When I found a good piece, I'd buy it and make a profit by selling it to one of the dealers in the city.

However, the real pivotal event in my life occurred when my obsessive love of vintage cars impelled me to swap a beautiful 1955 MG-TF I had painstakingly restored for a dilapidated 1936 Bentley Sports Saloon. I was enthralled with its walnut-veneer dashboard studded with neatly arranged toggle switches and gauges, and its posh leather interior. Some of my sports-car buddies helped me tow it home.

When we pulled into the driveway with it, Dad ran out of the house, flipped open the hood, and blew his stack. Half of its enormous straight-six-cylinder engine was pulled apart and in pieces. Months of work under the direction of my father and every penny I had were poured into the restoration of the beast, but it was well worth it. Friends were thrilled with rides into the city, cruising Greenwich Village and pulling up to Max's in style.

The car was terrific fun, but I soon discovered I was in way over my head. Apart from its voracious appetite for gas, the cost of parts was astronomical. A set of distributor points, which cost five dollars for my MG, cost seventy-five for the Bentley, a muffler ran six hundred, and God forbid something major blew, like a generator or transmission: it would be curtains.

Nevertheless, I managed to keep it on the road, and one fine day as I turned onto a street leading to the George Washington Bridge, I had the unparalleled good fortune to see the hottest girl in Fort Lee High hitching a ride to the city. Swerving to a stop, I could hardly believe my eyes as I looked into my rearview mirror. The beauty in skintight jeans and an old sweatshirt was running toward my car, her mass of wild dark hair tossed out behind her in the wind.

Linda was a stunning seventeen-year-old stringbean of a girl. She was five foot nine and all legs. Tony and I had occasionally glimpsed her walking around Fort Lee. Once Tony had swung a U-turn right in the middle of Palisades Avenue just to pull up and attempt to dazzle her with his Italian charm. He tried every trick in his seductive repertoire, but to no avail: she just smiled and kept on walking.

Now here we were, happily driving across the bridge bound for Fifty-Ninth Street. She told me she was headed to Central Park to attend a bra-burning. I confessed that I too found underwear abhorrent and never wore the stuff. With so
much
in common, and mutually confident that our meeting was much more than chance, Linda and I exchanged phone numbers, and a whirlwind romance ensued.

Linda lived with her father in a luxury high-rise in Fort Lee and planned to be a model. I'd pick her up after school in the Bentley and we'd cruise to Callahan's Drive-In for hot dogs and fries. Then we'd go to the Castle or one of the scenic parks overlooking the river, jump into the backseat, and make out for hours.

A month of bliss passed in the backseat of the Bentley. Life would have been perfect if it hadn't been for the perpetual state of poverty in which the car kept me. Any profit I made on a piece of antique furniture quickly vanished into that money pit. Desperate to finance the next round of repairs on the car and desperate to keep my romance alive, I was ready to do anything for some money. Once again Tom, my Svengali, had the answer.

CHAPTER THREE

Art Forgery 101

T
om liked to prowl around bookstores in an endless search for something new and interesting for his library. One evening while I was ruminating about my financial condition, Tom showed me a book he'd just picked up at the Strand bookshop. “Now, this guy knew how to make money!” he said. The book was about Han van Meegeren, a Dutch art forger who operated in the 1930s and '40s. He specialized in faking Vermeer, the seventeenth-century Dutch master. Van Meegeren had done very well for himself living in a villa on the Riviera, but apparently his success had affected his thinking, for he began selling his pictures to the Nazis when they occupied France during the war. And he didn't fool around with the riffraff, but sold his work to Hermann Göring, one of Hitler's closest chums.

Van Meegeren's downfall came after the war, when Nazi art treasures were seized by the Allies, who found some Vermeers along with transaction receipts listing van Meegeren as the seller. The poor man was brought up on charges as a traitor for selling national treasures to the enemy. In a supreme twist of irony, van Meegeren's only defense was to declare himself the artist. The court refused to believe him. Only when van Meegeren painted a masterpiece in his prison cell were the authorities convinced.

The van Meegeren book made a big impression on us. In addition to revealing the Dutch artist as a mastermind, the book delved into the technical details of how van Meegeren created his fakes. It explained basic principles such as using the canvas and stretcher or wood panel from a genuine antique painting of minor value as the support or surface for the forger's masterpiece. It also revealed techniques for producing cracks and hardened paint.

After I read the book, a plan began to take shape due to a combination of factors. First, the basic technical principles explained in the book seemed simple enough and well within my reach. In fact, a lot of it was just common sense plus some imagination. The second element was that every time I visited the Met and studied the work of Brueghel to get ideas for my surrealistic paintings, I noticed a collection of sixteenth-century Flemish portraits nearby. Measuring approximately ten by twelve inches each, they looked simple, and I was sure I could paint them.

The third and determining factor emerged as a result of my visits to Parke-Bernet. There, I was able to physically handle old master paintings, something I could never do in a museum. I studied several examples of Flemish portraits similar to the ones in the Met. I was able to lift them from the wall and view the all-important backside to see exactly on what they had been painted. I noticed that most were painted on the same type of thin wood panels. It occurred to me that I'd seen exactly the same wood panels used as the bottoms of drawers in the seventeenth-century furniture I hunted to sell to dealers in the city.

When the opportunity arose, I procured three suitable panels scavenged from a third-rate piece of early European furniture. I went to the Met, studied the Flemish portraits for hours, and bought books containing reproductions of them. I noticed that many of the paintings shared similar characteristics: deceptively simple portraits of people with thin lips, long straight noses, medieval hairstyles, and ethereal expressions.

With the originals as models, I used a method I had once watched Tom employ. I got a sketch pad and, borrowing a little from each model, was able to complete several plausible portraits of imaginary sixteenth-century sitters. All I had to do next was to cut the panels to proper size, carefully burnish the edges, apply a thin coat of gesso, and finally transfer the sketches to the panels, again using a cut-out-and-trace method I had observed Tom use in his work.

Over the next two weeks, my mother couldn't get me out of the garage. I was either tuning up the Bentley or working on the portraits. At last, I produced three examples ready to be “baked” in the sun for the next couple of weeks.

After the paint was sufficiently hardened, the next challenge was the cracking. I noticed from my studies at the Met that not all paintings on wood panels display cracks, but when they do, they show a unique crack pattern that resembles a macroscopic grid pattern that is referred to as “craquelure” by experts.

It was mentioned in Tom's book about van Meegeren that forgers sometimes used needles to engrave cracks into paintings. After raiding my father's tool chest for an engraver's needle, I began to engrave cracks fine as a human hair under a large mounted magnifying glass and lamp. It took several days to copy the “grid” pattern onto each panel.

The next step was to darken the cracks. Natural cracks in an antique picture appear black because of a deposit of microscopic debris and discolored varnish that has settled within them over the years. All it took was a wash of powdered pigment with some soap and water, wiped over the surface of each painting, to reveal the entire pattern right before my eyes.

I made an “antique” varnish by simply using a commercial brand of varnish and tinting it with a brown stain. After this was applied and the paintings allowed to dry in the sun for a few days, I rubbed dust thoroughly into the back, front, and edges of each painting.

I was very excited with the finished product. The portraits looked exactly like the real ones I'd seen in the Met, especially my third—and best—effort. It was a portrait of a man perhaps fifty years old. A black tunic covered his chest in pleats, and, in a corner at the bottom, a few fingers lay as if resting on a windowsill. His hair was clipped like that of a monk, and his face exhibited the serene expression of a saint.

With the Bentley on the fritz, there was no time to waste. I emptied a yellow manila envelope of some junk mail, slid the panel in, and left for the city.

As I was heading downtown on the Eighth Avenue A train, I was trying to decide which dealer I would approach. Then it came to me. There was a miserly old curmudgeon called Ephron, whose posh gallery on East Fifty-Seventh Street near Lexington Avenue dealt in Renaissance art.

Ephron's window invariably displayed a rich array of early European furniture, tapestries, and paintings. Once, when I was trying to sell a couple of pieces of early furniture, I thought I'd give him a try and perhaps establish a new client. I entered, told him I was selling some period furniture, and showed him photos. He took them for a second, looked at them, and asked how much. When I told him the price, which was reasonable, he simply handed back the photos and showed me the door. So I figured, What the hell; I'm gonna try that prick again.

By the time I got out of the subway and started walking east along Fifty-Seventh Street, I began to lose my confidence. The reality hit me that I was going to show an experienced expert a painting I had created myself. As I approached the shop, I almost lost my nerve, but still I forced myself to open the door. The old man was there just like the last time. I slipped the painting out from the envelope and told him that I was selling it.