The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World
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Authors: Anthony M. Amore
The Art of the Con
The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World
Anthony M. Amore
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Contents
For Gabriela and Alessandra—
My life, my sweetness, and my hope
Introduction
Gilbert Stuart’s iconic portrait of George Washington is likely one of the most-often-viewed images in the world. Painted in 1796 and often referred to as the Athenaeum portrait, the unfinished rendering of the newly constituted republic’s first president has been featured on the American one-dollar bill for more than a hundred years. The painting is shared by the National Portrait Gallery in Washington and the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, with each institution having the honor of displaying it at three-year intervals. It’s an eye-catching work and a true national treasure.
The painting certainly caught the attention and imagination of Captain John E. Swords, a merchant seaman from the Southwark neighborhood of Philadelphia. On March 1, 1801, Captain Swords approached Stuart, asking to buy a copy of the painting of the beloved Washington, who had died little more than a year before. Though he struggled with debt for much of his life, Stuart was only willing to sell provided the captain would agree to a non-negotiable condition: Swords must not make copies of the painting.
It was an understandable demand. Washington was still very much in the hearts of the nation he helped found, and selling his highly regarded portraits of esteemed Americans was how Stuart supported himself and his family. Captain Swords easily agreed to
the demand, promising Stuart that he would not have the painting copied. Instead, he wished to buy the portrait in order to present it to a gentleman in Virginia. Taking the good captain at his word, Stuart sold him the work.
Soon thereafter, in that same year, Captain Swords boarded the
Connecticut,
a ship owned by Philadelphians James Barclay and George Simpson, with his
George Washington
in tow. However, his destination was not Virginia—it was the Far East. And he brought with him no intention of keeping his word to Gilbert Stuart. Instead, upon arrival in Guangzhou (Canton), China, Captain Swords turned to the well-practiced copyists of that nation and placed his order: one hundred copies of the portrait, measuring 30
×
25 inches, painted in reverse on glass.
Such a betrayal wasn’t completely out of character for the hardy seaman. Letters to his mother, back home in Philadelphia, told of his smuggling, and according to historian E. P. Richardson, Swords’s was an age of a “free-and-easy attitude toward customs regulations and other such petty legalities.”
1
So it is perhaps unsurprising that upon its return to America, the inbound foreign manifest of the
Connecticut
did not declare the 100 portraits of George Washington. Instead, it made mention of only “one case painting,” which, Richardson speculates, might have been the original painting that had been purchased from Stuart.
Captain Swords was able to easily find customers eager to procure a painting of the man who the citizenry saw as the greatest man in the world, their own American Cincinnatus, and went about selling the works. Provenance was no more an issue to the buyers than it was to the seller: they simply couldn’t resist the opportunity to own a work by the man who was arguably the new nation’s greatest artist. Eventually, word that the captain was selling the portraits made its way to Stuart, who was, understandably, outraged. And so the artist
resorted to that most American of actions in response: he took Captain Swords to court. On May 14, 1802, Stuart swore a complaint with the Circuit Court of the United States in and for the Eastern District of Pennsylvania. In it, Stuart, who was still a British subject, told the court of the guarantees he demanded and to which Captain Swords had agreed. He also laid out the scheme as he understood it, asking the court to subpoena and interrogate the captain as to the agreement, his actions with the paintings, and the extent of the breach of contract, requesting that they determine “how many of them [he brought] into the United States with intention to vend or dispose of the same or some and how many of them and where they now are and in whose hand.” Finally, Stuart asked the court “that the said John E. Swords may, by the decree of this honorable court, be enjoined and restrained from vending or any way disposing of any of the said copies and may be ordered to deliver up all that remain unsold or otherwise” so that the court might dispose of them as it saw fit. Before the day was out, the court acted on Stuart’s complaint, ordering Captain Swords and any associates to “desist from selling or otherwise disposing of the same copies of the Portraits” and to have the remaining portraits ready for further action from the court.
Captain Swords’s betrayal of Gilbert Stuart is the first major art scam in American history. While fraudulent schemes involving art of all sorts is quite a common occurrence in the United States, it is a not a uniquely American problem. Instead, tens of millions of dollars in illicit art changes hands every year around the world. And the dodgy captain was not the first to the game of producing rip-offs of others’ art, as the practice of misrepresenting the authorship or authenticity of an artwork is a centuries-old practice. In fact, no less than the great Michelangelo himself is said to have sculpted a sleeping cupid figure and used his artistic genius to manipulate it into appearing ancient so that he could sell it to Cardinal Riario of San Giorgio.
2
The innocent Cardinal Riario wanted so badly to believe that he had come upon a truly special piece, something that perhaps no one else had found, that he was easy prey for Michelangelo’s fake. His desire to own a true object of beauty was so great as to blind him to its authenticity—much the same way one of Adolf Hitler’s most trusted accomplices, Hermann Goering, was.
The founder of the Gestapo, the art-loving Goering was not a man to cross. Though he was suspicious of attempts by his enemies to deceive him, his eyes opened wide when he saw Johannes Vermeer’s
Christ and the Adulteress.
With only 35 or 36 known paintings attributed to the great Dutch master (scholars will probably argue over the actual number forever), a “new” Vermeer would be a crowning addition to his growing, awe-inspiring, and completely ill-gotten art collection. Even Hitler, himself a failed artist who at the time was building his
Führermuseum
to display the greatest art collection he could steal and loot, hadn’t scored such a coup as a heretofore unknown Vermeer. It didn’t matter that
Christ and the Adulteress
didn’t look at all like the work of Vermeer. And according to Jonathan Lopez’s excellent book
The Man Who Made Vermeers,
it also didn’t matter that Goering doubted the painting’s provenance, believing the painting might have come from “a Jew, who would try to blackmail him later.”
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The
Reichsmarschall
wanted to believe he had come upon the find of a lifetime.
Goering had to have the painting for his burgeoning collection and paid 1.65 million guilders—the equivalent of about $19 million today—for this so-called “missing Vermeer,” which was, in truth, created by an unsuccessful artist named Han van Meegeren.
4
Because the painting was inauthentic, there was no genuine provenance the forger could provide. So, to assuage his concerns about provenance, Goering accepted a letter describing the painting’s history. Later, with the war over and facing execution for plundering
Dutch national treasures (which were, in fact, his own counterfeit paintings), Van Meegeren admitted that he had forged the alleged Vermeer and proved so by painting another in the presence of court-appointed witnesses. So great was his delusion that when Goering, facing his own trial in Nuremberg, was informed that his beloved Vermeer was actually a forgery, the stubborn Nazi steadfastly refused to believe it.
5
In examining the works of Van Meegeren today, it is somewhat difficult to understand how anyone could see Vermeer in them. But it wasn’t just the twisted, morphine-addicted Nazi who was fooled by the faux Vermeer. Even some experts of the day who examined Van Meegeren’s forgeries were convinced the paintings were by the great master painter. The opportunity to be part of the important new find seems to have clouded their judgment, a pattern that has been repeated several times throughout history.
There has been no shortage of accomplished fraudsters in the annals of art crime, and many of their stories have been told in books and on television. One of the most notorious was certainly John Drewe, a British scam artist who sold the forgeries of a talented but previously unsuccessful artist named John Myatt to unsuspecting dupes for millions of dollars. Their backstory: the paintings were the newly rediscovered works of major artists. Drewe was ultimately convicted and jailed for his frauds in 1999 and served six years. Upon his release, the compulsive con man went right back to work, scamming a 71-year-old widow out of more than a million dollars by taking money from the sale of her property and transferring the deed to her home. “In my view you are the most dishonest and devious person I have ever dealt with,” the judge told him at sentencing for this latest crime.
6
Con men the likes of Drewe are only successful because of their ability to find their marks—specifically, those in whom they can sense a strong desire to believe, against all indications to the contrary, that they have actually stumbled upon the rare deal that is
both too good
and
true. And a key component of the scammer’s ruse is the development of a strong backstory to explain how he came into possession of such valuable art. When it comes to phony art, the con man will typically develop a story that involves a collection that had been hidden away for years, perhaps by a relative who has just died. Maybe the art was hidden from the Nazis, or perhaps it was a gift from the artist himself. Whatever the case may be, the con man must create a plausible story to account for the fact that the paintings he is selling haven’t already been claimed by another collector, especially considering the bargain prices. Indeed, the con man’s one stumbling block is accounting for the art’s provenance.
In its simplest terms, provenance is the historical record of the ownership of a work of art. While that may sound basic, it is in fact quite tricky. The history of a piece could be hundreds if not thousands of years old, and there has been no standard, consistent, and regulated method for keeping such records. Thus, confusion ensues. Megan M. Fontella, associate curator of collections and provenance at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, writes, “Ideally, one seeks to secure documentary evidence—such as receipts or bills of sale—for every time that an object changed hands, whether it was by gift, sale, inheritance, exchange, or another form of transaction. However, archival records are sometimes fragmentary, difficult to interpret, or worse—lost. There may be stretches of time during which the possessor and whereabouts of the object are completely unknown.”
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Combine this with the fact that each piece’s history can be as unique as the work itself, and it becomes clear that establishing solid provenance free of gaps can become daunting.
It’s into these cracks and chasms of time that many con men insert their “newly discovered” collections, and a clever story to explain away the gap in clear provenance becomes essential to the ruse. Indeed, while the art of art theft is said to be in the selling of the art, not
the thievery, the art of art scams is in the backstory, not in the picture itself. Take the story of the forger David Stein, for instance. Stein began his art scams in the mid-1960s, posing as a wealthy dealer to sell paintings by famous artists—which he had, in fact, rather deftly painted himself. Where had these paintings been up until their sale? Surely Stein, who in fact was a man of meager means and was actually born Henri Haddad in Egypt, couldn’t have bought them. So he created a persona his dupes found irresistible, provenance be damned. One of his victims, a wealthy Palm Beach collector named L. D. Cohen, attributed Stein’s success not simply to his skill at producing faked paintings, but also to his faked life story. Though Stein was in fact destitute, Cohen said, he introduced himself to Palm Beach society as a suave, attractive conversationalist. To sell himself to the well-to-do of the affluent resort town, Stein “immediately bought a Rolls Royce, which he never paid for. He ensconced himself in a beautiful apartment in the finest hotel . . . he surrounded himself with beautiful women, and before you knew it he was giving great paintings to charity to get in the limelight, and he enticed a lot of people to buy art. He really was a master showman,” said Cohen.
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Clearly, it was his act as much as his art that led to sales.
For his part, Stein attributed another factor to his success. He told
60 Minutes
’ Morley Safer that dealers were willing to overlook signs that his paintings were not what they were purported to be “because they want to make money. They are not very scrupulous about making money. They close their eyes even if they have some suspicion about a painting . . . the whole art market is like that.” But greed aside, this was the work of a man whom Cohen described as “a con man par excellence.”
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Ultimately, Stein’s frauds resulted in arrests, imprisonment, deportation, and years spent evading creditors.
History is filled with men who, in their day, were described as possibly being the greatest forger ever to have lived. Rather than
being viewed as criminals, they somehow come to be seen through an almost romantic lens. Van Meegeren’s own popularity is said to have increased after he was exposed as a fraud, with the forger thought of as a “misunderstood genius who fooled the world,” according to Lopez.
10
Prolific 1970s and ’80s American art fraudster Tony Tetro maintains a website to this day in which he immodestly bills himself as “the Official Website of the World’s Greatest Living Art Forger.”
11
The nineteenth-century forger of sculptures, Giovanni Bastianini, has been called “the greatest sculptor of Italian Renaissance portrait busts” without irony.
12
Briton Eric Hebborn’s 1996 obituary in the
Independent
called him “the most successful art forger this century.”
13
Artist and bookseller Michael O’Kelly goes as far as to boast that he “Studied with World’s [
sic
] greatest art forger, Thomas Keating, England” as part of his resume of experience on his LinkedIn page.
14
Publicity for Ken Perenyi’s book
Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger
claims that “America’s first and only great art forger” is none other than Perenyi himself.
15
Of late, the work and deceptions of Mississippian Mark Landis (called “the world’s greatest forger” by the
Daily Beast
’s Justin Jones) have come into vogue, with the eccentric artist the subject of a documentary film that explores his penchant for posing as a clergyman and donating his forgeries to museums across the country.
16
The forger Elmyr de Hory, who is perhaps most famous for his faux Modiglianis, was the subject of a book by Clifford Irving titled
Fake!,
which describes him as “the greatest forger of our time.”
17
(Incredibly, in 2014 two forgeries said to be painted by de Hory were pulled from a New Zealand auction when his sole legal heir, the ironically named Mark Forgy, discovered that the paintings were actually fakes of de Hory’s forgeries.
18
)