Con artist, p.5
Con/Artist, page 5
Eventually everybody got tired of Carl. He had four ex-wives. One of them, who must have borne the heaviest brunt of his abuse and humiliation, finally snapped. She ran off with one of Carl’s longhaired day laborers who moved boxes and waxed his car. She took him, the diamond ring Carl had bought her, and his freshly repainted Rolls-Royce. I don’t think Carl ever saw her again.
five
THE LAST LAUGH
(1972 to 1975)
The more I learned, the more I outgrew Carl, and the more the power started to shift. I had gotten better at painting and started to feel more comfortable doing a wider range of artists and media. At first, I had been satisfied with 10 percent, but by the end, I was getting 30. Carl had always threatened me, saying that he did not want me “whoring paintings all over town,” but I had already started to take my art to LA and Beverly Hills. He must have known that eventually the golden goose would fly the coop.
Now that I was on my own, the things that an art student would learn in college Art 101 I had to learn myself. In high school, I had been a voracious reader, devouring books about cars, history, music, and art, as well as novels. I fell in love with Moby-Dick, and as I read, I could smell the salt in the air, picture the Pequod and Queequeg’s tattoos, and feel Ahab’s slow descent into madness from his pursuit of the whale. I remember being engrossed in The Adventurers by Harold Robbins, Salem’s Lot by Stephen King, and Sidney Sheldon’s The Other Side of Midnight, which I read only because my mother had left it lying around.
Back then, my reading had been random. Now, my reading became completely focused and pragmatic. I only read books that could reveal clues about the artists I wanted to forge and that could help me come up with plausible paintings. I focused on Chagall, Dalí, Miró, and Picasso, who at the time were like an industry unto themselves. Their pieces were so desirable and so liquid that a dealer could quickly turn them into a nice profit, sometimes within the space of twenty-four hours.
Marguerite, who had become a librarian at the Ontario City Library, would help me find books and order them through the Riverside County Library System. She even got me volume two of Chagall’s catalogue raisonné, which was a miracle to find in a public lending library, since the edition contained real lithographs and was worth over $1,000. I spent many hours at the library, poring over that catalog and quietly studying the high-quality color photographs and in-depth information in Abrams art books.
At first, I would read what critics and academics said about an artist, trying to get insights, but all the flowery words that they would write seemed like bullshit to me. A critic would say that something was inspired by Dalí’s Freudian period and come up with a sentence like “the apparatus was an antonym of symbols decaying matter and the object of artist’s admiration as an ardent devotee of science.” Maybe that’s true—whatever it means—but it confused me and seemed phony. It certainly didn’t make me a better forger.
I read that Chagall once met a bunch of schoolchildren looking at his famous stained-glass window in a synagogue in Israel.
He asked them, “Do you understand Chagall?”
They all said, “Yes.”
But Chagall replied, “That’s funny, I don’t.”
This was an epiphany to me, because I’m sure he didn’t. So, I stopped reading as much and started just looking at the work itself, trying to understand it, as one artist to another.
I tried to be as concrete and physical as I could and to avoid philosophy. I saw that Chagall might put seven birds in the sky during a certain period. Others might explain why or interpret what that meant, but I didn’t really care. If he put seven birds in a painting, I put seven. Not six. Not eight. Seven.
Though I had started to paint artists like Chagall and Dalí professionally, I would not have known how to give a lecture on them. Some dealers would talk to me about Dalí’s interpretations and meanings; all I knew was that you couldn’t put his home in Portlligat from the 1950s into paintings from 1975, or lobsters from 1936 into a painting from 1950. I developed a physical hands-on understanding of artists, which I thought was better than trying to get inside their heads without actually painting.
Dalí himself is often considered a guru of mystical and stream-of-consciousness painting. In reality, he was also a classically trained and practical draftsman. He famously created a scoring grid that he used to rate the great painters from 1 to 20 on concrete categories like Drawing, Technique, Composition, and Color. Vermeer, the highest scorer, got 20 for everything except Originality. Mondrian scored 0 for everything except Color (he got a 1), Originality (½), and Authenticity (3½). With that, I could agree. Dalí gave himself decent scores. Personally, I thought he was a great draftsman, and it was useful to learn that he judged artists in an objective and straightforward way.
I searched for practical things that I could translate into action. I found that Chagall used only a few pigments during specific parts of his career: lead and zinc whites, Prussian blue, cobalt blue, ultramarine blue, vermilion, red and yellow ochres, Naples yellow, cadmium yellow, viridian and emerald green. If you wanted to paint Chagall during that time, you used those colors, period. If you wanted to do an early Picasso, you used house paint, and if you wanted to paint like Dalí, you put the paint on so thin you could see the texture of the canvas underneath. These are the things that I needed to learn as a young art forger, not the abstract philosophical musings of some critic or expert.
I had already learned this way while working for Carl, but it had been a rough apprenticeship. With John Mercante, I had found a friendly role model who was happy to teach me what he knew. He was about ten years older and represented all the things I aspired to be: stylish, well traveled, and urbane. From him, I learned how to conduct myself as an adult, with maturity and polish that I didn’t have before. I even started to wear my loafers without socks.
In the early seventies, Palm Springs was a fun, star-studded place full of rich and sophisticated people who flew in from across the country for the winter season. John and I would hang out at old Rat Pack places like Pal Joey’s, named after Sinatra’s friend Joe Hanna, or Jilly’s, which was always packed with attractive women who came to town to tan and relax. Sometimes in the off-season, when it was too hot, I would go with John to Beverly Hills, where he would conduct business or spend time with his girlfriend, Emily, who I liked very much. She had been an international jet-setter, with important friends like Jackie Onassis and Lee Radziwill, but she never talked about that and always acted like I was the most interesting person in the world. I was proud when I heard John tell her nice things about me, calling me a “talented kid.” It was light-years away from Carl.
Running a gallery can be a lonely and boring business. John would sit in his gallery, making calls or passing time. I would bring in my black-and-white Chagall and Miró lithographs or small watercolors, with the books I had used for inspiration. He would compare the books to the artworks, looking back and forth like he was watching a tennis match. When he smiled, I knew that he liked it.
John was not as knowledgeable as I was about the artwork itself, but he knew the art business inside out. He could tell me whether my pieces were good, how they would be examined, and how much someone would be willing to pay. He also gave me general advice that I took to heart—though probably not enough. He told me to be careful about who I sold to, to get paid up front, and to never sell to galleries that were too close to each other. The most important advice was to just keep him out of anything. He did not want any trouble.
Palm Springs was nice, but after cutting off Carl, I had outgrown it and needed to find new clients. So, I went to LA and canvassed an area between Robertson and La Cienega, with Beverly Hills as the center. I would stroll the streets, looking in gallery windows, checking to see if they had Chagalls, Mirós, and Dalís. I finally ended up at the Kaiser brothers, well-known dealers with galleries in Beverly Hills, Las Vegas, and Hawaii. Like Carl, they turned out to be crude, foul-mouthed hustlers.
When I went into their gallery, I was still using the cover story about this naive kid selling his grandfather’s art. I showed them my black-and-white Chagall while they bantered to each other.
“Holy shit, Jerry. It’s a guinea with goodies from Grandpa,” Lenny said.
“Wow,” said Jerry. “Junior came to the big city to make a killing.”
They both laughed, jeering, “Are you gonna fuck us for a million?”
I laughed along, but it really got under my skin. After a couple more rounds of tired insults, they examined the lithograph. Though they seemed intrigued, they weren’t convinced and wanted to check with another dealer. In those days, before cell phones, if you wanted to reach someone, it was hit or miss. So, they called over to the famous Polo Lounge at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where Charles Fletcher took his calls. He agreed to come over, and as we waited, Len and Jerry talked about their wives and bragged about “fucking them in the ass” or “getting blow jobs” from their girlfriends. I barely paid attention because I was nervous about the big-time dealer on his way. I thought if he said my art was fake, there might be a fight.
When Charles showed up twenty minutes later, I was immediately relieved. Instead of a worse version of a Kaiser brother, he was a jovial, handsome British man in his forties with an upbeat and friendly manner. He held the Chagall up to the light, checked for the watermark, a faint translucent design that manufacturers put in paper to indicate authenticity, then looked at it with a loupe before announcing in a cheerful tone, “Well, gentlemen, I think this is a wonderful Chagall.”
When they heard this, the Kaiser brothers’ eyes lit up and they immediately offered me $600. I claimed it was worth more, but they offered me cash on the spot, fanning out hundred-dollar bills and saying, “We got green,” which I came to learn was their signature move. I took the money and handed over the art, happy that a guy like Charles had blessed it. Charles and I walked out together and when we said goodbye, he passed me his card and told me, “Let me know if your grandfather has anything else.”
A week later, I met Charles at his office on Melrose and sold him some gouaches, a drawing, and some lithographs I had done. I repeated this three or four times, telling him that now I was selling the art that my grandfather had given to my brothers and cousins. They had day jobs and didn’t have time to go walking around to galleries all over town.
Eventually, I brought him so much art that my story began to look ridiculous. He asked me to come clean and hinted that it would be OK if I had done them myself. When I confessed, he wasn’t upset at all. Instead, without skipping a beat, he gave me a commission for fifty lithographs, which I did the following week. Real or fake, the art business rolled on. It simply didn’t matter to anybody.
Charles was amused by my green, unpolished ways. He called me a “diamond in the rough” and treated me like a genuine friend. I considered him a true gentleman, well spoken, charming, and always impeccably dressed with a tie or ascot. I thought he must have been an aristocrat. Later I learned that his real name was Nathan Herschlag and that he had been in the clothing trade before changing his name and moving to America. It didn’t make any difference to me. I considered him a great friend, better than any duke or earl could ever be.
Charles and I hung out together at Café Suisse or the Moustache Café or we’d go to dinner at Figaro or Chasen’s. Everywhere we went people knew and liked him. I would always kid Charles that when I grew up, I wanted to be just like him. In reality, we were very different, but it’s true that I did want to be a happy-go-lucky man-about-town like him. I couldn’t believe how things had changed. A couple of years before, I was a small-town kid selling furniture and eating baloney sandwiches—now I was hanging out in Beverly Hills and stars like Jack Lemmon or Michael Caine would wave at us happily and call out, “Hi, Charlie!”
I still did business with other dealers, including the Kaiser brothers, because even though I disliked them, they would always buy my stuff in cash. When I’d come in, they’d double-team me with insults from the second I stepped through the door. Hassling me, chiseling me, and putting me down. Finally, one day I decided they needed a little taste of their own medicine, so I came up with a prank and had a few laughs at their expense.
Matisse had done a pencil drawing of a nude sculpture of the Greek god Hermes that’s in the Louvre. In Matisse’s drawing, the perspective is from the front, showing Hermes bending forward and fastening his sandal. I decided to draw him from behind, a little private joke that I was mooning the Kaisers.
To prove the drawing was real, I planned to present them with an Abrams Matisse book that would have my drawing in it. I bought two copies of the book and with the help of my printer made a fake page. It had all the same text as the original book, but instead of a photo of Matisse’s drawing, we had swapped in a picture of mine.
With a razor blade, I carefully sliced the real page out of the book and glued in my fake page. It was excellent, but it stuck out just a millimeter from the rest of the pages, so I sanded it down until the size was exact. Now I had a genuine Abrams Matisse book complete with my drawing to show the Kaiser brothers.
Though I wanted to show them my book, I did not want to leave it with them so that they could examine it too closely. So, with the help of Marguerite, I turned my store-bought book into an Ontario City Library book that was not supposed to be removed from the reading room, which gave me an excuse to take it back immediately and not leave it with the Kaisers. We put a real library card and pocket in it and stamped it ontario city library and do not remove. Then, I placed a Dewey decimal sticker on the spine and sheathed the whole thing in clear plastic. It looked exactly like a real library book.
Finally, just before I went in to the Kaiser brothers, I stopped into the Rizzoli bookstore near the gallery and into the Brentano’s bookstore down the street. I found their copies of the Matisse book, took them off the shelves, and hid them in the middle of the gardening section. Now, even if the Kaiser brothers went to look for the real book, it would be weeks before they ever found a copy.
When I went to show them my drawing, I told them that I absolutely could not leave the book behind and that I had to bring it back the same day so that Marguerite would not get in trouble. After some haggling, which led to me walking out, they chased me onto the street and waved $4,000 in cash in front of my face. I pretended to break down, handed them the Matisse, and cursed their good fortune. I told them they were lucky I needed the money that day. Secretly I was chuckling to myself, imagining the look on their faces when they saw the real book and discovered I had screwed them.
It cracked me up, though ultimately they had the last laugh. A few years later, I went to their gallery in Hawaii and saw my drawing hanging in the window. It was on sale for $25,000 and had a certificate of authenticity. On the back, in tiny print, was a thousand-word legal disclaimer saying that the drawing might not be real, and that if it wasn’t, it wasn’t their problem. Like it or not—whether on the customer or on me—the dealer always had the last laugh.
six
PRINTING MONEY
(1977)
Salvador Dalí was an original thinker and accomplished artist. He was also a ham with dramatic flair and the ability to attract attention, which he knew how to play to great effect, making a spectacle of himself and harnessing the attention for fame and profit. In the forties, while he was living in Monterey, California, Dalí threw a famous party to raise money for European artists fleeing the Nazis. It featured his wife, Gala, dressed as a unicorn, bottle-feeding an ocelot. Dalí, who wore earflaps shaped like faces, served his guests a menu of fish presented in satin slippers, a tray of live frogs under a silver banquet dome, and an erotic course of aphrodisiacs. The press ate it up as movie stars like Jackie Coogan and Bob Hope mugged for the cameras.
Dalí’s sense of the absurd, his self-promotion, and his ease at mixing high and low art made him a popular figure, with mass-market appeal. Even as a kid I had heard of Salvador Dalí before I knew anything about his art. Dalí knew how the world viewed him and he cultivated his crazy cartoonish persona freely. In the fifties and sixties, he appeared in TV ads for Lanvin chocolates, Alka-Seltzer, and Braniff airlines, where he made this big flourish and proclaimed, “If you’ve got it, flaunt it!” while his eyes bugged out and his handlebar mustache jangled in the air. He also appeared on the game show What’s My Line? and popular talk shows like The Merv Griffin Show.
So, in 1976, it wasn’t that surprising that Dalí presented, with his usual showmanship, his new oil painting, Gala Contemplating the Mediterranean Sea Which at Twenty Meters Becomes the Portrait of Abraham Lincoln, at a big Bicentennial gala at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. The eight-by-six-foot oil with this strange, elaborate title was finished in his suite at the St. Regis Hotel in the company of his pet ocelot and became one of his most famous images. The piece showed the nude figure of Gala from behind looking out over a fiery sky and blue-green seascape, and, as the title indicates, if you stepped back and looked at it from twenty meters away, it resolved into the portrait of Abraham Lincoln. It had all the makings of a Dalí: showy, interesting, quirky, and gimmicky.
Dalí’s painting had been inspired by a 1973 Scientific American article about visual perception that explored the number of pixels needed to create an identifiable human face. Now, the concept is a cliché, something you see in ads, movies, and apps. Then, it was a new and mysterious effect. The researchers used Abraham Lincoln’s face from the five-dollar bill as their case study and so it was for that reason that Dalí adapted it for his own purposes.
When Dalí released his oil painting, it did not receive serious consideration from the art world. It was not as groundbreaking as some of his early art, and not as unsettling as some of his film or performance pieces. It was met with a general shrug. I remember I read about it in ARTnews and I, too, shrugged. I think maybe I squinted at the picture in the magazine and thought, “Huh, that’s kinda neat.”
