The Art Forger

by Barbara Shapiro

  Bath, covered with a sheet, sits on the other side of the studio. I hate that she isn’t real, but I dig out the acetone, rectified petroleum, and packages of cotton wool I bought at Al’s. I place the Meissonier on my worktable next to the solvent and restrainer and grab a couple of cloths. If everything goes well—if the canvas is in good shape, if the paint’s easily removed and the old sizing isn’t too yellow—I could be done in a few days. But if the situation is reversed, or if there are additional problems, I could be looking at weeks of stripping. After going through it in Ellen Bonanno’s class, I know stripping will be my least favorite part of the whole process.

  If I were doing this for Repro, my first step would be to buy a new canvas and size it myself with some flake-white mixed with oil so the canvas will be ready to grab the paint. But to paint a forgery that can pass expert inspection, I need period canvas, stretchers, and sizing. Carbon dating can’t be fooled, so a high-quality forgery has to be painted on a canvas made at the same time as the original. And the sizing has to be kept intact because it retains the old fissures, the foundation the new paint will rest on. All Meissonier’s varnish and paint layers have to be scraped away until the old sizing is revealed. Once the canvas is stripped of these layers, I can start building my own painting over the nineteenth-century canvas and sizing.

  A traditional oil painting is a series of layers: sizing, underpainting, glazing—in which up to thirty translucent coats of paint are applied—and varnishing. The purpose of this is to control the refraction of light through the painting. Stripping is one of those paradoxical tasks that is both exacting and boring, requiring intense concentration dosed with high levels of tedium. Plus, my back’s going to be killing me within a few hours.

  I take a deep breath and bend to my task, a solvent-soaked cloth in one hand and a restrainer-soaked one in the other. I start on the lower right-hand corner, pressing the solvent to the canvas, wiping carefully to remove the paint, watching for any sign of white, which means I’ve hit the sizing. Damn. My left hand swoops down with the restrainer, arresting the solvent before it can dissolve the sizing. It’s a finely tuned skill to use just the right amount of solvent, which eats away the paint, but not too much, which can liquefy the sizing or even worse, the bare canvas. I labor on, pressing and wiping, and often, all too often, restraining,

  Hours later, cotton pieces lie around my bare feet like a paint-stained pond. My head pounds from the fumes, and my backbone feels as if it’s going to break in a dozen places. But a solid patch of the painting is gone, exchanged for an unbroken sea of sizing—slightly yellowed, but nothing a bit of hydrogen peroxide won’t take care of—full of tiny peaks and valleys that will produce a spider-webbing of craquelure in the final painting.

  THE CANVAS IS completely stripped down to the sizing in three days, and I’m hunched over and moving around the studio like an old lady. I think about going to see Rik’s massage guy, New Age Bob, he calls him, but decide it’s not worth the money. I dig my fingers into a spot under my left shoulder blade and press down hard. Not much relief. What I wouldn’t do for one of Isaac’s backrubs.

  The two canvases sit on easels side by side. I’ve cleaned the Meissonier canvas with hydrogen peroxide and the sizing glows pearly white. This is important—more than important, it’s imperative. As oil paint ages, it gains translucency, allowing more light from the sizing to refract through it, giving the painting its depth and luminosity. Degas was a master at this, so the proper base is vital if anyone’s going to believe he painted it.

  Charcoal in hand, I begin my task: sketching Bath on the new canvas. It’s the same process I use for Repro, and in a few hours, the drawing is done. I make a mixture of raw umber and turpentine and, using a very fine brush, go over the charcoal lines. I do some online research on Degas’ use of mediums while I wait for the paint to dry. When it does, I brush off the charcoal. Before me stands stage one of Bath II, a drawing in line and wash.

  Which is good because Markel is on his way over to check out my progress and take a look at the new stove. The stove is a beauty: all stainless steel with digital wizardry and a door more than big enough to accommodate the canvas. I can’t imagine what Han van Meegeren would think of such a wonder.

  When Markel arrives, he heads straight for the stove. He’s dressed down today—or dressed down for Markel—in a casual but perfectly fitted pair of khakis and a silvery-green shirt that plays up his eyes and well-muscled shoulders. “One big mother oven,” he says.

  “Yeah. They delivered it yesterday. It’s going to be great. Perfect. Thanks.”

  “And when you’re finished, you can go into the cupcake business.” He pulls open the oven door. “You could easily bake a hundred at a time in this thing. Two hundred.”

  “I’m hoping the art business is going to work out.”

  He glances over at my window paintings still hanging on the wall. “It will.” He turns to the two canvases and points at Bath II. “This Meissonier’s sizing?”

  I’m surprised that he would even ask this question, but it adds credence to his claim that he hasn’t done this before. “Of course.”

  “The drawing looks great. Really good.” He takes a step closer. “No underpainting yet?”

  “Next step.”

  Markel glances at the couch.

  “Oh,” I say. “Sorry. Want to sit down?”

  He takes a seat. “I see you’ve been shopping.”

  “I couldn’t help it.” I run my hand along the soft red fabric. “It was 70 percent off.”

  Markel tilts his head and looks at me with something between humor and compassion. “Don’t have to rationalize it to me.”

  I wonder why I never noticed what a nice man he is. I guess I was too intimidated by the prestige of Markel G and his power as dealer-to-the-stars to see him as an actual person. I was younger then, too—and much more naive.

  I sit down next to him. “I think I’m rationalizing it to myself.”

  “That’s not necessary either.”

  “Oh, you know, ill-gotten gains and all that.” I wave my hand airily to indicate that I don’t really mean it.

  Markel isn’t fooled by my posturing. “There’s no crime in copying a painting.”

  “It’s a crime to be in possession of a stolen Degas.”

  “What if it weren’t a stolen Degas? What if it were only a copy? Would that make you feel better?”

  I sit up straight. “It’s a copy?”

  He leans toward me. “Look, Claire, if anything happens, which it won’t, my plan is to say I told you it was a copy. That’s why I gave you the $8,000 check. In case someone follows the money, your deposit is substantiation that you accepted and then carried out a standard reproduction. We’ll both claim I told you my painting was a copy and that it never occurred to you it was the Gardner painting. No one will be able to prove otherwise.”

  I scan his face. “Is that what you’re telling me? That the painting isn’t a Degas?”

  “If that’s what it takes to get you to relax.”

  “Is it true?”

  Markel rests his hand on my thigh for a brief moment. “You know as well as I do that she’s as real as they come.”

  Seventeen

  THREE YEARS EARLIER

  The first week after Isaac left, I spent almost all my time feeling sorry for myself: crying, whining to friends, eating little, sleeping much. The following week, I flung myself into a frenzy of work, creating some of the most maudlin paintings ever made. I threw them all out. It was a month before I finally emerged from what I guessed from my undergraduate psych classes was a “situation-specific manic-depressive episode.” Not truly nuts, just momentarily so. When I returned to myself, my grief and self-pity edged into fury.

  Isaac and 4D were still everywhere. Hardly a day went by without a piece in the “Names and Faces” section of the Boston Globe about Isaac eating at some fashionable restaurant with some Red Sox player or celebrity chef. And everything from the New Yo
rk Times to the South End News contained articles about him or his work. It made me want to throw up.

  Much attention was given to my hourglasses, to “Cullion’s remarkable exploration of time on every conceivable level, including the inspired juxtaposition of traditional and contemporary painting styles.” The critics waxed ecstatic about his “brilliant marriage of theme, image, and meaning within the paint itself” and his ability to “mesh the abstract and representational” into a conceptual whole greater than its parts.

  “Artist of the Hour,” ArtWorld claimed in its Spring catalog issue, and the Wall Street Journal did an editorial on the effect of curated museum shows on the price of a rising artist’s work. Of course, Isaac was their case in point. It seems that his earlier paintings were being snatched up for between ten and twenty times what he’d received before the MoMA show.

  He never mentioned my name. Never called. Never e-mailed. Not even when I left multiple messages asking him to talk to Karen Sinsheimer about returning my phone calls. Which is how I found myself riding the Chinatown Bus—twenty dollars round trip—into Manhattan. I was on my way to MoMA to see 4D, my 4D, and to give Karen another copy of the slides she’d claimed she wanted to see. Her assistant kept telling me they never arrived.

  Although I’d been to the museum multiple times since the new addition, it’s always a bit of shock to enter the building. After all those years of the tighter, more confined space, the wide open lobby with its soaring atrium and view of the sculpture garden took a moment to process. But I was on a mission and didn’t dawdle.

  The temporary exhibits are usually on the top floor of the Rockefeller Building, and that’s where I headed. But as I wandered through the spacious, sky-lit galleries, I didn’t see any sign of Survey of Recent Painting and Sculpture. I’d assumed the show would still be up, and I was simultaneously crushed and relieved. Were these really the circumstances under which I wanted to view a painting of mine hanging in the Museum of Modern Art?

  Apparently so, for I went back to the lobby and got in line at the information desk. It was highly unlikely that a piece so recently acquired would already be hanging as part of the permanent collection, but still, I waited my turn.

  “I know this is a long shot,” I said to the woman behind the desk, “but is there any chance that a new acquisition is on public display? It was just bought a couple of months ago. Isaac—”

  “Ah, yes, you must mean 4D,” she interrupted with a knowing smile. “Our new Cullion.”

  Our new Cullion. Like our new Picasso. Our new Rembrandt.

  “Contemporary Collection. Second floor, Rockefeller,” she said. “Next?”

  I stumbled up the stairs. When I made it to the top, the light from the atrium windows filled all the space around me, seared into my eyes, and for a moment, all I could see was white. Disoriented, I turned toward the bookstore rather than the galleries. I gripped the top handrail, took a deep breath, and forced myself to walk slowly in the right direction.

  It took me a while to find it, but when I did, it nearly brought me to my knees. There it was. Between Chris Ofili’s Prince amongst Thieves collage and Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Perfect Lovers) clocks. 4D. A painting by Claire Roth, hanging with an Ofili and a Gonzalez-Torres. In one of the greatest contemporary museums in the world.

  And although the little white card on the wall attributed the work to someone else, I knew, and 4D knew, that she was mine.

  OF COURSE, IT wasn’t enough. Not nearly enough. Especially after Karen Sinsheimer’s assistant—who was about my age and much, much better dressed and coiffed—wouldn’t let me see her boss and informed me that although I was free to leave my slides, Ms. Sinsheimer was extremely busy and there was no guarantee she would have time to look at them.

  When I explained that Ms. Sinsheimer had asked to see my work, the assistant held my gaze for a moment longer than was comfortable, then, without a word, lifted them out of my hand with her perfectly manicured fingers. I can only imagine what she did with them after I left the office.

  On the way back to Boston, the bus blew a tire, and we had to wait on the side of the Mass Pike for three hours before they could find another bus to pick us up. By the time I got home, I was enraged. So enraged, I called Isaac from a phone booth so he couldn’t screen my call.

  When he answered the phone, I said, “I just saw 4D. Nice spot between Ofili and Gonzalez-Torres.”

  His voice was a low growl. “What do you want?”

  “Just calling to check in. Compliment you on your latest success. A former student connecting with her old prof. A former student who painted your current masterpiece.”

  “Don’t be ridiculous, Claire. You and I both know she’s mine.”

  “I don’t think that’s what either of us knows.”

  “Sure, you got 4D started, and I’ve thanked you for that many times. In front of both Karen and Markel, if I remember correctly. But it was my idea, my series, my style. You didn’t even know how to throw your body behind your brush. I had to show you how to do that. I had to show you! You didn’t know how.”

  For a moment, I was speechless. “Who painted it?” I asked softly.

  “I did.”

  I couldn’t believe he was actually saying this to me. “You ungrateful fucker …”

  “What do you want, Claire?”

  “I want you to tell them it’s mine,” I said before I realized that this was exactly what I wanted. What I’d wanted all along.

  “Are you out of your mind?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “Well, I’m not going to do it.” The phone clicked dead in my hand.

  Eighteen

  Strong light floods the studio, which is a good sign for the first day of painting. I’ve played with the position of the two easels to make sure the light hits each at exactly the same angle. I’ve ground the underpaint—flake white, raw umber, and turpentine mixed with a touch of sienna to warm it up—to my exacting and secret recipe. A red sable brush, ridiculously expensive, but the only kind of soft brush Degas ever used, stands at the ready. I immerse the brush in the small bowl of underpaint, close my eyes, and visualize the final painting, which in this case is almost effortless since the original, so to speak, is right in front of me. I begin.

  Underpainting is fast and straightforward. The perfect first step for a long project. It’s a monochrome wash painted between the initial drawing and the first application of polychrome color, a thin coat covering the entire canvas that sets the tonal aspect of the painting. To make it even easier, the umber and turpentine in the mixture cause it to dry quickly so there’s no need to bake it.

  As I work, my thoughts turn, as they do so often lately, to the origin of the forged Bath. If it was painted in the late nineteenth century, which I’m almost positive it was, then Belle Gardner and Edgar Degas become potential actors in the scheme. There are many possibilities. Degas sold her a forgery. Belle had it copied after she bought it. In transit between Degas and Belle, someone else forged it without their knowledge. Belle and Degas executed the forgery together.

  The in-transit option is the only one that seems remotely plausible. I was assuming that Belle purchased the painting directly from Degas, but she could just as easily have bought it from a previous owner. And who knows how many people handled it when it was shipped from Paris to Boston. There were lots of opportunities.

  When I finish the underpainting, which needs a few hours to dry, I’m restless, nerved up, closed in despite the fifteen-foot ceilings and floor-to-ceiling windows. I go out for a walk, which usually works, but my head swirls with images of Belle and Degas, their possible relationship, motives, and victimizations. I wave to the optician around the corner, the boutique owner down the street, and chat with the man selling flowers on the sidewalk, but I don’t feel comfortable outside the studio.

  I need to be up there, smelling the paints, talking to the canvas, cracking my knuckles, priming myself. When I go back, I can’t do any of those t
hings, I can only pace. I force myself to sit down, but my hands won’t stay still, so I go over to the computer and Google Edgar Degas and Isabella Stewart Gardner.

  I get over fifty thousand hits, most of which are about the 1990 heist or Degas’ paintings and prints in the Gardner Museum’s collection. I try an advanced search, deleting all entries with the words museum, robbery, and theft. This finds over seventy-five thousand. I double-check and see that I’ve forgotten the second quotation mark after Isabella Stewart Gardner and therefore have results for every page on the Web that includes Degas and anyone named Isabella, Stewart, or Gardner.

  I put in the quotation mark, and a single entry returns. It’s in Russian and appears to be some kind of biographical listing. I delete it from the search and try again. “Your search did not match any documents. Make sure all words are spelled correctly.”

  I know Degas lived from 1834 to 1917, mostly in Paris, where he was an active participant in the art scene of the day. Wikipedia tells me Belle lived from 1840 to 1924 and that between 1867 and 1906 she made at least ten trips to Europe, mostly to Paris and Venice. As these trips were primarily in pursuit of the 2,500 artworks that now fill her museum, it seems highly likely she and Degas crossed paths.

  I have a couple dozen books on Degas and examine the indexes of all that have indexes. No mention of Belle. I go to Amazon and check out books about each of them, but the synopses and reviews are too vague, and I’m not about to spend hundreds of dollars on the books.

  I go back to Google and read a little more about Belle and see that Rik’s right, she was quite a character. I’m taken by her courage and mischievousness, purposely provoking Puritanical Boston with revealing Parisian dresses and literary and musical soirees at her home, often attended only by men. The lions and Red Sox headgear are also noted. Evidently, she was loved by the young artists she collected and disdained by the old guard, adored by the men and reviled by the women. Scandalous rumors of affairs with Frank Crawford, a much younger novelist, and the older John Singer Sargent were in constant circulation. No mention of Edgar Degas.