Revenge!

Wolfgang Beltracchi (nee Fischer) is best known as an expert forger, who, from his own telling, has contributed at least 200 forged paintings into artworld-artmarket circulation over 30 some years.  He demonstrates remarkable technical acumen and confidence, describing part of his procedure of inventing “new undiscovered works” by various dead painters as a matter of “getting inside the artist’s head.”  He feels he can do anyone, and, in fact, feels he can outdo any artist at his own game.  He’d complement this bravado with thorough research of an artist’s oeurve and procedures and develop “unknown” paintings to fill in gaps in the certified accounting of an artist’s history of production.  He’d then further devise clever background stories concerning the “lost” collection of a reclusive relative of his wife in order to construct a plausible context for these “discoveries.”

Beltracchi made a lot of money this way, living large and happy in Mediterranean France and Germany with his wife and two children.  Fastidious and conscientious as he was, he got, as he put it, “lazy” and used tube paint in place of grinding pigments himself from scratch in a particular faux Heinrich Campendonk.  Inconveniently unlisted on that tube’s ingredients was a bit of titanium in a white alleged to have been painted long before the use of such pigment.  Scientific analysis of the eventually suspect painting — in tandem with a preemptive limited confession by Beltracchi to a number of forgeries — helped to earn him 6 years in prison (& 4 for his wife) as well as a pile up of debts accrued toward compensating a number of aggrieved art buyers.  However, none of this could expose him to the privatized gulags of the Land-of-the-Free-Home-of-the-Slave, as these legal proceedings were executed in a more or less reformed Germany, whose “open prison” conventions, in indicting contrast with the U.S.A. neo-chattel prison industrial complex, allowed him out of his cage to work alongside his wife each working day in a friend’s photography studio as part of their rehabilitation toward eventual reentry into unimprisoned life.

Arne Birkenstock, coincidentally the son of Beltracchi’s criminal lawyer,  happens also to be the documentary filmmaker who worked out a deal with Beltracchi to do a film on his career, Beltracchi — The Art of Forgery (Beltracchi – Die Kunst der Fälschung), with guaranteed final cut control.  We see bits of how Beltracchi would execute a painting, some of his thinking about art, artists and the process.  We see his working partnership with his wife, Helene, and we can feel the personal electricity between them.  We see some talking heads — art historians, gallerists, collectors.  One historian is clearly amused by the whole decades long escapade, whereas one dealer would rather rain Sharia law on this perpetrator.

It’s a fairly conventional, everyday-ordinary sort of documentary (Birkenstock’s film on Tango might likely be more worth seeing because that subject would simply steal the show, one would hope), but Beltracchi nevertheless comes across as a pretty likable, good looking, almost charismatic sort of person.  There’s a scene early in the film of the Beltracchis enjoying a farewell dinner just before prison with neighbors, where the mutual affection and humor shared by all weighs evident.  In another section, Beltracchi, although clearly proud of his craft, says he feels no real passion for painting itself.  That he reserves for his wife and children; and for this he’s likely a whole lot easier to live with than many artists are.

One notably skillful move by Birkenstock was a juxtaposing of Beltracchi inventing a “Max Ernst,” with the simulator claiming that his editions represent improvements (Beltracchi’s not especially impressed by Ernst’s techniques) with some archival footage where Ernst himself talks about the role of found elements and chance in taking the imagination elsewhere beyond preconceived limits.  Such concerns evade Beltracchi’s radar, so it seems, who tends to view painting as a more workmanlike craft — however expert at that he himself may clearly be.  He seems not too interested in liminal states of wonder, or confusion, or in getting beyond oneself — or even in the possible motives for doing so.  But then again, his affection for and understanding of the Fauves rings perceptive & aware.

I attended a post screening Q&A at the Film Forum in Manhattan last year with Birkenstock and NYU’s Dr. Sabine Wilson, an art historian and fine art appraiser.  It seems that, at least by the time of the documentary’s finalization, that Birkenstock and Beltracchi had managed to piss each other off a good bit, although the filmmaker was quite civil about it. After all, he’s the one in control of this particular version of the Beltracchi story, while Beltracchi has already composed his own published autobiography.  In Birkenstock’s telling, Beltracchi was most upset by that addition of Ernst’s self representation, but there’s no way we can know what’s been cut and what’s not being said either.  Birkenstock’s declared position was that the documentary aspired to a neutral display of all parties’ perspectives, leaving it to the film’s viewers to draw their own conclusions.

However, two remarks especially tilted my attention.  Dr. Wilson, who evidently felt disdain, even outrage, toward such a character, quipped wonder over whether Beltracchi even “liked” artists.    Birkenstock, dancing in some legalese ambiance, admitted that art market financial speculation swims indeed amid shady, insanely high priced swap and shops, but noted that, technically,  it’s still Beltracchi who is a crook and art buyers who have been his “victims.”

But, somehow, I just couldn’t spit up the same profound sympathy that Birkenstock could for auctioneers and their customers, et al.   While plenty of people of all sorts love, understand, appreciate and even crave the experience of paintings, very few of these can sport a handy 6 to 8 figures to throw at such artifacts in order to rope them in as personal “property.”  I won’t say that some of these people don’t actually love the artwork, or that their wealth doesn’t enable them to care for such vulnerable items, or that donations to art institutions aren’t helpful in terms of keeping these works available for future audiences, but I will say that their only human distinction is an excess of surplus poker chips. Once transformed into “investment,” an art object’s impact on viewers must be forced to concede before its newly assigned status as fungible property with potentially appreciating resale value. “Kept” artwork secures a de facto alternative bitcoin for high rollers; and, like dementia, money neither remembers nor cares.

This is the context for which I believe Beltracchi truly painted.  He didn’t so much forge “art,” per se, as counterfeit a currency that’s both scarce and pressurized by high demand.  He effectively sold to greed, and greed (or, shall we moderate this to “conspicuous excess?”) was willing enough to buy.  Such a precarious imbalance of judgement is exactly what a confidence man bargains with and appeals to.  Given his intended audience, I don’t think he’s ever been painting for other artists, or even against them, nor does he seem particularly drawn to dialogues with other artists, with ideas, with discovery, exploration, vision or concept.  He doesn’t seem interested. It’s therefore hard then to think of him as having genuinely damaged “art” or having hurt living artists.  Furthermore, as his impersonated paintings seem quite a bit of the time to have yielded to viewers as much engagement and satisfaction as an “original” might, he seems to be skirting territory not so far from a postmodernist abhorrence of “originality” or the continuing high esteem so often claimed by appropriation art.

Not that there aren’t individually wonderful art historians or gallerists and museum workers (or collectors for that matter) who are really committed to supporting living artists, the key point is that without artists, none of them could have the sorts of jobs they have or play the roles they do.  After all, these professionals do not themselves generate the art that their careers so depend on.   To the extent that art historians importantly sustain and expand the stories around artworks still extant and accessible, arguments about how fakes muddy up histories through how they confuse, if not dislodge, the relation between an artifact and the lived environment within which it evolved is not really trivial.   But for whom are these stories so important?  Is their narrative purity essential to living artists who are working right now, or do they only really matter to the status and credibility of these engaged, but finally, secondary and peripheral participants in art worlds?  Putting this in realistic perspective, what benefit do enlarged prestige or market value actually accrue to a dead person?  Do Pollock or Campendonk actually care anymore?

The Beltracchi story makes me think more about the actual conditions experienced  by living artists than about policing historical purity or market values.  I think about a friend of mine, a painter, almost exactly the same age as Beltracchi, who was a genuine true believer,  living, right here in the 21st century, hand to mouth (or, more accurately, painting to mouth), day by day, tiperoping it with neither day job, patron nor trust fund, all the while juggling material costs and fashionably gentrified rents for both studio and apartment.  Gracious almost to a fault, personally generous and no snob, he trusted visual art as an instrument of dialogue.  He was fascinated by looking and in finding something new, willing to talk with anyone and always open to how another person might see. Besides progressively witnessing his evolving idiosyncratic work (and he was definitely onto something, something heterodox and integrated enough that I’d hate to witness Beltracchi finessing glib knock offs of it), I’d go to visit him just for a shot of that kind of fire, persistence, hope and unreasonable optimism despite all adversity.

He worked hard, very hard, painting all day with his studio door always open to passersby in a strategically located, fairly public and accessible building.  He hung out quite a bit and knew “everybody” but never gained traction with any gallery or significant critic, rumor circulating that some didn’t appreciate an artist representing, hustling  and selling his own work — as if there was on the table at the time some better option.  Eventually, his heart suddenly and unforgivingly took him out, and even if his uninsured body really was hit by a congenital glitch, it’s hard not to also suspect a truly broken heart, or that he may otherwise have thanklessly labored himself right out of this existence.

This story may connote a nearly technicolor sadness, but it is nevertheless real, and, allowing for widths of variation, is not an especially unique tale.  How much do these sometimes sanctimonious, sometimes tenured, guardians of purity, or, how much does the market actually care about living artists? Not very much to as little as possible, especially given that death sells, keeps its mouth shut and even better yet, accommodatingly limits supply. What the art market trades in most is necrophilia. Beltracchi was adeptly able to recognize and leverage that. That anybody could be able to divert even a bit of that hoarded and bloated capital and live well from it scores a very tiny mark of vengeance on behalf of all the artists who have to juggle day jobs, personally finance their studios and materials and still have to feel grateful to score a biannual gallery show, that, if they’re really lucky, might pay them less than 50% of the selling price, that is, if something sells.  Granted, this is the sort of “reality” that usually at best merits dolorous shoulder shrugs regarding who usually profits in the long run from an artist’s work. This is not at all why Beltracchi ran his con, of course; but he accomplished most of it with so much style that it’s hard not to fall into a good laugh at his audacity, imagination and success.