A Final Word

A FINAL WORD Eric Hebborn, author of “Drawn To Trouble” , (“The Confessions of a Master Forger”) is cynically astute observer, records accurately, I believe, “Pictures which are unsaleable are bad business; and by some sort of warped logic become bad art, so dealers have it “improved”…should painting become unsaleable because it represented an ugly woman, the ugly woman should become a beautiful girl. If it represented a saleable (sic?) young man contemplating an unsaleable skull, the offending skull was turned into a brimming glass of wine, or some other object with commercially viable associations. A cat in the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape. Dogs and horses enliven an otherwise unsaleable pasture. Balloons floated into otherwise commercially deficient skies at once became immensely important, (i.e. expensive) documents in the history of aviation. Popular signatures came, unpopular signatures went: this is a sentimental response, not a sympathetic one born out of an aesthetic notion.” The other side of the coin is that the customer for this sort of work doesn’t know what he should be looking for. I am reminded of a social gathering at the home of a socially prominent woman in Minneapolis, honoring two retirees of the faculty of the university’s art department. The hostess over-flowing with selfimportance and a heightened estimate of her social behavior was showing a group of faculty around the large house and pointing out items in her collection. She beamed when she came to a work by one of the retiring professors and proudly announced that is was going to be sent to the Sao Paulo Biennale and discounted the importance of a George Braque she’d “got rid of”, which had, consequently, lost all its artistic importance. One of the guests a teaching assistant, apparently fed up with her posturing asked if she were familiar with the “so and so” collection in New Port. She wasn’t, of course, familiar with it and dismissed the question with a gesture of her wrist, at which point feigning submission the questioner admitted that it would have been unlikely since it was a really private collection. The hostess got the point immediately and turned a deep purple.

If customers behave the way Hebborn describes they deserve to get fakes, although I consider it thoroughly regrettable that a clever pastiche maker should have prostituted his talents to that end. I am still amazed at how clever some forgers can really be. The following story involved myself, a painting I own, which had been attributed to Albert Bierstadt, and Forrest Fenn, a very prominent art dealer in Santa Fe. I had come into the possession of this painting while still an undergraduate art student having bought it with the frame of the size I needed. I told the shopkeeper that I didn’t want the painting so would he be able to lower the price. He lowered the price 40%. The painting was so dirty it was impossible to tell what he subject matter was. I did some research into the methods of cleaning and following the advice of Max Doerner discovered that it was a landscape, a mountain landscape with a large lake, snow on the tops of the mountains, two eagles, and a sail boat back in the distance. One of the birds had been, apparently been painted with pigment that had varnish in it and as I was carefully cleaning, millimeter by millimeter, I could tell that the bird was disappearing little by little. So, I didn’t clean that area with a solvent any more. I left it that way and it remained that way for about thirty years until I had a friend who was a professional cleaner clean it again and restretch it. The bird had flown away when I got the painting back and my “friend” denied it was ever there. At one point I told Forrest I had the painting and he volunteered to photograph it and make an enquiry of Kennedy Gallery in New York. I hadn’t been aware that Kennedy had an interest in Bierstadt, but I assented. It was, I suppose, photographed and some months later I asked Forrest what he’d heard from Kennedy. He said he couldn’t remember, but he’d lost the letter. A few months later Forrest held a small exhibition of Bierstadt paintings and what appeared, without doubt, to be an exact duplicate of my painting, but 1/2 the size was a part of that exhibition at a sale price of only $18,000. I learned that the Goldfield Galleries in Los Angeles had an interest in the smaller painting and so I contacted them, made an

appointment, flew to Los Angeles with my painting and asked them what they thought. Their response was silence. They remarked that it had been retouched and I said I knew that, they did not express an interest in buying it, or in even saying that they weren’t interested and I didn’t tell them what I knew, and they didn’t ask. The absence of professional curiosity made me think I had been the vehicle for their discovering they, and I, had both been somehow fooled, but by whom, and for what reasons and, how, I still ask myself, could a genuine painting be so completely, so totally, dot by dot, a replica except for the change in size. My curiosity is still unsatisfied as to how a painting could be so exactly copied, without the bird, I should emphasize, even if it had been done by the original artist. It was a perfect reproduction at least in so far as I was able to determine not being in a position to take the copy in my hands to check details out about the canvas or stretcher, but the details of the painting itself were quite exact, undeviatingly exact. Of course, I know this is a matter of theft and that somehow an image that is rightfully mine –through the coincidence of physical ownership only --is out there masquerading in a material form that is not mine and that the damages done others may have been worse than those done me, except for one point. If I were unable to tell the difference between the two works except for the difference in size would any future buyer of the work be defrauded aesthetically? To phrase the question differently, if, to the human senses, there are no discernable differences between these products other than their sizes is the buyer, observer, being mislead, fooled, or bamboozled? Only if it is sold as and he buys it as a Bierstadt is he defrauded? And then perhaps only because I, and a few others, know it isn’t a Bierstadt. But, by the same token, maybe the painting I have might have been the product of a similar confidence game. The important difference in this hypothetical

structure of events is that, in this case, no one outside of my household, and or acquaintances, had had access to the work, after its second cleaning, except for that period of time it was ostensibly being photographed at Fenn Gallery. It has been my intention in this book to recreate the ambiance of Santa Fe as I knew it. I hope I have been successful in this effort and that the reader has been able to profit from these short exercises in looking and that the reader and the ancients applaud the effort.

PAUL HENRICKSON POJOAQUE, NEW MEXICO GOZO, (MEDITERRANEAN)