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 self-
importance 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)