by Gavin Atlas
* * * *
Two weeks later, I thought my life had turned around. A SoHo gallery accepted two of my paintings for a group show. The owner, Fairuza Hanadi, picked a subdued still life of faded flowers on a burnt umber background. The other was one of my “R-rated” works—one based on a Manet painting, Olympia. The original has a nude woman, boldly staring at the viewer from her bed. In mine, a man in a suit has pulled back the covers from a young male nude and watches him sleep. I titled it A More Modern Olympia.
The day of the opening, I bounced off the walls. Paintings of the dimensions mine were often sold in Fairuza’s gallery for more than ten thousand dollars. Half of me kissed my student loans goodbye, while the other half feared a grand snubbing from Art in America.
Twenty minutes after the doors opened, a woman with enormous blonde Pre-Raphaelite hair and a white sunhat entered. I had to look twice before realizing it was Aunt Lauren in Delia Blantyre drag. I had thought the pictures on the back of Aunt Lauren’s novels were of a twenty-eight-year-old model, but it was a forty-eight-year-old with expert make-up and a wig. Rosalie walked in behind her with a clipboard in one hand and her cell phone in the other.
Moments later, Casper and Darren sauntered in and exchanged air kisses with Fairuza. They saw me and turned away to say hello to the first person they saw. Fairuza’s janitor.
After a few minutes hobnobbing they wound up in front of A More Modern Olympia. They gave each other a stunned look when they saw my signature on the work. Aunt Lauren’s mood had changed since Casper walked in. Now she sidled up next to them. Casper began to say “Hello, Ms. Blantyre, you’re looking lovely” but she cut him off with a poisonous look.
“How dare you? No, really. How? Because I can’t imagine.” She stormed out of the gallery. Before he could exchange a quizzical look with Darren, Rosalie started in.
“Don’t pretend you don’t know what that was about, Casper. I called you at least three months ago asking about Mick Cutshaw works,” she stage-whispered. “You said no one considered him a real artist, and here he is. You know Delia needs to be the first to discover new talent. Now it’s too late.”
Rosalie, it appeared, was a fantastic actress. My aunt already had three of my paintings.
“Oh, come on, Rosalie, look how crass this is,” Casper said. “It’s an obvious rip off of Monet.”
“Manet,” Darren quietly corrected.
Rosalie rolled her eyes at Casper. “Yes, Manet. And at least one other artist has done a version of this work. Perhaps you’ve heard of Paul Cézanne?” She pursed her lips. “Or maybe you haven’t. I think you’ve blown your business relationship with Delia. Perhaps you’d better get on your cell and apologize for fucking up.” I tightened my gut to suppress the urge to laugh. Rosalie walked away, giving me a small wink.
Casper was silent. Based on his unfocused but menacing glare, he’d already had more than enough champagne. At the moment, he resembled a blond version of the Popeye villain, Bluto. I heard him tell Darren he knew it was my fault he’d run into Delia here, and that he’d “get me back.” Before I could point out I had no idea he was invited, Fairuza called me over.
“Mick, this is Giles Cavanaugh and his daughter, Pear. He’s hoping you could tell him about your still life.”
I smiled, but had to take a moment to get over the fact that the girl’s name was Pear. She looked to be about twelve and wore ripped jeans and a T-shirt with a big daisy on the front. Her headphones radiated heavy metal, which she turned down before saying hello. I was shaking Mr. Cavanaugh’s hand when I noticed Casper come up behind him.
“You’re kidding. You’re considering that? It isn’t even living-room art,” he said. “It’s, perhaps, hotel-room art. And when I say hotel, I mean Howard Johnson’s.” I felt the involuntary clenching of my teeth. Fairuza stared at Casper in disbelief.
Pear took off her headphones and turned to him. “Actually, sir, this painting hearkens back to seventeenth-century Dutch still lifes. Note the dead flowers representing vanitas, showing the ephemeral nature of life. Dutch masters used wilted flowers, insects on fruit, and even skulls to evoke a sense of life’s transience.”
Mr. Cavanaugh smiled with pride. “You should hang out with my daughter, mister,” he said to Casper. “You might learn something about art.”
Casper went red with fury. “It happens that I own a well-known gallery, and I’m an expert on Dutch art,” Casper said. That was news to me, and from their startled expressions, also Fairuza and Darren.
“This is hardly worthy of a comparison,” he continued.
At this point Fairuza said she had something to show Casper. It turned out to be the door. Darren left with him, offering quick apologies and a promise to take Fairuza to lunch. Even though I’d barely sipped the champagne, my head pounded. I had a hunch more trouble lay ahead.
The next morning the New York Times ran a horrible review of the opening. A freelancer named Monty Glassmore, who is tight with Casper, wrote it. Fairuza called the paper, explaining that Monty wasn’t even at her gallery. But now everyone who read the Times knew “esteemed gallery owner Casper Glansing” had deemed my work “unfit for a refrigerator door.”
Casper destroyed my career on its opening night. I lay in bed for the next eighteen hours with a sketch pad drawing cartoons of Casper. Each one looked more like Jabba the Hutt than the last until finally I drew myself, in a slave costume, choking him with a length of cold, industrial chain.
Aunt Lauren woke me to go to breakfast at a place “with an excellent bar.” Rosalie showed up as well.
“I’m so sorry about the article,” Aunt Lauren said as the waiter handed us our second round of mimosas. “I had no idea Casper could be that cruel.”
“There was one good thing. A kid named Pear made him look ridiculous.”
“He had to claim to be an expert on Dutch art,” Rosalie said, “I’d love to expose him as the complete fraud he is.”
Fraud, I thought. “Wouldn’t it be priceless if we could get him to sell a painting he thinks is a seventeenth-century Dutch master?” I laughed for the first time since seeing the article.
“I love it!” Aunt Lauren was loud enough to draw attention from other tables. “I know how to forge an old painting.”
I almost choked on my breakfast. “I wasn’t serious.”
Aunt Lauren touched my arm. “I know I said revenge was a bad idea, but that was then. I want to help.”
“Aunt Lauren, I worry when the research for your novels starts appearing in real life.”
Rosalie put a hand up. “Mick, it sounds outrageous, but someone has to do something. Besides using you for chef services, he’s using Darren for actual knowledge of art. You know how Casper nearly never shows representational pieces? It’s always some abstract glop of color. Instead of talking about style or form, he talks about what color carpets it goes with.”
“True. ‘This work will add sophistication to any room,’” I quoted.
“And he’ll be talking about something that looks like a solidified oil slick,” Rosalie added. “The other night I heard Casper say, ‘And the artist? He’s deathly ill, so you know the value will skyrocket soon.’”
“Wait a minute. I thought that was a rumor. He says that?”
Rosalie nodded. “I overheard him the night Fairuza kicked him out. Disgusting.”
I’d be lying if I said my feelings weren’t about me, but what Rosalie said spiked my fury past the breaking point. “All righty, then. Revenge, it is.”
* * * *
In honor of Casper’s “glop paintings” as Rosalie called them, we invented a painter named Gunzel van Glop. If we didn’t try to pass off my work as a real Dutch master, we figured none of us could go to jail.
We went after Casper with a multi-pronged attack. Aunt Lauren had delved into the exploits of a failed artist named Hans van Meegeren for a novel. He’d spent years creating a process to forge Vermeer paintings. Aunt Lauren sent for a near worthless seventeenth
-century canvas. It was a pastoral view of a cow which would be nice except the perspective was such that the cow’s head took up three-fourths of the painting leaving the body the proper proportion for a dachshund. I had expected to feel guilty painting over something so old, but it was obvious I wouldn’t be cheating the art world of anything it would miss.
Aunt Lauren next hunted down a Bakelite oven. A kiln might have suited our purposes, but van Meegeren had used a Bakelite, so we would, too. A Connecticut dowager who was a Delia Blantyre fanatic provided what we needed.
Second, Rosalie contacted her network of art buyers. She told her cohorts she’d discovered Casper’s Dutch masters expertise. Within days, collectors were popping into the Glansing Gallery to make inquiries. Could he find a Salomon de Bray portrait like the one Sotheby’s sold for one and a half million dollars? Did he think the winter landscape by Hendrick Avercamp was really worth eight million? Casper’s fifty-thousand dollar glops of paint weren’t worth his time anymore. We heard he now had to call Darren every two hours.
That was his mistake, since Darren was still close to Fairuza, our third front. She’d brought photographs from an armory show to her lunch with Darren. Among them was a picture of Casper and me. Casper was holding my hand. Casper was wearing a tie Darren had given him. Soon after, I called Darren, then hemmed and hawed through an apology to which he added his own. We could now add Darren to our conspiracy.
Darren happened to be web savvy and soon created DutchMasterNet, a site which we filled with legitimate news of exhibitions and sales from the era. It mentioned that a floral by a “virtually unknown” seventeenth-century Flemish painter named Christiaen Luyckx had been put up for auction at Christie’s. It fetched seven hundred thousand dollars. Every word was true. Then, Darren posted a small article about the “the recent discovery” of Gunzel van Glop. “If you like seventeenth-century Dutch masterpieces, you ought to think about purchasing a van Glop before the prices skyrocket,” it read. It went on to compare van Glop’s work to still lifes by Pieter Claesz and Jan de Heem. It never described him as their contemporary.
I spent my time doing studies of another vanitas painting. I had to learn how to mix chemicals such as formaldehyde, phenol, and lilac oil in with the paint to arrive at a result that would foil an aging test. My painting would be of a worn-looking wooden table arrayed with a skull and an apple. On the apple, there would be a fly, and the whole scene would be lit by a nearly expired candle on a silver dish. I figured Casper needed to be hit over the head with Pear Cavanaugh’s description of vanitas for him to recognize it as one. I added two books on the farthest corner of the table and behind them, barely discernible, I painted a postcard.
The painting had to be baked in the Bakelite oven at different intervals to fake the aging process. There was no way to be sure I was doing it right, but I followed Aunt Lauren’s instructions to the letter. Once it dried, I unveiled the work to Aunt Lauren, Rosalie, and Fairuza.
“Oh, you’ve outdone yourself,” Aunt Lauren said.
“It’s magnificent, Mick,” Fairuza agreed. “You keep improving. I expect you’ll get more out of this than a chance to trick Casper.”
“Can you tell what’s wrong with it?” I asked.
“Yes, I caught it,” Fairuza said with a small smile. “Quite subtle.”
Rosalie and Aunt Lauren continued to study the painting. Rosalie moved her head to within a few inches from the canvas.
“Oh!” Rosalie said, laughing, “I never would have noticed if you hadn’t said anything.”
“What are you people talking about?” Aunt Lauren asked. I pointed out the postcard.
“They didn’t have stamps until the 1800s, Lauren,” Rosalie explained. “It couldn’t be seventeenth-century. Casper’s not going to know that.”
We figured a minimal attempt to make the work appear to have “authentically come from Europe” would help. Fairuza packed up the painting and left to send it to her brother’s gallery in Paris.
* * * *
A week after the painting’s return to New York, we all met again in the Hamptons, but this time with Darren. He’d mentioned to Casper he planned to accept an offer to teach again in London. He’d hired someone to oversee his gallery, and he’d be leaving in a week. The next day, Darren noticed study lists of names that Casper pored over, pulling at his hair as he tried to memorize them. One of them was Gunzel van Glop, underlined twice with the word “undiscovered!” To keep from being sued, Darren acquired Aunt Lauren’s habit of taping his conversations. He’d brought one from that morning to play for us.
Darren (sighing): “There’s this painting at Fairuza Hanadi’s. I think there’s a way she could make a handsome profit. I could tell her and see if she’d be willing to share the commission, but after that show? I doubt it. I could buy it outright, but I don’t want to be wrong. The artist is Gunzel van Glop and he’s not well-known.”
Casper (an intake of breath): “Gunzel van Glop!” (recovering) “Really, Darren. What do you know about him?”
Darren: “Well, haven’t we met him?”
Casper: “What?” (condescending “tsk” noise) “Darren, please. You have no idea what you’re talking about.”
Darren (irritated): “Well, I know Fairuza has it earmarked for fifty thousand. Delia Blantyre would likely pay twice that. I’m just sad I don’t have enough time to weigh the chances of making that deal before I leave.”
Casper: “Why would anyone take that risk? That Delia Blantyre is such a flake.”
The next evening we all met in town. Fairuza told us Casper had sashayed into her gallery and inspected the “vanitas still life.” He spent a while badgering the price of “the van Glop” downwards to twenty-five thousand. The painting had “no authenticating papers of provenance,” he argued, adding “van Glop was a nobody.”
Fairuza told us she’d blinked and said, “Provenance? What are you talking about? I’m sure I can get you documentation. When can you come back?” She had documentation in her office and could have it photocopied for him after lunch. She didn’t mention that detail. Casper likely thought it would be a delay of days or weeks during which someone else might snatch up his prize.
When he’d said he had no intention of waiting, Fairuza acquiesced, saying “Fine, fine” and sold it to Casper for twenty-five. She told me he’d insisted on taking it right that moment, carrying the canvas and snickering like a villain who’d tied a helpless damsel to some railroad tracks.
The clock was ticking. I had student loan bills and rent to pay. Modeling gigs were harder to come by since Casper had forbidden his coterie from hiring me. Darren had no desire to be in Casper’s presence any longer and truly would be leaving for a job in London in a week.
At last, Darren brought champagne to one of our meetings. Casper had performed an alcohol test on the painting to see if it was an actual old master. It passed. Casper thought it was real and made his fatal mistake. He offered the painting to prospective buyers, including certain keywords in the description next to the work. The words were “by the seventeenth-century Dutch master.” He was asking a half million.
It took three days for scandal to break out. The Glansing Gallery was passing off an obvious fake. Accusations against Casper appeared in The Times and The City Review. Heavy fines from the gallery association he belonged to, if not utter ruin, loomed in his future.
At once, he referred back to DutchMasterNet. Somehow, a smiling picture of me wound up on the site, identifying me as the painter of the work Casper had bought.
Police were called. Fairuza and I were asked to come down to Casper’s gallery to explain ourselves. Rosalie and “Delia Blantyre” came as well. Darren, weighed down with suitcases, stopped by on the way to the airport.
The tall, copper-haired officer had an angry expression on his handsome face when he looked at us. I had to suppress fantasies of him spanking me. Casper had been driving him insane for the last two days. He motioned us past a group of reporters from var
ious art publications.
“Folks, I’m Officer Aaron Sanders. Let’s get down to business. Which one of you is passing yourself off as a seventeenth-century artist?”
None of us answered.
“That one. That fucking, no-good, little artist’s model, Mick Cutshaw!” Casper raged, pointing his finger scant inches from my face. “Arrest him!” His face was an unnatural shade of red. I didn’t know what repercussions I was about to face, but that red was priceless. I’d need Sennelier’s Alizarin Crimson to capture it in oils.
“Look, Conan, calm down already,” the officer told Casper.
“I will not calm down! He’s faked a seventeenth-century painting. I’m certain the amount of money involved here makes that a felony. Arrest him!”
Officer Sanders turned to me. “You’re a little young to be from the seventeenth century, aren’t you? What’s with the impersonation?”
“There is no painter named Gunzel van Glop, so there’s no one to impersonate.”
“Yes, there is! DutchMasterNet referred to a newly discovered seventeenth-century artist, and this woman,” he said, jabbing Fairuza on the shoulder, “passed Mick’s painting off as a van Glop!”
Of course, I’d come prepared. I pulled out print-outs from DutchMasterNet. “But it doesn’t say anything about Gunzel van Glop being a seventeenth-century artist.” Officer Sanders pulled up the archived version of the website on his phone to confirm this.
“Mr. Glansing told me he thought van Glop was a nobody,” Fairuza said, “I didn’t tell him he was buying an Old Master.”
“And I remember telling you we knew him,” Darren pointed out to Casper.
“That doesn’t explain why you’re not using your own name, kid,” Officer Sanders said, hands on hips.
“I kind of needed a new name since someone,” I said, glaring at Casper, “told the press my work wasn’t fit for a refrigerator door.” I produced a copy of the New York Times review which Officer Sanders skimmed. Then he looked at the painting in question and then looked at Casper.