When questions began to be raised about the authenticity of the paintings—even though, in some cases, the statute of limitations was up—the Beltracchis sold their estates, took off in a mobile home, and disappeared for a while. You can imagine a Winnebago painted pink and turquoise, empty bottle of rum spinning in the drive as its wheels grind the dust. Remains left in one of his estates: DVDs of Ocean’s Thirteen, Ice Age, a Led Zeppelin CD, Patricia Highsmith novels in German. Eventually, as the desire for multimillion-dollar paintings rose, and anxieties about provenance appeared to be receding, Wolfgang resurfaced and took up business again, but this time he created forgeries of better-known artists, venturing into dangerous territory by copying recognizable artists. Demand was higher than ever.
Among the buyers of his fake Campendonks were Steve Martin and Trasteco Ltd., a Maltese company. After plunking down $3.6 million, the latter wanted a certificate of authenticity, and when none was available, they had the painting tested by London-based forensic art scientist Nicholas Eastaugh, who discovered the presence of titanium, the element that was the undoing of Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi.
The party ended. Wolfgang and Helene were tried and convicted, but they received very light sentences. Others, accused of similar crimes, got much harsher terms. There are things, secrets, Wolfgang says he can’t discuss, leaving one to believe he could be the man who knew too much. The pair were allowed back to their home for him to paint during the day, but then they had to return to jail cells at night. As far as incarceration goes, it was a pretty cushy deal. He was mandated to pay back a percentage of what he had stolen, but now his Ernst or Léger lookalikes, signed by himself, were commanding high prices of their own. They are the Ernsts or Légers that could have existed, and so cozy up to the originals, claiming a bit of their space and their share of the market.
As a result of the Beltracchi conviction, not only were dealers and galleries sued by duped collectors, but art experts, those in the business of authenticating art based on what can be seen with the naked eye, felt the rug pulled out from under them. Beltracchi’s industry exposed what now appeared to be the man behind the curtain. The unreliable world of connoisseurship and its practitioners was becoming more and more like doctors afraid of being sued for medical malpractice, and, at the same time, unable to obtain adequate insurance to cover their assumptions. They end up staring at empty walls. Beltracchi turned the whole notion of authentic art and who is an expert on its head.
DR. FRANKENSTEIN
Beltracchi now says of his forgery business that it’s performance art, and his approach raises questions as to whether a forger’s skills can traverse the meridian that divides crime from recognized art form, as long as he signs his own name to the canvases. He has also sold pictures of himself painted over photographs of his forgeries. Even the collaged remakes aren’t cheap, and he’s been accused of “turning notoriety into a marketable commodity.”
When asked to describe how he works, Wolfgang says, “You have to know about the artist’s past, present, and future. You have to know how the painter moved and how much time it took him to complete a work.” His wife supports his method of working: “He reads about the artist, travels to where he lived, steeps himself in the literature. He’s like an actor.” When he was painting as Max Ernst, did he imagine living with Dorothea Tanning on 19 rue de Lille? Answer: unknown, but he does use what he calls his “Max Ernst box,” containing bark, leaves, shells, straw, the kinds of objects the surrealist used to recreate fragments of texture on the surfaces of his work. Ernst, who believed he was painting from his subconscious, would appear to be impossible to duplicate, but Beltracchi was, until he was caught, very successful at his ability to parrot another man’s subliminal thoughts.
In the “Be Right Back” episode of Black Mirror, a young man, Ash, is killed in a car accident, but his surviving wife is able to recreate a version of Ash programmed via the accretion of all his e-mail and social-media postings. The clone Ash arrives at her door as a sentient-appearing, if slightly robotic, version of his formerly living self. Unless they are destroyed, the Beltracchi paintings, like many forgeries, take on a life of their own, and come back in devious ways. They are like clones who knock on the door and are unwilling or unable to quietly disappear. One collector is known to have kept his Beltracchi Ernst and displays it openly, claiming it’s one of the best surrealist paintings he has ever seen. A twenty-first-century painting that really looks like Max Ernst could have painted it borrows the Ernst aura. The moonbeam passes for something solid with pylons and towers and doors you can walk through to rooms that may be a pleasure to inhabit.
THE FLECHTHEIM CASE
There is something crazy about art. It’s a passion stronger than gambling, alcohol, and women.
—Alfred Flechtheim
… insolent Jewish-Negro contamination of the soul of the German people.
—From Illustrierter Beobachter (Illustrated Observer), in its cover story “The Race Question Is the Key to World History” with a cartoon of Flechtheim on the cover
Who was harmed by the fakes of Wolfgang B.? Even though he made fools of those you might imagine resemble bronze Tom Otterness figures who have money bags for heads, Wolfgang wasn’t exactly Robin Hood. He stole from the rich, but he didn’t exactly give to the poor, and only enriched himself on a lavish scale. Not only was his reputation one of self-aggrandizement, but he must have made life very much harder for the heirs of the real Alfred F.
Besides the presence of titanium in the paint, the Flechtheim Gallery labels that the Beltracchis affixed to the back of the forgeries were total fantasy. Dyed with coffee and tea to appear aged, the labels were printed with a woodcut of the dealer’s portrait. The design of the actual labels contained no portrait. Flechtheim’s paintings were stolen by the Nazis, and the problem of restitution for his heirs could only have been compounded by the German forger’s high jinks, his pilfering of Flechtheim’s identity. A major collector of German expressionist and French cubist painting, as well as art from the South Pacific, during the 1920s and early 1930s, Flechtheim was considered a prince of the Berlin art world. Boxer Max Schmeling said of the dealer, “If I were a painter, I would want Flechtheim to represent me.” Alfred was known for having blowout parties in his galleries in Berlin where he would dress in Andalusian clothes and dance flamenco. But for Alfred, who was Jewish, a collector of degenerate art, and rumored to be gay, the party that was the Weimar Republic was soon to be over. Otto Dix, annoyed at what he saw as Flechtheim’s preference for French artists, painted him with the exaggerated features of a cartoon character, grasping paintings in one hand and bills of sale in the other. The message, the grotesque money-grubbing Jew, is ugly and unmistakable. It’s painful to look at, but others, from known artists to anonymous cartoonists, would repeat the image in a variety of forms. This version of Alfred’s face became a symbol of racial pollution that appeared over and over in Nazi propaganda. Completely impoverished, Alfred fled to France.
What horrifies me the most is the senseless fear that has taken hold of Flechtheim. In a completely empty restaurant, he looks left and right, even during the most harmless conversations, to make sure that no one is listening to us.
—Thea Sternheim, July 1933
But his phobias and paranoia were far from baseless. Fleeing Paris for London, Alfred found no respite. He fell on an icy street, but contracted blood poisoning from a rusty nail that had found its way into his hospital bed. Even amputation couldn’t save him, and he died, according to English friends, on March 9, 1937, in “misery, pain, and despair.”
Beltracchi painted works listed as missing that had no known reproduction, and because of the extent of Nazi art looting, it’s been difficult to know f
or certain what Alfred Flechtheim did own. It is believed that after Aryanization, paintings were illegally sold, sometimes to museums, and Alfred was erased from art history. Restitution has been a slow and difficult process even decades later, and Wolfgang B. wasn’t the only one profiting. According to a copyright litigation site:
Alfred Barr borrowed much of Flechtheim’s exhibition for the MoMA’s first show of German art and Flechtheim gave the MoMA one of the first works to become part of its permanent collection, a sculpture of the boxer Max Schmeling, the guy who Joe Louis beat. No one seems to know what MoMA did with the Schmeling sculpture. History has failed to document Alfred Barr’s intellectual and other debts to Alfred Flechtheim. Barr, of course, was gleefully grabbing up art bargains that the Nazis had stolen from Jews, including the great critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin.
Alfred’s F.’s widow, Betty, returned to Berlin in 1941, but committed suicide by taking an overdose of Veronal, just after receiving her deportation orders, with the Gestapo at her door. The surviving heir, Alfred’s grandnephew, Michael Hulton, is an anesthetist who lives in San Francisco, who plans to donate his restitution claims to AIDS research.
TAKE MY SNAKE GODDESS, PLEASE
Wolfgang B. learned that molecules don’t lie. Museums are of full of paintings and objects that may or may not be what they claim, but then sometimes the story of their manufacture and usurped identity takes on a life of its own. If you know the chemistry of the materials and the contemporaneous technology used to create an object, the genuine can be separated from the fakes.
I met with Richard Newman, director of the Science Department of the Boston Museum, on one of those days when it was so cold my phone froze, and I imagined cables snapping, the Red Line stalling as it made its way across the Charles River. Getting on to the floor where objects and paintings are analyzed and conservation takes place is not automatic. Visitors can’t just stroll in. You need an appointment and, even then, someone with a magnetic elevator ID must meet you and take you up to the lab. Some of the most valuable objects in the world may find their way here, but this is not Tiffany’s. The labs look more like sets from CSI. Very few museums have science labs—they are expensive. Some of the equipment costs upward of $100,000. Among the array of machines you can find X-rays, high-powered optical microscopes, scanning electron microscopy, and equipment used to measure energy-dispersive X-ray fluorescence. In the lab I saw the Senterra Raman microscope, which uses lasers to transmit information about chemical bonds; a mass spectrometer that measures fluorescence; and charts like three-dimensional contour maps of different materials graphically depicted according to their composition.
Testing for authenticity isn’t pure science. There are stories behind the copies, and that’s what tempers our dismissiveness towards fakes, our desire to put a crowbar under the manhole cover and explore the city beneath the one we know. Science and chemistry, Newman tells me, entered the province of the museum with the excavation of Pompeii in the nineteenth century when a pigment known as Egyptian blue, the first artificially produced pigment, was discovered in the ruins. The investigation of color is often tied to chemistry, as the Beltracchis discovered too late, and became one way of analyzing whether or not a work was genuine. Newman told me the story of the Snake Goddess, a small ivory-and-gold statue considered one of the prizes of the Museum of Fine Arts for nearly one hundred years, only recently questioned as not being the object it was once purported to be. His lab tested the gold and found it contained higher levels of copper than ancient Minoans would have amalgamated. The statue was removed from exhibition. I asked him who made it. In all likelihood it was fabricated by the diggers on the excavation of 1912, headed by a perhaps easily duped American. The statue was donated to the museum on June 28, 1914, the day Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the Great War was begun. A number of Snake Goddesses in collections around the world are believed to be fakes, but they were initially acquired and displayed with enthusiasm.
The ancient Minoan civilization was seductive for nineteenth-century archaeologists, often wealthy amateurs, because this was where they could drive a stake in the ground and declare the beginnings of what we talk about when we talk about Europe. Heinrich Schliemann, self-made German millionaire, was suspected of planting forgeries when he excavated Mycenae in the 1870s. The writings of archaeologists like Sir Arthur Evans, who conducted a major excavation just before World War I, are full of expressions like “inherently probable” and romantic assumptions about goddesses, mothers, and “Youthful Boy Adorants” that can be embarrassing to read today. Among their mistakes, they became known for getting the genders of figures wrong or for not allowing for athletic girls and feminine boys. Minoan history, religion, and cultural and social assumptions were based on stories that sprang up around things found on sites such as figures of acrobats, bull leapers, goddesses who may not have been deities at all but ordinary household objects. Once removed from what’s known as their findspots, once context is erased, it’s impossible to know what the objects were, so stories were invented. Some of the objects that passed through their hands had never been dug out of the ground at all but originated in contemporary local workshops. Not only did collectors want relics, but archaeologists like Schliemann and Evans worked what may have been invented relics into their narratives about ancient Minoa. They were eager for these objects, whatever their provenance, to have the imprimatur of authenticity guaranteed by museum acquisition. Production of forgeries in Crete was market driven but also fed by the desire to find objects that would support assumptions.
Sculptor Norman Daly created the civilization of Llhuros, an entirely fictitious society, launched from his studio in Ithaca, New York, beginning the project in the 1960s. For decades he constructed both religious and utilitarian objects that, if you didn’t look closely, certainly resembled ancient artifacts. Once you did look closely, you might identify twentieth-century gaskets, meat tenderizers, blender parts that made up votives, steles, nasal flutes, pairs of fornicating gods. Daly also wrote exhibition labels referencing scholarly interpretations of the artifacts that sound like parodies of the interpretations of the actual and invented Minoan artifacts like the Snake Goddesses and Boy Adorants. Daly quoted a host of anthropologists and archaeologists who made their marks in the study of his invented civilization. The acting director of Llhuroscian Studies at Cornellwas a character Daly called Professor Conrad Lionberger, whom he thanks in his compiler’s note in an exhibition catalog for a show of his life’s work: the Civilization of Llhuros. Yet it is difficult to place Professor Conrad Lionberger … anywhere except at the top of the list of those colleagues who sharedmost graciously their expertise with me. The expertise of those cited—Conrad Lionberger, Paver Slaban, Emmet Joseph McIntyre, and others—was, in fact, Norman Daly’s alone.
The Emile Gilliérons, Swiss father-and-son restoration team, working with Sir Arthur Evans in Knossos, openly sold via their catalog, Galvanoplastic Mycenaean and Cretan (Minoan) Antiquities, copies of artifacts, some a combination of castings from originals combined with creative restoration. Business was lucrative; everyone with the means to wanted a piece of the action that was ancient Minos. At the same time the Gilliérons were repainting missing pieces of friezes and murals at the actual site, to the point where the Knossos Throne Room figures would have looked at home in a Zurich Dada café. Art conservators now reject the mandate of restoration in favor of conservation, but when the Gilliérons were working, restoration—making an object or painting look as if it were made yesterday—was taken for granted as the right thing to do. The Gilliéron restorations and recreations, licit and illicit, couldn’t help but look a little suffused with the art nouveau aesthetic that was contemporary at the time they were working, and in this way the copies took on a life of their own, looki
ng partly ancient, partly art deco as well. Alfredo, grandson of the first Emile, still lives and works in Athens, and reportedly believes his copies could fool any archaeologist.
Forgeries like the Snake Goddesses and the Boy Adorants became screens on which to project desires and polemics, and over time they, in turn, transformed into historiographic documents, manufactured relics that unwittingly revealed traces from the periods in which they were actually created, becoming the babies that needed to be retained along with their used bathwater.
VINLANDIA
The Vinland Map is arguably one of the most important maps in the world.
—Robin Clark, Sir William Ramsay Professor of Chemistry at University College London
If the map of Vinland is real, then others, long before Columbus, sited and drew the edges of western continents and landmasses. Its shapes, both accurate and blobby, represent Europe, North Africa, Greenland, and northeastern Canada. The island of Vinland could be Labrador, Newfoundland, or Baffin. The legend reads, in part, By God’s will, after a long voyage from the island of Greenland to the south toward the most distant remaining parts of the western ocean sea, sailing southward amidst the ice, the companions Bjarni and Leif Eiriksson discovered a new land, extremely fertile and even having vines … which island they named Vinland.
If it’s not a forgery, Vinlandia is the oldest map of America. The map came to light in a hotel room in Switzerland in 1957 and was said to have been drawn in 1444, but referenced what could only have been much earlier Nordic exploration. Before the hotel room, however, the Vinland map was totally unknown. No record, no bill of sale, no mention of its existence by any traveler, explorer, king, or minister with an eye on expansion. Its murky provenance didn’t enhance its credibility, but the absence of a sort of family tree for the map doesn’t guarantee the verdict that the parchment is a total hoax.
Conjunctions 65: Sleights of Hand Page 13