As Edward and Gertrude bickered over how best to proceed with this or that element of the forgery, I leafed through their monographs and biographies about Pablo Picasso and regaled them with interesting titbits from Picasso’s life: how he’d met Dora Maar in a cafe in 1936, as Hitler was preparing for war; how, although he was by then one of the world’s most famous living artists, he was yet to rise to the heights that saw him become the wealthiest artist in history. That year, Picasso was on the verge of great things; idiotically, I believed we were as well. He had remarked that painting wasn’t an aesthetic operation but a form of magic designed to mediate between the hostile world and ourselves. Here then, in front of me, was a tangible part of that magic.
Usually dithery and vague, Gertrude adopted the upper hand in her role as the actual forger, with Edward as her grumbling assistant sidelined to mixing pigments, fetching tools and cleaning brushes. While working, Edward developed a set of superstitions he believed assured the success of the enterprise — he despised bananas, for instance, and would not allow one into the warehouse under any circumstances; he had to have a candle lit at all times while work was underway; he would only mix ingredients in a clockwise direction. Gertrude, however, was visibly relaxed and even appeared for the period less encumbered by her various life-threatening ailments.
A paint-spattered radio–cassette player in their studio was almost always on, tuned to local community radio station 3RRR or playing mixed tapes of weird music that was either infuriating or relaxing. It was there that I discovered the dubious delights of bands such as Throbbing Gristle, Foetus, Swans, Einstürzende Neubauten, Sonic Youth and the Birthday Party. In my mind’s eye I can still see Edward in his overcoat dabbing at a paint concoction, analysing it from every angle while I Love Her All the Time drones on and on in the background.
The flimsy notebook Gertrude and Edward had consulted when we first brought the Weeping Woman back to the studio was, in fact, a manual put together by an infamous postwar art forger called Elmyr de Hory, whom Gertrude had befriended when she was a girl.
In the coming days and nights, Gertrude told me more about this de Hory; indeed, what she told me of his life is worthy of its own book and (as I learned later), de Hory was the subject of a biography by Clifford Irving that, in turn, inspired F for Fake, a rambling, stream-of-consciousness documentary by Orson Welles.
‘I met Elmyr in 1964,’ she told me as she worked on the forgery. ‘I was only a kid. He was hiding out in Sydney when Interpol became suspicious that certain paintings being passed off in Europe as modernist originals were actually his.
‘Anyway, my father met him somehow when he came to Australia and started inviting him around for barbecues, although my mother never liked him. My dad thought of himself as a cultured businessman, you see. He was disappointed when Elmyr left after only a year.’
With his European accent, cravat and monocle, de Hory must have been exceedingly exotic at that time, a migratory bird blown way off-course. The charismatic foreigner befriended the eight-year-old Gertrude and — perhaps recognising in her a talent and ambition commensurate with his own, perhaps merely offloading evidence that could land him in jail — he gave her the notebook, along with a ratty cardboard suitcase stuffed with tools of his trade.
‘It’s an absolute goldmine of techniques,’ Gertrude said one night, as I flipped through the notebook’s hundred-odd pages covered with dense scrawl and illustrations. ‘Some of it’s hard to read but I can understand more than enough to get this done. Recipes for pigments, preparing surfaces, tips for applying paints and ageing canvases. It’s incredible information.’
‘How come it’s in English?’
She shrugged. ‘A boyfriend of his wrote it up, I think. Knowing Elmyr, he hoped to make some money out of it one day.’
Deciphering a number of passages, I learned that ink can be made to look aged by mixing it with the same quantity of water and leaving it to evaporate to its original strength; that borate can be used to dry oil grounds; that to make so-called ‘fox-marks’ (indicative of great age), scrape rust from an old nail onto damp fabric, press it to paper, and seal it in a plastic bag for a week.
‘And the best thing of all,’ Gertrude went on, ‘is that because de Hory was painting in the same era as Picasso, many of the materials he gave me were what Picasso would have used himself.’
In the suitcase was a jumble of horsehair brushes, palette knives encrusted with paint, vials of powdered pigment, jars of spirits, bottles of linseed oil, extra pages of notes, ink-pads, rubber stamps and all manner of art paraphernalia. There were clumps of charcoal, nubs of chalk, tiny pots of mordant or thinner. When it was flung open in front of me, the smell released was earthy and potent and rich. At once I laughed with appreciation of forgery’s fabulous allure; it was the wish to pit oneself against the acknowledged artistic genius of the century. All artists enter into ghostly discussion with those who have gone before. No artist has his complete meaning alone, as T.S. Eliot has noted. The challenge to reproduce a Picasso was akin to entering the ring to fight Ali, writing theatre that Shakespeare might watch from the wings, playing for Beethoven. I am as good as he is, the aspirant fumes. Why is he rich and famous while I toil in obscurity? This was all the more trenchant for Gertrude, who as a woman had struggled for credibility in a world that had so eagerly nurtured the cult of the solitary, anguished male painter: Rothko, Pollock, Caravaggio, van Gogh. Like most forgers, Gertrude’s ambitions were not about money; they were about getting even.
‘My very own father discouraged me from being an artist,’ Gertrude told me another night. ‘He mixed with bohemians, but just because you like dogs, it doesn’t mean you want your daughter to walk on all fours and bark. He thought it was, I don’t know, déclassé. I had to elope with Edward, and we were married at the registry office here in Melbourne. My father was embarrassed when I went to art school, then pleased when I had some success. That all ended, of course. I fell out of fashion a few years ago. That bastard Queel talked Anna into dropping me from her gallery with his French postmodern piffle. My work is too old-fashioned these days. Real painting is pretty much dead now. Edward sometimes does well selling his work, but people have mostly moved on to other things.’
This was at around three a.m., late in the first week we had the painting in our possession. The original Weeping Woman was fixed to an easel. Beside it, on its own easel, was the other canvas on which the forgery was being painted. On the workbench were other squares of canvas for daubed experiments in colour and line. In addition, there were books filled with reproductions of Picasso sketchbooks, from which Gertrude hoped to understand the underlying armature, as it were, of the paintings. All were lit by bright lamps.
The forgery was taking shape, but not as fast as we had hoped. Gertrude had promised to complete it within a week, but she had been delayed. Inexplicably, the version on the easel in front of me looked less developed than it had on the previous afternoon. When I mentioned this, Gertrude told me in no uncertain terms not to be ridiculous and to leave matters of such expertise to her.
Although I said no more about it, there were a lot of blank spaces on the canvas and they, along with Edward and Gertrude’s lack of urgency, started to irk me. Edward had already spent three hours earlier that night finding heroin (there was some sort of ‘drought’ on) and, once they had injected it, he and Gertrude wasted more time arguing over who produced Iggy and the Stooges’ first album. Edward fossicked through the hundreds of records stacked in green milk crates but was unable to find the record in question to settle the dispute, partly because he kept getting distracted and putting on other albums. ‘Oh,’ he would say, holding up a cardboard sleeve, ‘I haven’t heard Trout Mask Replica for ages …’
I was too timid to remind them that the sooner they completed their forgery, the quicker we could offload it, after which they could buy endless supplies of heroin and argue about the personnel of obscure rock albums as much as they wished. I remembered
James warning me about them, and I wondered what on earth we would do if the forgery wasn’t good enough, or if Anna Donatella’s associates didn’t come through for some reason. It didn’t bear thinking about.
‘Art forgery has an illustrious history of its own,’ Gertrude went on. ‘Who was that guy during the war, Edward? Who did the Vermeers?’
Edward gazed up from the square lid of an ice-cream container he was using as a palette. His mouth was unhinged, his pupils like hawks hovering in the pale sky of his irises. ‘Van Meegeren,’ he croaked. ‘Christ at Emmaus.’
Gertrude wound a wayward strand of red hair behind her ear. ‘That’s right. And there’s lots more. There’s meant to be a few Mona Lisas floating around after that was stolen. The art market is full of fakes, you know. I have it on very good authority there’s a van Gogh portrait in the gallery right here in Melbourne that’s fake. Warhol gets his assistants to run off a few screen prints so he doesn’t get his hands dirty. Rodin had a whole army of assistants. Dalí signed thousands of blank sheets of paper before anything was even drawn on them. The name on the work is not always the person who made the thing, but it doesn’t usually bother people in the least.’
‘What happened to this van Meegeren?’ I asked.
Gertrude coughed into her fist and muttered.
‘What?’
‘He was arrested for peddling art to the Nazis, got addicted to morphine, died.’
‘Oh. And what about Elmyr de Hory?’
There was an uncomfortable silence. Edward busied himself with his vials of pigment.
‘Ah, poor Elmyr. He sort of, ah, died in the 1970s. Of a pill overdose. Suicide, they think.’
Addiction, collaboration with Nazis, suicide. This was not encouraging.
‘What are you doing, Edward?’ Gertrude said. ‘I need some purple for her lips. And a bit thinner this time, please.’
‘It’s violet, actually. And I’m looking for it. Give me a minute. I think I need a bit more of this …’
‘Well,’ Gertrude said with a droll chuckle, ‘don’t look; find.’
Edward tested his colour on a scrap of canvas before proffering her the paste he’d concocted. They analysed it under the light, then Gertrude, satisfied, dabbed her brush in the blob and gazed at the two canvases — the original and its half-formed twin — before darting in and making a few quick brushstrokes.
This was her method: much inspection and comparison, combined with sudden bursts of action. She’d told me how difficult it was to generate the slapdash effect that characterised the Weeping Woman, how she needed to make her strokes with speed. This increased the danger of making an error of line or colour. She lessened this risk with careful consideration before she struck.
Although this way of working was painstaking, I had to admit it was effective; her own Weeping Woman was (very) slowly but surely taking shape on the canvas, a jagged green monster rising to the surface of a milky bath.
She stepped back, grunted with approval. ‘Forgery is a much purer way of making beautiful and interesting things.’
Edward groaned. ‘Oh dear, here we go. I’m off to make some coffee.’
‘You want to write novels?’ Gertrude asked me after Edward had ambled away.
I nodded, reluctant, as ever, to articulate this so boldly.
‘Why?’
This was an excellent question. Writing novels sounded like an interesting thing to do, but I hadn’t interrogated my ambition too deeply. If I were brutally honest with myself, there were cravings for fame and recognition in there somewhere, but it felt dishonourable and creatively dubious to admit this. I longed to be in the weekend newspapers, to have my work pored over by experts, to be praised for my creation in a field of endeavour I regarded with awe.
I prepared a more principled answer — about having meaningful things to say, about wishing to contribute to the corpus of literature — but my confusion must have confirmed Gertrude’s point, which she now pressed home with the relish of one despatching a floundering opponent.
‘Do you think anyone would bother making a painting or writing a novel if they couldn’t attach their name to it? Artists talk about the joy of making work, but I wonder if they’d get so much of this so-called joy if they had no chance of being known for it. Would you write a novel if it was published anonymously? Because the forger doesn’t sign her name to a work, there is no ego involved. The pleasure is in the creation, in putting beautiful work into the world. It is, as I said before, quite pure.’
‘You’re still engaged in deception,’ I said, reluctant to yield to her argument, which would only cast my motives in a suspect light, ‘passing off an artwork as authentic when it isn’t.’
Gertrude jabbed me with the gnawed end of her brush. ‘We,’ she pointed out, ‘are engaged in deception. Don’t forget that. Secondly, authenticity is mostly about the person making the work, not the work. Why should we care about the artist? Thirdly, why does it matter, if the work gives people pleasure? Does it matter they’re admiring a canvas painted by Gertrude Degraves in a Carlton warehouse in 1986 and not by Pablo Picasso in Paris in 1937? If people see meaning in it, take pleasure or solace in it? That Vermeer forgery was acclaimed as being a work of genius until they realised it was by someone else. If the differences between an original and a copy are so small as to be indistinguishable, then clearly they are as good as each other. And this Weeping Woman will be every bit as good as the original. Think of those Ern Malley poems. Everyone thought they were great — and some of them are great — until they were exposed as a con.
‘Our appreciation of a work of art often has nothing to do with the aesthetic virtues of the work alone,’ Gertrude went on, warming to her theme. ‘It’s the aura that surrounds it. The artist, the time in which it was made, and so on and so on. The brand, essentially. It’s ridiculous. You see people in the gallery walking straight past a painting because they don’t think much of it. Then they realise it’s by a famous painter, someone who’s supposed to be great, so they stop to coo over it. Bang! Like that, their opinion is turned right around.’
Edward reappeared with a cup of steaming coffee. ‘Is the lecture finished?’
Gertrude ignored him and lunged once more at the canvas. ‘Trouble is that the skills involved in making modern art have so deteriorated that there’s no challenge in trying to copy any of it. They don’t even do drawing at art school anymore. Only a bunch of theory. Look at that Keith Haring mural down the road in Collingwood. Anyone could do that. Nothing skilful about it. A bunch of green cartoon characters riding on the back of a giant slug. Pfft. Could have been painted by a gang of retarded teenagers on a community outing.’
Edward guffawed, snorted his coffee down the wrong way and lapsed into a coughing fit. When he had recovered, he and Gertrude continued to work in peace for a while.
On the wall above the workbench hung a dozen or so of Gertrude’s original paintings, part of her series of gargoyles. Each no larger than a postcard, they were frightening portraits of spectral creatures peering out as if from the murder holes of a medieval castle. Some of the figures were cowled, others grasped the sill of their canvas with bony fingers as if preparing to leap into the corporeal world. From their unlit windows, they resembled a monstrous jury of goblins casting their tumid, bloodshot eyes over the studio with horrified glee, as if it might be cadavers, rather than art, being assembled in front of them — an impression only enhanced by the candle burning on the bench and the air of criminality that hovered over the room.
Gertrude sat back to smoke a cigarette and assess her handiwork on the Weeping Woman. She seemed to fall asleep for a second, as heroin addicts are accustomed to do, before jerking awake in time to tap her sagging caterpillar of ash into a coffee cup.
‘What happened about Tamsin?’ she asked.
Her query was presumably in reference to a second letter that Tamsin had sent to the media about the painting’s fate. In it, she had threatened to burn the painting if the so
-called Australian Cultural Terrorists’ demands (which included the establishment of an art prize called the Picasso Ransom) were not met. Max was again furious at what he saw as her increasing the likelihood of putting the police onto us.
‘Max thought it best if James talked to her. He knows her better than anyone.’
‘Quite so. No point sending Max. We don’t want to aggravate her further. Who knows what she’s capable of.’
‘I don’t know if James is the right person to speak to her,’ Edward said.
‘James is tougher than he looks,’ Gertrude countered. ‘Besides, he’ll do anything Max asks.’
This was true. James and Max had a lopsided friendship, based at least in part on James’s readiness to endure any humiliations Max dished up.
‘Why is that?’ I asked. ‘Why does James put up with Max bossing him around so much?’
As if in sympathy, Gertrude pursed her lips and leaned in to make an alteration to her Weeping Woman’s mouth. ‘Because James is hopelessly in love with Max, that’s why. And when you have a situation where one person loves another more, there’s often exploitation. Max is not a kind man. He uses these things to his advantage.’
Although I tried to appear unmoved by this information (a goodly portion of being cool, after all, lies in being unshockable), I was taken aback. To my knowledge I had never met a real-life homosexual before, let alone been friends with one. I considered the numerous times I had been alone with James — the way he rested his hand on my shoulder; the nights we’d staggered home from bars, propping each other up, when we’d both drunk too much. There had even been an instance, some months earlier, when he had insisted I sleep in his bed rather than walk home so late at night and so drunk.
‘Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about our James,’ Edward said. ‘He does alright for himself. He goes to that gay bathhouse in Peel Street every so often.’
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