The Art Forger (13 page)

What if I tell Markel about
Bath
and he cancels everything, including my show? What if he wants the money back? I finger my new cell phone and think about that red couch I saw marked down 70 percent in the furniture store across from my studio. I think about Xavier’s silver paint and the five thousand dollars I’ve already spent. But it’s not the money. I’d do this for free if it meant my paintings would hang in Markel G. And that the Gardner would get its masterpiece back. Although, now it’s not so clear that this painting is a masterpiece.

The church blends into a chunk of rundown tenements, their high stoops filled with teenagers drinking and eyeing other teenagers drinking on other stoops. There are clusters of mothers too young to be mothers keeping watch—or not—over their children. The lovers groping at each other. The elderly in their short-legged beach chairs nodding off in the heat.

When I cross Washington Street, I officially exit edgy, up-and-coming SOWA and enter an almost-there district where the rents are double mine but only a fraction of what they’ll be a few blocks up. In my neighborhood, there are one or two nice restaurants or stores per block, on Washington it’s probably five or six, and when I come to Tremont, just about everything from steaks to manicures is overpriced. And yet, here there are still bits of sour-smelling garbage tucked into corners and more stoop-sitters defying the state’s open-container law.

As I head north, the townhouses get nicer, with painted shutters and tiny, perfect gardens; the sidewalks get cleaner, and half the cars parked on the street are those small, black BMWs. By the time I hit the blocks closest to Copley Square, there are no stoop-sitters and no litter. Ah, the Back Bay.

“T
O OUR
BATH.
”
Markel raises his glass to mine.

He looks directly, guilelessly, at me. He’s tan, fit, and seemingly quite pleased with himself. It strikes me that in all the years he was Isaac’s dealer, I never noticed how attractive he was. In the past, every time I was with him, I was also with Isaac, and now I find myself wondering if he’s involved with anyone. I know he’s been divorced for quite a few years, which is good, but after Isaac, I strongly question my ability to judge a man’s trustworthiness.

I watch him carefully for clues that will signal what I should tell him about the forgery. Except I have no idea what these clues might be. “She is a marvel.” I touch my glass to his and take a sip.

We’re sitting in a couple of overstuffed armchairs, pressed close together and tucked into the raised far corner of the Oak Room. The air is redolent with the subtle smell of fine food. A piano plays softly in the opposite corner, and the acoustics hush everyone’s words. It’s almost as private as my studio, but much more luxuriant.

“So you’re enjoying spending time with her?”

“And looking forward to getting down to painting. I’ve been researching the process, and if we’ve got to pass atomic absorption or mass spectrometry testing, I think the full glaze, bake, and varnish is the only way to go. And now with this new digital wavelet decomposition . . .” I hold my hands up. “There’s really not much choice.”

Markel rubs his chin. “If we assume there’ll be that kind of scrutiny.”

“Won’t there?”

“Depends on the sophistication of the buyer.”

“Even if there’s only low-level testing, it’ll be pretty easy to determine that the paint isn’t completely dry. Seems to me we’ve got to bake it.”

“Bake?”

“It sounds weird, but it works. You add a special chemical in the medium, then bake the canvas between layers. The combination of the two dries the paint the same way a couple hundred years would.”

He ponders his drink. “Obviously,” he says, thinking out loud, “the buyer isn’t going to be a museum or an ethical collector. And in most of the developing world, where I’m pretty sure our buyer will come from, there isn’t access to the same level of technology or to the top experts we have here . . . On the other hand, someone willing to purchase it, knowing its origin, could be savvy enough and paranoid enough to want to check it out thoroughly.”

I see my opening. “Is that what you did?”

His face closes up, and he sits back in his chair. “Of course,” he says, looking over my shoulder.

“All the tests?”

“So how much time will the oven save?” he asks.

“Months. Many of them. Is there a deadline?”

“No,” he says. “Not really. Although, obviously, the sooner the better.”

“You’re the boss.” I shrug. Does it really matter how I forge a forgery?

“So, what would you need?”

“The painting’s three-foot-eleven by four-foot-ten. The oven in my kitchen is sixteen by eighteen inches, so that’s not going to work.”

“A kiln?”

“We don’t need that kind of heat. I’m thinking a commercial oven. Like something used in a bakery. Wide enough to get the painting in and out, with digital temperature control and a digital timer.” I pause. “Has there ever been any discussion that this
After the Bath
was painted by anyone other than Degas?”

He straightens up in his chair. “None that I know of.” His look is hard and penetrating. “What’s this all about?”

“I just want to know if anyone’s going to come into this thinking it might be a fake right off the bat. About how we want to go about this. How much coverage we need.”

“I’ll check into the oven.”

“Great. Thanks,” I say. “But what if it actually was—”

Markel nods at my martini. “Drink up.”

I do as he instructs. It’s clear this discussion is over. “Whoever told me these were the best lemondrops in Boston wasn’t kidding.”

“Your friend, Crystal Mack.”

“What?”

He laughs at my confusion. “I mean, Crystal’s got to be the one who told you about the martinis. She loves them.”

“Yeah, right.” Not my favorite topic of conversation.

“You must be very proud of her.”

I shrug. “She’s not really a friend, more of an acquaintance.”

“Oh.” Markel’s eyes crinkle, and I can tell he doesn’t like her either.

“She’s gotten a bit puffed up.”

“And now the Danforth purchase is going to add another fifty pounds?”

“You’ve got that right,” I agree. “We’re hoping she’s so impressed with herself that she’ll shun lowly Harrison Avenue and hang exclusively up here in Back Bay.”

Markel holds up both hands. “Please, anything but that.”

“Hey, it was the Markel G
Local Artists at Work
show that pulled her out of SOWA. You’ve got only yourself to blame.”

“The Danforth was because of the
ArtWorld
contest.”

“It’s never just a contest.” I try to keep up my bantering tone.

“You entered.” It’s not a question.

“Yup. Sure did.” I take another sip of my drink.

“You know one of the judges was from the Whitney, don’t you? And that it had to be a unanimous decision?” He sighs. “The Whitney’s always had its thing about Isaac.”

There’s no denying this shit still hurts.

“It’s not your stuff,” Markel says. “Your work is remarkable. Far superior to hers.”

This doesn’t make me feel any better.

“Isaac’s been gone three years now,” Markel says. “Grudges die down in time. Memories fade.”

“I hadn’t noticed.”

“Few people are as stuffy as the Whitney.”

I raise my glass and force a bright smile. “Let’s hope so.”

“I don’t know exactly what went on with
4D
and MoMA,” he says, “although I’ve always had my suspicions. Even at the time.”

I blink. Is he telling me he believes I painted
4D
?

“But my opinion isn’t what matters, and now’s not the time to get into it.” Markel takes my free hand and presses it between both of his. “The important thing here is that your show’s going to make everyone forget what happened to Isaac Cullion.”

I’m both comforted by his hands encircling mine—a kinship, past and present, a level of understanding—and keenly aware of his sexuality. “What if people boycott the show because of my name?”

“I don’t want to sound as ‘puffed up’ as Crystal,” Markel says. “But it’ll be difficult for people to boycott a show at Markel G.”

Sixteen

Last week, I estimated I had ten more hours on the Pissarro for Repro, but somehow I’ve managed to stretch it into three days. And I’m still not finished. I try to focus on the painting in front of me instead of the Meissonier nagging me from the back corner. I need to strip the canvas and get on with creating
Bath II.
But I keep finding distractions that I must attend to first.

There’s research to complete on Degas’ paints and brushes, how he mixed his pigments and mediums, issues to resolve about the best aging techniques—even though it’s going to be a while before I need most of this information. Then there’s laundry and visiting that red couch one more time before I make a final decision. There’s e-mail to read, bills to pay, and of course, the fake Pissarro to finish.

And there are other things to consider. Like my decision not to tell Markel about
Bath’
s origins. Despite his arguments to the contrary, it’s clear that my days as a pariah are far from over and that my only chance of getting out from under this art McCarthyism is a successful show at Markel G. It really pisses me off, the spiteful way I was treated, and the thought of a full payback is hard to resist. It occurs to me that if Markel loves my work as much as he claims, wouldn’t he do my show even if I told him what I know? I dab a bit of chrome yellow on the edge of a flower. I’m pretty sure he would, but I’m too much of a coward to take the chance.

I step back, compare my result to the oversized Pissarro print taped to the wall and add one more dab. I reach my brush forward again, then stop before it touches the canvas. I’m at the point where I often start overthinking—and overpainting. A dangerous prospect that, at worst, can destroy a painting or, at least, create weeks of extra work. I lower the brush. I give the fake Pissarro a hard look, then drop the brush into a can of turpentine. A final coat of varnish after the paint is dry and it will be done.

Bath,
covered with a sheet, sits on the other side of the studio. I hate that she isn’t real, but I dig out the acetone, rectified petroleum, and packages of cotton wool I bought at Al’s. I place the Meissonier on my worktable next to the solvent and restrainer and grab a couple of cloths. If everything goes well—if the canvas is in good shape, if the paint’s easily removed and the old sizing isn’t too yellow—I could be done in a few days. But if the situation is reversed, or if there are additional problems, I could be looking at weeks of stripping. After going through it in Ellen Bonanno’s class, I know stripping will be my least favorite part of the whole process.

If I were doing this for Repro, my first step would be to buy a new canvas and size it myself with some flake-white mixed with oil so the canvas will be ready to grab the paint. But to paint a forgery that can pass expert inspection, I need period canvas, stretchers, and sizing. Carbon dating can’t be fooled, so a high-quality forgery has to be painted on a canvas made at the same time as the original. And the sizing has to be kept intact because it retains the old fissures, the foundation the new paint will rest on. All Meissonier’s varnish and paint layers have to be scraped away until the old sizing is revealed. Once the canvas is stripped of these layers, I can start building my own painting over the nineteenth-century canvas and sizing.

A traditional oil painting is a series of layers: sizing, underpainting, glazing—in which up to thirty translucent coats of paint are applied—and varnishing. The purpose of this is to control the refraction of light through the painting. Stripping is one of those paradoxical tasks that is both exacting and boring, requiring intense concentration dosed with high levels of tedium. Plus, my back’s going to be killing me within a few hours.

I take a deep breath and bend to my task, a solvent-soaked cloth in one hand and a restrainer-soaked one in the other. I start on the lower right-hand corner, pressing the solvent to the canvas, wiping carefully to remove the paint, watching for any sign of white, which means I’ve hit the sizing. Damn. My left hand swoops down with the restrainer, arresting the solvent before it can dissolve the sizing. It’s a finely tuned skill to use just the right amount of solvent, which eats away the paint, but not too much, which can liquefy the sizing or even worse, the bare canvas. I labor on, pressing and wiping, and often, all too often, restraining,

Hours later, cotton pieces lie around my bare feet like a paint-stained pond. My head pounds from the fumes, and my backbone feels as if it’s going to break in a dozen places. But a solid patch of the painting is gone, exchanged for an unbroken sea of sizing—slightly yellowed, but nothing a bit of hydrogen peroxide won’t take care of—full of tiny peaks and valleys that will produce a spider-webbing of craquelure in the final painting.