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‘Art Of The Con’ Paints Revealing Picture Of Scammed Collectors

‘Art Of The Con’ Paints Revealing Picture Of Scammed Collectors

By Carolina A. Miranda, Los Angeles Times (TNS)

The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World by Anthony M. Amore; Palgrave Macmillan (272 pages, $26)
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Late last month, an art dealer named David Carter pled guilty to seven counts of fraud in a British court for passing off cheap bric-a-brac paintings he found on the Internet as originals by Alfred Wallis, an early 20th century painter known for producing marine scenes that toyed with perspective and depth. This comes just weeks after a pair of German men were accused of trying to ply a fake Alberto Giacometti sculpture to an undercover detective. The plot — it’s a thick one — involved one of the men’s 92-year-old ex-mother-in-law and an infamous Dutch forger who once kept an entire warehouse full of knock-off Giacometti bronzes.

Dip into the news on any given month and chances are you will find similar stories about art world ignominy, from the British copyist churning out oils attributed to Winston Churchill to the Manhattan dealer pushing looted Indian artifacts. There is something irresistible about that point where art and crime intersect: the money, the egos, the jet-set country club types — not to mention all the talk about provenance and brush strokes and craquelure (those cracks that form in the varnish of painting as it ages).

Anthony M. Amore would know a thing or two about the world of art swindles. For the last decade, he has served as head of security at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, which was famously robbed in 1990 of several Rembrandts and a Vermeer. Three years ago he published, with investigative journalist Tom Mashberg, the book “Stealing Rembrandts: The Untold Story of Notorious Art Heists,” which explored the colorful history of thefts of works by the 17th century Dutch master, an activity that has involved machine guns and speed boats.

Now Amore is back with a new book that explores similar territory. The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World looks at some of the most high-profile cases of art skulduggery from the last couple of decades. Each chapter tells the story of a single case, such as that of convicted German art counterfeiter Wolfgang Beltracchi, whose faked canvases based on the works of surrealist Max Ernst and modernist Heinrich Campendonk were so well executed that they successfully fooled even the artists’ families (as well as actor Steve Martin, who unwittingly purchased a bogus Campendonk).

Likewise, there’s the tale of West Hollywood gallerist Tatiana Khan, who claimed to be dealing works from the collection of the late real estate mogul Malcolm Forbes and who, at age 70, was busted by the FBI in a wild web of lies after selling a fake Picasso for $2 million. By the time the authorities caught up with her, she was in ill health, living in a jumbled house stuffed full of sculptures and antiques — like some sort of frayed “Miss Havisham character,” writes Amore. (She ultimately pled guilty and was sentenced to five years probation.)

In this manner, Art of the Con takes the reader through a whole spectrum of cases, from the high to the low. There is the esteemed New York art dealer who ended up in jail after deceiving a star-spangled array of high-profile clients. And there’s the case of the couple from La Canada Flintridge who produced unauthorized ink jet prints of lesser-known artists’ works for a fraud operation that extended into the world of cruise ship auctions. (Surreal and enlightening.)

While Amore recounts each of the cases efficiently from beginning to end, what’s missing is more psychology. Early on in the book, he notes that a good art con isn’t just about creating a good fake, it’s about inventing a probable narrative to go with it: “The art of art scams is in the backstory,” he writes, “not in the picture itself.”

And while he diligently conveys some of these backstories (down to the vintage family photos faked by one forger), he overlooks some big-picture questions: What makes something art? Why is art such an entrancing symbol of power? What kind of person flips a $17-million painting by Jackson Pollock as an investment? And why are so many people so willing to ignore the warning signs of a sham deal?

Art of the Con is methodically researched and reported but does little to illuminate the process of seduction that takes place when it comes to acquiring art. Buyers can do their due diligence: They can check the provenance, they can analyze the market, they can consult with the pedigreed experts. But there comes a point in many deals where acquisition is guided entirely by intangibles such as status and beauty and a desire to possess — not to mention a healthy dose of greed. Ultimately, it is in this messy gray area that a more compelling story could have been mined and told.

(c)2015 Los Angeles Times. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Book Review: David McCullough’s ‘The Wright Brothers’ Takes Flight

Book Review: David McCullough’s ‘The Wright Brothers’ Takes Flight

By Tom Beer, Newsday (TNS)

The Wright Brothers by David McCullough; Simon & Schuster (320 pages, $30)
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How much do you really know about the Wright Brothers? If you’re like me, you probably have a vague outline of their story, gleaned from the history books of your youth: Orville and Wilbur Wight were a pair of Dayton, Ohio, bicycle mechanics who invented and flew the first airplane at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. Beyond that the details are hazy, as they so often are with the figures of American legend.

David McCullough’s new book on the brothers brings them into sharper focus, and their story — one of thoughtful study, rigorous scientific experimentation and calm persistence, founded on sober Midwestern values — is worth knowing. McCullough, a two-time Pulitzer Prize winner and author of nine previous books, is the person to tell it.

Wilbur (born 1867) and Orville (1871) grew up in Dayton. McCullough writes, “They lived in the same house, worked together six days a week, ate their meals together, kept their money in a joint bank account, even ‘thought together,’ Wilbur said.” Neither married; their family life centered on their father, a traveling United Brethren preacher, and their younger sister, Katharine, a schoolteacher. (Their mother died of tuberculosis in 1889.) McCullough makes much of the Wrights’ “home circle” — the backdrop that made their remarkable accomplishment possible.

Inspired by the experiments of German “glider enthusiast” Otto Lillienthal, the brothers would begin a course of study_observing the flight of birds and reading systematically _ that led to their flying experiments at Kitty Hawk, chosen for steady winds and sand beaches that promised soft landings. There, on Dec. 17, 1903, after three years of painstaking work, Orville was at the controls of their motorized 605-pound Flyer for that first, 12-second flight, immortalized in a photograph.

McCullough charts the ups and downs of the Wrights’ course, through the many refinements they continued to make to their machine. He follows them across the Atlantic to France, where Wilbur gave demonstrations to a skeptical public in 1908. The French were easily won over. “The crowd was ecstatic, cheering, shouting, hardly able to believe what they had seen,” McCullough writes, and the brothers became hugely popular celebrities. “Both remained notably modest,” he observes.

McCullough brings to the story an attention to detail and no-nonsense tone that the Wrights’ themselves would have admired. That tone comes through clearly on the audiobook (S&S Audio, $29.99), narrated by McCullough, sounding like a professor emeritus at perfect ease with his material, much of it drawn from the Wrights’ own papers. “Seldom did any of the Wrights — father, sons, daughter — put anything down on paper that was dull or pointless or poorly expressed,” McCullough writes. The same can be said of the author.

(c)2015 Newsday. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.

Weekend Reader: ‘On The Move: A Life’

Weekend Reader: ‘On The Move: A Life’

In a February op-ed published in The New York Times, Oliver Sacks, the eminent neurologist and cultural luminary, revealed to the world that he was dying of terminal cancer.

Sacks discussed his new resolve to live life free of inessentials, and his gratefulness for being able to participate in what he called “the special intercourse of writers and readers.” It’s a relationship that Sacks has built and maintained over the decades through his myriad essays and books, such asAwakeningsandThe Man Who Mistook His Wife For A Hat, which meld his extensive knowledge of the biology of the brain with a generous, inquiring spirit, and shine a light on what he dubbed “the suffering, afflicted, fighting human subject.”

In his latest book, On the Move: A Life, the “human subject” is Sacks himself. Picking up where his previous memoir, Uncle Tungsten, left off, On the Moveis a chronicle of unmoored youth, capturing young Sacks’ detours, setbacks, and flashes of early brilliant discovery.

You can read an excerpt below. The book is available for purchase here.

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Muscle Beach

When I finally made it to New York in June of 1961, I borrowed money from a cousin and bought a new bike, a BMW R60 — the trustiest of all the BMW models. I wanted no more to do with used bikes, like the R69 which some idiot or criminal had fitted with the wrong pistons, the pistons that had seized up in Alabama.

I spent a few days in New York, and then the open road beckoned me. I covered thousands of miles in my slow, erratic return to California. The roads were wonderfully empty, and going across South Dakota and Wyoming, I would scarcely see another soul for hours. The silence of the bike, the effortlessness of riding, lent a magical, dreamlike quality to my motion.

There is a direct union of oneself with a motorcycle, for it is so geared to one’s proprioception, one’s movements and postures, that it responds almost like part of one’s own body. Bike and rider become a single, indivisible entity; it is very much like riding a horse. A car cannot become part of one in quite the same way.

I arrived back in San Francisco at the end of June, just in time to exchange my bike leathers for the white coat of an intern in Mount Zion Hospital.

During my long road trip, with snatched meals here and there, I had lost weight, but I had also worked out when possible at gyms, so I was in trim shape, under two hundred pounds, when I showed off my new bike and my new body in New York in June. But when I returned to San Francisco, I decided to “bulk up” (as weight lifters say) and have a go at a weight- lifting record, one which I thought might be just within my reach. Putting on weight was particularly easy to do at Mount Zion, because its coffee shop offered double cheeseburgers and huge milk shakes, and these were free to residents and interns. Rationing myself to five double cheeseburgers and half a dozen milkshakes per evening and training hard, I bulked up swiftly, moving from the mid-heavy category (up to 198 pounds) to the heavy (up to 240 pounds) to the superheavy (no limit). I told my parents about this — as I told them almost everything — and they were a bit disturbed, which surprised me, because my father was no lightweight and weighed around 250 himself.

I had done some weight lifting as a medical student in London in the 1950s. I belonged to a Jewish sports club, the Maccabi, and we would have power-lifting contests with other sports clubs, the three competition lifts being the curl, the bench press, and the squat, or deep knee bend.

Very different from these were the three Olympic lifts — the press, the snatch, and the clean and jerk — and here we had world-class lifters in our little gym. One of them, Ben Helfgott, had captained the British weight-lifting team in the 1956 Olympic Games. He became a good friend (and even now, in his eighties, he is still extraordinarily strong and agile).  I tried the Olympic lifts, but I was too clumsy. My snatches, in particular, were dangerous to those around me, and I was told in no uncertain terms to get off the Olympic lifting platform and go back to power lifting.

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The Central YMCA in San Francisco had particularly good weight-lifting facilities. The first time I went there, my eye was caught by a bench-press bar loaded with nearly 400 pounds. No one at the Maccabi could bench-press anything like this, and when I looked around, I saw no one in the Y who looked up to such a weight. No one, at least, until a short but hugely broad and thick-chested man, a white-haired gorilla, hobbled into the gym — he was slightly bowlegged — lay down on the bench, and, by way of warmup, did a dozen easy reps with the bench-press bar. He added weights for subsequent sets, going to nearly 500 pounds. I had a Polaroid camera with me and took a picture as he rested between sets. I got talking to him later; he was very genial. He told me that his name was Karl Norberg, that he was Swedish, that he had worked all his life as a longshoreman, and that he was now seventy years old. His phenomenal strength had come to him naturally; his only exercise had been hefting boxes and barrels at the docks, often one on each shoulder, boxes and barrels which no “normal” person could even lift off the ground.

I felt inspired by Karl and determined to lift greater poundages myself, to work on the one lift I was already fairly good at — the squat. Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym — “Sacks and his fives.” I didn’t realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent, in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.

Excerpted from On The Move by Oliver Sacks. Copyright © 2015 by Oliver Sacks. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.

If you enjoyed this excerpt, purchase the full book here.

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