Stephanie Kane--A Perfect Eye

DEBORAH CROMBIE: We are having an arty week here on Jungle Red! I've always been fascinated by books centered on art, whether it's heists or scams of clever forgeries. And when stakes AND egos are high, you have a perfect recipe for misdeeds of the highest order. Add a French Impressionist to the mix, and I am totally hooked! Here are some startling facts--and a helluva story, from author Stephanie Kane!

 STEPHANIE KANE-- My Favorite Criminal

It’s estimated that twenty percent of the art in museums today is fake. That’s roughly one in five paintings hanging on the wall. How do forgers get away with it? I care because as a crime writer, I’m always looking for a good crime. That means an interesting criminal.

Not that I’m promiscuous. I do have standards. Sex and money may be the root of all crime, but a purely financial motive doesn’t do it for me. I like my crime straight, not with a dose of humor; capers and heists are out no matter how clever they are. Nor do I like gratuitous sex or violence. My crimes need a psychological motive, the more twisted the better. And the criminal has to be be self-defeating. The seeds of his downfall must be embedded in the obsession itself.

In A PERFECT EYE, a landscape by Impressionist Gustave Caillebotte becomes the template for a murder. To ignite a grievance powerful enough to kill, the painting had to mean something personal to the killer. What kind of guy gets that torqued over a landscape? That led me to forgers. It turns out the best ones don’t do it for the money. They do it to make a point.

The classic art forger is a failed artist who is frustrated by the art world’s refusal to recognize his genius. He gets his revenge by showing how easily the “experts” are fooled. But once he proves his superiority by getting away with it, it isn’t enough. Now he wants credit. Forgers are twisted and self-defeating, but my criminal still needed one more thing. I had to relate to him personally.

When I was a lawyer, the client who gave me nightmares wasn’t the one who decapitated a kid in a low-slung sportscar when the hitch on his trailer failed; at least he was remorseful. My nightmare was an ordinary con man. Con men thrive on marks. They’ll leave $100 on the table to cheat you out of $10. Because lawyers want to believe in their clients, they are prime marks. I certainly was. And he knew it.

My con man sabotaged his case just because he could. I dreaded our interactions. By the time I got him a deal for restitution and counseling, I couldn’t stand to be in the same room with him. Sensing my discomfort, at the last minute he nixed the deal. I was able to get out of the case only after he stiffed me on my fee. But for a novelist, revenge can be sweet.

When I plugged my revulsion for that con man into my forger, he started to become real. A forger is a human shell. Like a con man without a mark, he’s nothing without a real artist to copy. Which brought me to how he does it.

Unsurprisingly, some forgers glory in their work. They even write books about it. A real forger, Eric Hebborn, was more than generous with his tips in The Art Forger’s Handbook. The first step is mastering technique.

As with a con, the art is in the line. A forger’s lines are as fundamental as a painter’s touch.

Experts look for a flowing line in one part of a drawing or painting and a hesitant one elsewhere. When Hebborn tried to make a forgery too faithful to the original, his line was halting—too deliberate and precise. He sped it up and it began to flow. Spontaneity mimics the throes of creation.

The second step is creating a convincing backstory. The art world calls that provenance. An unbroken chain of title from the time the artist completed a painting is rare; gaps in the chain are the rule. For a forger, each gap is an opportunity to salt the record with phony data: letters, diaries, an early sketch of the painting itself. How would my forger create a false provenance? Gustave Caillebotte was a forger’s dream.

When Caillebotte died at age 45, he left just a small body of work. He’d inherited wealth, and unlike Monet, Renoir or Degas, he never had to paint to sell. He was also intensely private. He left no journals or diaries, but in 1883 from his countryside estate he wrote to Monet about his frustrations with a series of landscapes he was painting: For the two months I have been here I have worked as much as I could—but everything I do is really bad. Caillebotte practically begged a forger to paint one more in the series—a “lost” landscape that would be the breakthrough he so desperately sought.

But could my forger get away with it?  

Gustave Caillebotte, Paris, Rainy Day (The Art Institute of Chicago)

Authentication of paintings has traditionally rested on connoisseurship, the so-called “eye” of an art historian or dealer who has expertise in the artist’s work. Forensic tests can be expensive, destructive and non-definitive, and a forger can beat them with period materials. Centuries-old canvasses can be found in flea markets throughout Europe; in his book, Hebborn provides a recipe for boiling acorns to make iron gall ink. It goes back to the expert’s eye. Who doesn’t want to find a lost Impressionist masterpiece? And having found one, why let it go?

Now it’s game on. Hubris and clashing egos put criminal and victim on a par, and the line between good and evil blurs. As he craves recognition from a world he despises, the forger’s dodgy moral code kicks in. People believe what they want to believe. As the con man says, there’s a sucker born every minute. In a world where perception so often trumps truth, my forger could pull it off. The one thing he might not count on is a paintings conservator with a perfect eye of her own.

Like I said, revenge is sweet. 

DEBS: I love the Caillebotte painting above, owned by the Art Institute of Chicago. Reds and readers, do you have a favorite art-related crime novel? Share with us, and chat with Stephanie!

 

Stephanie Kane is a lawyer and award-winning author of four crime novels. Born in Brooklyn, she came to Colorado as a freshman at CU. She owned and ran a karate studio in Boulder and is a second-degree black belt. After graduating from law school, she was a corporate partner at a top Denver law firm before becoming a criminal defense attorney. She has lectured on money laundering and white collar crime in Eastern Europe, and given workshops throughout the ountry on writing technique.

She lives in Denver with her husband and two black cats. Extreme Indifference and Seeds of Doubt won a Colorado Book Award for Mystery and two Colorado Authors League Awards for Genre Fiction. She belongs to Mystery Writers of America, Rocky Mountain Fiction Writers and the Colorado Authors League. CONNECT WITH STEPHANIE KANE ONLINE WEBSITE: writerkane.com