The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [10]
As in Wright’s spoof, most forgers in real life work backward—they start with materials, not with an artist, and then choose the artist to fit. Their motto is, “Let the paper choose the master.” Usually that paper comes from books. Tom Keating, a sloppy but nonetheless successful English forger who thrived in the 1960s and ’70s, once found a supply of vintage paper at a venerable art shop that had gone out of business. But such finds are rare. Books are far easier to locate than any other source of blank centuries-old paper, and like John Smith’s tome, they carry precise dates.
So forgers haunt secondhand-book shops in search of forgotten, dusty books, preferably ones with large pages. Elmyr de Hory, a famous Hungarian-born forger, favored such titles as Chateaux of the Loire and Battles of the Great War. He claimed he once sold a “Modigliani” on a page torn from a book he’d bought for a dollar.
So far, so good. Next come wormholes. Forgers are not the only bookworms with a consuming interest in Chateaux of the Loire. Wormholes are tiny tunnels burrowed into old books or other pieces of ancient paper. (The culprits are not worms but beetles and other bugs, especially silverfish.) The forger is glad to see wormholes, since they testify to age, but the holes pose a subtle problem.
In an authentic drawing made centuries ago, the sides of a wormhole would not show any sign of ink, because the ink would have dried long before the bugs began their tunneling. But if a modern-day forger ignores the holes and starts drawing, ink from his pen might seep into the wormhole and give away the game. What is the forger to do?
Forgers tend to clutch their secrets jealously—again like magicians—but the late, showy Eric Hebborn broke the union rules. His Art Forger’s Handbook is a how-to guide. Thomas Hoving says that the book abounds in insights “virtually on the level of e = mc2.”
Hebborn was a liar by trade, and many of his stories are hard to credit. Could it really be true, as Hebborn claims, that as a teenager he worked for a kindhearted madman whose eccentricities included sleeping with his leg out the window with a string hanging from the big toe? Attached to the string was a note instructing visitors to pull only in case of emergency.
But everything about Hebborn was different and strange (including his death, on a street in Rome in January 1996, when someone bashed in his skull with a hammer). He had sold upward of five hundred fake old masters, he boasted, and he claimed that some of them hang even now in such temples of art as the Met in New York and the National Gallery in Washington. What ever the truth of these stories, Hebborn was undeniably a skilled draftsman. (Hoving refers to his “frightening talent.”) And his fellow forgers concede—sometimes with irritation—that the technical information in his handbook is solid.
Hebborn’s solution to the wormhole riddle called for little more than cunning and spit. How to keep ink out of a wormhole? The trick is first to plug the wormhole and only then to start drawing. Chew a bit of paper until it is perfectly soft. Unfold this patch and lay it over the wormhole. Tap it gently into place with a wooden mallet. When the patch has dried completely, trim away any protruding bits with a razor. Proceed with your drawing. Then, when the ink has dried, remove the plug.
Fox marks pose a similar problem. These are the rusty-looking spots found on