The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [11]
For those who forge works closer to their own day, life is simpler still. Since the paper only has to appear years or Decades old, rather than centuries, rough-and-ready treatments will do. Giorgio Vasari, author of the sixteenth-century Lives of the Artists, claimed that Michelangelo made good use of a smoky fire. “He also copied drawings of the old masters so perfectly that his copies could not be distinguished from the originals, since he smoked and tinted the paper to give it an appearance of age,” wrote Vasari. “He was often able to keep the originals and return his copies in their stead.”
If holding a sheet of paper above a fire is too much trouble, the forger might opt for dipping it briefly in tea or coffee instead. The forger David Stein, who specialized in such modern masters as Picasso and Chagall until his arrest in 1969, spoke as enthusiastically about the virtues of tea as any connoisseur. At one point he broke down the costs of a “Chagall” watercolor that he would knock off in an hour or two and sell for $5,000: “Tea, two cents; paper, $3; colors, $8; framing, $30.”
On to ink. Here the forger’s strategy is akin to the sharpshooter’s trick of first firing his pistol at the wall and then drawing a bull’s-eye around the bullet hole. As ink ages, it fades. To produce a drawing that looks old, Hebborn explains gleefully, you start with watered-down ink.
The ink itself, of course, must be made to ancient specifications, to pass any chemical tests. The ink favored by the old masters, Hebborn writes, had one of three main sources: soot from a chimney where willow logs had been burned; or cuttlefish ink; or the tree growths called oak galls. Like the formulas for an apothecary’s remedies, the old inkmakers’ recipes spell out a sequence of involved steps. Mix the raw materials with a dash of rainwater, one recipe begins. Add a few flakes of rust and a drop or two of vinegar, and then heat the concoction until it reaches the proper consistency.
Few forgers are scientifically inclined; their tactics smack more of the kitchen than the laboratory. Hebborn, especially, continually resorts to cooking analogies. A drawing “may be baked, not burnt, in a moderate oven,” he instructs, in a discussion of how to make ink cut its way into the surface of the page, as it eventually does in old drawings. “It is rather like frying garlic, a moment too long and it is spoiled, so keep a close watch over it.”
HAVING SEEN SOME of the obstacles facing a would-be forger of drawings, let us turn to oil paintings. Later we will look in detail at how forgers go about making “old” paintings, but for now the point to emphasize is a general one—forging paintings is difficult, and forging old paintings is terribly difficult. Forgers themselves blanch at the challenge. “The likelihood of catching a forger of oil paintings is a thousandfold greater than catching one who fakes in the other media,” warned the French forger David Stein. “Oil paintings constitute an artist’s major works and are almost always Catalogued worldwide. Thus, when a counterfeiter tries to sell a fake oil and the gallery owner or art dealer fails to find it listed in the book, he knows immediately that something is fishy. Moreover, a major oil painting, like a Chagall, cannot be peddled to just any gallery. How many galleries have sixty thousand dollars to shell out for such a work, which is what an oil by Chagall usually goes for?”
Stein was a small-timer in comparison with Hebborn. Cocky as Hebborn was, though, he echoed Stein’s warning. Stick with drawings, he advised would-be forgers. Stay away from oil paintings. And then Hebborn added a further warning. Even if the forger has had the sense to steer clear of oils, he still must concentrate on “accessible