8
AT THE EASEL
Myatt put Amy and Sam in their pajamas, tucked them in, and read them their bedtime stories. When they had drifted off to sleep, he went down to the living room and cleared off the table. Closing the curtains, he turned on the lamp and returned to the Giacometti he’d been working on for the past few days.
He had become extremely cautious, even paranoid, about being seen at work. He painted only at night. After he’d pocketed Drewe’s money for the Gleizes he could no longer deny that what he was doing was illegal. In the back of his mind, he was always afraid of being caught. A neighbor might drop in unannounced, put two and two together, and turn him in. Or the children might innocently tell the babysitter that Dad was painting all the time, and then she’d go to the police and inform them that she suspected her employer was engaged in forgery.
It was all quite irrational, of course, but Myatt’s livelihood now depended entirely on Drewe, and he couldn’t take any chances. With a little luck Drewe would sell one or two more pieces, and then Myatt would get out of the game. He’d be able to cover the rent for a few more months while he looked for a legitimate source of income.
He returned to the canvas, dabbed the brush into a pot of gray, and made several bold strokes around the figure in the center.
It had occurred to him, once he consciously acknowledged that he was in the business of making fakes, that a good forger had to go beyond technique to avoid detection, so he’d been around to the galleries and museums to stand as close to Giacometti’s paintings as he could without attracting the attention of the security guards. The Swiss artist was famous for his elongated, ethereal bronze sculptures, but his paintings were equally masterful, with a distinctive palette of blacks, whites, and grays, and a few strokes of primary color. To paint a decent Giacometti, Myatt would have to adopt the artistic vision of the man whose creative expression he had chosen to appropriate. He would have to set aside his own preconceptions about what could be achieved in a work of art and see the work through its “creator’s” eyes. He would have to become Giacometti.
Myatt had found some good biographical material on Giacometti and had read up on his techniques, looking for telltale quirks that would convince the experts that what they were seeing was the master’s handiwork. He’d read about Giacometti’s marriage and his numerous affairs. He’d discovered that the artist was injured in a car accident that left him limping around the studio with a cane, and that he smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, drank countless cups of coffee, worked until dawn, and rarely slept.
Every detail of Alberto’s work habits would come in handy.
Was he right- or left-handed?
How did he hold the brush?
What kind of light did he favor?
Was he prone to reworking a painting ad infinitum?
Was there ever a sense of closure, of satisfaction with the outcome?
For Giacometti, there was not. He considered many of his masterpieces failures and could never manage to leave a work alone.
“The more one works on a picture, the more impossible it becomes to finish it,” he once said. One artist and writer called his artistic process an “obsessive paring down.” When Giacometti was sculpting, his hands “would flutter up and down a piece, pinching and gouging and incising the clay, in a seemingly hopeless, even heartbreaking, struggle for verisimilitude.”
12Giacometti began to resemble his own creations. His frame
became thinner, his face more haggard, his hair ever paler with plaster dust. It was as though he’d been boiled down to his essence. In the end he resembled an armature of a man, a bonhomme of gnarled steel and chicken wire, smoking in the corner café. Once, when he was already rich, a lady saw him sitting forlorn, took pity on him and offered to buy him a cup of coffee. He accepted at once, his eyes brimming with gratitude and joy.
13Myatt could definitely relate, but that didn’t seem to help much. His canvas was a plain composition of a nude woman emerging from blue-gray shadows, a copy of one of three basic figures Giacometti had painted again and again: the standing nude, the seated figure, and the walking man. Ever since he was an art student, Myatt had admired them. He thought they were simple constructions that would be easy enough to imitate. He was wrong.
The Swiss artist had his own unique energy, painting in a tangle of lines that seemed both calculated and frenzied. His nudes were full-figured and so evocative that Myatt could almost feel the bones beneath the flesh. His mysterious images seemed to emerge from the canvas as if they were about to step out into the room.
How had Giacometti managed it?
Myatt lashed at the canvas, then stood back. The nude looked emaciated. He moved in again and worked on the torso, dabbing at the rib cage to put meat on the bones. This improved things a little, but the arms looked wrong.
The more he tried to copy Giacometti’s style, the more elusive it seemed. He’d already scrapped one attempt at the standing nude because it was utterly lifeless, like a puppet on a string. He’d tried hard to correct it, to harness Giacometti, but it was no use. He’d lost his focus. Now he was failing at his second attempt. He began to question his own talent and consider the potentially disastrous consequences of his new endeavor. What would happen if he got caught? He would never survive the loss of his children and his farmhouse.
In a fit of anger and frustration, he took a bucket of white paint and splashed it onto the canvas. The nude disappeared. When he finally calmed down, he smoothed the surface over with a brush and set the canvas aside to dry. He would use it again to give the nude one more shot.
Myatt’s third attempt began promisingly enough, but again the figure he envisioned vanished with each brushstroke the more he worked on it. It would have been easier if he’d been able to use a live model, as Giacometti had. The artist had always painted from life (his wife was one of his favorite models), demanding absolute stillness and concentration from his subject. He would spend months on a single painting, sometimes sitting a few feet from the model while he worked. He would ask her to look straight at him until she was within his gravitational arc, and then he would reel her into the canvas.
Myatt feared it would be too risky to bring in a model, so each night, after he pulled out his old Winsor & Newton easel and put his cans of paint on the table and began to mix black and white and all the shades in between he could find, he would imagine the nude in his living room. He had been trying to keep this image fresh in his mind for several days now, struggling to re-create the precise tilt of the head and the right proportion of limb to torso, but he just couldn’t transpose his mental image onto the canvas. He dabbed again at the nude’s arms, then lengthened the legs and stepped back. It was better, but he still didn’t have it. The feet looked wrong, as if they were anchored to the canvas.
Sometimes he could tell right away whether a piece was ready. If not, he would wait until early the next morning, when he could look at it with a fresh eye. Tonight he worked on the nude until he was too tired to think and his vision faded. Then he leaned the canvas against the wall, covered it, and put the paints away.
In bed, Myatt tossed and turned. When it was hard to sleep, as it often was these days, he would lie there and try to drift back to his childhood. He’d been four years old when his father moved the family out of the city to Sugnall. There was always music in the farmhouse. Mom and Dad would stand at the piano, and Dad would make like an Italian tenor while his boy sang along with perfect pitch. John had taught himself piano, and they’d set him up in the parlor next to a windup gramophone to play along with Anton Karas’s zither music and Frankie Laine’s honking High Sierra yowls. It was clear to his parents, who sang Mendelssohn in the village choir society, that the boy had a good ear and a degree of artistic talent. They had no television, so when they sat him down on the floor with his crayons and pencils, he would tumble into a world of Beano comics, chocolate Smarties, and Spitfire fighter aircraft, drawing mosaics of color and spark, Gauls at the bonfire and Saxons coming up over the hill. By the age of six he could sketch a credible and expressive human figure, a skill that came as easily to him as repeating a melody after a single listen. With his colored pencils and sheets of paper, he was as good as gone.
For the teenage Myatt, 1960s Britain was a grand place to be. He left a private cathedral school for a public education, developed a strong physique, and grew a good head of hair. His talent for portraiture was such that whenever he had his sketchbook out the girls would come around to see what he was up to. He played a little guitar and favored bell-bottoms and tie-dyes. His parents put up with his scruffy appearance because he was enthusiastic and persistent about his studies. During holidays he worked construction on the M6, England’s north-south highway, and drove an ice-cream truck that played Mozart over its speakers. In his spare time he sketched whenever he could, for the pure joy of it. Then he went to art school, where joy gradually turned to defeat as his work was found wanting, despite his relentless attention to technical detail—or perhaps because of it.
Myatt rolled over for the umpteenth time and punched his pillow. He wondered what his professors would think of him now. Well, at least he was still obsessed with getting it right. He’d been lying awake half the night brooding about the Giacometti he’d promised Drewe.
In the morning, when Amy and Sam were settled in the kitchen with bowls of mashed bananas and yogurt, he walked into the living room and turned the canvas over.
The nude was a bust. He had failed to crack the code. He’d have to start from scratch again. Frustrated, he called Drewe to say he would be late with the delivery.
“I can’t get the feet right,” he told the professor.
“Don’t worry,” said Drewe. “Just hide them. Paint in a bowl of fruit or a piece of furniture. No one will know the difference.”
Drewe wanted the painting sooner rather than later because he had an interested buyer, but Myatt argued that the piece would never pass muster. As far as he knew, Giacometti had never painted a standing nude with an object in the foreground. Any dealer would know that. Worse still, the nude, like all his other forgeries, had been painted with ordinary house paint. Suspicious of the composition, a dealer might scrutinize the paint. Myatt had stopped using proper oil paints about a year before meeting Drewe because they were too expensive and took too long to dry. Besides, the smell of the solvents used to mix oils gave him a headache.
Regular house paint, on the other hand, came in large, affordable cans. Within five miles of his home he could find any color he wanted, from Tuscan Gold to Aegean Green. It wasn’t the most elegant medium, but after some experimentation he discovered that adding a little lubricant jelly to the paint helped make the brushstrokes “move” across the canvas, just as if they’d been done with oils. The jelly made the paint more viscous, and with the right mix it held to the canvas with greater definition and produced a richer color. A little varnish sprayed on the work added depth and luminosity.
Apart from Myatt’s general preference for the modernists, paint was the principal reason for his reluctance to go back too far in time with his forgeries. Any attempt to duplicate sixteenth- or seventeenth-century works would have required more effort than he was prepared to expend. He would have had to scour herbal shops for the base ingredients of the old masters’ pigments: beechwood soot to make bister; a certain South American insect to make carmine red. He would have had to grind lapis lazuli for the beautiful pure blue—now replaced by the synthetic French ultramarine blue—for which patrons had once paid extra if the artist would include it in their portraits. It would have been fun to find these ancient sources, but Myatt didn’t have the financial or emotional resources to do it. He told Drewe about his choice of materials.
“Don’t worry,” Drewe assured him. “No one’s going to ask for a paint sample.” Even if they did, he said, a chip of new paint could be interpreted as a sign of recent restoration rather than proof of forgery. It was well-known that restorers dealing with a badly damaged work often repainted part of the canvas in an attempt to re-create the artist’s intention.
Besides, Drewe said, he had come up with a new approach to age Myatt’s works: by impregnating the paint with turpentine and linseed oil, then placing the canvas in a pressurized container to force the oil into the paint’s nuclear structure. Under analysis, he told Myatt, the house paint would show up as oil paint.
Myatt had nearly run through the £12,500 from the Gleizes and was in no position to argue with Drewe. If the professor could create a facsimile of fifty-year-old paint in his lab, all the better, but in the end it wasn’t about materials. It was about attitude. If he approached a painting with the right energy, he usually came up with something decent.
Myatt hung up. That night, after the children were asleep he returned to the canvas and painted a table in the foreground, cutting the figure off at the knees. The standing nude had become the Footless Woman.
When the paint was dry he took the canvas down to London in his old Land Rover and met Drewe in the parking lot outside the Spaniard’s Inn, a four-hundred-year-old pub in Hampstead Garden Suburb. He expected Drewe to take one look at it and turn it down, but the professor seemed pleased enough.
“Great work, John,” he said. “We’ll sell it, no problem at all.”
Myatt thought the nude was crap, truncated and off-kilter, but he was touched by Drewe’s kindness. They shook hands, and Myatt drove off into the night.