Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age by Jonathon Keats

Author:Jonathon Keats
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Art, Business Aspects, General
ISBN: 9780199928354
Publisher: OUP USA
Published: 2013-01-03T00:00:00+00:00

1. In the case of Augustus John, Hebborn boasted of having also improved the artist’s oeuvre. As he wrote in Drawn to Trouble, “the curious thing about the eighty or so drawings I have made over the years in this particular artist’s manner is that they have proved more popular than the greater part of John’s authentic works, and the collector is able to buy several genuine examples for the money they would now have to pay for a single ‘John’ of my own making.”

That stunt put him in reform school, followed by a series of foster homes in the seaside town of Maldon, where he joined a local art club under the tutelage of a landscape painter trained at the Royal College of Scotland. He learned to paint. No longer was he deemed a juvenile delinquent. The town newspaper praised him as “a keen and promising artist.”

The article also noted his admission to the Chelmsford Art School. He studied there for several years, the start of a traditional education in drawing, painting, and printmaking culminating in his graduation from the Royal Academy of Art. Distinguished by the Hacker Prize 2 and the Silver Medal in Painting, he competed for the Rome Prize, which he won in 1959. At the age of twentyfive, the greengrocer’s son had establishment credentials that were impeccable—and that would have ensured him a sterling career a century earlier, before modernism supplanted academic acumen with avant-garde innovation.

Yet old-fashioned acumen was not wholly a thing of the past. Or rather, there were still precincts where the past had not been overtaken by the present. While at the Royal Academy, Hebborn discovered that his skills with pen and brush were still valued by art restorers. According to his autobiography, he worked for one in his free hours, a man named George Aczel who kept a studio in Haunch of Venison Yard. In Aczel’s shop, Hebborn was given the task of filling in gaps. Often these were areas where the canvas had been damaged beyond repair and had to be patched, in which case he might paint in a stretch of sky or a fold of flesh. Sometimes the gaps were more speculative. Customers requested that desirable signatures be found or, more fancifully, the addition of horses and hot air balloons. As Hebborn improved at his job, adding new details that Aczel artificially aged, the gaps grew increasingly gaping until, as he dryly wrote in Drawn to Trouble, “I would one day be able to ‘restore’ a whole painting— from nothing at all.”

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