Fake: Forgery, Lies, & eBay by Kenneth Walton

Author:Kenneth Walton [Walton, Kenneth]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: True Crime, White Collar Crime, Biography & Autobiography, Criminals & Outlaws, art, Business Aspects
ISBN: 9781416934615
Google: yyjfraUxmy8C
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2006-05-15T23:58:09.620262+00:00

THE NINTH PART.The painting leaned against a table on a patio overlooking Folsom Lake, about twenty miles east of Sacramento. Jim Albertson crouched and blew on the “RD52” in the lower right corner. He touched the tip of his finger to his tongue, tapped it on the letter R, and watched his saliva evaporate in the heat.

“One thing for sure,” he said, craning his head to look up at me, “is that you didn’t add that signature. It was painted on by the artist. I’ll vouch for that.”

I exhaled, my eyes fixed on the painting, and felt a sense of relief as he said this.

Albertson stood, put his hands on his hips, and shook his head. “But I just don’t think it looks like a Diebenkorn.”

I was at the home of John Fitz Gibbon, an art critic and retired university professor who had known Richard Diebenkorn for many years during the artist’s life. It was Saturday, May 13, five days after the auction had ended, and this was Phase One of my attempt to “authenticate” the painting. Fitz Gibbon, slowed by Parkinson’s disease, passed a quivering hand over the center of the canvas. “It looks especially weak in this area here.” His voice wavered and his white head trembled as he spoke.

I’d come here with Steve Vanoni, a Sacramento artist I knew through a mutual friend. He’d called the day before and offered to help me try to get the painting authenticated in exchange for a small portion of the profits if he succeeded. He scheduled this meeting with Fitz Gibbon and picked me up that morning in his white 1970 Cadillac Eldorado. Fitz Gibbon had invited Albertson, a local artist, to lend a second opinion.

We all stood around the painting in silence for a moment, and then Albertson said, “One thing I can say in its favor is that the materials look right. The handmade frame? It’s dead on.” He leaned the painting forward and examined the back. “These stretcher bars? Look, they’re just one-by-ones, sawed off and nailed together. That’s the kind of thing those guys did back then.” He looked at Fitz Gibbon. “Hey, John, don’t you have a couple of Diebenkorns inside? Let’s look at the backs of them.”

We walked through sliding glass doors into Fitz Gibbon’s modest house, which could have qualified as a small museum of postwar northern California art. Richly hued paintings hung on every wall, in a way that seemed less about tasteful placement than maximum coverage. Fitz Gibbon, taking small, hunched steps, escorted us to a guest bedroom and pointed to a painting hanging high on the wall. “Can you get that down, Jim?” I followed his trembling finger and—Jesus!—an original oil by Diebenkorn, a landscape from the early 1960s. It was so much better than mine I felt ashamed to have even come here. Fitz Gibbon’s real Diebenkorn was small—half the size of my fake one—but was probably worth several hundred thousand dollars. And here it was, adorning the wall of an unused bedroom.

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