Christophe Petyt is sitting in a Paris caré, listing
the adornments of his private art collection: several Van Goghs, and a
comprehensive selection of the better impressionists. "I can," he says quietly,
"really get to know any painting I like, and so can you. " Half an hour later I
am sitting in his office with Degas’ The Jockeys on my lap. If fine art looks
good in a gallery, believe me, it feels even better in your hands. Petyt is the
world’s leading dealer in fake masterpieces, a man whose activities provoke both
admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the
painting and for as little as $1,000 he will deliver you a copy so well executed
that even the original artist might have been taken in.
Petyt’s
company employs over eighty painters, each ordered in the style of a particular
artist or school. "We choose them very carefully," he says. "They’re
usually people with very good technique but not much creativity, who are
unlikely to make it as artists in their own right. But they love the great works
and have real insight into what’s gone into them. " Every work is individually
ordered, using new canvases and traditional oil paints, before being
artificially aged by a variety of simple but ingenious techniques.
The notional value of the original is not the determining factor,
however, when it comes to setting the retail value of Petyt’s paintings. This is
actually linked to the amount of effort and expertise that has gone into
producing the copy. An obscure miniature may therefore cost much more than a
bigger, better-known painting by a grand master. The Degas I’m holding looks as
though it came off the artist’s easel yesterday. Before being sold it has to be
aged, and this, so to speak, is the real "art" of the copy. A few minutes in a
hot oven can put years on a canvas, black tea apparently stains it beautifully
and new frames can be buried underground, then sprayed with acid.
The view when Petyt started out was that very little of this could be
legal. He was pursued through the French courts by museums and by descendants of
the artists. This concern was perhaps understandable in a country that has been
rocked by numerous art fraud scandals. " The establishment was suspicious
of us," huffs Petyt, "but for the wrong reasons, I think Some people want to
keep all the best art for themselves. " He won the case and as the law now
stands, the works and signatures of any artist who has been dead for seventy
years can be freely copied. The main proviso is that the copy cannot be passed
off to dealers as the real thing. To prevent this every new painting is
indelibly marked on the back of the canvas, and as an additional precaution a
tiny hidden piece of gold leaf is worked into the paint.
Until
he started the business ten years ago, Paetyt, a former business-school student,
barely knew one artist from another. Then one particular painting by Van Gogh
caught his eye. At $10 million, it was well beyond his reach so he came up with
the iclea of getting an art-student friend to paint him a copy. In an old frame
it looked absolutely wonderful, and Petyt began to wonder what market there
might be for it. He picked up a coffee-table book of well-known paintings,
earmarked a random selection of works and got his friend to knock them off.
"Within a few months I had about twenty good copies. " he says, "so I organised
an exhibition. In two weeks we’d sold the lot, and got commissions for sixty
more. " It became clear that a huge and lucrative market existed for fake
art.In the first paragraph, the writer indicates that he shares ______.
