ART FRAUD

Prickly, polemical memoir on the fine distinctions between artistic inspiration and commercial reproduction.

Marthouret, a onetime petty thief, found a less risky occupation when he began copying French painters, including van Gogh, Chagall, Vlaminck, Gauguin, and Modigliani. Telling his life story in 101 brief, barbed chapters with such titles as “Ownership,” “Self-Importance,” and “Irritating People,” he conveys an impressionistic and misanthropic sense of the artist as outlaw: “I generally despise anything that joins people together in organized groups,” he declares. In the 1960s, Marthouret was employed by Fernand Legros, a notorious dealer in forged art and the European underworld’s conduit to the lucrative US market, for whom the author created numerous fakes. Although he ultimately served five years in jail for his role in those scams, Marthouret found that the international art market was structured so as to actually facilitate his crimes; artists’ heirs, for example, often had a vested financial interest in certifying the provenance of forgeries for personal gain. He became scornful of so-called “experts,” whose approval could be manipulated, and of the stultifying museum culture that focused public attention on a few ultra-expensive paintings rather than cultivating a broader love of art. Following his prison term, Marthouret found numerous clients for his work, mainly rich professionals who wanted to brag that they’d obtained “lost” paintings by the likes of Monet and Dufy. The author consistently portrays his work not as fraud, but as “a tribute to the greatest artists of all time.” Yet he mischievously notes that many of his approximately 4,500 canvases continue to be “rediscovered” and to hang in numerous museums. The author writes provocatively about the process of forgery, claiming that he inhabits the spirit of the original artists while dismissing the art scene overall as “a marshland swarming with crocodiles, piranhas, and other greedy animals.”

Humorous and perceptive at times, but fragmentary in narrative, with habitual spleen-venting that may alienate the dilettantes he so disdains.