Here’s a question: How did a longhaired German hippie, a drifter who had once lived on a beach in Morocco, with a wife and two children, end up becoming one of the most reviled figures in the art world? Simple: For more than two decades he forged paintings by artists such as Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, and Heinrich Campendonk, among many others, and placed them in the art market for exorbitant amounts of money. Fifty-eight fake paintings have been discovered but many believe more are still out there, circulating between buyers and possibly even hanging in well-trafficked museums.That hippie’s name is Wolfgang Beltracchi, who, along with his wife Helene (and two accomplices), were arrested in August of 2010 and sent to prison more than a year later — he for six years, she for four. Their story is the subject of “Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery,” a new documentary that opened at Film Forum in New York on August 19.“Beltracchi is a personality that the art world hates and a filmmaker loves because he’s so ambivalent,” said the film’s director, Arne Birkenstock, in a recent interview. “He has so much light and so much dark, fascinating things that we admire and other things we detest.” Birkenstock was introduced to the subjects through his father, who acted as the couple’s criminal lawyer. At first, when Birkenstock heard about the story, he was skeptical about making a film about the Beltracchis because of the personal connection. But, he said, after speaking to other journalists, he realized that, if he waited until his father’s job was done and confirmed that both the Beltracchis and his father would have no say whatsoever in the final cut of the film — and remaining completely transparent during the production process — there would be no conflict of interest.As Birkenstock dug deeper into the case and spent more time with Beltracchi, he realized that the story had larger implications and raised questions that were hard to answer. “On the one hand you have an extremely greedy criminal forger, and on the other hand you had a certain segment of the art market, which, I would say, is not lacking greed either,” he said with a laugh. “Which, of course, maybe opened up too many doors for forgers.”This refusal to place Beltracchi as hero or villain has landed Birkenstock criticism. “It’s really interesting how people react to him in the film,” the director said of the reception from audiences. “Some people have accused me of making a propaganda film, of making him too positive, while others find him so terrible that they can’t even sit through the entire movie.” Birkenstock admits that his ambivalence is not a strategy, but that he simply understands both interpretations. Either way, people are drawn to Beltracchi, he said, because “he is betraying people with a lot of money.” There is a hint of the likeable trickster in Beltracchi’s mischievous smile, and you will be hard pressed to find many people who will feel bad for a millionaire who lost some money and, in the end, remains a millionaire. But at the same time, Birkenstock also sees the popularity of Beltracchi as being rooted in a prejudice towards contemporary art.“The guy who goes to the museum and says, ‘Look at that crap, it’s just some blue spots on a canvas, my daughter can do that,’ is the same guy who says, look at Beltracchi, he is just as good as any of these other artists,” Birkenstock said. He addresses this in the film through an archival sequence featuring Max Ernst, one of the artists who Beltracchi forged. In the footage, Ernst, while in his studio, talks about his process of making work, and the risks it entails, never knowing if it will be accepted every time he steps in front of a blank canvas.“That is, for me, the big difference between the artist and forger,” Birkenstock said, “because the forger, who does it 100 years later, always knows what to do next. He’s not afraid in front of the white canvas. He does something that already, for a long, long time, had been approved by the art world — by the market, by the critic, by the historian.”This doesn’t mean Birkenstock wasn’t impressed by the way Beltracchi made his fake paintings. Indeed, a lot of the film is dedicated to how strenuous the work of making a forgery actually is — it’s an elaborate, specialized craft that involves both technical skill and exhaustive research into what works have been mentioned by historians but have not yet been displayed in catalogs and exhibitions. “Then selling them,” Birkenstock said, “the strategic qualities, the way he managed to invent provenance and the way he laid out little tracks for the art world to find. He somehow knew what they wanted to hear and gave it to them. He was a great storyteller.”While admitting his fascination with the particulars of the crime, Birkenstock also saw, after spending so much time with Beltracchi, “that he is quite ruthless, that he has a really weird, even ugly relationship to art and toward the artists he forges.”Despite his attitude toward the work, Beltracchi’s forgeries expose holes in the art market that, for a variety of reasons, remain open. “They don’t do much from preventing their customers, the collectors, from forgeries,” Birkenstock explained. They would rather remain quiet than risk the loss of reputation, or more importantly, the loss of money.“Imagine an entire collection popping up out of nowhere that has never been heard of, which only consists of masterpieces, and, funnily, none of those masterpieces have been shown or published anywhere,” Birkenstock added. “They are all masterpieces that have disappeared, all found in one collection, all of a sudden. Nobody asks any questions?” Questions, however, lead to answers. And the answers hurt business.
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