The Art Forger by B. A. Shapiro
Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 2012
355pp, trade paperback
notes & discussion questions
A Review by Gene Stewart
First, this novel is a fascinating tour through Boston’s art world, high and low. Mostly low. Everything pivots on the notorious real-life theft from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum of thirteen paintings, cut from their frames, worth an estimated billion dollars. Not a sign of any of them has ever surfaced and the myriad rumors have all proven hollow.
Narrator of the book is Claire Roth, an artist whose personal life has sabotaged her career. Seeking to help another artist, her boyfriend at the time, crawl out from under depression that prevents him from painting, she begins a painting in his studio. She goads and prods him into guiding her and ends up doing the whole painting herself. This painting goes on to make his career and fortune, and as fame gathers around him, he first distances, then dismisses Claire’s contribution. He starts believing he painted it.
From there the plot continues to twist and tangle. Claire, talented yet ignored, becomes a pariah when she tries to prove it was she who painted the work being celebrated. It seems experts are not as expert as they claim.
Claire’s skills and techniques lead her into painting high-end reproductions of Old Masters, in their style, complete with cracks and other faked signs of age. By the time Claire is approached by Aiden Markel, the gallery dealer who made her ex boyfriend famous with her painting, she is primed to fit perfectly into what he proposes.
“All you’ll be doing is painting a reproduction. Nothing illegal in that. Law enters only if you sell a reproduction as an original. That’s fraud.”
Art fraud, a dark business worth billions, is not simply catering to collectors who crave works of art to horde for themselves alone. Turns out many stolen masterworks are used as collateral to fund arms deals and other black market schemes and crimes. At least forty percent of paintings hanging in galleries and museums today are likely forgeries, and there exists no central clearinghouse to keep track. Worse, authentication is more art than science, although technological advances help make forgery more difficult. This applies only to those few paintings tested by such methods, however, and, as this novel shows, many duplicate paintings are displayed as if the sole original all across the world. Curators rarely if ever check with their colleagues to see if a newly-acquired painting — often donated, which is no crime even if it’s a fake — is an original and is legitimate.
Claire knows all this as well as the subtle methods by which forgers fake the evidence authenticators look for.
She is then presented with a painting to copy, and it turns out to be one of those stolen in the notorious Gardner Museum heist, a Degas, one she begins to suspect, as she studies it, may be itself a copy, one done in Degas’s time.
Mystery deepens and layers as Claire’s expertise leads her into research that uncovers historical fraud, personal secrets, and astounding cover-ups. Who is doing what and why baffles her and leads the reader on a fast-paced mystery even as the art world is uncovered layer by layer to reveal fossils few every get to see.
The Art Forger combines intelligence, poise, and crisp writing with mystery, romance, and danger, all presented through real people the reader cares about. It is a superb novel on all its many levels and layers. A superb literary thriller in every sense.
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