You'd better get your skates on if you want to buy some bona fide original mock art (of if you want to go skating, for that matter) because the exhibition of John Myatt's Genuine Fakes at Mayfair's Air Gallery is only running until tomorrow evening, writes Guy Dammann.
Myatt, interviewed in yesterday's Guardian, famously duped the seemingly bottomless pockets of the art world into parting with substantial amounts in return for "new" paintings by a number of the century's most bankable painters. Freshly discovered Giacomettis, Rothkos and the (looka)like appeared in Sotheby's and Christie's until eventually Myatt - or Picasso to his fellow inmates - booked a spell in the Brixton slammer.
Although Myatt's disgrace resulted in several years of porridge, he is now celebrated as a legit purveyor of fine art replicas - a practice by no means unusual before the age of photographic reproduction - and his spin on the no-longer-hot stuff is disarming: "With a fake painting", he told the Guardian's Mark Honigsbaum, "you're free to ask, does it go with the curtains? You can't do that with a genuine Van Gogh because it's worth millions." Indeed.
Less modest in his self-appraisal was the perpetrator of a fine-art scandal that sent shockwaves, not only across the art market but also right through the heart of the scholarly and art-critical establishment of postwar Europe. Hans van Meegeren, who introduced to the world a significant number of painstakingly produced, "undiscovered", Vermeers, de Hooghs and various other lowland giants, and who rather like Myatt took to the forge because of the frustrations of trying to shift his signed work, took the line in his 1947 trial that the critics must either acknowledge their fallibility or "admit that I am as great an artist as Vermeer."
The trouble was that his forgeries were so good that a number of the relevant Golden Age scholars denied they could have been faked, and the Dutchman was asked to reveal his trade secrets - which included adding a resin to his oils and baking the canvas to give the effect of great age - and make a replica, in courtroom conditions, of Vermeer's Jesus among the Doctors. And even then, numerous scholars would still not have it.
It's a tempting business of course, being an unrecognised artistic talent. Only this morning, having left my bed unmade with a light scattering of underwear and sundry personals, I just managed to restrain myself from getting a relevant collector on the blower and making him a reasonable offer. But if you are reading this, Mr Saatchi, do get in touch.
