HOW FAKE ART CAN BECOME GOOD BUSINE

HOW FAKE ART CAN BECOME GOOD BUSINESS.
Christophe Petyt is sitting in a Paris cafe, 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 steeped 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 commissioned, 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, with several major French art dealers cheering from the sidelines. 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 o1 1 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, Petyt, 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 idea o1 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 faux art.
Petyt's paintings are exhibited away from the traditional art centres - in places with lavish houses in need of equally impressive works of art. Although their owners include rock stars, fashion designers and top businesspeople, they either cannot afford or more likely simply cannot obtain great works of art. Petyt is understandably reluctant to name any of his clients, but says that sometimes even the owner of the original will occasionally commission a copy. The best paintings are so valuable,' he explains, 'that it's risky to have them at home and the costs of security and insurance are huge. So some collectors keep the original in a bank vault and hang our copy.'
Is it art? Petyt draws a parallel: 'Take music, for example. Does Celine Dion compose her own tunes - write her own lyrics? She's interpreting someone else's work, but she's still an artist. Classical musicians often try to produce a sound as close as possible to what they think the composer intended. Nobody's suggesting they're anything but artists. With us, maybe, it's the same.'