A Forger's Tale E-Book

Shaun Greenhalgh

• Herausgeber: Allen & Unwin
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 630

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Observer's Best Art Book of the Year, 2018 In 2007, Bolton Crown Court sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in prison for the crime of producing artistic forgeries. Working out of a shed in his parents' garden, Greenhalgh had successfully fooled some of the world's greatest museums. During the court case, the breadth of his forgeries shocked the art world and tantalised the media. What no one realised was how much more of the story there was to tell. Written in prison, A Forger's Tale details Shaun's notorious career and the extraordinary circumstances that led to it. From Leonardo drawings to L.S. Lowry paintings, from busts of American presidents to Anglo-Saxon brooches, from cutting-edge Modernism to the ancient art of the Stone Age, Greenhalgh could - and did - copy it all. Told with great wit and charm, this is the definitive account of Britain's most successful and infamous forger, a man whose love for art saturates every page of this extraordinary memoir.

Leseprobe

For my Mum and Dad

Contents

Introduction

Preface

I.

A knock at the door

II.

A mention in passing

III.

Consequences

IV.

In the beginning

V.

The wrong direction

VI.

Rome and beyond

VII.

Not doing Degas

VIII.

All that glitters

IX.

Seeing is believing

X.

The road to Amarna

Postscript

Glossary

Picture section

Copyright

Introduction

by Waldemar Januszczak

YOU ARE ABOUT to read the story of a man who grew up differently from the way most people grow up and who was waylaid by forces bigger than him. The forces of art. You have probably heard something of Shaun Greenhalgh already because back in 2006 he was, briefly, front-page news. In 2006, following a police raid on his parents’ home in Bolton, Shaun was arrested and eventually charged with producing a large number of fake artworks. According to media reports at the time, the Greenhalgh family – Shaun, his mum and his dad – had formed a kind of fakers’ Cosa Nostra, a forgery ring operating out of a garden shed in Bolton. From there they had fooled some of the world’s most important museums. The British Museum in London was one. The Chicago Art Institute was another.

While Shaun was acknowledged as the maker of most of the fakes, his parents were presented as the deal closers – the pretend pensioners who cobbled together the provenances and approached the museums. The ‘Artful Codgers’ they were dubbed on the telly, the oldest criminal masterminds in Bolton. Though their crimes were serious, there was a sense of working-class rascality about them. From my distance – from far away – the whole affair had a humorous tinge. You could imagine someone making an Ealing comedy out of their story, starring Alec Guinness as Shaun’s dad, and the young Jim Dale as Shaun himself. With their Lancashire Leonardos and their garage Gauguins, the Bolton forgers should never have got as far as they did in the posh environs of the art world.

But this sense of working-class mischief was well and truly stamped on in June 2007 when a judge at Bolton Crown Court sentenced Shaun Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in gaol. How long? If Shaun hadn’t spared them all the cost of a trial by pleading guilty it would actually have been seven years. His parents were sentenced, too. But because of their great age their sentences were suspended. Hah! As I write this, the captain of the cruise liner the Costa Concordia, which ran aground off the coast of Tuscany in 2012, has just been given a sentence of 16 years for the crime of killing 32 people. A ship captain kills 32 people and gets 16 years. Shaun Greenhalgh sells some objects to a museum that were not what they appeared to be and gets four years and eight months, reduced from seven years. What kind of a world sees things that way?

I came into contact with Shaun a bit later. For my sins, they let me on to the telly occasionally where I make films about the artists I love and in whose footsteps I happily stumble. One of the artists I have most wanted to make a film about was Gauguin, the stockbroker turned painterly genius, best known for his escape to Tahiti. I have always enjoyed the Tahiti pictures with their dreamy fibs about Tahitian life and their magically coloured seashores. But just as much, or even more, I admire the art Gauguin made before he left France on April Fool’s Day, 1891. He was multitalented. He could do many things really well – painting, sculpture, prints, ceramics. He was also a skilled fencer, a fine billiards player, a boxer, a musician. So he was one of those rare people with magic in their hands who can pick things up and do them. Like Shaun Greenhalgh, as it happens.

One of the best exhibitions I have ever seen was held in 2002, in Amsterdam, in the prestigious Van Gogh Museum. It was devoted to the wild and fruitful relationship between Gauguin and van Gogh, his art-buddy, whom he briefly visited in Arles in 1888. This was the disastrous artistic houseshare that culminated in the notorious ear-cutting. Van Gogh and Gauguin were together in the south of France for just a couple of months, but they churned out enormous amounts of great art. Seeing it all together in a show called The Studio of the South was unforgettable. As I was making a Gauguin biography for the BBC, it was a show I had to film.

Among the objects on display in The Studio of the South was a ceramic I had never seen before that had been lent to Amsterdam by that fabulous American museum, the Chicago Art Institute. It showed a faun, a follower of Pan, half man, half goat, sitting naughtily on a ceramic mound. The cheeky ceramic was signed ‘PGo’, the shorthand signature that Gauguin sometimes used, derived, apparently, from the nautical slang for a penis. A typical Gauguin joke. Wanting to make a point about this signature, I settled on the Faun as the clearest example in the show. Peering closely at it, particularly at its familiar hooked nose, I fancied, too, that I saw something of Gauguin himself in it. So when it came to do my piece for the camera, I introduced it on film with obvious enthusiasm and added some clever remarks about its possible autobiographical meaning. What I didn’t know then was that, back in Bolton, its maker was watching me on the telly with some pals in a pub and probably thinking, ‘What a plonker.’

In the past, I have been reasonably good at spotting fakes. When William Boyd published Nat Tate: An American Artist 1928–1960, in 1998, I knew within a couple of pages that Nat Tate had never existed. It was all a clunky hoax. Whenever somebody finds yet another stash of lost Jackson Pollocks in yet another Long Island garage, I can usually tell from the first newspaper photo that they were made in China. So I’m not always easily fooled. The fact that the Faun was on show at the Van Gogh Museum, that it had been lent by the Chicago Art Institute, that it was included in one of the best exhibitions I had ever seen, all served to make it unsuspicious.

So when it came out at Shaun’s proceedings that it had actually been made by him in his shed, I wasn’t angry. Yes, I’d been made to look like a twit on national television, but that was my fault for opening my mouth so quickly. Besides, whoever made this thing was a faker of impressive cunning. The Faun was unexpected, but not impossible. At some point, it could well have existed. There was even a tiny drawing of it in a genuine Gauguin sketchbook. Instead of hating Shaun Greenhalgh for fooling me, I immediately liked him for pushing my button and being such a clever rogue.

The day after the Greenhalghs were sentenced, in the autumn of 2007, I sent off a proposal to two commissioning editors I knew who dealt with arts subjects on television asking if I could make a film about the Bolton Cosa Nostra. One of them quickly replied that I had been beaten to it and that such a film was already commissioned. Eh? There were, in fact, a couple of films made about the Greenhalghs in the end. And as you can now read in this book, both were massively inaccurate. I never met Shaun in gaol, but remained fully fascinated by him, and having the chance to work with him later on a series I made about the Dark Ages – he created an Anglo-Saxon brooch for the film, using all the original methods – I got my hands on a manuscript he had written in prison which a researcher for another TV company, Clare Duggan, a true hero of the Shaun Greenhalgh story, had persuaded him to attempt. It took me a few months to get round to tackling the mighty memoir. Once I started, I binge-read it in a couple of days.

A Forger’s Tale works on various levels. If you’re a nerd, like me, who’s interested in techniques and methods of making art, you will find here several garages’ worth of useful nerdish information. If you’re a crime buff, here are some very tasty and very subtle crimes to relish. If you’re a museum professional, I’m afraid these admissions are an indictment of much of your profession and a serious questioning of your levels of knowledge. If you’re a policeman, you might be thinking: why the hell didn’t he tell us all this at the time?

Through my agent, I sent Shaun’s manuscript on a tour of the publishers with an underlined demand that its contents remain confidential. Eventually, they all rejected it. Among the comments that were made, a common one was that the manuscript was ‘self-justificatory’. Which made me laugh. Of course it is, here and there, self-justificatory. This is a man who has spent a significant slab of his life in prison for crimes of which many others are also guilty – in many instances, more guilty than him. Of course he wants his side of the story to be heard and understood. The real wonder here is not that these confessions are, occasionally, self-justificatory, but how often they are not. Most of the time, in these pages, Shaun Greenhalgh is funny, charming, self-deprecating, warm-hearted and, above all, instructive.

The detail lavished on how it was all done is sometimes close to delirious. Shaun knew the methods inside out, especially when it came to the making of ceramics – from pre-Columbian pots to fake Barbara Hepworths; from brand-new eighteenth-century Chelsea ware to that damned Gauguin Faun; from the mad birds churned out by the Martin Brothers to the delicate porcelain of the Emperors of China. Some will read these accounts and mistake them for a forger’s guide, an instruction manual on how to make copies. I prefer to see them as the expression of an ecstatic interest in art, bulging with knowledge and expertise. Here’s a forger who can disguise all kinds of things – except his own obsessive fascination with making things.

Is there too much of this technical ecstasy in the book? Again, some will probably think so and, again, I do not. Too many of us are too used to letting such information slip. When we look at a van Gogh painting or a Chelsea pot, we admire the image but ignore the methods, as if art arrives before us by magic. It doesn’t. In Shaun Greenhalgh’s world, the making of the objects is what really counts. In this joyously detailed account of how it was all done, with its alphabet soup of technical terms, we have a resource that is valuable and shape-shifting.

Art has always attracted the crazies – off-centre people who see things differently. I’d like to think I am one of those, but Shaun definitely is. His life story is an extraordinary blossoming of passion among the dark satanic mills. Against all the odds, a northern lad from a Bolton comprehensive manages, somehow, to fall prey to the addictions of art and, without anybody’s help, turns himself into an Egyptian granite carver, a Venetian bronze caster, an Impressionist sculptor, an American watercolourist, a second L. S. Lowry and a one-man Renaissance. The real subject of this book isn’t the forgery or the unmasking. It’s not the ever-present warning, ‘buyer beware’, or the detailed record of a particularly unlikely Lancashire life. The real focus here is the power of art to bewitch and change, inspire and transform.

Reading these pages, it’s tempting to conclude that some societies might, however, be better off without it – our own most of all. Without art, there would be less deception, less pretence, less deviousness in the West End of London, less crashing of values at the Frieze art fair. The world would be more honest. But it would also be duller and less tasty. A sponge without its jam. When we step off the hamster wheel of history, art is the best evidence we leave behind. What would we know of the Egyptians or the Greeks or the Romans if they had not left behind their art? It’s our memorial, our gift to the future. That’s assuming, of course, that some of it is genuine. These days, who knows?

Is Shaun a scoundrel for filling our antiques shops and museum walls with so much that isn’t what it purports to be? I suppose so. He has made it harder to know what Gauguin really created and that is an unhelpful act, at best. This entire memoir is studded with pleas of innocence and complex moments of dissembling as we range backwards and forwards between copies and fakes, real truths and imaginary ones, mirrors and their reflections in other mirrors. To my mind, Shaun was more aware of what he was doing than he usually admits. But while there are reasons to doubt some of his suggestions of innocence, there are no reasons at all, I believe, to doubt his basic drives.

This is a man who was enslaved by art. Every time he tried to get away from it, it hunted him down. He fell in love. It hunted him down. He joined the army. It hunted him down. This is not a book about art as a hobby or a sideline or a profession, it’s a book about art as a motor force. The only thing. For all the flimflammery and dissembling that comes with the territory of being Britain’s greatest ever forger – a regrettable title, yes, but one that Shaun surely holds – what is most often expressed here is an addiction. Compared with the tepid art dealers who tiptoe furtively through these confessions, or the blundering curators, or the frantic Keystone Kops of the Art & Antiques Squad, Shaun’s passion for art is a volcano next to some molehills.

In contrast, the art world’s role in the saga is dismal. Too many of the incidents remembered here, too much of the detail, is too scary. Those of us who have dipped our toes already into the world of art dealers, auctions and museum purchases, but who have previously had no overwhelming reason to doubt art’s seductive surfaces, are in for a slapping. You will decide for yourself, reader, if every word in this memoir tells it exactly as it happened. But I guarantee you will emerge from the read substantially less ready to trust the demonic modern entity, fashioned from desire and mirrors, that is the art world.

I’ve been an inhabitant of it for a long time. I’ve known for a long time that it is full of mountebanks. For a long time I have been particularly suspicious of ‘new discoveries’. But it turns out I only suspected a fraction of what really goes on behind the closed barn doors of the Cotswolds or inside the converted mills of Bolton. Now that you mention it, that head of Nefertiti in Berlin does look like something the Art Deco era might have come up with, doesn’t it? And ‘La Bella Principessa’, by Leonardo da Vinci, really could be ‘Sally from the Co-op’, by Shaun Greenhalgh, couldn’t she?

At the end of the book, there’s a glossary. Nerds speak their own language and we part-time nerds need some translation tools. Theseus had his ball of silken thread when he descended into the labyrinth. You and I have the glossary.

Preface

MOST OF THIS book was written whilst I was in prison several years ago. Originally, because this book is essentially about me and my life making and faking works of art, I intended to write it by starting logically, at the beginning, on the day I came into the world – the 21st of June, 1960, the Summer Solstice. Having written nothing substantial since boring school essays – something now almost 40 years ago – I thought that would be the best and simplest way to go. However, thinking further about it before putting pen to paper, and not wanting to send my reader off to sleep before turning the first page, I have decided to cover the consequences of my time faking works of art first. Then onwards in due course – forwards to the past, so to speak. This part of my life seems to be what people most want to know about.

Also, there’s been so much rubbish in the press, that I thought it time to say something on the subject myself. Many of those articles were laughably inaccurate. I’ve been described as some kind of class warrior fighting that old chestnut, the North–South divide. As the little man against the Establishment. Others have me down as a disgruntled artist out for revenge. But, having never been to art school or ever been interested in an artistic career, revenge against whom? Some even said I was a nutty recluse, which is good for a laugh, I suppose. Never let it be said I haven’t got a sense of humour. All of it is more exotic and complicated than the actual reality of things. So this is my story, told in my own way. I just hope it doesn’t have too much of the snooze factor about it.

I have also described some elements of my life which aren’t really related to art or fakery. Originally, I thought not to include them, but those events have had a bearing on my life as it turned out, so they are part of things, I suppose. In most cases I have not used the real names of the people within, sometimes for personal reasons, other times to protect the innocent and, lastly, so as not to get embroiled in any legal tangles. I’ve had quite enough of the law. This is just my side of things. For the record.

I.

A knock at the door

FOR DRAMATIC PURPOSES, I’ll start with a knock at the door – 8.30am, the 15th of March, 2006. That date, the 15th, was already in my mind. Then I remembered – the Ides of March! A most inauspicious date for the ancients and a bloody awful one for me as things turned out.

By this time, I’d been back at my mum and dad’s for some years. They were into their eighties and I was their paid carer. Well, 40-odd pounds a week doesn’t really cover the effort, does it ? Not much more than a kid’s paper round. But it’s the government’s going rate for a stressful and full-time occupation for legions of relatives and friends of the sick and vulnerable in what passes for society these days. I’d better climb down from my soapbox for now and get back to the story of my Waterloo. Please forgive me if I occasionally climb up on it again and feel free to skip those rants if you wish, with my blessing. I’ve been talking to myself on such things for years, so doing so in print will carry on the tradition.

To continue. Standing there at the door, peering past me whilst shouting loudly, was a little fat man with a red face, dressed like a downmarket stockbroker, but doing his best impression of a TV cop – hooking his foot around the door, as if resistance was expected. The next thing, he, his foot and his followers were all crowded into the lounge, all speaking at once, so I couldn’t make out a single word. What followed during the day is still a pretty vivid memory for me, even though that experience is now all of four years ago. Looking back, much of it seems a bit Laurel and Hardy and would, but for its consequences, be quite amusing, even to me.

The detective in charge introduced himself and informed me that they were from Scotland Yard’s Serious Organised Crime Unit, and that their bit of it was known as the Art & Antiques Squad. Whilst offering this information, the others dispersed all about, upstairs and down, going through drawers, cupboards, scattering everything as they went.

A particular memory is of a detective sitting cross-legged on the floor, with the contents of my dad’s glass-topped fossil cabinet scattered all about him, a hobby my father took particular interest in. There was nothing particularly valuable in it. All the specimens were always neatly laid out with handwritten descriptions, something he would get out and show to his grandchildren whenever they called, showing his latest pieces and explaining all about them and their place in the great scheme of things to enchanted little faces. The detective was now sat in the midst of them like a monkey sorting nuts. What he was looking for still isn’t apparent to me. When he’d finished, he simply scooped up handfuls of them and dumped them in a heap in the drawer. Others were trod underfoot. I decided there and then that co-operation was, for the time being, out of the question.

The day dragged on, searching and more questions, occasionally finding various items, some greeted with a squeal of delight. Another peculiar incident occurred when my sister arrived to help out Mum and Dad whilst I was, for want of a better word, ‘helping’ the police with their enquiries. My sis had just put a chicken in the oven to cook for teatime and was closing the oven door as a female DC came into the kitchen from the garden. The DC suddenly took it into her head that this was something sinister and proceeded to unwrap the bird from its foil, probing it in a most unladylike manner. Raking through the drawers for a pair of scissors, she proceeded to cut the suspect chicken in half, almost mincing it in the process. What she thought to find is a mystery.

By now various detectives were busy looking for and collecting all sorts of materials, equipment and discarded work. Some things came from the loft, including a bust of the second president of the US, John Adams, which had been sold in auction some years earlier for £100,000. Finding he couldn’t sell it on, the purchaser had later requested a refund. Never wanting to draw attention, I was quite willing to refund the discontents and move on to the next project. The bust joined a growing collection in the back of a police van, one of many parked outside. I think the neighbours were expecting bodies in the garden or something, such was the hive of activity. I thought then, as now, that it was all a bit over the top for an amateur artist armed with a paintbrush and chisel.

Next on the scene were the firearms experts who arrived to great effect in two large vans – all blue lights and wire grills – and in marched several large gents in jumpsuits and body armour. The police had discovered a deactivated old revolver and a toy rifle, left by my six-year-old nephew some weeks earlier. One of the firearms officers took up the revolver, looked under his eyebrows at the detective proffering up the deadly weapon and dismissed it as a ‘wreck’. The toy gun was picked up with a loud sigh and a despairing sideways glance at me. Then, ‘Out lads, there’s nothing for us here.’ And off they went, much to my relief.

As I stood there looking about me, I noticed several DCs rooting around outside, all in animated conversation. They were handling some pieces of alabaster, cut into slices, sawn off the back of a large panel that I had been carving into a copy of an Assyrian relief of a winged deity from the Palace of Ashurbanipal, one-time king of the seventh century BC Assyrians. These relief panels, depicting scenes from palace life, were mostly about half life-size and originally lined the walls of the king’s mud brick palaces in a place called Nineveh that’s now in Iraq. They were mostly dug up in the mid-nineteenth century by British explorers, the British Museum being the main repository of them. Others were taken by members of the expedition and are now in museum collections worldwide. My effort purported to be just such a piece.

I had first looked at these Assyrian scenes, so full of life, when I was about 10. Horses and men, fighting lions, kings and gods, all presided over by the great god of the Assyrians, Ashur. In the guidebooks I’d found an even better-sounding name – Ahura Mazda. I hope what springs to your mind isn’t what I pictured as a 10-year-old reading this name in a British Museum guide – Lieutenant Ahura of the Starship Enterprise driving a shiny Mazda sports car through the desert sands, with lions in pursuit! Perhaps I should have been a surrealist back then.

Those alabaster pieces were particularly damning as they had been cut from the back of a panel presented for inspection just four months earlier to the Keeper of the Middle East collections at the British Museum. I originally intended to dispose of them, but, due to the cost of the original block, I had decided to keep the offcuts with a view to doing some fragmentary pieces at a later date to sell through the trade. I never liked to discard materials which are all the while becoming more difficult to source. Even in my own time, some things still available 30 years ago can no longer be found. So off to the ever-growing pile in the back of a police van they went. And on to the garden shed went the DCs.

‘Shaun, can you come upstairs and tell us something about this ?’ Another half-forgotten object had been found at the back of a cupboard. Then in came the detective in the stockbroker’s pinstripe suit, now partly coloured orange. He’d picked up a bag of iron oxide that I used in my glass and ceramic work, without putting his hand under the old paper bag in which it had come from Stoke-on-Trent, a few years before. Now he looked as though he’d been Tangoed! I said something bland to the effect that he’ll probably need to get his suit steamed, but he seemed upset at this and retorted that he could get another one on expenses – the implication being that it might be a while before I had the opportunity to acquire another suit myself!

The old shed proved to be a goldmine of finds. Over the years I’d produced some of my best work in that place, which seemed to amuse the detectives. One of them gave it the title of ‘the northern annex of the British Museum’. That got a laugh all round and even squeezed a smile out of me on a decidedly unsmiley day. Some of the stuff in there had been kicking around for years – a sandstone head of the pharaoh Akhenaten in a white crown, a red sandstone female figure in the Hepworth style, an old kiln in which I’d fired the Gauguin Faun, marble blocks, marble points, chisels and mallets, enamels and glass, diamond saws and burrs. All of it was being carried through the kitchen and out into the aforementioned vans, which were now rapidly filling up with enough to hang me for sure. Gulp!

The day turned into the afternoon. More questions, more comments, but very little from me. These people come in here storming about, I thought, making the place look like it had been ransacked by burglars – and, incidentally, overlooking a great deal that might have been of interest to them, if only they had possessed a better understanding of the materials and methods used to make art! I say this not to poke fun at anyone. I’m sure the detectives are very good at what they do. After all, one doesn’t get to work for Scotland Yard, whose reputation speaks for itself, without being the best! At that time, and still now, I’m of the opinion that if they had come in peace, sat down and talked to me calmly, explained their presence and asked to be shown what I might have in the way of ‘fakes’, and the means of their production, they would have had my co-operation from the start. It would have sorted things out 12 months earlier than was the case. Some high-placed collars might have been thrown in as well.

By now I was getting a bit concerned for my mum and dad. They had been sat in the midst of all this for hours, so I told the Tango man that I needed to get them something to eat and drink, both being diabetic. Off I went to the kitchen with a DC following. What they expected me to do, I can’t say. ‘Drinks only,’ the DC ordered, ‘we’ve got some more questions for you yet.’ I protested, to no avail. It just served to harden my attitude.

Not until 4pm, or thereabouts, did they decide to call it a day. I returned to the living room to see a man who didn’t introduce himself, but who I took to be the boss, putting the sofa cushions back and generally attempting to tidy up what his underlings had scattered throughout the day. I made it clear to him that we’d had nothing to eat and no time or opportunity to do so. At this, he reached for a plastic bag and handed it to me with a mumbled apology. He seemed genuinely upset. The plastic bag held the remains of their lunch – two scotch eggs and a partly eaten chocolate bar. I’ve heard rumours that police suffer more than most from piles and ulcers. If that’s what they live on most days, no bloody wonder! I just put their actions down to bad manners and left it at that.

The most curious incident that first day was the disappearance of an old business ledger I’d had since I was a kid – the type used for bookkeeping in times past. Made in 1921, it was backed in calfskin and had beautifully marbled paper. I’d got it from a dealer at the Last Drop Antiques Fair in 1971, swapped for several of my bottle digging finds. From the age of 11 or so, I had used it to keep a record of every single thing I’d ever made. Even the destroyed or recycled ones. How and with what I’d made them, kiln firing times, mould burnout cycles, alloy recipes, paints and all sorts of other things. I last saw it on the kitchen table that afternoon, obviously put there by one of the detectives, and presumed they’d taken it with them when they left. This can’t have been the case, for if they had, why so many questions ? All the answers were in that book. So that’s a bit of a mystery.

As they left the house, they informed me I would be required to attend Bolton Police Station the next day, but that my mum and dad could be interviewed at home on account of their age. I thought that was very decent of them. They said I should get my solicitor to come along and off they went. I duly rang the solicitors used by several family members over the years, only to be informed that due to the nature of the case I needed the services of a good criminal lawyer. A couple were suggested. The first one was in court that day. The next one turned out to be the gentleman who was to act on my behalf, for better or worse, for the next two years.

I don’t think he would mind me saying that he was definitely of the old school – softly spoken, obviously well educated, clever and cultured, with an interest in and knowledge of art to boot. Much later, long after the court appearances, and even after the completion of a substantial part of my sentence, I would receive letters from various media people who had been in contact with him about some projects in which they wanted me to participate. Most had been sent from his office with a flea in their ears. All I can think is that he had either had quite enough of the whole affair, lengthy as it was, or, as I prefer to imagine, he was looking after my best interests.

Before going on with what happened after that day, I would like to say something about how I first came to the attention of Scotland Yard. I mentioned earlier some fragments of alabaster from the back of a fake copy of an Assyrian bas-relief panel. This was the object that proved to be the ‘one too many’.

This Assyrian relief was my main project for 2005. Over the previous few years, I’d started to do considerably fewer pieces of work than before. Money had never really been the driving force for my artwork and, in any case, by this time I was secure enough financially to do pretty much as I pleased. Quite a lot has been said in the media about my motives for doing the fakes. Things like me wishing to expose and deride a particular art expert’s abilities or have a go at the art establishment in general. Others have claimed it was some kind of one-man crusade against the supposed art snobbery of the south, as if art had regional loyalties and traits. It doesn’t. In common with music, art is one of those rare things that speaks to all people, and includes and involves all. Somehow it found me. And from the time I was a kid, it just seemed to be what I was interested in. Whenever I tried to walk away from it, it would search me out and wind me in again, like a puppet on a string.

It was a visit to the Manchester Museum, in late 2004, that had brought the Assyrian thing to mind. I had gone to look at this great collection with nothing particular planned, just an afternoon’s wander through the galleries. Whilst walking around, I saw this particular stone relief of an Assyrian figure. It was pretty standard stuff – a standing figure in side profile, walking to the right, with wings and the head of an eagle, carrying a libation pail and a palm leaf. I had seen many such figures at the British Museum years earlier and, through my wide-ranging amateur art interests, I was quite familiar with all things Assyrian.

Apparently, these winged deities were actually priests of the court in costume and not, as I had presumed as a child, something mythological like you see in classical art – hippocamps, centaurs, satyrs and the like. Across the bottom was a band of cuneiform inscription. This script was used at various times across Assyria – modern-day Iraq – and usually consists of the king’s titles and his achievements in war and lion hunting, a particularly popular pastime of kings and widely illustrated in the art of Assyria. These inscriptions consist of groups of what look like, for want of a better description, little paper darts.

Having never cut such a thing in stone before, I spent a long time perfecting the manner of their appearance, even going to the trouble of taking an impression in white Plasticine from a panel at another location, so I could look under high magnification at the direction of cut used by the ancient craftsmen. Such small details can prove decisive in attributions. After several attempts at copying a plaster cast of that impression, I was confident enough to have a go.

In making a successful copy of any artwork, no matter in which medium you are working, fluency of line is everything. Also, it’s best to keep in mind that the artists and craftsmen who made the originals did these things every day of their working lives, and that only the finest work would be acceptable to their patrons. So being up to scratch, without the job looking laboured, is a must before setting about the copy.

You may have noticed that I refer to it as a ‘copy’, when, considering my past, you might think ‘fake’ would be a better description. Copying in art is as old as art itself, something most artists, and certainly all of the most proficient ones, have done throughout art’s history. Buonarroti after the Laocoön. Rodin in the manner of Bernini. Moran after Turner, and so on. A ‘copy’ only becomes a ‘fake’ when it is knowingly misrepresented as being a work by a particular artist or age, when, in fact, it is no such thing. Misrepresentation is something I mean to cover later, so for now, if I may, I’ll call it a ‘copy’.

Early January, 2005, saw me back at the British Museum, reading up on the mid-nineteenth-century expeditions to Nineveh, and taking mental notes of old illustrations and anything else that may have helped in the project I had by now decided upon and which, for various reasons – some reported, some not – led to my present situation. Speaking of my present situation, I need to get back to the story of the arrest before the trail goes cold.

The night after the police visit, I didn’t sleep much. Eight in the morning. A ring on the doorbell. Standing there were two of the detectives from the day before. ‘We’ve just called to remind you that your presence is required down at the Central Police Station at 9.30am, if you remember ?’ As if I could forget! They were making sure, of course, that I hadn’t done a Ronnie Biggs in the night. At least that was my take on it.

I’d arranged to meet my solicitor at the station, but he was fashionably late, so in I went. Gulp again! The Central Police Station in Bolton was, at that time, in its final days of occupation. A new one had already been built at a location on Manchester Road, close to the site of the old Bolton Wanderers football ground, which had been bulldozed and moved to the Reebok Stadium at Horwich. So, as you can imagine, the old station was in a grotty state. The actual building, though, was quite a grand affair. Housed in a neoclassical crescent, to the west of Bolton Town Hall, it had the museum and art gallery at one end, and me and my captors at the other.

I informed the desk sergeant of my name and that I had an appointment for 9.30am. ‘Please take a seat if you will,’ he replied. I sat there, watching the clock, as people with sheepish looks and their own troubles went in and out. Then I was called to go through to the police station proper, where Sergeant Tango was standing, all smiles, rubbing his hands together. Forward stepped the youngest female DC, rather nervously I thought. A formal arrest came squeaking forth. I informed them that my solicitor had not yet arrived and that I didn’t wish to proceed without legal representation. So they searched me, put my watch and other belongings in a bag, took my details and put me in a cell.

I hadn’t been in a police cell before. The first thing I noticed was the cold. The smell wasn’t great either. I was expecting shouts and groans from the other cells, but it was perfectly silent and quite eerie. I don’t know how long I waited. It seemed a long time, but in reality it was probably less than an hour. Finally, the spyhole in the cell door flicked open and I saw a beady eye at the aperture, looking like a piss-hole in the snow. Sergeant Tango. (The ‘piss-hole in the snow’ line isn’t original. It’s something I’d heard earlier at the station.)

Tango informed me that my solicitor was here. So off I followed to meet him. He introduced himself and explained that I would now be formally cautioned and a recorded interview would take place. A bit of small talk. And in we went. As I walked in, piled 3 feet high against the wall, was what I took to be the contents of their haul from yesterday. I later found out it was just a selection. I’ve always been pretty prolific. But quite a lot of the piled-up work was stuff I thought had been destroyed or recycled. Had I realised there was this much lying about, I would have had a jumble sale!

Before the proceedings got underway, my solicitor addressed the gathered ensemble: ‘There are solicitors and solicitors. I can assure you that I am the real thing. So we’ll have things done properly.’ The assembled all nodded at this and then they read out my rights, each speaking into the tape as it buzzed into life.

One by one, the sculptures, pictures, materials and all were described for the record. They asked me if I had seen them before and did I have anything to say about how they came into my possession ? All through that first day, I denied that I or anyone known to me had anything to do with their production. As I saw it at the time, it was my turn to be awkward and to make them earn their pay. For the record, my denials were nothing to do with trying to wriggle out of my predicament. I was well aware that the material evidence was damning. My actions were purely a response to the over-the-top treatment I had had, and – more than that – to the disgraceful disrespect shown to my mum and dad. For that, I was of a mind to give them a run.

Initially, they assumed several people were involved in the production of the artworks. Months later, when I decided it was finally time to co-operate, it was with difficulty that I managed to convince them I alone was responsible for all the work, wide-ranging as it was. My interest in art has always been non-specific and I could never have imagined myself as just a painter, sculptor or any other single discipline. I always prefer to try my hand at everything. Trying different things helps me to understand the methods used and, in some small way, improves my next effort.

During the day, the conversation wandered about from piece to piece, with me feigning ignorance about everything. This went on into the evening. So I didn’t get home until 12.30am, bailed until further notice, while the police pursued their enquiries.

For some time after, I heard nothing more from them. Next up, however, was the media interest, something I found more trying than the police investigation. Throughout my life I’d always preferred to stay out of the limelight, so having a gaggle of journalists and photographers hanging about from dawn to dusk was something to get used to. A particularly persistent duo were from Germany. How they came to hear about all this, I haven’t a clue. They looked to me like the comedians Little and Large from back in the seventies. By now, I had started to leave the answerphone permanently on and every morning, without fail, at around 9 am, on would come a German accent asking, very politely, if I or my father would like to give them an interview, and if we could discuss some ideas they had for German TV along the lines of the things done by the art faker Tom Keating.

I didn’t know much about Tom Keating on TV. I vaguely remembered that he too had been convicted many years ago for selling copies with false documentation. Eventually, I told them that in my present situation it would be inappropriate for me to comment, but that when this was settled I would be happy to discuss things with them. That seemed to do the trick. Now all I had to do was put up with a bashing from the British press.

After my conviction, a lot of hurtful and untrue things were said in the press about me and my personal circumstances. Hopefully, I can set the record straight in the pages of this book. Having heard it straight from the horse’s mouth, you can then make up your own minds as to the degree of my villainy.

In early May, I heard again from Scotland Yard. A letter from my solicitor informed me that I must attend another interview at Bolton Police Station. Between the first and second interviews I’d had quite a torrid time of it and was feeling pretty low. To top it all, on the 23rd of April, St George’s Day, my dad had a bad fall whilst coming in from the garden. He’d been out to feed the birds, something he did most days. From the position of his foot, which was lying flat outwards, I could see he had broken something. My understanding of anatomy was finally of some use – other than in the impractical world of art. I called the ambulance and off to hospital we went. Sure enough, he’d broken his leg, and the break was awkwardly situated just below the hip socket. The doctor explained he would need an operation to fix it. The op was done the next day and the following weeks were a mix of sidestepping journalists, hospital visits and dealing with solicitors.

By this time I hadn’t picked up so much as a pencil in months and decided it was time to have a clear-out of what remained of my artist materials. First, I checked with my solicitor that doing so wouldn’t constitute the destruction of evidence. I was already deep enough in you-know-what without digging deeper! Over the next few weeks I binned the accumulated tools of 30 years’ work and took down the old garden shed that had been my ‘studio’ and was now in a pretty wonky state.

Also, at this time, some of my best and most expensive equipment seemed to disappear. I presumed the police had taken much of it, but, apparently, that wasn’t the case. Some 18 months later, my solicitor sent me a list of all the confiscations, and most of what I was missing wasn’t on the list. So that’s a mystery not to be solved.

Another sad loss was a box of pictures and Plasticine models I’d done as a lad, some from as early as six years old. Unbeknown to me, my mum and dad had saved them until my arrest. Those weren’t on the police inventory either. Heaven knows what happened to them. As things stand, I’ve little of my past work left, or the means to make any more. However, looking at it positively, I’ve still got what any artist needs – two eyes, two hands and what passes for a brain. So I’m still a going concern. Before that’s taken the wrong way, let me add immediately that, without any doubt, I have had my fill of fakery!

The day of my next meeting with the art squad came round sooner than I wished. I can only suppose that during the interval they had been busy little bees, building their case against me. There’s not much hope for you when Scotland Yard is on your trail, is there ? Two months earlier, on leaving them at Bolton Police Station, I had already decided that at our next meeting I would put up my hand to everything and get things over with as soon as possible. However, the day before our meeting, I had been to see my dad, who by this time had been moved to a nursing home. The doctors had decided he wasn’t fit enough to go back home yet, so he was in a bit of a state and wanted to go home. This was in my thoughts as Sergeant Tango and his crew entered the room. So I changed my mind about co-operating.

The second interrogation followed mostly along the lines of the first, only this time all the material evidence had now been photographed and described on individual files. On walking into the interview room, the only thing there ‘in person’, so to speak, was a Lowry picture leaning against my solicitor’s chair. Conscious of being watched for a reaction, I pretended not to notice it, though I did instantly recognise the picture for what it was – a pastel drawing in the manner of L. S. Lowry, done by me several years earlier, one of hundreds of such things I have copied.

This particular ‘Lowry’ was now reframed in some style and at obvious cost. I had only initialled it L. S. L. and, as in most of my productions, it contained a fault, a skew in the perspective, something Lowry himself would never have done. He was a draughtsman of the first order and would never have made this type of mistake in the geometry of a townscape with which he was so familiar. And so expert at depicting.

My copies were always purposely designed to contain such faults. They were meant to be decorative pictures, sold to dealers by me or my father for reasonable sums. If those dealers took the picture to be a genuine Lowry, then the prices they offered to pay us were nothing short of theft on their part. I suspect that on seeing what they took to be a turkey ready for plucking, they took some pleasure in thinking their birthdays had all come at once. The proper course should have been to make the seller aware of any potential value and to point them in the direction of a reputable valuer. This, without exception, they never did. So to all of them I would say – buyer beware. And the next time something looks too good to be true, it most likely is!

This particular ‘Lowry’ had been sold to an antiques dealer not far from Bolton. He bought it with the express understanding that its authorship was questionable. If that is disputed, I point to the fact that a few hundred pounds hasn’t been the going rate for a Lowry since before old Lowry started shaving. Some days later my dad answered a call from this same dealer. He said something to the effect that he’d had someone in to ‘look’ at the picture and that if my dad would write a note and post it off, he would pay an extra £900 for it. The note had to say that the picture had been in the family for X number of years, as this would enable the new owner to insure it and prove it hadn’t been stolen.

Throughout my time dealing with these people, these types of things were commonplace. I knew full well that he had found a customer for the copy and was in the process of giving it a provenance and, in all probability, a huge price hike. I eventually found out that he had, indeed, sold it on to another party as a genuine Lowry for £7,000. At the time of my arrest, it was in the process of being sold again, this time for a sum I believe to be around £75,000. How all this could have been discovered by the police in such a short time, considering what a minor work it was compared to other things I had done, was a mystery to me.

During the summer, the police informed us that six people had been arrested in connection with this ‘Lowry’, and that it had apparently been accompanied by a letter of provenance. This letter was less genuine than the picture, which at least didn’t carry a fake signature – unlike the letter which was in my dad’s name! Much later, when I had been sent to prison, I received an anonymous note from someone who seemed to be in the know and who claimed that the reason no charges were ever brought against those arrested in connection with the Lowry was that it had been the property of a person involved in my case. This fact had not been declared as it should have been, so to proceed against them at that time would have compromised the case against me. If at all possible, I hope to make some headway in this regard and hope to expose the ‘Lowry’ man in due course. Maybe I will hear from the letter writer again.

After going through all the photos and written descriptions, still denying all knowledge of them, I was bailed to appear again at a later date. All that summer, I heard nothing more from the police. Dad, I’m happy to say, started to show signs of improvement, due in no small measure to the fine nurses at Thicketford, the support of all the family and the pester power of his grandchildren. They simply wouldn’t allow him to give up. My mum, in the meantime, had a pleasant summer being taken on trips, treated to some new outfits and generally looked after by my sisters and brothers. This, I must admit, was a timely break for me, too – a chance to get back to some normality.

So this is a good place to get back to the story of the Assyrian relief that I mentioned earlier – the one that led the police to my door. I made it in the summer of 2005, in the shed at my parents’ house. Since the casual look at just such a panel at the Manchester Museum in late 2004, I had been researching it and, for several weeks after, I’d tackled some Limoges-style enamelling in the manner of the ancients, just for practice, trying all the time to improve my attempts. The actual enamelling isn’t the problem. The difficulty is cutting the design in copper without a slip and achieving a convincing artistic style and fluency. I’d also been doing some sculpture, mostly horses, usually about half life-size, so as to be manageable in the confines of my studio – the shed.

Having settled on the Assyrian design, next came the problem of finding the stone in which to cut it. The stone used originally was a calcite alabaster commonly called ‘Mosul marble’, on account of it coming from Mosul in present-day Iraq. Given recent world events, you can see my difficulty in getting hold of a large block of this material. Unfortunately, I don’t know any US Army generals! So it would have to be done in something closely resembling it. Eventually, I settled on a calcite alabaster that I knew I could work with, having used it before.

There are two types of alabaster. The calcite one is harder and more durable. Being crystalline and translucent, it was used by the Egyptians and throughout the ancient world. Some magnificent examples have been found in the tombs of the New Kingdom pharaohs in the Valley of the Kings. The other type, more usually found in nineteenth-century work, is the softer gypsum alabaster. This was famously used in English Medieval church work, carved into the figurative groups known as ‘Nottingham alabasters’, an allusion to a major source of this material throughout the period.

Having ordered and paid for a block of suitable dimensions, I went down to the stone yard to collect it. It was enormously heavy. When I finally got the slab home, I transferred the image of the winged deity onto the stone with a pencil and then went over the pencil marks with a stylus, scratching the image into the surface so it wouldn’t be lost during the cutting. Gypsum alabaster is much softer than Mosul marble, so I decided to cut it with wood chisels.

The first task in doing any relief work is to cut away the background – in this case to a shallow depth of 10 or so millimetres. With the figure standing proud of the surface, it can be rounded at its edges and the detail easily rendered with a chisel and rasp. This cutting back the surface, without being able to use the mallet in case it bruised the stone, was the arm-aching bit. It took a couple of days’ hard labour. I could have removed the stone more quickly with a router, but didn’t fancy getting silicosis! After polishing the sunken background, I traced on the detail of the figure – face, fingers, feathers and all. Carving the detail is the best bit. When I was satisfied as to the correct form, I set about the cuneiform inscription.

There have been some sneering comments in the press about this, saying I made a fatal mistake in the execution. This isn’t the case. The fact is that in all ancient inscriptions – whether they be cuneiform, Egyptian hieroglyphics, Greek, Hebrew or Latin text, or even early Chinese characters – the artisans charged with the task were almost without exception skilled but illiterate stonecutters, following the marks inked in by the scribes. These marks were not always followed to the letter, as you see time and again on ancient monuments of undoubted authenticity. As an eminent archaeologist said to me many years ago: ‘If an inscription is perfect, it’s suspect.’ So I cut the script as I saw fit. And moved on to putting some ‘age’ into it.

This was, and usually is, as difficult as producing the piece in the first instance. Often, it’s more difficult! In this case what was needed was a soak-bath large enough for the relief. This was achieved by means of a plywood frame, a couple of inches larger and deeper than the panel, inside which I fixed some pond liner. Primitive but practical.

Depending on the type of stone being worked, a wide range of ageing techniques can be employed. For this piece, the first thing I needed to create was a layer of ‘weathered’ surface to receive the colour. This was done by soaking the panel in a strong alkali bath. The solution reacts quickly with the calcite and, at a point decided by trial and error, the bath is drained gently so as not to disturb the fragile corroded surface. Next, it’s rinsed repeatedly to return it to neutral pH and then gently heated. If too much heat is applied the stone becomes opaque, a definite giveaway! So care is needed at all stages.

On this particular piece, the ‘ancient’ surface wasn’t quite as critical as it would have been in other circumstances, as I’d decided to treat it to a ‘Victorian’ makeover. It’s a trick I’d used before to give the experts something to discover for themselves. Many of the reliefs that had been in private collections were poorer quality pieces that were not required for the official collection destined for the British Museum. These were often damaged or unattractively stained or fire-damaged. Some of them had been recoloured, and, in some cases, waxed or even shellacked. For this piece, I decided to recolour it with tannin and iron stain, and added some light beeswaxing to reflect its Victorian makeover. This was pointed out at its inspection by the experts – to my feigned surprise!

So that was how I made the Assyrian panel which ultimately led to my arrest and conviction.

II.

A mention in passing

BACK IN BOLTON