[MSN] Book review: The Forgery of Venus

[MSN]

"The Forgery of Venus," riffs on art history

By Mary Ann Gwinn
Seattle Times book editor

Michael Gruber's new thriller, "The Forgery of Venus," is as layered as a
luminous portrait by an old master. In fact, its hero (or anti-hero) is a
painter whose ardent desire is to become an old master, despite being born
three centuries too late.

"The Forgery of Venus" (William Morrow, 336 pp., $24.95) is a tour de force
combination of suspense and characterization, as well as a primer on the
world of art and art forgery. The polymathic Seattle-based author (Gruber
has a doctorate in marine sciences and was a speechwriter for former EPA
head William Ruckelshaus) has set a standard for brainy, intricate mysteries
that juggle philosophical, cultural and even religious issues.

"The Forgery of Venus" tells the tale of Chaz Wilmot, a brilliant painter
whose gifts exceed even those of his famous painter father. But he wants to
paint like the old masters, and nobody in the contemporary art world cares.
Chaz is recruited into a psychological study investigating whether the
ingestion of a hallucinogen promotes creativity. It does, and then some — it
sends Chaz cartwheeling back through time, first through his own childhood,
then into the childhood of the famous Spanish court painter Diego Velázquez
(1599-1660).

Soon Chaz paints even more vividly, but he's both in jeopardy of losing his
mind and in danger of being recruited by some very rich and nasty characters
determined to use him to forge famous paintings. In a recent interview
Gruber talked about the threads he pulled together to write "The Forgery of
Venus:"

Q: Talk about how you learned about painting and the culture and business of
art for this book.

A: When I was 22, I lived in a loft with a guy who was a painter in SoHo.
One night we had been drinking a lot, and he said, "I'll paint you." He drew
me in charcoal and painted my portrait — the guy was painting like
Velázquez; with bravura technique and psychological presentation.

I was 22 when it was painted, and when I was 22 I was not a very nice
person. I keep it in the attic, like the picture of Dorian Gray. This guy
later became a successful commercial artist, but he never painted like that
again. I wondered: why is the skill of someone who can paint like the old
masters not valued?

Q: Why did you decide to focus on Velázquez and his painting, "The Rokeby
Venus"?

A: On a trip to London a couple of years ago, I visited the National Gallery
and went to the Velázquez room. There was "The Rokeby Venus" (also known as
"The Toilet of Venus" and "Venus at her Mirror"). This painting has a
resonance. It was attacked by a suffragette. She succeeded in slashing it.
It was repaired and now is under glass.

The power of the image is enormous — the presentation of a woman's body with
all its warmth and erotic charge. But it was not Velázquez's style. He was
the court painter of Philip IV — he was an insider of high rank. Nudes were
seriously frowned upon in the age of the Spanish Inquisition.

Velázquez had gone to Rome — many people think he painted four nudes there,
but only "The Rokeby Venus" survived. Velázquez went from the most rigid,
sexually repressed court in Europe to the relative freedom of Rome —
suddenly it was party time.

Q: You also play with the idea of what is really "original" in art.

A: There are a lot of ways of looking at that. Milan Kundera (the Czech
writer) wrote an essay about originality and creativity. Suppose someone
came up with a music manuscript that looks like a late, unknown Beethoven
string quartet. He performs it, people are crying, very moved. Then he
revealed that he wrote it last month. Kundera said it would be regarded as
garbage. Kundera claimed it would completely lose its value because it was
an impostor. But there's the paradox of fiction — why do you cry when a fake
character dies? It's the basis of art. You engage with people who don't
exist and care about them as you would your friends and relatives.

Q: Why is it that people still revere the old masters, even though no one
painting that way today gets critical respect?

A: Why do people still want to do easel painting? What is art's purpose?
What is its current state in our culture? I did a lot of research. I have a
feeling for painting, I have lived with a painter (Gruber's wife) for 35
years.

We live in a decadent age, a period in art history where there's no juice
left in the culture. Everyone is living off times past — we don't believe in
anything. Art has to be iconic, reflect something the culture believes in.

The Greeks believed in beauty. Christian Europe believed in the church. The
Dutch masters believed in the bourgeois ideal, that everyone would get
richer and more comfortable and wonderful — science would solve everything.
Modern art is elegiac. How terrible that we have lost this wonderful
culture. That's worrisome because artists are prophets. If anybody comes up
with a new idea, they're immediately trivialized and attacked by the
antibodies of culture — it gets blogosphered to death.

On the other hand — who could have made the Barack Obama story up? It may be
that people will look back and say — this was the beginning of a completely
different thing.

Q: A number of museum paintings have been stolen in the last couple of
years. Who perpetrates this kind of crime, and why?

A: Most art theft is semi-amateur, but professional gangs do steal paintings
for collateral. If you have a $10 million painting, you can use it as
collateral for a $1 million loan. There's an enormous undocumented black
market economy in the world.

Q: Why are some wealthy people so obsessed with owning rare paintings?

A: If all you do is make money — you feel that emptiness and you want to be
close to someone who is plugged in. What you are saying when you buy a
valued painting is — I can afford it, and you can't. So many people now can
afford a Lexus or a McMansion. At the highest levels of wealth, you can
spend $100 million on a painting, which says: "I made it — I've got the
Monet."

Talent is unequally distributed, and talented people have a finite lifetime.
Van Gogh never sold a painting; now they sell in the tens of millions of
dollars.

Mary Ann Gwinn: 206-464-2357 or mgwinn at seattletimes.com

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/