This is a memoir of the star and subject of the Emmy-nominated documentary, "Art and Craft," the story of the search for America's greatest living art forger, Mark Landis.
This is a book in which the reader can satisfy both intellectual and artistic palates. The tone and subject matter of the text is reminiscent of J. D. Salinger/s
Catcher in the Rye, and the story of Mark Landis' life and art is reminiscent of the life and art of Vincent van Gogh, who struggled with mental health issues and only sold one or two paintings in his lifetime. Despite the controversy of his forged paintings, Landis just may just turn out to be the most important artist of our generation.
In 2013 a reporter for the
Financial Times, John Gapper, wrote a story about
Mark Landis after he got wind that someone from the Oklahoma Museum of Art believed that someone was donating forged paintings to museums all across the U.S. The donor did not use his real name and sometimes dressed as a Jesuit Priest, other times as landed gentry from the South. It was Gapper who tracked him down in Laurel, Mississippi, a small town that is probably best known as the home of the popular home-renovation TV show, "Home Town," and it was he who became the first person to hear Landis's remarkable story.
As it turned out, Mark Landis, is an unassuming, 68-year-old genius with an IQ of 150 who has spent most of his life in mental health facilities, mostly in Mississippi, bravely coping with schizophrenia. However, despite his mental illness (he is likely also autistic and would meet the qualifications for being a vulnerable adult in Mississippi), he has created not only flawless forgeries of the world's greatest art, but also a memorable body of original art, which he is now willing to share with the public in this book.
For more than three decades, Landis donated artwork done by the world's greatest painters, to America's premier art museums, explaining that the valuable artwork had been in his family for years and needed a permanent home. His presentation was very impressive, but it was all a product of Landis' creative mind. Because of his loneliness he became addicted to making the donations.
Sometimes Landis would ask the museums where they intended to display the artwork and they accommodated him by showing him exactly where his donated masterpieces would hang. Eventually a museum official at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art became suspicious. As a result, 30 years of art donations that were accepted as authentic at the time by America's top experts on fine art, were investigated by the FBI and determined to be forgeries done by Landis, who used art materials purchased from Walmart and Hobby Lobby to carry out the deception. To make his frames look old, he simply rubbed them down with coffee grinds.
Landis was not arrested for his forgeries because he never asked for money for the artwork and he never claimed them as donations on his tax returns. In other words, he broke no laws with his deceptions. By any measure Mark Landis is a master art forger, arguably the best con-man America has produced since Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Unlike Parker, Landis is a genuinely likeable man who has had to overcome much in his lifetime.
