The Art Forger

Based on the actual--still unsolved-- theft of several famous paintings from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, which in fact included several by Degas, this is a fictionalized and romanticized account of what happens when one of the Degas paintings (a fictitious one) resurfaces. Claire Roth is a talented painter who has made the all too common mistake of falling for her famous and married art teacher, Isaac Cullion. Three years ago, when he was having a "painter's block" she painted a picture for him to help him meet a deadline for a viewing by an agent from MoMA. The picture she painted, fortunately or unfortunately, became the keystone for their accepting his work for a special showing and was ultimately purchased by them; yet he refused to admit that he hadn't painted it. When Isaac dumped Claire, she tried to set the record straight and became persona non grata in the art world; now no one will touch her work. She has become labelled as "The Great Pretender." She works making custom reproductions for a company called Reproductions.com and is a certified Degas specialist. When the owner of a famous Boston gallery comes to her with an offer for her own show at his gallery if she will make a copy of the missing Degas from the Gardner heist, she is eventually persuaded by his claim that he will return the original to the museum itself. As she works with the painting, though, she comes to realize that it is not a real Degas but a clever forgery that had been hanging in the Gardner all these years. No one is going to want to hear that, any more than the experts at MoMA wanted to hear that they had been fooled into buying a painting by a graduate student instead of the well-know professor. We see what we want to see. Author B.A. Shapiro has done detailed research that will tell you the nitty gritty details of how to forge a painting if you have the talent, as well as the struggles facing unknown artists.