In the Zoo of Fake Birds

The documentary film “Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery” brings the greatest art scandal of recent decades to the cinema. #32 asks the author Philipp Holstein for his view.

A film critique for the online magazine of the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen.

Basically, this film deals with emptiness, while is interesting only because this nothingness unfurls itself out behind the forehead of a well-known person: the documentary “The Art of Forgery” features the life and work of Wolfgang Beltracchi. The sardonic joke is the fact that Beltracchi created no oeuvre of his own. He was celebrated solely because for decades, he produced paintings in the style of the great masters, taking art dealers and collectors for a ride, earning millions, only to lose everything after his conviction. Many residents of Jungle Camp on RTL TV show have done more.

Once, Beltracchi is asked whether he regrets anything. The 63-year-old replies circuitously, in a kind of singsong voice, but without ever really coming to the point. He began sensing, he says, that things couldn’t go so well much longer, but he wanted to buy a palazzo in Venice, so he continued to paint. You sit there in the cinema, asking yourself: What’s wrong with this guy? But you learn nothing, he can't be pinned down, he's simply unfathomable.

After being sentenced to six years in open prison for criminal conspiracy, Wolfgang Beltracchi is said to be millions of euros in debt; every evening, he returns to prison after day release. During the day, meanwhile, this sad clown markets himself. He visits the talk show of Markus Lanz, gives interviews, and smiles at us from the front page of the weekly newspaper Die Zeit. He advertises his reminiscences, a volume of letters sent from cell to cell between him and his wife Helene, who is also serving time – and now we have the film as well. You ask yourself, of course, how credible love letters between a pair of forgers can be, and who wants to read them anyway. There is something highly dubious about the film as well: the director Arne Birkenstock is the son of Beltracchi’s Cologne lawyer, and as a precondition for such a production, this circumstance seems just as loony as the word “art” in the film’s title. The film can certainly be reproached for posing too few critical questions and allowing the forger too much leeway. On the other hand, it provides us with a highly entertaining 100 minutes, enthralling right to the finish, yet at times so sad you could almost cry.

We begin with Beltracchi being stylized as a kind of Robin Hood. The audience encounters him shortly after his sentencing in his house in southern France, which he must now vacate to move into prison. At a shared meal, his friends observe sneeringly that Beltracchi has held up a mirror to the market. This is countered with sequences from auctions: 13 million for a Francis Bacon. “Crazy!!” The filmmaker winks now at his protagonist, accomplice-style. Gradually, however, Birkenstock seems to grow tired. For Beltracchi is so obtuse, it drives you crazy. He progressively vanishes as the film proceeds, his contours become increasingly indistinct. In 1992, Wolfgang Fischer, born in Höxter as a son of a church painter, took his wife's somehow Renaissance-sounding name, thereby adorning himself in false plumage, blurring his identity to the point of unrecognizability. As we watch him forging works, he betrays no emotion, and whether it's a Max Ernst or a Cézanne – he finishes each picture with the kind of exclamation of pride you might hear from a child who just went to the bathroom: "Finished!" The director wants to know whether Max Ernst was a genius: "I don't think so.” Why not? "It takes more than an idea to make a great painter." Beltracchi knows the difference between good and evil, but at the same time, feels nothing.

Doubtless, we will soon be seeing a feature film on the topic, the material is so promising: with great intuition and subtlety, a brilliant craftsman feels his way into the temporal gap between two paintings by a great artist, and creates something new in the same spirit. He fools everyone, and leads the kind of life he never could have had as an honest artist. The problem with this documentary, however, is that you never quite believe that Beltracchi of all people is really credible as a rogue of this kind. An art dealer from Switzerland highlights this with reference to Beltracchi’s appropriation of Heinrich Campendonk’s painting style. In pictures from the period before World War I, you sense the artist’s anxiety, his apprehensiveness, and only this makes the works great. But with Beltracchi, you sense nothing at all behind the pigments. “These paintings are empty.”

In the end, all that remains of the man is a shell. For we arrive at the point where we realize that Beltracchi is also deceiving himself. Working with him, an art historian assembles pictures for an exhibition. Beltracchi wants to include one of his own paintings, which shows a fallen angel. The expert points out that people don't want to see that sort of thing, they only want to see the fakes. Is this upsetting? Did your heart and soul go into the making of the original? "Heart and soul, certainly not," Beltracchi replies, shrugging his shoulders. “So art really means nothing to you, then?”, asks his interlocutor, annoyed.” Beltracchi looks straight at him, and replies: “No.”