Mark
Landis is not all bad. After all, he regularly shops at a great American
retailer like Hobby Lobby. He just happens to be one of the most notorious art
forgers of our day. However, he never made a dime off his impressive fakes.
Instead, the high functioning schizophrenic indulged his “philanthropic”
impulse, to the embarrassment of many of the nation’s most respected museums. Landis
and his nemesis will take stock of his strange career in Sam Cullman &
Jennifer Grausman’s Art and Craft
(co-directed by Mark Becker), which screens during the 2014 Tribeca Film Festival.
Clearly,
Landis has difficulty relating to people. Yet, we cannot automatically blame
his mother and father, since the master forger describes them as gregariously
social and indeed loving parents. Landis lived with his widowed mother for years,
so he is understandably still struggling with her somewhat recent death. He has
a unique coping mechanism. Even as a child, Landis always had a talent for the
mechanics of art, but he lacked either the vision or the confidence to produce
originals. However, regional museums throughout the country rolled out the red
carpet for him, thanks to his facility for forgery.
It
is still unclear whether Landis’s fraudulent donations were all for the sake of
a massive ego boost or the misguided product of a compulsion to please.
Regardless, shockingly few institutions did the sort of “due diligence”
practiced by former museum registrar Matthew Leininger. Having discovered
several of Landis’s “gifts” offered to his museum suspiciously listed in press
releases and websites of other institutions, Leininger sounded the alarm bell
in the museum world. Yet, Landis remained at liberty and continued his “giving,”
because no money ever changed hands, relegating his activities to a
persistently gray legal area. At an obvious cost to his career, Leininger
became the Javert to Landis’s Valjean, dogging the former in the press and
through his professional networks.
What
happens when Landis and Leininger finally come face-to-face? It is a rather
interesting moment. To the credit of the battery of directors, A&C is very understanding of human
frailty and presents both pseudo-antagonists in a sympathetic light. In a
sense, the two men represent polar extremes, with Leininger arguing for truth
above all, while Landis points to the immediate gratification produced by his
gifts. Most viewers will line-up somewhere in the middle, alongside the curator
organizing a display of Landis’s work. Duping museums is obviously problematic,
but we still recognize a good story when we hear one.
In
fact, the entire film sounds great, thanks to a swinging soundtrack composed by
Stephen Ulrich to evoke big band music of the 1930s and 1940s (particularly
Artie Shaw, but you will also hear echoes of “The Mooche” in there), as well as
the solo guitar work of Eddie Lang. Although it has the fullness of more modern
recording technology (and takes occasional liberties with instrumentation),
there is something wonderfully appropriate about Ulrich “forging” a vintage swing
era sound.
