We took a cab to Chez Guerlin, the place du jour, I guess, not the kind of joint I would ever go to but sort of interesting in a natural history way. They seated us at a banquette table, right side front, which is the supreme place to be in this particular beanery, a fact he related to me shortly after we sat down. He then told me which famous people were dining with us, cautioning me not to stare, which I was in any case not inclined to do, except I stared at Meryl Streep. Mark’s shamelessness is a legend and is part of his charm.
There followed a good deal of tedious business with the captain, who came by to pay his compliments, and a discussion with the waiter about what we should eat and what wine was drinking well this week, to which the two of them gave not quite as much discussion as Eisenhower held with his aides on the subject of D-day. I let them order for me. This done, Mark gave me a rundown on his business and dropped a dozen or so boldfaced names, which were largely lost on me, although when he observed this he helpfully provided the identifying surnames for the various Bobs and Donnas and Brads so dropped. Business was apparently booming. The art market was going nuts again: the sixteen-thousand-square-foot houses that people of a certain standing now require have lots of wall space that cannot be left blank, and since the rich are no longer paying taxes, money was squirting through New York like a firehose and a lot of it was going into high-end art.
Then we talked about his current artist, young Mono; he asked me what I thought. I told him wallpaper of a superior grade; he laughed. It’s his pretense that I’m opposed to nonrepresentational art on principle, like Tom Wolfe-I’ve never been able to explain to him why that’s not the case-and he spent a while bending my ear about the dynamic values and hidden wit of his kid’s wallpaper. Asked me how I was doing, I told him about the Vanity Fair fiasco but left out the part about the show at Lotte’s-he’s always trying to get me in with him in a business way and I won’t do it, don’t ask me why.
I admitted I was in deep shit, no shame in that, maybe fifty grand in the hole, and he said he’d just gotten back from Europe, buying pictures, talked about hotels, the luxe life, a completely insensitive guy, yeah, but I know him a long time now. I asked him what he’d bought and he said he’d gotten a nice small Cerezo and a couple of Caravaggisti I’d never heard of, and some Tiepolo drawings almost good enough to be genuine-laughed here, just kidding, but you have to be a shark over there, everyone wants to sell you a missing Rubens, and I said it sounded like a perilous life.
Then he asked me if I could work fresco and I said I hadn’t in a while, not since I’d done the St. Anthony seminary out on the Island with my father when I was a kid, and why was he asking, and he said he had a nice little project for me if I could get away to Europe, an Italian zillionaire he’d met in Venice had bought a palazzo with a Tiepolo ceiling in bad shape, ruined really, and he might be able to get me in there, and I said I wasn’t interested, and he said, you didn’t ask how much.
So I asked, and he said a hundred and fifty grand. He had a “gotcha” look in his eye that I hated, and I said I might be interested but it couldn’t be for a while, after Christmas really, because I was committed to participating in a drug study being run by Shelly Zubkoff. When he heard the name he laughed and we did the whole “small world” thing that people do in New York, and he asked about it and I told him the story of what had gone down while I was on the drug. He pumped me pretty dry on the subject, which I thought was a little funny because Mark mainly likes to talk about himself and his experiences. He said it sounded a little scary and I agreed that it did, but I still wanted to go on with it because of the effect it was having on my painting.
So we ate minuscule portions of pretentious food, the sort of stuff that Lotte calls gourmet cat food, and drank a lot of expensive Chambertin, and he filled me in on the gossip of the art world, who was up, rising, falling, or down, and while he talked I could not (as he’d obviously intended) get out of my mind the prospect of earning a hundred and fifty grand for a month or so of work.
I said, “Okay, you got me, tell me more about this palazzo job.”
And he did, and it turned out that the palazzo had been vacant for a while and the roof leaked and the ceiling had essentially collapsed, so it wasn’t a restoration job exactly but more like a reproducing job. Which kind of pissed me off, because it was getting into the forgery zone, but he said, “Not at all, no way, not only do we have a photo of the ceiling, but we even have Tiepolo’s original cartoons for the thing, you’ll be one with the masters, except with electricity.”
“You know this Italian guy personally?” I asked.
“Castelli,” he said, “Giuseppe. He’s big in cement and construction, builds airports, bridges, like that.”
“But do you know him?”
“Not as such. I met him at a dinner Werner Krebs organized in Rome. That name mean anything to you?”
“No. Should it?”
“Probably not. He’s an art dealer. Old masters. Very big in Europe, private sales, multimillion-dollar level.”
“Well, that lets me out of his circle, being a young master myself.”
“Yeah, you could say that. You know, Wilmot, you’re a fucking piece of work. You’re always broke, you do shit magazine work for peanuts, and all the time you’re sitting on a million-dollar talent. Christ, you could be another Hockney.”
“Maybe I don’t want to be another Hockney.”
“Why not, for crying out loud? Look, you want to do representational? You think I can’t sell representational? There are people dying for representational work. They only buy the conceptual and abstract shit because they think they should, because people like me tell them to buy it. But they hate it, if you really want to know the truth; what they’d really like is an old master, or a Matisse, or a Gauguin, something where they don’t have to read the artist’s statement to know what’s going on. I’m talking people who have a million, a million and a half to spend on art. It’s a huge fucking market. Why aren’t you getting rich off it?”
I finished my glass of wine and filled the glass again. “I don’t know,” I said lamely. “Whenever I think about doing another gallery show it makes me sick. I want to get drunk, dope myself into oblivion.”
“You ever think about seeing someone about that little problem?”
“A shrink. Yeah, oh, Doctor, save me, I can’t participate in the corruption of the art market! Vermeer had the same problem, you’ll recall. He did about one painting a year, and when he could bring himself to sell one, sometimes he used to go and try to buy it back. Then his wife would take the painting back to the buyer and beg him for the money again.”
“So he was a nut. So was van Gogh. What does that prove? We’re talking about you, the Luca Giordano of our age.”
“The who?”
“Luca Giordano, the painter, Neapolitan, late seventeenth century. Hey, you’re an art major. You took Italian painting in the seventeenth.”
“I must’ve been out that day. What about him?”
“Fastest brush in the west, and he could imitate any style. They called him the Thunderbolt, or Luca Fá Presto, Luca Go Faster. Interesting guy, a major influence on Tiepolo, as a matter of fact. Never developed a real style of his own, but that didn’t matter, because if you wanted a sort of Rubens, or a sort of Ribera, Luca was the man to see. He once did a Durer that was sold as a genuine Durer, and then he told the guy who bought it that he’d done it.”
“Why would he do that?”
“Because he wasn’t a forger. The client took him to court for fraud, but Luca got off when he showed the judge that he signed the painting with his own name and covered it with a layer of paint, and also that he never personally stated it was a Durer. He left that to the so-called experts. The judge threw the case out of court. After that it was balls to the wall for Luca; he imitated just about every famous artist of his time, and the previous generation too: Veronese, the Caraccis, Rembrandt, Rubens, Tintoretto, Caravaggio-especially Caravaggio. And always with the hidden signature, so he could skate on any forgery charges. When he was court painter to Carlos the Second in Spain, he forged a Bassano from a private collection, a picture he knew that the king wanted, and after it got bought he told the king it was a fake and showed him the hidden signature. The king cracked up, he thought it was terrific and complimented him on his talent. I mean, the guy was a rogue, but a genius with a brush.”