One of the busiest art forgers in America has been plying his trade for decades, duping museums both large and small ... and not making a dime off his deceptions. Mark Landis, an aging, frail-seeming and deeply peculiar man, has been forging works and donating them to museums simply for the pleasure of feeling like a philanthropist. He makes an excellent subject for Art And Craft.
The only son of a globe-trotting military officer and a woman with a taste for the finer things, Landis was mentally ill-equipped to operate in the social world he seemed to have been born to. He was institutionalized for a time in his late teens, had little success as an adult, and as old age approached he shared a small, curio-stuffed home with his mother. (Years after her death, he still feels the loss deeply.) But he found a way to maintain an illusory connection to the upper crust: He would create faux artworks – ranging from religious icons and Dr. Seuss cartoons to impressionist paintings – and visit museums (most of them small, regional institutions) claiming that a fictional relative had died and bequeathed the work to their collection.
Most museums were happy for the donations. But when Matthew Leininger, a registrar at one such museum, found that he’d been duped, he made it his life’s mission to expose his fraudulent patron. We follow Leininger almost as much as Landis, observing a single-mindedness that eventually got him fired from his job and appears to have strained his home life. He simply can’t abide the brazen nature of Landis’s hobby – never mind that the FBI says it’s officially not criminal, since no sales were made – and his indignant attempts to expose Landis give a dramatic boost to a story that might otherwise have been constrained within the walls of the forger’s hermetic abode.
In that home, we watch as the most humble of materials – premade picture frames, Xerox copies of artworks, glue and coffee – are transformed into copies that even an art historian might accept at first glance as the real thing. University of Cincinnati gallery director Aaron Cowan is impressed enough – both with the technique displayed in the work and with the story behind it, which he sees as having ‘a performance art quality’ – to set up a bona fide art retrospective for Landis. In preparing the show, Cowan conducts phone interviews that provoke some mini-revelations. But our deepest insights into this confounding character come from just hanging out with him, listening to him describe his ethical philosophy in one moment – ‘I live by the code of “The Saint”,’ he says, referring to the old Roger Moore tv series – and unashamedly recall decades of fraud the next.
– John DeFore, The Hollywood Reporter
