Caveat Emptor (7 page)

Sonny had three boys seated at easels working on paintings, while he stood cleaning paintings at a table where he could keep an eye on us. This arrangement left us open to Sonny's wisecracks. His trenchant witticisms increased as the day wore on, due, no doubt, to the toxic effect of the chemicals used to clean the paintings.

Sonny was suspicious of everyone who came into his studio. Many pictures were parked there in rough, unrestored condition, waiting to be spiffed up and put on the auction block.

Should gossip or a derogatory rumor concerning the condition of an important painting leak out from a restorer's studio, it could ruin the business. As a result, Sonny insisted that his employees just deal with the technical problems and never talk to art dealers about paintings in the studio, who owned them, or what went on there. It was like working at the CIA.

For the time being, I had a real job. I hated it but worked hard and learned fast. It seemed a rift was developing between Sonny and another boy who worked there—a fat, humorless, fart-blowing misanthrope who held the title “junior partner and assistant”—and Sonny began eyeing me as a possible replacement. He even took the unprecedented step of having me stand and watch him clean paintings. I looked on with fascination as Sonny performed the delicate procedure of removing old discolored varnish and previous retouching from the surface of antique paintings. I soaked up every facet of the work and learned how a picture, whether painted on canvas or panel, was systematically restored.

The fact that Sonny could be insufferable was of no consequence to me. Some guys took his crazy remarks to heart and quit. I threw everything right back in his face, and he liked me the more for it. Once one of us innocently remarked that an artist currently receiving publicity was a “genius.” Throwing down his cotton swab, Sonny marched over from the cleaning table and confronted us.

“So you think that asshole is a genius?” he asked with contempt. We just shrugged our shoulders. Sonny then encapsulated for us his official definition of a genius. After establishing that a true genius is in possession of intellectual, artistic, or creative powers beyond the comprehension of others, which was fair enough, he curiously went on to include a number of personality traits as well.

“A genius doesn't care about money, fame, or any of that bullshit” (Sonny likewise had none). “It's work that's important to a genius, nothing else.” (Sonny was a pathological workaholic.) “Geniuses possess absolutely no sense of time or self-conscious awareness!” (Half the time, Sonny didn't know what day it was, let alone the time, and he dressed like a slob.) As Sonny's diatribe progressed, his audience was led inexorably toward the inevitable conclusion that the comparison between himself and a genius was incontestable!

After Sonny was finished, a profound silence descended, and sufficient time was allowed to elapse so that the striking resemblances could sink in. “Well,” I asked bluntly, “if you're a genius, why ain't you a millionaire?” His wife, who sat at the reception desk nearby, chimed in with her nasal voice: “Yeah, Sonny. Why ain't you a millionaire?” That shut him up for the rest of the day.

To work for Sonny was important to me because I got to handle and examine many period pictures. I came to recognize every type of canvas and stretcher that was used by every major school of art. I saw every kind of wood panel and every kind of crack pattern in existence. I also saw every type of patch-up repair commonly used fifty or a hundred years ago.

From listening to Sonny, I picked up my first tips on what experts look for to establish the authenticity of a painting. I saw how he used an ultraviolet light that, when shined on the surface of an antique picture, could detect old repainting and touch-ups. Most importantly, it also detected whether the varnish applied to the antique painting was original to the painting. True antique varnish displays a characteristic green fluorescence when viewed under ultraviolet light. This fluorescence can't be simulated, so experts often look to this as a positive proof of age.

This was also the first time I was exposed to American paintings. I found them boring, but the market was experiencing a boom in nineteenth-century American paintings and prices were going through the roof. The boom was drawing in a group of young, obnoxious, and greedy dealers who hunted around old historic towns in hopes of finding valuable paintings. I watched as they stood enraptured while Sonny did some quick cleaning and speculated what the painting might be worth.

Meanwhile, in a bizarre manifestation of his mounting paranoia, Sonny sought to compartmentalize everyone around him and was soon erecting partitions to block views of the studio from both his own employees and dealers coming in. He was convinced his employees were plotting against him to start their own studio. The whole place was eventually divided into little compartments with masking-tape markers on the floor designating where an employee might or might not go. Any violation of these directives would result, as Sonny put it, “in immediate dismissal.” Finally, even his wife was stuck in a crazy-looking box he constructed of drywall, with a small square hole cut in it through which she spoke to customers. Indeed, Freud certainly would have had a field day with Sonny.

Around this time, I thought I should have my own apartment in the city. I found a studio in a grand-looking building designed by Stanford White at 43 Fifth Avenue, on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Eleventh Street. The rent was only a hundred and ten dollars a month, because the bath was in the hall. But this drawback was adequately made up for in charm. The studio had tall ceilings and French doors that stretched across an entire wall. They opened onto a small terrace enclosed by a low brick wall. Situated on the eleventh floor, the terrace offered a view of the surrounding area.

Back in Fort Lee, I'd found a real World War II Army Jeep with the original paint job, serial numbers, gas cans, and all. I fell in love with it and reasoned that it would be the ideal thing to get around the city in. To live in Greenwich Village in my very own studio with a Jeep parked outside was a dream come true. I painted the walls, hung a few of my paintings, bought some old Oriental rugs, threw down a mattress—and I was in business. One of the first friends to visit and cruise around the Village with me was Michelle, a red-haired, blue-eyed model whom I met through Tom and whose brother Elliott, a rock-and-roll star, was playing at Max's.

We liked to visit the galleries in SoHo and have hamburgers at the Broome Street Bar. Other times, we'd go to the Met, look at the paintings, and take long walks on the Upper East Side where she lived with her mother. Once, while holding hands and strolling up Fifth Avenue at sunset, we started to walk past one of the big bookstores near Fifty-Seventh Street when something caught my eye. A few months earlier Tom had shown some of my surrealistic works to a few art directors, one of whom worked at Dell. He had liked what he'd seen and asked me to do a cover painting for a novel by Nat Hentoff entitled
In the Country of Ourselves
, a story about student revolutionaries. I did the job but had no idea when the book would be released. There in the window was the book. A hundred of them were stacked in a house-of-cards display. We stood there, staring in the window and laughing like schoolkids.

As time went on, though, I just couldn't stand having a job and being locked up in that loft all day long. The matter was finally settled by Sonny's junior partner and assistant. He resented me for the way I got along with Sonny. He, on the other hand, was forever catching hell for his endless blunders, and nobody liked him. He was in charge of opening the studio every morning, since he got there before Sonny. One day, he informed me that I was to greet him with “Good morning” when I came in each day. I knew he was just trying to bust my balls, and I purposefully ignored him. The next day, I came in, sat down, and went to work without a word. He came right over and demanded, “Well, what are you supposed to say?” I looked up at the slob and said, “Go fuck yourself!” He threw a tantrum, fired me, and ordered me to leave at once. An hour later, Sonny came in and asked him where I was. When the assistant informed Sonny that he had fired me for not saying “Good morning,” Sonny went out of his mind. He fired him on the spot and begged me to return. I was stubborn and refused. I had some savings and decided to say adieu.

I now had more time to attend the exhibitions of old master paintings at Parke-Bernet. This helped me to expand into Dutch painting. I was attracted by the river and harbor scenes of seventeenth-century Dutch painters such as Jan van Goyen and Salomon van Ruysdael. Their tranquil scenes, painted in cool blues, greens, and grays, portray people going about their work on the rivers. Not only was I convinced that I could paint them, but there was the added advantage that many of the originals didn't have cracks, thereby saving me the tedious job of engraving them into the panels. The wood panels they were painted on were, again, just like the ones commonly used as the bottoms of drawers from furniture of the period.

I had installed a small drafting table in my studio, and I completed four pieces, three of them river scenes with the initials and dates of van Goyen and other artists in his circle. The terrace was ideal for putting the pictures out in the sun to dry and harden. Then I applied a varnish, which I tinted with pigments simulating an antique patina. As a finishing touch, I took something I'd seen Sonny fooling around with one day, a very fine powder he mysteriously referred to as “French earth.” I finally discovered that the substance was
rotten stone
, a superfine powder made out of volcanic rock. It's commercially used as a polish when mixed with oil, but when applied as a dry powder it has an outstanding ability to create a hazy, dusty look in anything it's rubbed onto. So after I applied the final patina on each picture, I rubbed the “dust” on and blew it off. The result was amazing.

The fourth painting was a fine portrait of a Flemish gentleman, done on the Ephron panel I'd been saving. The sitter's face was delicately creased with the lines of age; a band of gray hair framed the sides of his balding head. Dressed in the usual pleated tunic buttoned up to the neck, he gazed stoically out at the viewer. After I gave it a “dusting” and placed the panel back in the antique frame, I was astonished by how much visual credibility the frame had added to the final effect.

When I'd worked at Sonny's, I had become acquainted with Walter P. Chrysler Jr., scion of the automobile family. As a hobby, he had a gallery on upper Madison Avenue, and he invited me to drop in sometime. Chrysler was forever dragging in paintings—which he imagined were lost masterpieces—for restoration. He was in the habit of deluding himself with ludicrously optimistic attributions—believing, for example, that the painting he'd just found was in reality an unsigned Rembrandt, Titian, or Vermeer. In short, he was the ideal candidate to buy one of my “Flemish” paintings. This time, I took a photo of the painting with me and dropped in at his gallery with a story that I was disposing of the piece for a party who wanted to remain unnamed. Chrysler took the bait and asked me to bring the painting in. The next day, I returned with the painting and was soon collecting fifteen hundred bucks cash in the back room of his gallery.

From that point on, I understood that a fine frame is to a masterpiece what a Saint Laurent original is to a beautiful girl. Without delay, I put the three “Dutch” paintings into my shoulder bag and headed up to Sixty-Fourth Street and Lexington Avenue. Sometime back, I had noticed a dusty-looking second-floor shop that displayed a single antique picture frame in its window. The sign above the window read, in clear, elegant lettering, E. V. Jory, Picture Frames. When I entered, I might as well have been transported back in time to an eighteenth-century Parisian frame-maker's shop. The walls, covered with the patina of age, were hung with arrangements of pricelessly beautiful antique frames nested within each other, according to their style, period, and size. An Empire table and a pair of armchairs in the center of the room for customers created an air of intimacy.

The proprietor, wearing an old suit and work apron, possessed perfectly erect posture despite his eighty-some years. He had striking blue eyes, silver hair, and a handsome mustache.

As I wandered around, I was enchanted by the reflection of the shop's warm light against the antique gilt and gesso on the ancient carved frames. When I produced my paintings and confided to him that they were my own work, he was greatly impressed. He asked me to leave them with him and he would see what he could do. A week later, I returned to find each painting fitted out in a beautiful period frame, complete with chips and missing pieces. When Mr. Jory offered to repair them because they were damaged and I told him I wouldn't think of it but would prefer the frames just the way they were, he gave me a knowing smile. It warmed his heart that I, like him, viewed such traces of time as part of their beauty.