Caveat Emptor (8 page)

From that point on, Mr. Jory was my exclusive source of antique European picture frames and a friend who could have come straight out of the eighteenth century. Born and raised in Paris, Mr. Jory came from a family that had been making picture frames since Louis XIV. The Jory family could visit the Louvre and point to frames carved by their ancestors.

Years ago, Mr. Jory had been able to count among his customers the Fricks, the Vanderbilts, and the Carnegies. For many of these clients, Mr. Jory carved the finest reproductions of French and Italian frames that could be found anywhere. When I eventually saw examples of his handiwork, I was left speechless. I knew at once that Mr. Jory could easily fulfill and exceed Sonny's Profile and Attributes of a Genius. Indeed, the magnificent Florentine frame on Titian's
Venus and the Lute Player
that hangs in the Met was entirely carved by Jory.

But all that had happened a long time ago. These days, Mr. Jory mostly sat in his old shop, alone with his memories and his frames. Whenever I had any extra cash, I made a beeline there. Soon I was incurably hooked on antique frames and either bought them for my own paintings or simply to nest them on the walls, just as Mr. Jory did.

Mr. Jory was the consummate artisan and loved discussing all the technical aspects of his trade. Not only did he know the precise procedures of fine frame making as it had been handed down to him, but he also possessed an intimate knowledge of artists and the way they'd done things in the old days. He critiqued my paintings and gave me many invaluable technical and stylistic tips.

Of particular concern to Mr. Jory was that I understood the precise way in which the old masters made real gesso. One day, he ushered me into the back workroom of his shop. The room was illuminated by a single soot-clouded skylight. Dust clung to every surface. The first thing that caught my eye was a fantastic assortment of antique tools. Sets of beautiful chisels, obviously handed down through generations of carvers, were hung on the wall above a long worktable. Huge unfinished frames awaiting gessoing and gilding hung like half-materialized ghosts from the shadows on the walls.

As I looked around in wonderment, Mr. Jory opened a cabinet and presented me with something he wanted me to have—two old glass jam jars, their faded caps proclaiming BAR-LE-DUC preserves. I was a little puzzled. I noted that one jar held a white powder and the other was filled with amber-colored crystals.

I followed Mr. Jory back into the front room. We sat down with the jars on the table before us, and he explained. One jar contained powdered gypsum from the white cliffs of Dover. The other held a substance known as
rabbit-skin glue
, which hails from France. Mr. Jory then proceeded to explain to me how real gesso was made by artists and gilders alike from time immemorial. The glue is prepared from the rabbit-skin crystals, which are soaked in water until they become soft. Then they are heated and dissolved in the water, making the glue. This glue is then mixed in specific proportions with the gypsum powder and water, making a thick white substance. Then, when spread like paint on canvas or panel, it would render, when dry, an ideal surface on which to apply oil paint or gilding.

I was very attentive, yet unsure whether I was going to undertake all that complicated bother just for the gesso. Although I wanted to be authentic in every way, one really couldn't see the gesso, and besides, the commercial latex-based formula worked just fine. Nevertheless, I listened and retained all that Mr. Jory taught me. I left with the jars and extra gypsum powder that he insisted I take along.

The first time that I had a practical need for Mr. Jory's gesso occurred when I ran out of the sort I'd been using from the art-supply store and needed some in a hurry. Recalling Mr. Jory's instructions, I retrieved the jars, prepared the glue, mixed it with the powder and water to a workable consistency, and spread it like paint on some cardboard surfaces for practice. I then applied it to the panels and set them, along with the cardboard pieces, out on my terrace to dry in the sun.

When I got back to them, I noticed that Mr. Jory's gesso had dried to a much harder surface than the kind I had been using, and the pieces of cardboard I'd tested the gesso on seemed somehow different. I noticed that, as I handled the pieces of cardboard and bent them slightly, in the handling, cracks began to form in the gesso. I began to play with the pieces of cardboard, manipulating them to produce more cracks. When I repeated the same process with a piece that had been left inside to dry, I was unable to achieve the same effect. The cool pieces would not crack. However, when they were put in the sun, had absorbed its heat, and were gently bent, an area of fine and natural cracks appeared in the gesso.

When I spoke to Mr. Jory about this, I inadvertently gained some priceless information. He said that the effect was caused by the rabbit-skin glue. He went on to explain that the glue has a unique ability to become brittle or increase its
tensile
strength when exposed to heat, as opposed to most substances, which become softer. Even though he advised me that the cracks occurred because I was using too much glue in my mixture, I chose to keep my formula the same.

From then on, Mr. Jory's gesso was the only kind I'd use, but I was still a long way from understanding its application and potential to produce genuinely convincing cracks in panels or canvas. As time passed and I used it on my wood panels for Dutch pictures that didn't require cracks, I used the leftover for experiments on different surfaces, understanding that if I could perfect an easy way of producing cracks, I could expand into other areas of painting. The more I experimented, the more I learned, but the basic facts remained: the gesso became brittle when heated, and it cracked when stressed or bent, as long as the surface remained hot.

I spent a great deal of time studying paintings in museums, staring at them for hours until they gave up their secrets, seeking to understand what made the paintings appear old. Was it wear, damage, style, dust, patina, cracks? Of course, I realized, it was a combination all of these elements. As I made new observations, it became a game for me to see how cleverly I could reproduce each one of these effects.

My parents retired to Florida, and I now realized that I was really on my own in the city. I was feeling a little lost when one sunny day I got some interesting news. Tony couldn't stand the quiet life in the country. He and Barbara weren't getting along, and word was that he was back in New York City, looking for a place of his own.

CHAPTER FOUR

Union Square

T
ony found a loft at 864 Broadway, just off Union Square. It was half a block from Andy Warhol's building, two blocks away from Max's Kansas City, and a short walk from my place on Fifth Avenue.

The Psychedelic Sixties were over and the hippies were disappearing. There were no more be-ins, and Tompkins Square Park, the spiritual center of the counterculture, had become a haunt for drug addicts and bums. The building that had once housed the Electric Circus on St. Mark's Place was a drug rehab.

It was a sobering time. Edie Sedgwick had OD'd in California and was, indeed, “Eight Miles High.” Poor Andrea Feldman went “flying” one last time, committing suicide by jumping out of an apartment window on Fifth Avenue. Tom was still living at the Castle as a recluse. The property had been sold and was now scheduled for demolition in order to build another high-rise. He was determined to stay until they drove up the road with the wrecking ball. And Don Rubow, the old beatnik who'd first invited me into the Castle and subsequently changed my life, was also dead. His sorry end was one of the last stories Tom told me before I moved to the city. As he explained it, “Don was running like a madman from job to job trying to keep food on the table for his wife and four kids in a loft on Canal Street, when his heart just exploded one day!”

When I'd first met Tom and Tony at seventeen, I hadn't cared about the future. To be part of their world was too exciting for me to pass up, even if I had burned my bridges behind me, but those few years changed everything. The Revolution was a bust, I was temperamentally unemployable, and by 1972 the future had arrived.

Reality for Tony and me wore a hard and brutal face. The economy was in a severe recession, and New York City was hit hard. Life was becoming a fight for survival in which we were willing to resort to more and more desperate measures. My plan was to struggle through this situation with the only means at my disposal, namely art. Tony simply refused to work in any way, shape, or form. Instead, he spent his time at Max's or hanging out in bars in Brooklyn with his hoodlum friends, figuring out their next score.

Nevertheless, I was glad Tony was back in New York and back to his old routine. As long as I'd known him, he'd sleep until two in the afternoon, get up, pull himself together for the next couple of hours, and by four he'd be ready to go out to a café. Then he'd return at seven, lounge around for a while before hitting the bars at ten, stagger back home at three, and do the same thing all over again the next day.

Aside from a few extra pounds, Tony's looks and charm hadn't faded a bit. He moved in the highest circles of the contemporary art world and was invited to every party and gallery opening in SoHo. But ever since he'd cleaned out the museum in Lake George, his behavior had grown increasingly frightening.

Letting him into your home could be a disaster. He would be perfectly comfortable, sunk in a sofa, looking quite harmless. You could leave the room for moment and not give it a thought, return, and find him exactly as you'd left him, never realizing that the minute you were gone, he had rifled through every drawer and desktop and relieved them of any credit cards or checkbooks.

His victims were legion, and no one was immune: friends, family, or business acquaintances. He expected his victims not to take it personally. In fact, he often invited them for dinner or drinks, sometimes paying with his guest's own stolen credit cards. He seemed to possess—and I've heard others say this as well—almost a sixth sense telling him exactly where a checkbook or credit card might be.

Since I'd been living in the city, I'd continued my education at Parke-Bernet, and had also started visiting the galleries in SoHo. I was trying to follow the advice of Barbara (whose letters I waited for every week) to “find” myself artistically. I wanted very much to paint and succeed as an artist. I had come to the conclusion that I'd outgrown my surrealistic stage, and I certainly didn't view forgery as a career. If there was to be a future for me in art, I would have to be part of the movement.

In the summer of '73, I was having dinner with Tony at Max's when I outlined for him a concept I'd formulated during the past year. I wanted to create a collection of art consisting of twenty-four pieces in three components: canvas, Plexiglas, and steel. The work on canvas would be composed of eight large abstract paintings measuring eight by ten feet each.

The second component would be made of eight rectangular Plexiglas boxes measuring four feet tall, three feet wide, and eight inches deep. Eight more paintings would be removed from their stretchers and then stuffed into the Plexiglas boxes, along with the empty tubes of paint, brushes, rags, and anything else used in their creation. Then each box would be sealed shut.

The third component of the collection was to be composed of eight boxes made of sheet metal four feet high, fourteen inches wide, and fourteen inches deep, with welded seams. These too would have crumpled-up paintings jammed into them along with brushes, tubes of paint, etc., before being welded shut on top. The idea was that one could only visualize—imagine—the paintings within. The gallery arrangement would consist of paintings on the walls, the Plexiglas boxes displayed on pedestals, and the steel containers placed on the floor.

Tony liked the idea, but two major impediments prevented me from getting started: lack of space and lack of funds. Without hesitation, Tony suggested I move in with him. He had little use for his loft space beyond the bedroom and, besides, he could use some help with the rent. He also suggested that if I could put this collection together, he'd be willing to use his connections in the art world to gain interest in it—for a piece of the action, of course.

That night, I thought about Tony's offer. I came to the conclusion that this was a golden opportunity. After all, Tony knew everybody in the business, and the space in his loft would solve the first problem. Now the only thing that remained was the money. I needed at least a couple grand to buy the materials for the collection. The only possibility I had of raising that kind of money fast was to sell the few “Dutch” paintings I had, including the three Mr. Jory had framed for me months ago. If I can go out and sell them, I thought, then I'm gonna move in with Tony.

Although I was dying to let him in on my little secret and tell him of my plan to raise the cash, my instincts told me not to. Aware that he was still wanted for questioning by the FBI, and certain that he'd insist on selling some of my paintings, I knew that if anything went wrong and he got in trouble, the cops would surely tag him to the museum robbery, and instead of moving into the loft with Tony, my next home might be the bottom of the East River.

A few days later, I was ready for action, and I didn't have to go far. The streets just east of University Place were crammed with antique shops, many handling paintings, and most with signs in their windows stating “We Buy Antiques.” A week later, I had raised over twenty-five hundred dollars. Convinced that I was being guided by the hand of providence, I loaded up the Jeep and moved to Union Square.

The loft was on the second floor of a run-down building above a Jewish dairy restaurant. It was practically empty, not much more than a dingy storage room illuminated by two windows at the front that looked down upon the street. The furnishings consisted of a table and two old chairs, a stepladder for guests to sit on, and a neurotic refrigerator that never stopped rattling and shaking. Tony was basically living in the bedroom, the only room with heat. The door to it had always been conspicuously closed on my previous visits.