Tom Keating: The Forger in Love With Art

In the second week of September 2008, DVDs of series one from 1982 and series two from 1983 of Keating on Painters arrived in my door. Carol had thoughtfully bought me them on EBay. I joyously relived these lessons on painting that I had last watched when I was a callow teenager in the mid 1980s.    

                                                                                                                                     
I had feared that my fond memories of these television programs - would with the passing of time appear foolish. However, I was delighted to fall in love again with Tom Keating’s honest, humours, self-deprecating, intelligent and technically informative programs. They reminded me again - what a hero this portly, bearded and grey haired gentleman had been for me. Keating possessed more genuine, simple love for art - than hundreds of people I have encountered in the art world.                

Tom Keating (1917-1984) was born into a poor family in London. After World War Two he worked as an art-restorer and house-painter. Keating was a skilled but frustrated traditional painter whose work had failed to make a mark in an art world dominated by American Abstract-Expressionists, Pop artists and Conceptual theorists.                                                                

In 1970, auctioneers became suspicious when thirteen unknown drawings by the English Romantic artist Samuel Palmer - all of the town of Shoreham - came up for sale. Doubts were voiced in The Times and in letter to the paper Keating confessed that he had forged them and may other works by other artists. He said he had made them to get revenge on an art world that he thought was corrupt and got rich at artists’ expense. He also revealed that he had knowingly left anachronisms and flaws in the paintings - which would later reveal themselves to restorers. For example before starting a forgery – he would write on the canvas in lead white, fully knowing that x-rays would reveal them instantly.

             

In 1977, Keating was brought to trial at the Old Bailey. It was revealed that he had forged over 2,000 paintings by over a hundred different artists. He claimed that his forgeries had been made to show up the art establishment. However, the case was dropped due to Keating’s ill health - brought on by a life-time of chain-smoking and inhaling dangerous fumes from his restoring chemicals and painting turpentine. That year with the help of Geraldine Norman and Frank Norman he wrote and published his bestselling auto-biography The Fakes Progress: The Tom Keating Story.                

After the trial, his fakes – now titled homage’s - and his own work began to be avidly collected. His last hurrah were these wonderful programs for Channel four in 1982 and 1983 - when he was in his mid sixties and in poor health.

             

In these half-hour television programs - made at the tail-end of his life - he showed how the painters; Titian, Rembrandt, Constable, Turner, Boudin, Rousseau, Manet, Monet, Degas, Renoir, van Gogh and Cézanne  - conceived, started, worked up, qualified and finished their canvases. As he made works in their style (often with tongue-in-check) - he told brief but telling stories of their lives, character, training and working habits. Keating modestly taught the techniques of tempera and oils and pastels, which kinds of brushes to use, how to grind pigments, how to prime canvases, apply glazes, use impastos, varnish paintings and handle the paint brush.

             

Keating said: “I am trying to encourage everybody to have a go… anyone can pick up a paint brush… it’s inhibition that stops even children… it just needs courage.” Yet at the same time he made clear the need for academic or self-training, the difference between genius and talent and those unteachable aspects of painting that required an inner vision. He also honestly pointed out how comparatively easy it was to copy a painting – since the forger did not have to imagine, compose and construct a painting from scratch and out of a highly evolved personal style – they merely imitated.

             

Keating most admired the techniques of the Venetian painters like Titian and Dutch painters like Rembrandt. Although he acknowledged that Titian was widely regarded as the greatest painter in the Western tradition – his favourite was Rembrandt whose humanity he found very moving. William Turner he regarded as the greatest landscape painter of all time.

             

As an old forger Keating frankly spoke of the difficultly of old master and academic techniques - which he confessed required more discipline, skill, craft, patience and professional focus – than Impressionist techniques. However he also spoke of the freshness, direct honesty and reality of out-door painting conceived by Constable, Turner, the Barbizon painters and the Impressionists. He also spoke of the courage and Christ-like humanism of van Gogh and the obsessive dedication of Cézanne.

             

I noted to Carol that she could learn more about the technical aspects of painting in these two series – than fours year in NCAD. Keating was quite simply the greatest and only credible painting teacher I had ever seen in this debased, low-brow and asinine genre. If I had one complaint about Keating’s painting it was the slackness of his underlying drawing and the crudeness of his brushstrokes.

The Yellow House

"I used to be too subjective, and I was always tempted to find my inner self in the exterior and dissipate my imagination on other people and on life."

Oskar Kokoschka

Later that month I watched with great trepidation The Yellow House on C4. I was nervous, because if any artist was more in danger of being caricatured by a film it was Vincent van Gogh. Already the premises of the book and this film based on the book irked me - why isolate just this nine weeks stay of Paul Gauguin with van Gogh probably because it’s the most sensational part of the van Gogh story - when he cut the lobe of his left ear off after a fight with Gauguin. Besides, although art critics have sometimes laughed at it, I was so familiar with the great Hollywood film Lust for Life, which covered the whole of van Gogh's creative life and had great central performances from Kirk Douglas as Vincent and Anthony Quinn as Paul. I hardly imagined that Lust For Life could be bettered by this new film and it was not. I had never bothered reading Martin Gayford book of the same name, for the simple fact of van Gogh fatigue. I mean I adored him, his art, and his writings, but enough was enough! After all, there were plenty of other artists whose stories would have made good movies.

In a sense, the nine weeks Vincent and Paul spent together were atypical in van Gogh's story. He was a profoundly lonely man who spent most of his adult life in isolation, in one run down room over a cafe, after another - 37 different places in total. He probably suffered from manic depression compounded by epilepsy, absinthe poisoning, frantic over work and malnutrition. He wandered, he painted, he drew, he read, and he wrote incessantly seeking salvation in his art.  But perhaps because of his isolation he had always dreamed of an artist’s community, where he could work together with other like minded artists on the project of late Impressionism. Vincent hoped that Gauguin would just be the first artist to join him in Arles. The trouble was that as characters they were an explosive combination. Gauguin was sinister, manipulative and domineering while van Gogh was passive-aggressive, argumentative and needy. They had met before in Paris many times, usually near the art supply shop of Pere Tanguy, where Tanguy showed artists paintings he had received in receipt of art supplies. At this time, van Gogh was still trying to find himself in a variety of sub Impressionist experimentation's. Gauguin on the other hand had slowly but surely started evolving his own very private style in Brittany. However when Gauguin walked off the train and saw Vincent's recent efforts he was walking in to a full-scale revolution in art. Seeing the huge number of canvases that Vincent had made in less than a year must have been gob smacking. However, Gauguin defended his own self-esteem by attacking Vincent’s slap dash approach to painting. Paul took on a tutor’s attitude towards Vincent, trying to get him to paint from memory, slowly and with consideration. 


As artists, they were in many ways opposites. Gauguin would in his later years in the South Seas, produce highly coloured exotic nudes that were built on a drawn foundation handed down from Ingres and Degas - they were modern and primitive and yet also strangely classical. Gauguin thought deeply about his paintings, and painted them slowly, often over years. Van Gogh on the other hand was all about capturing the moment. He painted in a frenzy, which had an inner logic of its own, and he described his best paintings pouring out in feverish bursts. But there was far more intelligence in van Gogh's manic painting than one might imagine, and despite Gauguin's classical leanings there was far more of a whiff of sulphur about his work - he was a decadent familiar with drugs, whores, drink and later underage Tahitian girls. 

Of course, the high moment came when after they had a fight, Gauguin stormed off and Vincent cut off his left ear and then handed it in a letter to a girl in the local brothel. This was just the latest in a series of what today would be called 'self-harming episodes' in Vincent's life and it would not be his last - that was when 18 months later he shot himself in the chest and died a day later. The best explanation I have heard about this episode, is that Vincent would go to the bullfights in the local arena and saw the way the matador's cut the ear of the bull off as a trophy. In cutting his ear off, Vincent was acknowledging Gauguin as the victor of their psychic battle of wills. However, it was also typical of a passive aggressive man boiling with rage, but who could not bring himself to strike out at another man so turned upon himself - the man he truly hated. However, he cut his ear lobe off - not his painting hand! He was not that beaten! 


Therefore, you would expect that with material like this, any drama could not lose. Well 'The Yellow House' bombed. Over acted, under-acted, theatrical, tedious and laughable at times - this film was rubbish. I did not believe a word of it, even when I heard them quote directly from their letters. The lowbrow nature of this film was summed up at the end when they told us that the 40 paintings they made together are now worth $1.5 Billion. So Fucking What! What in God’s name does that tell us about their work or the meaning of their lives! Just another example of the way the capitalistic, consumerist, and celebrity-driven culture of the devoured all higher meanings and shitted it out as sound bite adverts for consumption, capital and fame. The fact of the matter was that Paul and Vincent were just two among many artists, thinkers, socialists, philosophers, decadents, and writers in the late nineteenth century who imagined a better world, one driven by higher morals, shared wealth, and belief in the power of art to change the world. They may have been wrong or naïve, but they had principals. This was part of the barrier to the modern worlds understanding of them and their art. The kids on the ramparts in Paris in 1968 were the last people to understand these men. 


Neither John Simms as Vincent nor John Lynch as Gauguin, had any understanding of them. Neither of them had the volcanic and tortured personalities to live up to their parts.  If alive in 2007, Gauguin might have been in prison for paedophilia, and van Gogh would have been on lithium, unable to paint. But we still had their art and their example.