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.