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.

Trip to the National Gallery of Ireland 2006

The following day I went to the National Gallery of Ireland with Carol. One of the great things about the National Gallery for me was that it was so familiar to me. I had visited it thousands of times, which meant that I could just go in to look at a half dozen paintings of my choice, without worrying that I was missing out on something. That day I saw some lovely English paintings by Hogarth, and Alfred Munnings (the arch Conservative painter of horses.) Munnings hated modern art, but he used the colorful pallet of the Impressionists, mixed with the tonal pallet of the academy. His painting of horses wading a stream was a beautiful fireworks display of colour especially in the colours of the water. Hogarth's portrait of a brother and sister was also beautifully painted in muted grays, and the under-pinning drawing was impeccable. The greatest thrill for me was to see a Modigliani reclining nude from 1917 - which was on loan. I loved Modigliani's paintings and the story of his brave life of bohemian decadence. Sadly, the recent film on his life that I had seen earlier in the year did not do him justice. Modigliani had talent to burn, and unfortunately he did indeed burn up a lot of his talent in drink, drugs, and passionate affairs with women. The nude on loan was beautifully painted in creamy rich thick opaque paint. In parts the under drawing could be detected - a loose but graceful line in thin black paint, over which he had scrubbed on a think creamy paste over the coarse grain of the canvas. The nude was painted in virtually one rich Orange/pink tone, and only subtle darker tones modelled the form. I loved this painting! It was scared on my mind!                                        

 Going around the National Gallery surrounded by such technically accomplished canvases, was both a joyful and humbling experience. It was joyful, because as a lover of art it was always a great pleasure to see works of such skill and beauty. But it was also humbling, because I realized just how far from this kind of technical genius I (or for that matter any modern painter) was. Modern art had many great qualities in which one could find pleasure. The main quality of modern art was originality. Artists of the modern age struggled to discover a style all of their own which could be recognized a mile off. Picasso, Warhol, Hirst all had their own styles, and it was their style that gave them a place in the art market. The technique was a secondary consideration, so that even if the work had technical sophistication and difficulty - it was only in the service of an idea of style - or artistic identity. But art before the late ninetieth century was first and foremost about technical skill of a supreme level. In the past an artist might only paint a dozen paintings a year, and sell them to a very local clientele. It was vital that every painting represent the artist at his very best, so many works were destroyed in case the public see the artists failures (for example Constable never showed his sketch's to the public, which was wise, as they might have thought him mad. Ironically though, in my day it was his sketches, which approached Impressionism that were most admired.) Where as in my day, art was a global business. The world was crammed with modern art museums and collections all of which wanted representative works by art stars - which led to over production and great variation in terms of the quality of works one saw.

However, there was really no point in expecting things to change. We could not go back to paint like Rembrandt, our society had changed, our training as artists had changed and the way art was consumed had changed. I thought artists like Odd Nurdum proved this point. Odd Nurdum would never be Rembrandt - he would always be a pasticheur. Rembrandt did not look back - he looked forward, he was as much of a modernist in his time as Picasso was in his. There was nothing stale in Rembrandt - his work was alive because he was of his time and yet ahead of it. Nurdum on the other hand was sickening. There was a gimpish quality to his work because there was something fundamentally incomplete in his personality. Something you could never say of Rembrandt who was one of the fullest and most complete recorders of humanity, history had ever seen. Thus the genius of Dalí was his ability to turn his old masterish technical command to new and modern subjects. Dalí was as skilled a painter technically as any in history, but by placing these skills in the service of modern surreal observations and fantasizes he avoided becoming a pasticheur. 


Before I left the National Gallery, I bought the letters of Delacroix. Delacroix's journals, which I had read constantly for years, were along with van Gogh's letters the most beautiful and thought provoking insights into the creative mind I have ever read so I had high hopes for his letters, but they turned out to be less pithy. I also got a great Taschen book on Impressionism, which was only €9 because it was part of the 25th anniversary of Taschen. How would I have survived without Taschen! I still remember the day before Taschen, when one was delighted to buy a book with only a half dozen colour photographs!