It doesn’t exist any more than God does, or the End of Days, or eternity, or the Heavenly Host. All that exists are works, different in style, in form, and in essence, and the whispered hurricane of opinions about them. And the changing names of these artists that with the passage of time get attached to the selfsame objects. There are not a few Rembrandts that were once considered to be the apogee of painting and that we now know to have been painted by hands other than his. Does this lessen them?
“Of course not!” the laymen cry zealously, but it’s not that simple. A picture is not that selfsame picture if it was made by someone else. A work is very closely linked with our image of who brought it into the world when, why, and driven by what impulse? A pupil who has acquired all his master’s skills and now paints like him still remains a pupil, and if van Gogh’s paintings had been made by an affluent gentleman a generation later, the same rank would not be accorded to them. Or would it?
Things really do get even more complicated. Who has heard of Emile Schuffenecker? And yet he painted numerous pictures for which we worship van Gogh. We’ve known this for some time, but has van Gogh’s reputation suffered as a result? Lots of van Goghs are not by van Gogh, Rembrandt’s paintings are not all by Rembrandt, and I’d be very surprised if every Picasso was a Picasso. I don’t know if I’m a forger; it depends, like everything in life, on how you define it. Nonetheless Eulenboeck’s most famous paintings, all the ones on which his reputation rests, were created by the same person, namely me. But I’m not proud of that. I haven’t changed my opinion: I’m not a painter. That my paintings are hanging in museums says nothing against the museums and nothing in favor of my pictures.
All museums are full of fakes. So what? The provenance of each and every thing in this world is uncertain; there’s no particular magic involved in art, and the works that are ranked as great have not been brushed by an angel’s wings. Art objects are objects just like everything else: some are extraordinarily accomplished, but none of them springs from a higher universe. That some are linked with the name of this or that person, that some of them fetch high prices and others don’t, that some are world-famous and most are not, is due to a number of different forces, but none of these is otherworldly. Nor do forgeries have to be successful to fulfill their purpose: perfect imitations can be unmasked while imperfect ones are hung on walls and admired. Forgers who are proud of their work overestimate the importance of well-grounded skill in exactly the same way as laypeople do: anyone who isn’t totally inept and makes the effort can learn a craft. It’s quite right that craft lost its importance within art, it makes sense that the idea behind a work became more important than the work itself; museums are sacred institutions that have outlived themselves, as the avant-garde has been saying for a long time now, with good reason.
But visitors to cities want somewhere to go when the afternoons are long, and without museums there would be a lot of blank pages in the travel guides. Because there have to be museums, they also have to exhibit things, and these things have to be objects, not ideas, just as collectors want to hang things, and pictures are better to hang on walls than ideas. Admittedly, an ironic free spirit once displayed a urinal in a museum to mock the institution and all its holy affectations and artistic pieties, but he also wanted money and honors and, above all, he wanted to be admired in the traditional way, and so a replica of the original still stands on its plinth, surrounded by holy affectations and artistic pieties. Although the theory that the museum has outlived itself is correct, the museum has in fact won, the urinal is exclaimed over, and as for the theory behind it, only students in their second semester still wonder about it.
I often think about the artists of the Middle Ages. They didn’t sign things, they were craftsmen who belonged to guilds, they were spared the disease that we call ambition. Can it still be done that way, can you still do the work without taking yourself seriously — can you still paint without being “a painter”? Anonymity is no help, it’s merely a clever hiding place, another form of vanity. But painting in the name of someone else is a possibility; it works. And what amazes me all over again every day is: it makes me happy.
The idea came to me already on the third day. Heinrich was asleep next to me, the sea was casting its reflections on the ceiling, and I suddenly realized how I could make him a famous painter. What distinguished him, what he lacked, what I had to do were all quite clear to me. He would be good on television and in magazine photos, and he would give wonderful interviews. The only drawback was those farmhouses. It was going to take diplomacy.
A few weeks later I raised it for the first time. We had just been looking at his most recent work: a farmhouse with barn, a farmhouse with farmers mowing, a farmhouse with surly, arrayed farm family, plus cockerel, manure pile, and clouds.
“Let’s agree that it’s possible to become famous by fulfilling all the requirements and doing what’s opportune. Then what? You would be mocking a world that deserves it and simultaneously collecting what you’re owed. What’s bad about that?”
“That you’re not owed it in such a case.” He stood before me, self-righteous as only a loser can be. His narrow face, the fine lines of his nose, the flashing eyes, the gray hair, and the loden jacket with its silver buttons — it was all made to order for the magazines.
“It would be a victimless crime,” I said. “Nobody loses anything.”
“You yourself would be the loser.”
“But what would you lose? Your soul?” I pointed at the farmhouses. “Your art?”
“You’d lose both.”
And neither of them exist, I wanted to reply, but I kept quiet. So that’s how it goes, I thought: with pride. When you’re proud, you can tolerate being average. “And if we — as a sort of experiment, if we try it — if we don’t take either of those things too seriously? Either ourselves or art?”
We laughed, but we both knew, he just as much as I, that I was being serious.
“And what,” I asked a week later, “what if we risk it? Paint a couple of pictures we know are likely to please the relevant people. And later we’ll announce it was a joke.”
“It would be quite some joke,” he said thoughtfully.
I’d already finished the first three. A boulevard in Málaga, disfigured with a Dalí sculpture, and painted in the wan naturalistic style of Zurbarán, a rain-soaked German pedestrian precinct in the heavily shaded manner of late Rembrandt, and Tristia 3, still one of his most famous works to this day — a surreally high-ceilinged museum gallery, with menacing sculptures made of grease and felt displayed in glass cases along the walls and in the center, disturbed and unhappy, a little boy next to a severely ecstatic art teacher: pasty brushwork interspersed with holes and cracks that let the white canvas show right through.
“Heinrich Eulenboeck,” I explained as I showed him the paintings. “A reclusive aristocrat, a proud outsider, who pursues the art of his time with contempt and has missed not one of its developments. In many paintings, with subtle mockery, there are references to the works of this or that contemporary artist whom he considers to be utterly worthless. He’s seen everything, tallied everything, weighed it all, and finally found it wanting.”
“But I’m not an aristocrat. My father had a small factory in Ulm. I sold it when I was twenty.”
“Do you want to sign them yourself?”
He said nothing for a long time. “You’re probably better at that too.”