By William Wolf

ART AND CRAFT  Send This Review to a Friend

One of the most bizarre tales of art forgery is given a fascinating exploration in “Art and Craft,” a unique documentary smartly directed by Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman, with Mark Becker as co-director and editor. This is forgery without a crime, for the forger, Mark Landis, has never sought money for works donated to major museums across the country. He was only after the prestige and acceptance of his own skills as an artist and perhaps the pleasures of deception.

In addition to providing a portrait of the bright, talented and very weird Landis, and the tracking down of his trail of forgeries, the film implies a lot about the gullibility and laxness on the part of museums that all to readily accepted Landis’s contributions to their collections without performing due diligence to authenticate the works.

What’s more, once the forgeries had been exposed, a major exhibit of Landis’s work was arranged, with the forger as a celebrity. The film demonstrates that even proven fake art can become an attraction is this skewered art world.

The film examines Landis in the context of his treatment for psychological problems. (He has been diagnosed as a schizophrenic.) He has made contributions in honor of his late mother, for whom he has had a strong attachment and love, and of a sister who never even existed. The film goes back to his boyhood memories of how he was well-travelled, how he developed an early appreciation of art and the creative impulse he displayed. There is a brief fictional enactment of his childhood that breaks the documentary mold. We also are shown early family photographs.

The film is filled with interviews of Landis, to whom the filmmakers had broad access. The result is insight into his odd personality and into the nerve he displayed in encounters with museum officials and the stories he invented. At one point we see him posing as a priest.

The film also details the work of Matthew Leininger, an ex-museum registrar obsessed with tracking down Landis’s forgeries, and the ultimate organizing of the con man’s work into an exhibition.

Landis comes across as an endlessly strange and mischievous character, to say the least, and to the credit of the astute filmmakers, we get a memorable portrait of this different type celebrity whose forgeries span more than 30 years. We see him at work, demonstrating his technique and are shown the range of artists he has been able to imitate. It’s quite a story. An Oscilloscope Laboratories release. Reviewed September 19, 2014.

  

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