Reviewed by Rama Gaind.
By Shaun Greenhalgh, Allen & Unwin, $32.99.
A memoir of a different kind: an art forger, a fraud, who leaves a path of disenchantment and uncertainty. Some may look on him as a folk hero.
As Greenhalgh writes: “Most people have an image of the art faker as a bewhiskered old codger slaving away patiently at his easel”. A Forger’s Tale quickly corrects that picture!
The is an astonishing, though definitive account, of one of the greatest living art forgers, who fooled the world’s experts whilst working from a shed in the garden of his parents’ house in Bolton, England. Shaun Greenhalgh reveals how he did it – and why.
A working class kid from England’s north-west, his backyard workshop was jokingly referred to by police as “the northern annex of the British Museum”.
With sidekicks mum, Olive, and dad, George, both in their 80s, Shaun hoodwinked museums, art galleries, even royalty and US presidents for more than 17 years before the family was busted.
From a very young age Greenhalgh began a career of forgery. Using canny tricks and basic tools he created an extraordinary range of art and museum pieces dating from ancient times to modernists like Barbara Hepworth.
He was arrested in 2006, and a year later Bolton Crown Court in the UK sentenced Greenhalgh to four years and eight months in prison for the crime of producing artistic forgeries. The breadth of his forgeries shocked not just the art world.
Written in prison, A Forger’s Tale details the notorious career of Britain’s most successful and infamous forger and the extraordinary circumstances that led to it. From Leonardo drawings to L.S. Lowry paintings, from busts of American presidents to Anglo-Saxon brooches, from cutting-edge modernism to the ancient art of the stone age, Greenhalgh could – and did – copy it all.
