In August 1968 the Spanish government imprisoned a man on the island of Ibiza for creating a long series of sketches and paintings — beautiful, intensely lyrical works that Art Experts had universally proclaimed as masterpieces.
The imprisonment of this Maker of Masterpieces did not represent censorship in the ordinary erotic or religious sense. Nobody even accused the artist of Political Incorrectness. He got jugged for a technical matter — namely, that he had signed the wrong name to his works… or several wrong names, in fact. Names like Picasso and Van Gogh and Modigliani and Matisse, for instance….
In fact, Fake! says Elmyr had painted over a thousand of the classics of modern art. Every time you walk through a museum and see a Picasso or a Matisse that you particularly like, you should stop and ask, “Now did Picasso or Matisse do that, or did Elmyr do it?” Sort of changes your whole view of what critics call “the canon,” doesn’t it?…
We simply do not know the extent to which Elmyr has entered the canon. Maybe 2 per cent of the masterpieces in modern museums emanated from his wizard’s brush, as virtually everybody now admits. Maybe the figure (at least for post-impressionism, fauvism and early cubism, Elmyr’s specialities ) runs as high as 25 per cent, or 50 per cent…. An ouvre of “more than a thousand” paintings might make up something in that percentage range of canonical 20th Century Classics. These implications appear heavily suggested in Irving’s Fake! and even more stressed in the Welles-Reichenbach film….
