The Forgery of Venus

by Michael Gruber

Book Overview

An artist born outside his time, Chaz Wilmot can paint like Leonardo, Goya, Gainsborough--and he refuses to shape his talent to fit the fashion of the day. His unique abilities attract the attention of Werner Krebs, an art dealer with a dark past and shadier present, and soon Wilmot is working with a fervor he hasn't felt in years. But his creative burst is accompanied by strange interludes--memories that are not memories . . . and he begins to...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006087449X
• ISBN13: 9780060874490
• Release Date: March 2009
• Publisher: William Morrow & Company
• Length: 336 Pages
• Weight: 0.61 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.8" x 5.4" x 8.0"

Customer Reviews

Forging a Masterpiece

I'm a sucker for novels about art forgery and faked antiques. I've thoroughly enjoyed Jonathan Gash's Lovejoy series and Iain Pears Art History mysteries featuring Jonathan Argyll and the Italian art theft squad. So seeing "The Forgery of Venus" was a no-brainer for picking up, but this book was more than an art scam rip-off; it's a kaleidoscope look inside the "hero's" head that makes this a masterpiece read. Artist Chaz Wilmot has little regard for modern painting technique: "Anyone can do a figure in oils. If you screw up, you just paint over it, and who cares if the paint is half an inch thick. The thing is to catch the life without trying, without any obvious working." When someone says that he's painting like Velásquez, Chaz agrees. "I can paint like anybody except me." So Chaz takes on the challenge of recreating (not restoring) a Tiepolo fresco so successfully no expert can tell the difference. Then, later, he creates a "lost" Venus by Velásquez, while channeling the dead artist--living within the artist in 17th Century Spain and Italy--until he is so mixed up that "I had no idea who I was." "There were possibilities, I had those,... I might be Chaz Wilmot, hack artist, forger of a painting now hailed as one of the great works of Velásquez, hiding out from criminals. I might be Chaz Wilmot successful New York painter, now insane and under treatment... Or I might be Diego Velásquez, caught in a nightmare. Or some combination. Or someone else entirely. Or maybe this was hell itself. How would I tell?" So who is he? Does it matter? The transitions from being Wilmot to being Velásquez are so smooth that it takes the reader a moment to realize which one is speaking. "I run blindly, tripping and bumping into people...and then I am swept up off my feet and held, a man in black, a broad hat and a cassock, a priest...and I say my name, Gito de Siva,...and he says he will take me home, and I am glad to be saved but also terrified that I will be beaten and so I struggle in his arms. The priest says, hey, take it easy, buddy! And I find myself struggling with a UPS man in a brown uniform." "I lay down...and chewed (the drug infused sponge),...and I was sitting in psych class...and the professor gabbing on about human existence, and I was ignoring him...and drawing a girl across the aisle...I'm working with a soft pencil on cartridge paper, using my thumb to blend it in...as the professor drones on, though now his voice slips into a lower register and he's reading from the lives of the saints...and I'm drawing the king of Spain...in front of me His Majesty and a tall canvas I have primed with glue and black-lime mixture, and over that a priming of red earth, 'tierra de Esquivias,' as they do here in Madrid. I am painting his face." Then there are Chaz's descriptions of painting technique: "I stretched a big canvas, over five by seven feet. I sized it with glue mixed with carbon black, and when it was dry I put on a thin layer of iron oxide, red

A Novel with Sprezzatura

In recent years there have been alot of novels about art and even more about drug induced ststes. The Forgery of Venus has both in spades. Read it anyway. If Art History was a favorite course and you can enjoy an afternoon at the Metropolitan, then you will appreciate this book. Michael Gruber seems to touch on every important theme of concern to artists: originality, authenticity, diversions, greed and more. He is equally knowledgeable about technical things- at times I felt I was getting lessons in how 17th century painters thought, prepared and worked. And there is considerable insight into the present day art world and its values. For the most part, I dislike novels that force a major character to contest his sanity because the bad guys have doped him silly. (Novelistic flaws can be disguised if the reader is confused as to what's really happening.) However, the drug induced episodes in this novel tie into the plot and are elucidated with great skill. They provide a window into the past and are quite revealing of consciousness. The drug is salvinorin, a powerful naturally occurring hallucinogin that native shamans in Mexico use to inspire out of body trips to past generations. That characteristic is useful if you need to become Velazquez and restore/create/forge a lost work. Salvinorin remains unrestricted- its chemical composition is unlike the better known brain scramblers. This book is nothing like that other best seller about art. The Da Vinci Code was a paint by numbers novel; The Forgery of Venus has sprezzatura. The prose is not overly ornate, but it is well crafted. The author has a penchant for using unusual forms of fairly common words: eg. parodically, pasticheur and charism. Thus he discovers a number of thoughtful insights about art and the human condition. This is the best contemporary novel I've read in a long time and certainly the best ever about painting.

Art forgery thriller rivets the reader

Gruber's literary thrillers transport the reader into detailed realms entirely apart from ordinary life - worlds of passionate scholarship, pivotal moments in history, monumental avarice - where the stakes are as sophisticated as they are deadly. From shamanism to Shakespeare - and now the art world - Gruber's meticulous research and considerable writing skills bring his intricate and rather fantastic plots to life. The narrator of this sixth book (like the narrator of 2007's, "The Book of Air and Shadows") is a flawed, apparently doomed character, but in this book Gruber does not need to switch points of view to get other perspectives. Instead, his narrator, Chaz Wilmot, simply, literally, becomes the 17th century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. The story opens with a prologue - commercial artist Chaz declares to an old college friend that the Velázquez' "Venus" about to be auctioned for record millions is a fake, a forgery, a Chaz Wilmot in fact. Painted in 1650. He presents a CD, in which, he says, he explains everything. This CD - the story of his life - is the heart of the book. After college Wilmot did not live up to his initial promise. Like his famous father, he became a commercial artist in an increasingly digitalized world with less and less use for traditional illustrators. He had plenty of talent, but was held back by some inner resistance to selling his paintings. This part is never really clear. But no matter. He makes a good living despite this flaw, but not good enough. His young son has a lung disease which is expected to kill him by his early teens if not sooner. Treatments are cripplingly expensive and now there's a clinic in Switzerland offering a new, experimental treatment which might actually cure him - for a price. Meanwhile Chaz enters a drug experiment run by another old friend who is testing the effects of Salvinorin A on creativity (this is a real drug, Gruber tells us in a postscript - legal too - but you won't want to try it at home). He has a vivid flashback to his father's funeral then goes home and paints. The next five days are the most productive he's ever had; "total focus, total pleasure in the work." He can't wait for his next dose. Another flashback, more productivity. But then things get scarier - he finds himself in the body of a boy in a foreign country a long time ago - Velazquez. And next time he's Velazquez the apprentice, already better than his teacher. And then he's painting at the Spanish court. Chaz cannot get enough of this stuff. He becomes irritable and erratic and steals extra doses. He's dropped from the study, but it no longer matters. He no longer has control over his own identity and slips in and out of being Velazquez in the 1600s and Chaz in New York. His personal life begins to fall apart, but his art has never been better. Then Mark, his gallery owning friend, offers him a very lucrative job - the restoration of a Tiepolo ceiling in a Venetian palazzo. It's more a re-creati

Amazing sleight of hand.

The subject is perspective, and as some of the other reviewers have pointed out, the fine line that separates perception and reality. In this instance, we witness one man's perceived descent into madness, and engage in both time travel, and alternative reality. Mr. Gruber is a student of the human experience, and his historical, artistic, scientific and political observations are absolutely delightful to read. Keep a particular eye out for his discussion of the ways in which forged art is used for credit and sold by wealthy gangsters. These descriptive passages remind me of the best writing from Ian Fleming on gold and diamond smuggling as an organized criminal enterprise. Mr. Gruber is a major talent and I recommend this book to you without reservation. This book also perhaps serves as a bit of a jest on the author's part: just as the protagonist Wilmot is drawn into the world of art, painting under someone else's name, so did Mr. Gruber ghost write a series of popular novels, before releasing the wonderful thriller, Tropic of Night, under his own name.

Fantastic Novel that Examines Art, Creativity, Sanity, and Madness

It's been suggested that there's a fine line between brilliance and madness, and it is exactly this edge of reason that becomes the centerpiece of exploration for "New York Times" best selling author Michael Gruber in his new work, "The Forgery of Venus." This brilliantly written, endlessly fascinating story focuses on the life of Chaz Wilmot, an artist of exceptional talent who has had to make a hard scrabble living from commercial work, even while living in the shadow of his father, a far more famous artist. Chaz has led a less than exemplary life (doing drugs, acting out) and despite his superior talent (better than his father or other contemporaries), he finds himself desperate for money to help support his sick child who needs expensive medical treatment. To make ends meet, Chaz first agrees to participate in a drug study on creativity, but then receives an even more lucrative offer he finds he cannot refuse. His best friend, gallery owner Mark Slade, tells him about a ceiling in Venice that needs a secret restoration. This Tiepolo ceiling, however, is more re-creation than restoration, but the price is so tempting that Chaz agrees. Thus begins the descent into confusion over his own identity and sanity. While in Italy, Chaz Wilmot continues to take the drugs stolen from the medical study on creativity, which have a transformative effect on him. When under their influence, Wilmot believes that he becomes the Spanish painter Velazquez. Adding to the insanity surrounding Wilmot are the motivations of his employer, a shady art dealer who has been accused of selling paintings stolen by the Nazis in World War II, who seeks to keep Wilmot in a questioning state so as to use his talent for forgery. It is this descent into a mixture of madness and the full execution of Wilmot's own exceptional artistic talent that lay at the center of the novel. Which reality is true? Or can both be true at the same time? Can Wilmot believe what is happening to him or what he knows within himself to be true? Gruber is a master at using this novel to explore these issues and create for the reader the sort of confused state in which he imagines his own main character. Add to this his gripping tale of the life of Velazquez, the story of paintings stolen during World War II, and the issue of forgery and truth in art, and you have an amazing novel in which the line between sanity and insanity seems arbitrary at any given moment. This hallucinatory state is so brilliantly and compellingly written that Gruber touches on something that seems nearly impossible to describe: the state of creativity. What makes art so interesting in part is its magic: Just how did the artist create the work? What was his state of mind? Because artists tend to live on the edge of society (apart in their craft and way of seeing the world), the rest of society seems to view them as "mad geniuses," an apt description in this novel. The author himself has created something truly outstanding wit