Wolfgang Beltracchi: And then he paints paradise

m&k: Wolfgang Beltracchi, while we are talking here in Lucerne, Mr. Beltracchi, a hundred kilometers away the "Art Basel" is just being dismantled ...

Wolfgang Beltracchi Ah, okay.

 

From your reaction I conclude that you have not looked at the fair?

No. First of all, I don't have time. Secondly, I don't do that to myself.

 

At the latest since your 2016 performance at the fairgrounds, you're not so popular there either, I would imagine?

At that time, we had rented rooms in the hotel across the street and showed my own pictures there. Only three or four days, until the beginning of the fair - then we were sold out and already dismantled again. But at the VIP opening of Art Basel, we stood on the fairground with eight people, all wearing T-shirts with the inscription "I Am Not The Real Beltracchi". We didn't move, didn't speak to anyone. Nevertheless, we were insulted - the head of the German Gallerists' Association even came to me personally to say some very savage things to my head. That was quite funny (laughs).

 

The gallery owner's anger was probably not only directed at your performance - but also at your past activities?

Yes, exactly. And the fact that I exist at all. That's enough for "them". Then of course they also saw that my own pictures were already all sold. And that also made them angry. By the way, we filmed the performance with a French crew and took photos. The photos went around the world. Saturday in the Le Monde was a report on Art Basel, a double-page spread, so (makes a sweeping motion with his hands) a large photo of Beltracchi, and so (moves hands again) a report about me. It was mentioned in passing that Art Basel is also taking place right now and a few artists are there (laughs). However, not another word was said about them.

 

It seems like you have a knack for crashing parties.

All the big TV stations approach me every time before Art Basel, or Art Cologne - and want to walk with me through the fair; do an interview with me while I walk through the fair. I don't do that. Because that can end quite badly. I can only imagine that it can end really badly.

 

Are art fairs an "appealing" place for you because they exemplify the nature of the market? Or because you may do little with the works shown there?

I once said to my wife in front of a stand of a large gallery: "Look at what is shown here first. Actually, you could get a container now, throw all the junk in there, that would not be noticeable at all. Wouldn't it?" And then the gallery owner was standing behind us and realized that. She also knew us (laughs loudly). I also know from an employee of a gallery there that they sent one of their artists just one day before the opening to "produce" something else. He then stole two garbage cans and packed them at the stand. Someone even bought them for expensive money. True story.

 

You can make money with garbage?

You can make money with it. Ultimately - as far as your comment about the trade show performance is concerned - I won't do that again. I did it once to show them, look, I'm still here. And I make a lot of money with my art, without you. I don't need you. I don't need all your hype. You know, I've always been like that. I'm one of the few artists who doesn't need this art market.

 

Do you still meet true collectors at art fairs, true passion, or is it all just business?

Of course, there is such a thing. Collectors who are really passionate about their objects. And I didn't say that everything at trade shows is junk. That is certainly not the case. I have a few collectors who are really addicted. I have already said to one of them: "No". He bought several paintings and then wanted to buy another one, and then I said, "No. Now is good. Think it over for two weeks and then we'll talk again."

 

But you prefer this passion to the pseudo-intellectualism that you attribute to large parts of the art industry?

That's the worst thing anyway. Pseudo-intellectualism and educational arrogance go hand in hand.

 

It's not the heart that decides what pleases - it's the head that decides what should please: Why do many recipients allow this reading of art to be forced upon them?

I don't know either. The Swiss are perhaps a bit different. But the Germans are not only obedient to the authorities, but also ignorant of education. That's the highest good for them: education. And if someone has an academic degree, at least that was always the case in the past, then they listened to him. He was right anyway. And that is still ingrained in people somewhere. And the more complicated and incomprehensible the chatter is, the more people believe it. Most people can't even imagine that supposedly smart people can talk so stupidly that you don't understand anything anymore. And that's what is taken to such bizarre extremes in the art industry.

 

So you prefer to spend time with people who have nothing to do with the industry?

In any case, I enjoy meeting people who are not like those described above. These can also be people who nevertheless have a lot of knowledge. I had one here who wrote many books about the Renaissance - Professor Bernd Roeck from Zurich. The man has a real clue, not only about history. And then it's fun. It's like talking to the philosopher Sloterdijk and he says, "Well, we can discuss it, but you don't have enough books to talk to me. (laughs) That's real intellect, there's something behind it. That's simply true. But this chatter that many members of the art business give off, this stupid chatter about art that isn't art at all - I just find it ridiculous. And it always only serves sales and business.

 

Are online sales platforms and new forms of communication now helping to democratize the art world?

The assumption is not entirely wrong. I have sometimes said that in recent years, because I think we are in a process of evolution as far as art is concerned - and a very rapid one at that. What has happened in the past twenty or thirty years is this: Through digitization and all the computer stuff, which I don't really know anything about. (laughs)... more and more people have begun to occupy themselves with art. To study art. But they don't learn how to draw in their studies - the professors haven't been able to do that for a long time - they don't learn any craft. But that's not a bad thing, because computers are taking over little by little. And in ten years' time, the computers will perhaps make the better art. The more beautiful pictures. They're not ready yet.

 

But there are two hearts beating in your chest - on the one hand, you lament the loss of artistic craftsmanship. On the other hand, you say that computer art is on the rise - and you sound quite conciliatory!

Yes, you are right, of course. But I am a living anachronism. I'm old now, slowly coming to the end of my life. And I've mastered my craft. But there are hardly any people left who can do what I can do. A pity? Yes, that is a pity. At the same time, it's a fact. Young people today use technology, use computers, to not only simplify their work on art - they create with it. Their understanding of creativity is different from the one I have. Everything has its time, doesn't it?

 

What is the source of your creativity?

First and foremost, the knowledge. About the art of the past. And literature, music, everything that goes with it. We have maybe five thousand books here, or even more, all about art. We collect them. We buy books practically every week. Because that's important for us. You can't find that on the net. You have to look, you have to search, you have to look. That's important for every new project. The knowledge that you accumulate. What you deal with, what you learn from again and again. That is a good foundation. Then there's the ability - the skill. You have to work hard to acquire the ability to make this art. It took me at least ten years.

 

But your "absolute eye", or as you call it, your "genetic defect", did you have before?

I have always had that. Whereby I would be careful with the term "absolute eye". There was this American gallery owner, Richard L. Feigen. And he wrote a book about the art industry around the turn of the millennium. In it, he claimed that he had an absolute eye. He could see immediately whether something was a fake or not. What can I tell you ... he had several pictures of us. So that's done with the absolute eye (laughs).

 

Today, you are also sometimes asked for your expertise when museums or collectors suspect forgeries, right?

I was sent a photo here asking if I had painted the picture of Carlo Mense, a German expressionist. I only have to look at it once. Then I know: This is no Carlo Mense. Because Carlo Mense could not paint as well as the picture looks.

 

But it's no Beltracchi either.

It is also no Beltracchi. I did paint a Mense once. But this (holds a photograph up to the light) is a picture that he did not paint. I can see that right away. After all, the people who sent it to me think I could paint such a great picture. Well, that's nice.

 

You say you can put yourself into pictures - become one with them and thus also with the handwriting of the other artists. Is that an uplifting feeling, or does it cost you strength above all?

I already had this way of seeing as a child, without noticing it right away. I grew up on the edge of a forest, and I was six when I first noticed that there were cars. So I was very influenced by that environment. It was quiet, I didn't experience much, nothing bothered me. And then we moved away, to the Rhineland, and I was exposed to all this... life. At that time, I immediately started sleepwalking. Every night. I couldn't process all these external impressions. Because I have such an extreme capacity for absorption. And it took me years as a child to shut that down so that I wasn't always so look. Today my wife says to me, "You're not seeing anything again!" I keep tripping over things. I run into things somewhere. Why? Because I don't look "properly". The moment I start to look properly, it strains me terribly. And then it floods me and it becomes almost too much for me. I can't go to a museum and look at all the pictures at once. I go there and look at one. Or two.

 

That sounds really exhausting - but it also led to your first "career".

What I can do through that is: I can recognize the handwriting in a picture. When I look at a picture, I know how he or she did it. How did he or she move? That's what I always say: Painting comes from movement and time. When I now look at (points to the left with his hand) I have a completely different stroke and style than when I do the same (points to the right with his hand) I do it with the other arm. Or I do it with the other arm, then it's different again. All of this becomes handwriting. Like when you write a letter. Movement, time, material - and that's how a picture is created. And when I stand in front of it, then I see that. Then I can assimilate that. I take that in. I don't even have to look at it consciously, I just look at it. And then I can paint that painter. No matter which painting.

 

Media always like to look for easy narratives. You've been branded a "master forger" - but the work you do seems to me to transcend forgery by far. A bit like Mozart, who had an absolute ear back then, but knew how to evade all social conventions ...

Musicians actually approach me frequently. I am also often invited by musicians, or they write to me. There are quite a few musicians who have written pieces for me. From rap to chamber music, everything. Because they draw these comparisons.

 

Does art have a meaning?

Absolutely. That would be bad if it weren't so. Then I would be sitting here now after seventy years and would have to say that my life had no meaning, at least in that respect. I have now occupied myself mainly with art. Moreover, a journalist once asked me this question, slightly modified. He wanted to know: "What is true art? I said that "true" art is art that saves lives. That makes life beautiful. Or that simply gives pleasure. For some years now, a man has been writing to me who is completely paralyzed - he can only move his mouth. He said he didn't want to live anymore, but then he saw my series (The Master Forger, 3 Sat 2017, editor's note). and then said that I could do that. I can still do that with my mouth. And then he and his family started to try it out. That's what I told the journalist at the time. I picked out a picture like that, didn't say what was wrong with the man, I showed him the picture and said that this is "true" art, because it saves lives. Oh, he didn't understand that. He didn't want to.

 

He wanted a universal value judgment or some kind of criteria set.

That doesn't exist anyway. And that's also the point. There was once a nice documentary about the "value of art". I'll tell you frankly: There is no value of art, there is only a price of art. You know the price, the painter costs so and so much. That is the price. But that has nothing at all to do with a value. Let's take the Salvator Mundi, we know the price now, 450 million US dollars. What is the financial, real value of this painting? If you ask me: around 10,000 US dollars. Artistically, it's worth nothing anyway, because it's scrap metal. (laughs). But it cost $450 million. That's the price, but it's not the value. And so it is with many things.

 

So the market acts detached from the actual content of the art?

Many people buy art because they see it as an investment, and they pay an inflated price. You have to know one thing: In this business, there are always people who want to sell something above all else. Like everywhere else. They want to sell this art at a high price. And as expensively as possible, in order to earn as much as possible. Simple business. Voilà. Practically everything you see on the market in terms of big events are not controlled outliers. You have to take that with a lot of caution.

 

You mentioned beauty in art, several times already. Can performing art, can images "capture" - even immortalize - beautiful moments?

Yes, definitely. I think it's great that you're bringing this up now. That's one thing I'm very concerned with - the "power of images. That's simply what I call it now. Images have an extreme power. If you can read them correctly and if you can "get into them" ... I experienced that when I was ten years old, that I saw an old master painting in The Hague. My first visit to a museum. It was a winter landscape with lots of people in it, by Haverkamp. And I smelled the fire and heard the children and those skates. It was like a movie for me. I even got cold. And then I went back out with my aunts and thought, "This is why people go to the museum, this is crazy!" I didn't talk about it at all because I thought it was normal. And those are moments that art captures forever. And I was talking about this earlier with a good friend, exactly about this. That we always have moments in our lives that we may not even realize at the moment. But they are extremely beautiful, extremely important. Not important in the sense of money or something like that. No. Important, because they stick with us and are memorable. And when you're fifty years older, you still think of that moment. Or that image. I have thousands of images in my head. Thousands and thousands. I don't know how many images I have stored in my head. And I can call them all up. And then there are so single ones, where I go once. Also in my dreams. That's another defect I have. I can dream consciously. I dream myself somewhere at night. Let's say I go into a picture like that and I'm there. That's like cinema for me. I can direct that, too. And that's why I'm sometimes very tired in the morning. (laughs).

 

Lucid dreams, I believe, is what the experts call it.

I do that very often. And that was absolutely normal for me as a child and also later. I didn't even know that others couldn't do that. But it was never enough for me. This power of images, it's quite crazy. We have so many ideas in our heads about different things. Let's say paradise. If you are a believer and you think of paradise, you have a certain idea. Everybody has a different one somehow. Now imagine that you have a picture that really represents paradise. And you could go into this picture. That's what pictures are capable of! They can take you to another time, to another life. It's quite insane.

 

The writer Peter Kurzeck comes to my mind - here in Switzerland he is rather little known, he also never made the big breakthrough in Germany - who wrote very impressively about how he imagined dying: Like looking at a picture in which a tiny wanderer is walking through a hilly landscape; and all of a sudden, as a viewer, you yourself become this wanderer and walk into the picture, into the light....

That's an interesting idea, it's not new either: all the famous gurus that were around, you know how they all died? They sat down and said, "I'm leaving now." And then they left. And they went somewhere they wanted to go. The spirit just left the body and at that moment the body died. In deep hypnosis you can reach a similar state, into an image, another time. It just gets harder and harder the further away you go, away from your own epoch, your own life. I experiment with such states, with me they always, always have to do with images.

When do pictures reach their limits? The core of mysticism, at least that's what philosophers like Karl Jaspers say, no one can paint anymore, no one can write or say. It can perhaps be experienced, in rare moments, but ...

...perhaps experience, yes. But I can't paint it the way one would have to paint it. And I have painted so much in my life, I should know it (laughs). Leaving the body to go into images - I still do that often. For me, the "normal" consciousness, the "normal" state that we are sitting here now, is very questionable. That this really "is" now. Who is telling me that? It doesn't have to be. It may be, it may not be. One does not know it. One really doesn't know. We coined the term time, we invented it. We used it to create a framework for ourselves.

 

Aristotle would say you have retained a philosophical wonder in your view of the world.

I am not a philosopher...

 

I would disagree.

...but I have a lot to do with philosophers. I just did a podcast with Richard David Precht. Markus Gabriel wants to visit me here in the studio. Only: All this doesn't go far enough for me. I have this feeling of moving outside of time more and more often. I'm tracing it now, even beyond words and images.

 

Do you feel freer today than before, in your "old life"?

In a way: yes. Not because of the legal process. Not because I don't do forgeries anymore, not at all. That has nothing to do with it at all. I feel freer because I move more freely in my head. And I simply know more, I know more precisely where things are going.

 

Weren't the artists' handwritings, which you virtually imposed on yourself, also sometimes a burden for you?

No. You have to look at it this way, I haven't painted many pictures. Sometimes one, sometimes two or three. Above all, we lived. I've had a great life. Very exciting, quite wonderful. Well, we got a bill afterwards, but when you see fifty years of a great life and then this bill... you can cope with that. Someone who goes to work in the factory every day gets a different bill. Through this story and afterwards, of course, I've met a lot of other people; a lot of interesting people who I like to talk to. Who like to come to me. What luck that is! When we talk, they're often surprised at where it leads - it's not just the art I'm talking about today - but the art or the paintings have somehow opened a gate for me, through which I now look through with pleasure.

 

Have you ever wondered what it is about you that fascinates people so much?

I think, first and foremost, that I am who I am. That I never tell, do or pretend anything that I am not really. And that I treat every person the same. Really everyone. And I also have no false "respect" for whether someone represents this, this or that. It does not interest me. I am only interested in the person and nothing else. And money, no one can come to me with that. With such things, here my yacht and there my airplane and such shit ... with these things I never had anything to do. I always tell people: "I once lived in a fur coat for two years. It was a nice time too." I don't regret that, it was really nice. But today it's fine the way it is. Today, although I'm earning a lot of money with my art again, it could be completely different. That's not what really interests me.

 

You refuse to form your own artistic signature. You want to constantly reinvent yourself in your own art. Not interested in artistic immortality, Mr. Beltracchi?

No.

(Beltracchi's wife, who has been listening from the beginning and commenting in places, intervenes).

Helene Beltracchi: What we actually want to leave behind, again and again, is the pleasure of art. The completely normal way of dealing with it. And that this "deification" finally comes to an end.

Wolfgang Beltracchi: People go to my exhibition and then ask: "Which picture is yours? That one? That's beautiful!" And then I say, oh, that's high praise! They're all mine, but that you ask extra, that's great. Because I actually never, ever paint the same pictures twice. I always start from scratch. I don't find it creative to reproduce myself over and over again.

Helene Beltracchi: Wolfgang is also not annoyed by people. When an exhibition takes place, he stands there; when someone asks a question, he explains it to them in detail and then all of a sudden there are five, fifteen, fifty, a hundred people around him and he keeps explaining. And the people just have the feeling afterwards that they have understood something. And that they had fun with art.

Wolfgang Beltracchi: Do you remember, in Munich, we were there on the last day of the exhibition of Joaquín Sorolla ... a Spanish painter whom I hold in very high regard. And then I met with two or three people there to explain it to them a bit. I was always a fan of this painter. And then when we were in there, I started to say something about the paintings. Why he is called the "painter of light" and how he did it, that everything looks like that. And then first there were ten people, then twenty, then fifty. Then there was a question. And then they all went along, further and further from picture to picture and listened. They didn't read any more of what was written on the funny boards, no. They really wanted to know, "Why is that? What makes this picture by that painter different from that one, and why? How did he do that?"

Helene Beltracchi: No learned art historical knowledge, but just like that.

Wolfgang Beltracchi: No one else can tell you that.

 

Because you are able to describe it "from the inside".

Wolfgang Beltracchi: I see that, I know that. And because, of course, I also know these techniques and how he did it. That's exciting for people, of course. To hear how he actually did it. How long did it take him to paint this or that. I can tell them exactly, to the half hour.

Helene Beltracchi: And Wolfgang always weaves the artists' stories into it. He humanizes the artists. Then they tell about the rheumatic complaints and about this and that ailment, and people realize that these were actually living people who painted the pictures.

Wolfgang Beltracchi: Painted by people for people. And not for art dealers.

 

You mentioned your 3Sat program earlier, in which you portrayed celebrities. Who would you like to paint personally one day, from the present or the past?

Wolfgang Beltracchi: Jimi Hendrix. I would have liked to paint him. I would have liked that.

 

And is there a painting you've always wanted to do but haven't yet?

Wolfgang Beltracchi: I don't know. Well, whereas: There are a few pictures in my head that I still want to paint. There are. There are especially a Picture that I will still paint: I will paint my very own idea of paradise. I've had it in my head for a long time. I don't mean it religiously at all, as it is written in the Bible. I mean a place that is so beautiful and where there are all kinds of things that are also beautiful and peaceful, a paradise. I will still paint that. In any case.

Helene Beltracchi: I don't know how to picture it.

Wolfgang Beltracchi: I will describe this to you once. I need the painting anyway, I have to paint it because that's where I want to go. I want to be able to take people there. So that they have this beautiful experience. I'll always be able to do that myself, but I want to do that with others. Because that's something you never forget in your life.

Helene Beltracchi: Has anyone ever come back from paradise?

Wolfgang Beltracchi: Lene, you can't look at it that way. You're only going there in spirit.  (looks at her) You are here.

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You would like to experience Wolfgang Beltracchi live? Then register now for the Swiss Post Direct Day toAmong many other exciting guests, he will appear there and talk to Rainer Maria Salzgeber about his eventful life.

If you would like to learn more about and from Helene and Wolfgang Beltracchi, we recommend these two books: the autobiographical exposé "Self-Portrait" and "Enclosure with Angels," which contains the couple's prison letters. You can also find more information on Wolfgang-beltracchi.com.