Customer Reviews

The Forgery of Venus: A Novel

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Talented artist Chaz Wilmot is the son of a slightly less talented but popular artist, and is obsessed with the idea of wasting his talent and thus is doing exactly that. In addition to the paltry sums he brings in with commercial work he is a paid participant in the trial of a completely legal but somewhat psychotropic drug hoping to identify the roots of human creativity. With two ex-wives and three children to support -- one of whom is desperately ill -- he desperately needs money and when he's offered a huge sum to recreate a frescoed ceiling in Venice, the offer is just too good to refuse.

What follows is a finely crafted, intricately woven novel of psychological suspense that I found completely absorbing. While at certain stages I felt that I could have used an art history lesson to get full enjoyment out of the book -- and I'm sure that readers with more knowledge of art than I have will reap an extra dimension -- ultimately that was beside the point and I found myself thoroughly enjoying the ride I'd signed on for.

With the only other Michael Gruber novel I've read being The Book of Air and Shadows, I will definitely be checking out more of this author's backlist.

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.

I have liked everything Gruber writes (especially Night of the Jaguar and Tropic of Night). He is smart, imaginative, his ideas are provocative and go outside the boundaries of our current socialization. This book tackles the springs of creativeness. His artist hero is a great imitator of old masters. He is not a forger but a reinventor of new art in old techniques. The artist merges with Velasquez after taking a new drug being tested and ... Read the book, it's worth it.

When Chaz Wilmot attends a party hosted by another Columbia alum, he meets up with a former college roommate and gives him a CD with an incredible story on it. Before he does this he admits to the old friend that the Velazquez they're looking at and admiring is, in fact a fake. Chaz admits that he painted it; in 1650.

So begins a story that becomes so engrossing that the reader is hard pressed to put the book down. Chaz is an artist that can paint in almost any style required. He can duplicate Leonardo, Van Gogh, or any other highly valued artist. His talent though isn't popular today. The art world has basically passed him by. And this is the root of his problem. Chaz is so full of a talent that the world no longer values. As such, Chaz is relegated to doing advertising copy or art for contemporary magazines. Not being that stable in the first place he is driven to drug use and he is, at the beginning The Forgery of Venus, spiraling down to a life he wasn't meant to live.

Enter another college roommate, a successful research MD studying the roots of creativity. Chaz is asked to participate in a clinical study and he agrees. What begins as a benign medical study soon turns into trips into the past that further stretch Chaz' grip on reality. Are they real or imagined? Add to this the chance to go to Italy and recreate a damaged fresco and you have quite a story.

Michael Gruber is a superb writer that spins stories that grab the reader. His reputation as a spinner of tales is well deserved. Coming on the heels of The Book of Air and Shadows, the Forgery of Venus is sure to add to Gruber's reputation.

Peace.

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 with this novel: He has allowed a peak into that world through his story and character Chaz Wilmot. He has created a book that is part mystery, part art history, part literary fiction and totally engrossing. Where is the line between madness and sanity? Although Michael Gruber may not answer that question in his novel, he certainly gives his readers plenty to think about.

Christine Zibas, Book Pleasures

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 lake, and carbon black, mixed with powdered limestone. Paint like Velásquez, prep like Velásquez." "The paint was thin, the fine canvas almost showing through, the brushwork free as a swallow in the skies, the palette simple, not more than five pigments." "(T)he handling of the satin of the 'camauro' and the 'manteletta' and the dense fall of the 'rochetta,' white but made of every color but white..." "I lay in the shadows on the white cloth--not white in the painting, of course, only fools paint it so with actual white paint..." "I brush in thin tints...always thin so that the white of the underpainting shows through..." "...using smalt with calcite on the dress, touches of lapis...I want transparency and speed; I'm working with the paint thinned to a milky liquid, a few back-and-forth swashes..."

It's invigorating, absorbing. And I find my fingers itching, my mind composing a scene, and I want to dig out my old box of paints, pull an unused canvas from the closet, and start painting again. This is my first reading of Gruber, but it won't be my last.

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.

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-creation than a restoration and the lines between forgery and original art become more difficult to define as Chaz is pulled deeper into the schemes of a wealthy, sophisticated art dealer, the son of a Nazi art dealer/thief.

Velázquez' life continues to intertwine with Chaz' in increasingly intense ways although he's no longer taking the drug. And Velazquez is tortured by incomprehensible dreams of a hellish place, which Chaz recognizes as New York while Chaz can no longer determine which of his own memories are real and which are delusion.

Still, in the grip of creation, he is magnificent. Gruber brings an excitement to the painter's vision and work that is totally captivating. The reader begins to see with the eyes of a painter even as the painter can no longer tell whose eyes he sees through. It's a marvelous, creepy sensation that makes the heart beat at least as fast as the increasing danger and convolutions of the plot. (Many readers will also want to run to a museum - or the internet - to look at Velázquez' paintings with their new eyes.)

Gruber immerses the reader in his knowledge of the art world and the fascinating, exacting, highly sophisticated techniques of old master forgeries. His exploration of identity and its connection to memory entangles the mind amid plot surprises that are as bizarre and repellant as they are satisfying. There are a lot of contradictions and blurry lines here and Gruber clever storytelling and rich, descriptive prose style makes it all work.

After "The Book of Air and Shadows" I couldn't wait to read "The Forgery of Venus." Indeed, it confirmed to me what a remarkable writer Michael Gruber is and how his books both entertain and inform while leading the reader on mindbending journeys that remain even after finishing them.

This book takes the reader from the (superficial) New York art world scene into seventeenth century Spain, to Venice both past and present, winding up somewhere in Bavaria, Germany. At the forefront is the increasingly schizoid? time traveling? past life experience? painter, Chaz Wilmot, who may or may not be reliving parts of the artist Velasquez's life, as a result of a medical doping experience with a little-known drug, Salvinoren. Chaz's present-past day transitions are so smoothly executed as to be practically seamless and indeed, believable, despite his (and the reader's) growing suspicion that all is not right or so easily explained. His trips into the past only compound his tortuous efforts to sort out his convoluted personal life in the present where, as a painter, he has been overshadowed by his father's outsize reputation.

The author also demonstrates an in-depth knowledge of the art world and how the art underground plays a role in international finance (including the Nazi looting and disposal of major artworks). His descriptions of great works of art are spellbinding as he vividly breathes life into them. It is fascinating to learn how some forgeries are so well done that they have flummoxed and deceived experts throughout the world. How many art collectors are unaware that the old master they acquired for millions may be the work of a painter such as Chaz Wilmot who has the ability to "channel" a great artist?

Perhaps my one criticism - and this with reservations - is that this reader would have liked a few more "active" insights into the Velasquez' character rather than the mainly narrative voice that skips over or relates in brief sentences whole chunks of the great painter's life.

This is a book I look forward to re-reading and enjoying as much or more the second time around.

I am dismayed to see that a number of people didn't much care for this novel. I am giving it five stars and here are my reasons. First of all, I listened to it rather than read it. Narrated by Eric Conger,the reading was spot on. Restraint, subtly, nuance, Conger is a master - one of the best.

You probably have to be an oil painter and or an art history buff to really appreciate the depth and scope of this novel. I am both so yes, I loved it. The novel is part time travel, part parallel universe, part psychological thriller. The art history is deep and accurate - the grounding details about art and painting particularly are perfect. The erotica is delicious and the ending very satisfying. Gruber has created one heck of a story - I give it 5 stars and a thumbs up.