BOOK
REVIEW A
Wolfe loose as Miami meets
Moscow Back to Blood: A
Novel by Tom Wolfe Reviewed by John Helmer
MOSCOW - The value difference and profit
opportunity between a genuine piece of art and a
fake are so large there's no deterring
entrepreneurial forgers. Until now, the cleverest
schemes have, ethnically speaking, been the
specialty of Englishmen, Americans, and well-known
art auction houses, museum curators and experts in
connoisseurship. That last term is upper-class
slang for hucksterism.
But when American
Tom Wolfe, exponent of what was called the New
Journalism 50 years ago, exposes a Russian
oligarch for a plot to make hundreds of millions
of dollars in fakes through donating some to a
Miami art museum, and selling others on the
side, he has created a
700-page scapegoat for many things, including the
loss of Wolfe's talent.
Wolfe's tale is
set in Miami, which he's at pains to explain from
the get-go is mostly Hispanic and pretty venereal.
Wolfe, now 71, is preoccupied with the
monsveneris, which pops up often in the 107 pages
before the oligarch appears for the first time.
He's called Sergei Korolyov. The descriptions of
him are more the American fantasy of what they are
missing in cash and potency than they are of any
known Russian oligarch who's ever dropped in on
Miami, let alone lived there. There's no
resemblance to Dmitry Rybolovlev, for example, who
bought the most expensive house in that southern
American town. There's the "square jaw,
amazing blue eyes" - no resemblance to Dmitry
Afanasiev, the Rusal lawyer, who also has digs in
Miami. Square Russian jaws, remember, are the hallmark of
the Russian villains in pulp British spy
fiction.
Wolfe is famously pernickety
for getting right the detail of object
brand-names, locations, garments, and other human
detritus. In the case of Korolyov, together with
the other Russians in the story - Igor Drukovich,
Mirima Komenensky, Boris Flebetnikov, art advisor
Lushnikin, chessplayer Zhytin- Wolfe not only
depicts them mangling their transition into the
Englishlanguage. He also transcribes their accents
as a cross between Polish and Russian which noone
speaks on either side of the border - unless they
are wearing S&M gags, bear congenital
harelips, or have suffered stammers since their
military service.
President Vladimir Putin
appears twice - on both occasions as the American
epitome of cold, calculating violence. In one, a
Jewish billionaire named Maurice Fleischmann, who
is in treatment for genital herpes compounded by
addiction to pornography, says: "Whattayagonna do
- get Putin to slip an isotope into my
cappuccino". A character less educated and less
afflicted than Fleischmann claims Korolyov has
"got the heart of one of those Russian Cossacks
who used to go around cutting off the hands of
little children caught stealing bread."
Wolfe the investigative journalist does
get to the heart of the Cold War, though, and why
it isn't over. This comes late in the book, with a
disclosure that explains the reason white male
supremacist Mitt Romney, and vacillating Barack
Obama, have made such a to-do about Russia when
their electors are concerned only about their
jobs, taxes and pay.
This is what
Magdalena, the 24-year old Cuban-American target
of almost every male organ in the book, is saying
to herself as she wakes up before dawn in
Korolyov's "outsized [natch] bed in his great
[natch] duplex in Sunny Isles". She senses he's
feeling her up around the you-know-where, and
thinks to herself: "she couldn't believe a man his
age could regenerate over and over, before they
had finally gone to sleep... They couldn't have
been asleep more than a couple of hours - and
obviously he was ready to go at it again." Way to
go, "Sergei Andreivich"!
There is a brief
moment when American manhood reclaims the
initiative by flooring Flebetnikov. "Here was a
good old country boy who would happily beat a fat
Russian senseless and feed him to the hogs." Wolfe
explains this is possible because Flebetnikov has
lost all of his hedge fund on gas price futures,
and at the moment of being beaten senseless lacks
bank credit and bodyguards.
Wolfe makes a
cameo appearance himself in the suit he made
famous for a time in New York in the late 1960s.
In the story Wolfe describes the maitre d' of a
Miami restaurant called Chez Toi. "The maitre d'
was instantly recognizable. He was the one dressed
like a gentleman... He wore a cream-coloured
tropical worsted suit and a necktie of darkest
aubergine." In reality, Wolfe was a shy man in
that costume, and its ill-fit and poor cut gave
the gentleman game away. He is still getting the
geography of tailoring in London wrong, placing
Jermyn Street off Savile Row.
For reality,
real reality, Wolfe appears in the book for an
instant to say, it's up to the Russians to
demonstrate. Correcting the phraseology of a
television team at a party, Korolyov says: "That
would be 'real reality'? Then what would be
'unreal reality'?... this is a reality show, I
thought. And I speak lines by a writer? I think
the English term for that is 'a play'?"
In
real Russian reality, there are oligarch-sized art
collections. Alisher Usmanov, for example, bought
the collection of Russian pieces collected by the
late Mstislav Rostropovich after his death in
2007, diverting them from sale by Sotheby's
auction house to the Konstantin Palace in St
Petersburg. If Wolfe's tale is to be believed,
double-checking the authentication and valuation
of the pieces in that collection might be a good
idea, if only to allow the $40 million valuation
of 2007 to keep piling capital gain on the
palace's books; and doing likewise for the items
Mrs Rostropovich (Galina Vishnevskaya) has kept
back at home.
There are other well-known
connoisseurs of Russian art at the oligarch level.
Sergei Frank is a notable collector of 19th
century Russian painting of maritime scenes,
especially of far-eastern waters. Igor Shuvalov is
a connoisseur of Russian antiques. Shalva
Chigirinsky got his start in antique icons, and
then assembled a fine collection of Shishkins.
Vladimir Potanin made a well-known save of one of
Malevich's Black Squares (1915), and
repatriated it. He paid just $1 million in 2002.
Much bigger numbers are ascribed to the
three Russians listed by ArtNews of New York as
top of the artpops. Roman Abramovich and his wife,
Daria Zhukova, come first alphabetically; their
speciality is reported to be "modern and
contemporary art". They are followed by Mr and Mrs
Oleg Baibakov ("contemporary art"), and then Rybolovlev
(19th- and 20th-century). You spot works being
sold out of their collections, Wolfe's advice
would be what art buyers already know - caveat
emptor.
The valuations of collections like
those, which are bound to be believed, are dwarfed
by the size of Korolyov's scheme, according to
Wolfe's tale. This involves the donation of faked
Maleviches, Goncharovas, and Kandinskys to the
Miami museum. The publicity generated by the
jacked-up valuation of Korolyov's $70 million
philanthropy allows him to start selling privately
an even bigger number of fakes, thereby netting
him double, triple or quadruple the phoney
valuation, depending on what he paid the forger,
the experts, and everyone else who played a role
in his scheme.
However, Drukovich, the
artist employed by Korolyov, drunkenly reveals
what he's done to a local policeman and a
reporter. After the news is reported by the latter
in the Miami Herald, Korolyov rolls off the top of
the Cuban girl; orders Drukovich's murdered
without trace; snatches back the forgeries waiting
for sale in his studio; and just to be safe, flies
off.
Before Drukovich shuffles off the
mortal coil, he has this to say about the quality
of early-20th century Russian painters. Regarding
Malevich, "he try to be realistic. He haf no
skill! Nozzing!" Between downing vodka - "Na
zdrovia!... Now you honorary muzhiks!" - he
explains that the Russian modernists are easy to
copy because they had no talent to start with.
Kandinsky, "when he start out, he try to paint a
picture of a house... it look like a loaf of
bread. So he give up and announce he start a new
movement, he calls it Constructivism! Goncharova,
"she is most unskilled of all! She cannot draw,
and so she makes a big mess of straight little
lines."
It's hard to be sure that
extracting this confession is a triumph of
investigative journalism on the part of the
journalist, either the fictional Miami one or
Wolfe in New York. "You lack sufficient objective
evidence and have no eyewitness," the storybook
lawyer tells the Miami reporter, the editor, and
the proprietor. "You can't even indicate that
Korolyov is to blame for any of it."
But
then the corpse turns up. Then the newspaper lets
fly with innuendoes against Korolyov, to which his
lawyers Solipsky Gudder Kramer Mangelmann and
Pizzonia respond with a libel warning. And then,
::::::yaaaaaagggh!::::::: the intrepid reporter
gets hold of the evidence of the faked catalogue
and the side sales. Wolfe has invented some new
punctuation, and it's all over for Korolyov.
The genuine Miami Art Museum opened its
doors in 1996, and is rebuilding at a cost of $200
million. So far it appears to have bought or
exhibited not a single Russian artist. Just four
residents of Miami are on the ArtNewstop-100 list
- car dealer, doctor, lawyer and broker. As Wolfe
makes clear, "any similarity to real persons,
living or dead, is coincidental and not intended
by the author." The attribution to Russians, which
is as central to the plot as the mons veneris is
to the girls, looks to be something else.
Back to Blood by Tom Wolfe,
Jonathan Cape (25 Oct 2012), ISBN-10: 022409727X,
$16.48, 720 pages
Note: 1. For the method,
business and talent of art forgery, there is no
better reader than the autobiography of Eric
Hebborn, Confessions of a Master Forger, published
in 1997. Hebborn was murdered in 1996. The quality
of his work isn't
fictional.
John Helmer has
been a Moscow-based correspondent since 1989,
specializing in coverage of Russian business.
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