Learn about the story of the false collector who deceived more than 46 museums and galleries for more than 30 years without going to jail.

There are several reasons why people perform false works. For example, it does not require much explanation to know why there are people who use the name of successful artists to make easy money. There is also revenge or frustration; artists like Tom Keating who feel defeated by an unfair system that does not recognize their talent and hard work, and who look to counterfeiting as a way to mock. But what about social acceptance? Human interaction? The need to feel like a recognized member of your community? Are these reasons enough to scam people? For Mark Landis, American artist, forger, and con man, the answer was always clear.

Origin

Mark Landis (1955) was only 17 years old when he first experienced a nervous breakdown at the loss of his father. Son of a middle-class family, during his childhood he was constantly moving in cities in Europe and the US. due to his father's work in the United States Army, making it difficult for Landis to develop social skills with people his age and making him an extremely introverted child. Given his nervous episode, Landis was admitted to a psychiatric hospital and his doctor's diagnosis was severe: schizophrenia. And like many patients who seek alternatives to alleviate the ills of the mind, a doctor recommended that Landis turn to art, a therapy that would not only help in his diagnosis, but also in an activity that would give meaning to his life.

But despite the refuge that art offered, Landis lived the next few years of his life in a bubble of isolation. A victim of his illness, and limited to watching television for multiple hours a day, Landis nurtured a fascination with art collectors; people so opposed to him with economic power and social influence, that they were celebrated as philanthropists for their donations to museums and galleries.

In the mid-1980s, after several years of admiring collectors, Landis gave in to the obsession, and impulsively went to a library where he copied photographs of Native Americans in the artist's "cowboy" style as Maynard Dixon (1875 - 1946). Later he visited the Oakland Museum of California where they had an exhibition of the artist and donated his work as an original.

Landis did not expect much from this act; he just wanted to impress his mother and thought the museum would only thank him for the donation. His act was so well received by the museum, however, that Landis, who had lived most of his life in solitude and feeling like an outsider, received special treatment that immediately made him addicted to the attention.

Admiration and deception

For the next 30 years, Landis would refine his "donation" system; he studied what museums had in their collections, prepared a work that might be of interest to him, and presented himself, as a collector or priest, with a story of how he had obtained the work and why he wanted to donate it. He also created different pseudonyms like Mark Lanois, Father Arthur Scott, John Grauman and more; mostly names he got from art catalogues.

His art therapy had made him an excellent copyist; he developed the ability to copy works with different materials in as little as 2 or 3 hours, and used easily accessible and inexpensive materials that he bought in supermarkets, such as colored pencils, watercolors, and coffee, which he used to give an antique look. He was also careful to select which artists to copy and which museums to contact; a small-town museum was less likely to be picky about the work it received, and even less likely to spot an anomaly if it was a little-known artist. In addition, a normal behavior of museums is that donated works are less studied than those that are purchased; As the mexican phrase goes "at a gifted horse, you don't look its teeth".

But probably the most interesting thing about Mark Landis is that the motivation for his scams was fueled by the special treatment he received from museums. Affected by his illness and low self-esteem, Landis found something in his deceptions that he could not obtain in his daily life: human interaction and admiration. The attentions he received from art institutions (museums and universities) were unusual for anyone; gifts, dinners, people traveling from other states to receive their donations, press conferences and even plane tickets. As Landis would later describe, every time he donated a work, he became "king for a day."

At Discover

Despite his skill, Landis was not particularly thorough or detail-oriented with his forgeries and scams. And the error that exposed him was not a matter of his materials; a few museums did spot his fakes, but simply assumed that Landis didn't know his donated works were fakes. The mistake that put museums on alert was somewhat easier to prevent: Landis repeated the works he forged.

Matt Leninger, in charge of receiving and cataloging the new works of the Oklahoma Museum, was the one who discovered the farce. In 2007 Landis presented 5 works by French artists Paul Signac and Stanislas Lepine at the museum with a donation. And as part of a normal curatorial protocol, Leninger took on the task of researching the artists of the works they had received. He quickly found out that 2 other museums had held press conferences for having received the same works as a donation that Leninger had. The donor? Mark Landis

Leninger immediately contacted different art institutions in the country asking if any other institutions had received donations in the name of Mark Landis; In less than an hour, I already had emails and calls from 20 different institutions asking what was happening. By the next day, Leninger had already identified 16 different museums as having repeated forgeries of 3 19th century works.

Fame and truth

For the next 3 years, Leninger would obsess over Landis, tracking the museums he had donated to, the works he had turned in, the pseudonyms he used, and more. Additionally, Leninger consulted with a former FBI agent specialized in art crimes to know how to proceed legally; his surprise was great to discover that Mark Landis had not committed any crime. For a fraud to be considered as such, Landis would have to have been paid for his works or have claimed a tax deduction for his donations, which never happened.

In 2010, Leninger's investigation coincided with that of Joyce Penn, a cataloger at the Hilliard University Museum of Art, who had recently received a gift from Landis that turned out to be fake. Having compared the investigations of Leninger and Penn, Mark Tullos, director of the Hilliard museum, sent a mass email to his colleagues at the Museum Safety Network and the American Association of Registrars of Museums. His message resulted in a story in The Art Newspaper that included a photograph of Landis and an alert about his donations, making it difficult for Landis to continue his charade. Landis began to notice that little by little more museums were rejecting his donations and that Leninger was on his trail.

In 2012, Leninger had an idea: if Mark Landis received recognition as an artist, would he stop producing fake works? In collaboration with several museums that had work by Landis and a space provided by the Cincinnati Museum, 40 works were curated for exhibition. Even Landis himself collaborated from a distance by sending works and his priest's outfit. The exhibition was inaugurated with the name "Faux Real" (Trans: False originals) on April 1, 2012, a date celebrated in the United States for celebrating "April's Fool" or "Innocents' Day", a date known for making jokes among community members. Landis and Leninger were finally confronted in person with the exposed truth, but Landis could not help but thank Leninger for the exhibit, apologize for his actions, and leave the exhibit early.

But in 2014, Landis was still something of a myth that was only known to people who worked in the art industry. Taking advantage of this, Sam Cullman and Jennifer Gauman decided to record a documentary about his life called "Art and Craft", including real scenes of Landis in action, scamming people with his works disguised as a priest, and interviews with Matt Leninger. This finally put Landis on the map nationally, with famous news outlets requesting interviews with him like The New Yorker, BBC, The New York Times, ABC News, and more. He also began to receive invitations to exhibit his work along with that of other famous forgers, and the attention he received for his real life may have filled the void that he had long tried to fill with his forgeries.

Present

Today, Landis works doing commission work in his community in Laurel, Mississippi. His background as a swindler brought him to the attention of a wealthy local woman named Elizabeth Wyndham, with whom he befriended and has served as a patron ever since, securing commissioned work for her and her acquaintances. While Landis says he regrets misleading people, he shows no remorse for the profits he made. To date, he continues to give interviews about his life, one of the most recent in May 2021 with the journalist Jay Lush, published on YouTube.

Mark Landis is believed to have defrauded more than 46 museums in 20 different states in the United States for almost 30 years. The estimate of fake works donated exceeds 100 pieces, but Leninger and Landis declare that it could be more; Landis never kept a record of the museums he visited and possibly many institutions still do not know that they have a fake made by him, or have not wanted to declare it. And at this moment, in some museum in the United States, there could still be a fake work by him, mounted in an exhibition.

Sources: BBC News, Jay Lush Interviews the World, The Art Newspaper and The New Yorker.