By SUSANNAH CAHALAN
Last Updated: 2:04 AM, July 22, 2012
Caveat Emptor - The Secret Life of an American Art Forger
by Ken Perenyi
Pegasus Books
In 1993, a New York real estate developer bought a small painting of two hummingbirds for $3 at a British flea market. He had a gut feeling it might be more valuable, so he took it to Christie’s, who attributed the work to 19th century painter Martin Johnson Heade. It sold at auction for $96,000.
The Post covered the story, a perfect example of the art collector’s dream find, under the headline “Art of the Steal.”
Little did we know then how accurate that headline really was.
The painting did not come from a flea market, and painter Heade had never touched the canvas. And that unnamed real estate developer? He happened to be one of the most prolific art forgers in history.
Between 1968 and 1998, Ken Perenyi passed 1,000 of his own paintings off as long-lost Old Masters — in Flemish, American and British styles — amassing millions and flooding the art world with very convincing fakes, some of which are still being sold as the real thing.
Just a few years ago, Perenyi, who has since gone legit, saw one of his J.F. Herring equestrian paintings in a Sotheby’s catalog. The painting, which he sold for $3,000 more than 20 years ago, was now asking for $32,000, and was billed as a genuine Herring.
The self-taught painter has fooled renowned experts in auction houses, private collectors and antique dealers from New York to London.
Yet Perenyi was never arrested. And his story has never been told — until now.
With the statute of limitations on his crimes expired, Perenyi happily confesses all in “Caveat Emptor,” telling how he successfully pulled the wool over the eyes of the stuffy art world, who more often than not was thrilled to capitalize on his forged long-lost great works of art.
Perenyi, though undoubtedly gifted, did not become aware of his artistic hidden talent until his late teens. Born to a working class family in Palisades Park, NJ, in 1949, Perenyi describes himself as a lackluster student without ambitions.
But he found his way — through a haze of drugs and alcohol — in New York’s underground art scene.
At 17, he met older artist Tom Daly, who took him under his wing, and introduced him to Titian, Rembrandt and Michelangelo. Perenyi practiced painting by copying the Masters.
Perenyi had an uncanny knack for mimicking, Daly noted. That same year, the two men discovered a book written by a famous Dutch art forger. The germ of an idea was planted.
Perenyi spent every waking hour devouring books about artists, going to museums and picking up antique furniture whose wood panels could be used as the canvas for his artwork.
He first attempted 16th century Flemish portraiture — because of how simple it seemed to recreate. Using original paintings as models, and taking characteristics like medieval hairstyles, thin lips and long straight noses, he made three portraits. After painting each one on the wooden panels, he burned the edges, baked them in the sun for several weeks and painstakingly applied a grid pattern of cracks, darkening them to mimic the debris that collects over time. He finished by rubbing it in dust.
His first portrait sold in 1968 at a New York antique store for $800. With cash in hand, he bought a pair of leather boots from Bloomingdale’s, the first of many shopping sprees to come.
THE portraits were so easy to make that he found it hard to sell them all — until he hooked up with a dealer from Nyack who “placed them.”
“I wasn’t asking any questions,” he writes. “I gave him a painting, and a week later he was back with cash. I gave him another, and it looked like I had steady money coming in.”
But the demand for Flemish paintings just wasn’t high enough. The Nyack dealer had an idea: “If you could start painting me some portraits of American Indians, we could sell them like crazy.”
Perenyi found another mentor in Jimmy Ricau, one of the most prominent 19th century American collectors in the world. To Perenyi’s surprise, Ricau had plans for the young painter: He wanted to make him the best American Old Masters forger in the world.
To do so, he gave him history lessons and walked him through his immense catalog of original pieces from big names like John F. Peto, James E. Buttersworth and Heade. Perenyi took stock of measurements, signatures and brush strokes.
It was a perfect time to exploit the American arts market, Ricau explained, because the American Masters were still not popular enough for people to think they warranted forgeries.
“Jimmy said it best, ‘It was like shooting fish a barrel,’ ” Perenyi says. “That was when I started seeing the real money — the market was so vulnerable for exploitation if you had the skill to do it.”
The key was that none of these were exact replicas. Each piece of art was original but plausibly authentic. For example, Buttersworth often used the same yachts with different backdrops, and the same backdrops with different yachts, so Perenyi would play around with these elements until he had something new.
There was also a bit of a Robin Hood-type mission about the plan.
“They’re a bunch of prostitutes,” Ricau would say of auctioneers. “And their primary appreciation of a picture is its price tag.”
Perenyi was producing about two forgeries a week. But the moment of no return happened in November 1978 when Parke-Bernet (later Sotheby’s) released their catalog called “The American Heritage Sale.” In it, were two full pages dedicated to recently discovered Buttersworths.
“Isn’t the one on the right yours?” Ricau asked.
“Actually, they’re both mine,” he said.
By 1980, the sheer number of fakes had flooded the market. People began whispering about Buttersworth forgeries that were everywhere.
Then, two of Perenyi’s associates were interviewed by the FBI, but no formal charges were lodged against them.
After these close calls, Perenyi laid low for several years until he was goaded out of hiding by a new Christie’s “Conditions of Business” caveat in their contracts. Now, they no longer guaranteed anything about the pieces they sold.
From his headquarters in Florida (where he had moved in 1978), Perenyi began transporting forgeries of British sporting scenes (equestrian, boating, hunting, etc.) that he claimed to have picked up at local flea markets. It was the perfect time for these pictures, too. Ralph Lauren was hugely popular — and there seemed to be a fetish for English-style paintings.
Some even seemed to be in on the con — but were so thrilled by their profit margins that they actively turned a blind eye.
“I would say that on a couple of occasions, I knew they knew,” Perenyi says. “My paintings were lifting up the prices of everything else, so they couldn’t say no.”
During one trip alone, Perenyi brought a suitcase filled with paintings — a few for Christie’s, one for Sotheby’s, one for Bonhams. In 1997, Bonhams even used one of his paintings (an American Buttersworth) for their promotional postcards.
He’d often wear disguises so as not to tip off anyone. Sometimes he’d play the part of a British playboy in a Hermes scarf; other times he’d arrive with a deep Florida tan and be the typical American tourist.
No matter what he wore, often sales of his work would double or even triple house estimates.
The British sporting scene eventually flooded the market, too, and he had to draw back.
But his appetite had already been sufficiently whetted — and now he wanted to make the big score. And an artist named Martin Johnson Heade would help him do just that.
In 1992, after reading a throwaway line from a book saying that many of Heade’s best work — called the “Gems of Brazil,” a series of pictures of hummingbirds in South America — was later found in England, he came up with a plan.
Armed with a fake “Gems of Brazil” painting, he arrived at Christie’s with a tale that he had bought the masterpiece at a Bristol flea market for $3. Christie’s was so tickled after the painting went for $96,000 that they leaked the back story to the The Times of London.
“It was easy money,” he said. So he tried it again at Sotheby’s in New York. “This is the finest passionflower I’ve ever seen painted by Heade,” one of the Sotheby’s experts exclaimed.
But there was trouble in paradise. One of the experts was not entirely convinced and insisted that the painting be cleaned with acetone before it was placed on the auction block.
Perenyi balked, knowing that a cleaning would tarnish the new paint and reveal it to be a fake. In a standoff, Perenyi won out, and the piece sold for $717, 500.
A year later, he heard a rumor that the painting “disintegrated during restoration” — but he never heard from Sotheby’s about it, he says, possibly because they wanted to avoid the humiliating fact that they had been duped.
That would be one of his last big frauds. He now had a million in cash — enough to travel and go on endless Versace couture shopping sprees.
But the life he loved almost ended in 1998 when two FBI agents arrived on his front steps, asking about his connection to two Buttersworth pieces.
Though the FBI spent five years investigating Perenyi and his business associates, they never indicted him. Now it’s too late to bring charges — he got away with the perfect con.
From his home in Madeira Beach, Fla., Perenyi’s launched a legal career, openly selling his works of art as fakes. Though not as lucrative, he still makes a living.
But this is not the end of Perenyi’s story, he says. RKO pictures has optioned the story of his life (when asked who should play him, he hesitantly offered up “a young Johnny Depp”) and he hopes that this newfound notoriety might reinvigorate his career.
“The art world has such a fascination with the subject of fakes,” he says. “Who knows? Maybe a great faker could have his own show in New York.”