During the past 30 years of his improbable life, Mark Landis of Laurel has been called a philanthropist, a con artist, a benefactor, a criminal. Whichever label one leans toward after watching the documentary “Art and Craft” presented by the Columbus Arts Council May 7, one handle is indisputable. Mark Landis is an art forger. He has also twice been diagnosed as schizophrenic. He has never been arrested. And he plans to be at the Rosenzweig Arts Center in downtown Columbus Thursday for the documentary screening and a Q&A with the audience.
Unlike other art forgers, Landis never profited from his copies, never sold one, never took a tax deduction for donating them. It really began because he simply wanted to please his mother.
Landis spoke at length by telephone Tuesday from his home in Laurel. It was once his mother’s place, before she died in 2010.
“I’m just a lonely, old shut-in. I like to talk to people,” he says in a feathered voice, graciously pleased to be called. His speech is alternately rapid, and then halting, at times childlike.
I’m prepared to dislike him, having already questioned the soundness of giving a con man yet more publicity. But in spite of myself, within minutes I felt I had an inkling as to why he has not been relentlessly vilified, pursued by authorities. After all, he did dupe about 50 unsuspecting museums in 20 states by donating forged artworks through three decades. The fact is that, however much disdain his misdeeds spark, an encounter with this 60-year-old — even by phone — tends to rouse more compassion and curiosity than condemnation.
Transient beginnings
The disarming eccentric’s early life was spent moving around the globe with his Naval career father and his mother, to Hong Kong, Paris, London and Brussels. Landis spent many hours by himself as a child.
“I’d be alone in a room at night and there wasn’t any TV, but there would be leftover catalogs from museums we went to,” he explains, his words high in register. “I would amuse myself by copying. Mother liked Madonnas and Christ child pictures: I used to do a lot of those. That’s pretty much how I got started.”
When his father retired from the Navy, the family settled in Mississippi in the late ’60s. But at age 17, Landis suffered a breakdown after his father’s death.
“After it happened, I wouldn’t talk at all … just stared at teachers when they asked a question,” he remembers.
Following more than a year in the Menninger Clinic in Topeka, Kansas, Landis pursued art courses at the School for the Art Institute of Chicago for a while, before moving on to the San Francisco Art Institute. After a small art gallery he opened failed, he returned to Mississippi, where his mother still lived.
Throughout, Landis visited museums and galleries. The small but distinguished plaques next to much of the artwork didn’t go unnoticed.
“I would always see ‘This was donated by so-and-so,’ and I’d seen on TV wealthy or prominent people always giving something to museums,” he explains. “I remember ‘Perry Mason’ episodes with those, and things in the newspapers. I wanted to impress Mother that I was doing well, and that I did something to memorialize Dad, because I was always a disappointment to Dad.”
Carried away
His first donation was in 1985, to a museum in California — forgeries featuring American Indians, by 20th century western artist Maynard Dixon.
“I just had the impulse,” Landis says candidly. “I just did a few drawings of Indians and everybody was just so nice to me. … I liked it so much, I just got used to doing it.” When he showed his Mother the paperwork acknowledging an early donation, she was impressed — as he had hoped.
The impulse Landis felt led him to copy numerous artists, most of them lesser-knowns, others not — Picasso, Signac, Cassatt, Walter Anderson, even Walt Disney and Charles Schulz.
He approached museums, sometimes posing as a wealthy benefactor, a grieving executor or a Jesuit priest. The names he used varied.
“I got the idea of a priest when I was watching ‘The Swan’ on TV; I didn’t have much to do except watch TV,” the movie buff says. The 1956 film starring Grace Kelly includes a priest character. “I was sitting there and thought, I always did kinda want to be a priest.”
Landis was often treated “like royalty” by museum staff appreciative of his largesse. He enjoyed being a “philanthropist,” relished the respect.
“People get carried away. I got carried away. They make all kinds of promises and talk about having huge picture collections,” he says. “I’ve seen plenty of other people get carried away, especially at parties and things … they make all kinds of extravagant promises.”
The forgeries were not always front and center during his 30-year deception. The mental issues were ongoing; Landis spent time in a homeless shelter and lived in housing projects for a time.
The art
The story of Landis’ long run is notable, in part, because his forgeries were done in relative haste. His patience didn’t extend to painstaking searches for materials from bygone periods, to varnishes that make new paint look old, to creating faux hairline cracks on canvas. He preferred an assembly line approach, a trait he thinks might have come from his late grandfather, a manufacturing vice president.
“I like to get two or three things done at once,” Landis explains. “I don’t have a proper studio, never had one. I just use my bed as a table.”
He combed catalogs for work he could pretty rapidly reproduce with humble materials from places like Home Depot and Lowe’s, and easily carry. Then he drove across the country in his mother’s red Cadillac, offering the finished products to an assortment of museums. Many were smaller institutions, less likely to have the resources to closely inspect a gift.
The jig was up
Landis’ first sign that he’d been found out was an online visit to Laurel’s Wikipedia page. For some time he’d been listed under “Notable People” from there. He liked to look at it often.
“I found out I was in trouble about five years ago,” he says. He several times refers to it as being “in trouble” during the conversation. “I was checking the Laurel page and saw something derogatory.” It led him to an article that had surfaced — people had become suspicious. Most notably, Matthew Leininger. The Oklahoma City Museum of Art registrar discovered that Landis had donated more than one copy of the same painting to different museums. He was on the forger’s trail.
“It shook me up; I don’t know how to articulate it. I always knew they’d eventually find out … maybe tomorrow, maybe 50 years from now. I just thought they’d throw (the paintings) in the basement … ”
Before long, Landis’ phone was ringing; investigative reporters showed up at his door.
Enter the filmmakers
A story in The New York Times about this unusual man caught the attention of Jennifer Grausman.
” … I couldn’t get it out of my head,” the “Art and Craft” documentary maker says in a statement about the 2014 release she produced with Sam Cullman and Mark Becker.
Their interest took them to Laurel, where their intended film about a prolific art forger evolved into an intimate story of obsession, mental issues and the universal need for human connection and purpose.
“Since Sam and Jennifer, life has been like a Hollywood movie,” says Landis. Somehow, Grausman and Cullman convinced the reclusive Landis to attend the documentary’s premiere in New York.
“I tried to sneak out,” he admits. “But the (score) composer found me and got me to go back inside. Once the movie got started I got interested; I wanted to see what would happen … even though during parts of it I kinda crouched down in my seat.”
The filmmakers, he says, “saved my life.”
Not in it for money
Because Landis never financially benefited from his forgeries, he has never been charged. As one art crimes expert put it: “Basically, you have a guy going around the country on his own nickel giving free stuff to museums.”
Leininger and the rest of the art world’s goal now is to ensure that Landis stops. To that end, several exhibits exposing the forgeries have been organized.
Press about the frauds and their perpetrator’s compelling story has been abundant. Some of it raises intriguing questions, as in Christine Scheller’s 2014 story at onfaith.com that asks, “Where does biochemistry end and free will begin?”
At present, Landis uses his talent to produce portraits and paintings on commission, by copying photographs sent to him by clients through the website marklandisoriginal.com. To these, he can sign his own name.
He seems somewhat amazed by all the attention, especially since the release of the documentary in September.
“But I’m a lonely, old shut-in,” he says again before we say goodbye. “And I’m sorry I caused so much trouble.”
Editor’s note: “Art and Craft” will show at the Columbus Arts Council’s Rosenzweig Arts Center, 501 Main St., Columbus, at 7 p.m. Thursday, May 7. The 90-minute film is free to the public. Seating is limited. Landis plans to attend and bring some of his paintings. For more information, contact the CAC, 662-328-2787.
Jan Swoope is the Lifestyles Editor for The Commercial Dispatch.
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