Art and Craft

Description

A philanthropist, a grieving brother and a Jesuit priest are among the personas and aliases Mark Landis has created over a span of 30 years. One of the most prolific art forgers in U.S. history, Landis used his disguises to dupe over 40 museums across 20 states with an impressive array of ingeniously crafted fake masterpieces ranging from 16th-century religious paintings to Picassos. His trail of deception might have been discovered sooner had it not been for one peculiarity: The works were always donated, never sold. Landis and his “philanthropic binges,” as he describes them, finally found a nemesis in Matthew Leininger, a registrar at the Cincinnati Art Museum whose obsessive, implacable efforts to track down the counterfeits at various institutions finally culminated in the unraveling of Landis’s fraud. Despite being a reclusive schizophrenic who rarely interacts with anyone other than his health care providers, Landis takes a witty, often-comical approach to his masterful creative process that is fascinating to behold. While posing questions around the definition of art and the value of authenticity, Art and Craft ultimately becomes a captivating study not only of living life with a mental illness, but of our fundamental desire for recognition and acceptance. –Julia Barbosa

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