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LOS ANGELES TIMES
An Artist of Talent
and, Some Say, Genius, Tony Tetro Is Charged With Forging the Works of Chagall, Miro, Dali.
But He Claims Only to Be:
THE
REPRO MAN
By: Paul Dean
Times Staff Writer
Tony Tetro's high and expensive profile was the very model
of the modern major drug dealer. When not driving a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit, he growled around town in either of his two
Ferraris. Or the Lamborghini Countach. His bachelor condominium in Claremont was trilevel and custom-decorated in wallpaper
of lizard and suede. The paintings were Picasso erotics.
Tetro knew the bistros of Paris as well as the tavernas of
Rome
and when in Monte Carlo he stayed at Loews but gambled at the old casino. Yet the cool, mobile, groomed, expansive, charming
and ever-partying Tetro had no visible income. Nor any apparent career, known inheritance or lottery win.So suspicious neighbors
were not at all surprised when county investigators raided the condo and arrested him. Then the charges were announced; that
really shook the complex on Manchester Court.
Tetro stood accused not of dealing drugs--but of forging the fine art
of Marc Chagall, Joan Miro, Salvador Dali, and modern watercolorist Hiro Yamagata. Specifically, he was charged with 38 felony
counts of forging lithographs of paintings by Chagall, Miro and Norman Rockwell. He also faces 29 counts of forging Yamagata
watercolors.
"I consider Mr. Tetro to be one of the two major (art) forgers in the United States," said district attorney's
investigator Gary Helton. "The other was in New York, but he died."
Tetro--the son of a New York house painter who
developed a special process for coating water towers--recalls his feelings when arrested, arraigned and proclaimed the nation's
biggest art forger. Some relief. A certain satisfaction. Also a twitch of pride."For well over 10 years, every cop in this
valley and many people who didn't know me personally, were certain I was a drug dealer," he
remembers.
"I must
have heard it myself, conservatively, 300 times. And the more I defended myself, the more I wasn't believed.
"Drive down
the street in a Ferrari and a cop is certain that you're a drug dealer. And you are constantly harassed, constantly getting
tickets for nothing, constantly getting your car searched.
"So there was some satisfaction . . . even some pride when
I was arrested . . . that finally these idiots knew that I was an artist." An artist of definite talent, he claims. Certainly
a painter with a genius for re-creating the oils of Rembrandt, Renoir and Monet, right down to their signatures. But, he insists,
not an art forger.
"Forgery indicates intent to defraud . . . and I never sold anything as real," he explains. "I prefer
(the term) reproductions , in my definition an exact copy as close (to original) as you can do. "Every one of my friends knew
what I did. You know: 'What do you do for a living?' 'I copy masters.' I even had business cards which said: Anthony Tetro,
Art Reproductions.
That explanation undergoes public examination next month when Anthony Gene Tetro, 40, ex-altar boy
and a former furniture salesman for The Broadway, goes to trial in Los Angeles County Superior Court. At a preliminary hearing,
he pleaded innocent and was released on $10,000 bail.
And in the nine months since that hearing, Tetro has concentrated
on liquidating his assets to solidify finances for his defense. He has sold the exotic cars (the Rolls-Royce went for a bargain
$32,000) and now drives a Honda Civic. The condo has gone and home is a small apartment in an unimaginative complex in Upland.
Some
Yamagata watercolors overlooked by raiding investigators have been sold to longtime friends such as Colton mortgage banker
Ken Ketner. "I have a couple of real Chagalls and some of Tony's Chagalls and I havea lot of fun with them," said Ketner.
"No one can tell the difference. "I also have a genuine Yamagata that cost me $7,500. After his arrest, Tony sold me five
or six of his Yamagatas for $1,000 for all of them. They aren't bad. And they were definitely purchased as Tetros." Tetro
has a personal publicist from Exclusive News Relations of Los Angeles. "We specialize in celebrity repositioning," notes chief
press agent Mark Manning, "people who have been misunderstood by the public and the media."
The agency's fee will be
a Tetro oil of Winston Churchill, and a percentage of proceeds from the sale of a Ferrari Testarossa replica that Tetro built
in flusher years. The artist has a new attorney. But Jay J Tanenbaum is working for cash only.
And as his Feb. 4 trial
approaches, Tetro, who acknowledges no formal art training beyond reading books and visiting museums, agreed to his first
full-length interview. "I think we (defense) are going to show, in essence, that I painted ... and other people did the crime,"
he says. "I never represented them as real. Other people sold my stuff as real.
"I want to also emphasize that most
of the work that I did do was not for the art industry at all. (Art brokers) contacted me, they came to me because they found
that I could copy anything and emulate anything. "And they said there's a market for excellent copies. So I started doing
them and, in fact, developed a printing method that is unique, and I did colored lithographs, Chagall, Dali, Miro. . . . "
But
with lithographs sprouting like museum posters, what is the profit in reproducing the readily available? There exist, explains
Tetro, only 200 authentic lithographs of Norman Rockwell's painting, "Doctor and Doll":
"They're all gone (sold) and
they're over $18,000 if you want one. But every doctor in the world wants one for his office . . . and I sold mine for $500."
The history and economics of Tetro's career, however, are of little concern to investigator Helton. His interest is on the
legal definitions of forgery, and evidence that Tetro marketed his work knowing they would be sold as originals.
"I
think we have a real solid case," Helton says. It was Helton who led the 16-person raid that filled one van and loaded a stake-bed
truck with the lithographs and paintings seized at Tetro's home. Although several dozen copies of oils, lithos and gouaches
by Dali and Picasso also were seized, they do not figure in the charges. Helton says art forgers generate "large dollar amounts,
a lot of victims" and roam relatively unthreatened in a market policed by "only three people I know in law enforcement with
the expertise to work these cases."
Other investigators say developments in photomechanical printing, an explosive
demand for lithographs and an affluent generation of dabblers more interested in quick profit than authentic art, have added
to theripeness of the market.
In recent months:
* Manhattan Beach art broker Frank de Marigny, 38, pleaded no contest
and was sentenced to 30 months in prison on multiple counts of grand theft and art forgery. De Marigny tried to sell a fake
Renoir to an undercover police officer and wanted $3.2 million for it.
* Federal authorities reported that between
1980 and 1987, more than $1 billion worth of fake Dalis alone have been found in galleries from Newport Beach to New York.
*
Pierre Marcand, a Beverly Hills art dealer, has been named a defendant in a civil suit filed by the Federal Trade Commission.
It alleges Marcand produced and sold at least 22,000 fake prints.
* In March, 1989, Mark Henry Sawicki, former owner
of a Sherman Oaks gallery, was charged with 10 counts of art forgery and grand theft. And there was born a perfect witness,
a capstone of the district attorney's case against Tetro. Because after his arrest, Sawicki copped a plea. In exchange for
three years probation, 1,000 hours of community service and $78,000 in restitution, the dealer agreed to deliver Tetro as
the man who painted the art he had sold.
Sawicki set up a meeting at Tetro's condominium. They discussed mutual friends,
monies owed and artworks to be created--while Sawicki was wearing a concealed tape recorder. The audiotape and Sawicki's testimony
were bombshells at Tetro's preliminary hearing in Los Angeles Municipal Court. On the tape, Tetro is heard to say he "did
a Chagall" and that other paintings were "in the works." In testimony, Sawicki said he saw Tetro practicing artists' signatures
on note pads and scratch paper and "on the backs of damaged artwork."
The case against Tetro continues to build--brutally.
Dealer Sawicki has told authorities that between 1984 and 1989, he did from $75,000 to $100,000 in business with Tetro--and
sold hundreds of works attributed to Miro, Dali and Yamagata. In an interview, Helton said he located examples of that work
at the Carol Lawrence Galleries in Beverly Hills and as far afield as Studio 47 in New York and a gallery in Japan. Los Angeles
Police Detective Bill Martin, an art fraud expert, says Tetro is "a major player."
Yet, even if guilty and convicted
as charged, eight years is the maximum jail sentence for the charges Tetro faces. And within a justice system that rarely
deals in maximums, Tetro is unlikely to serve a full sentence.
"But it's not a laughing matter," said Tetro's prosecutor,
deputy district attorney Reva Goetz. "He has taken the work of these artists and made the market unreliable, and thrown into
question, for most people, the viability of the entire graphics market."
Artist Yamagata says that although Tetro's
copies, in general, are "not bad," he wishes Tetro had painted in his own style: "I just don't know why he doesn't establish
his own way. I feel sorry for him because he took the easy way, he didn't go his own way. Having talent to paint in general
is one thing. But artists must also have a passion for creation before a painting exists.
"I paint a very tranquil
image. It represents my feelings, my senses, my memories and you just can't copy those. Not being able to copy my passion
and energies means people (buyers) can't find it in his copies." Barry Levine, president of Martin Lawrence Galleries and
one of Yamagata's publishers, says he presumes forgeries have affected sales of his client's watercolors. But he knows of
no way to measure financial loss.
Levine should be one of Tetro's harshest critic. But he's not. "From a glance, hanging
on a wall, it (a Tetro watercolor) looked like a Yamagata," Levine commented. "Could people have taken it for a Yamagata?
Yeah. Sure."
But would an expert be fooled? "If he had sat down and studied it and perhaps knew Mr. Yamagata's philosophy
as far as watercolors are concerned . . . probably not," Levine decided.
Tom Binder is president of Tom Binder Fine
Arts in Venice, which specializes in Yamagata paintings. He says that "even though there might be only a few forgeries among
hundreds
of legitimate watercolors" the emergence of forgeries always "puts a damper on the watercolor market.
"But you know
what the bottom line is? The guy (Tetro) was just a brilliant mind that went astray. A Frankenstein. All I know is that the
guy's a genius."
The genius is in his apartment where rooms are cubes softened by Tetro's designer eye. He lives within
a theme best described as post-Renaissance eclectic clutter. There is a large, framed paper sculpture over a sofa, an original
by Billy Mack. But a crystal sculpture on a pedestal is a Lalique look-alike.
Some of the bronzes are recasts. Tetro
says: "I traded them for one of my Chagalls." But a lithograph signed by John Lennon is real. In the bedroom, a faux ficus
with faux fallen leaves. On the overhang of the breakfast bar, an enormous, very old, rather ugly French painting of the death
of D'Artagnan. Tetro paid $1,000 for the cracked canvas. He said he intended to paint over it. Its antiquity would be perfect
for his planned reproduction of
Rembrandt's "The Night Watch."
A magnificent, hand-carved gilt frame holds a surrealist
oil that must be a Dali. The patina is deep. A hand-scripted plaque is inscribed with the title, "Nuclear Disintegration of
the Head of a Virgin," the name of Salvador Dali and 1953 as the date of painting.
But Tetro painted it. It is not
a copy, he says, but an emulation of Dali's artistic hallucination.
"I enjoy doing emulations more than copying," Tetro
says. But the plaque with Dali's name? "A job worth doing is worth doing well." How well is that? "Most are very, very close,"
he continues. "Sometimes I grade them like they do (automobiles) at a concours . A hundred-pointer, 98 points, 99, like that."
How many points for this Rembrandt, the copy of "Man in a Golden Helmet"? "I'd say that is a good 98."
Art for Tony
Tetro began in a parochial school in Fulton, N.Y. "I drew a picture of one of the nuns, Sister Antonia. I did this beautiful
Vargas picture of her, but pruney-faced and in a habit. "She whacked me and took me to the priest. He chuckled." Tetro married
his pregnant high school girlfriend at 16 and was a father at 17. He moved to California at 19 and was divorced by 23. By
then, he was reading about art, learning about canvas and paper,experimenting with paints and using formaldehyde and a baking
process to produce craquelure --the surface cracking of oil paintings that indicates antiquity.
He learned that Cortez
used a pinhole in the center of each canvas to set horizon and perspective for his Paris street scenes. He has visited the
Chagall museum in Nice, says he enjoys Renoir's work for their happy sense and believes restoration of the Sistine Chapel
reduced its reverence by showing a cartoon coloring to Michelangelo's frescoes. . . .
Tetro says he was short only
one skill: His own style. "I never really had a tremendous desire to be a famous artist," he explains. "But I enjoyed painting
and I enjoyed copying." He also found copying classics an effective way to absorb techniques and understand emotions of the
masters. "I enjoyed doing a Renoir and using his pastel colors, learning how he would fuse everything around the subject until
everything was blurred but the subject's face. "Then he'd put a splash of color over here ... and I'd understand why he did
it. I didn't understand why he did it just by looking at it." He found pleasure, even a vicarious thrill, in the work.
So
Tetro tried selling his imitations at local art fairs.
"But nobody wanted a Rembrandt because they figured if you put a
Rembrandt over your fireplace, somebody is going to think it is a print," he remembers. "I sold them for about $300 in an
Aaron Brothers frame. Although I didn't sell many." Then he began copying from photographs. And 15 years ago, a hobby grew
into a business.
"I did portraits of many people," Tetro said. "Judges. FBI agents. I did Herb Hafif . . . and it is
hanging in his office right now." (Hafif, a Claremont trial lawyer and a 1974 gubernatorial candidate, said that he received
the portrait as a Christmas gift from his employees. "Those who claim it to be a wonderful likeness, I consider to be my friends.
(The portrait) forever memorializes me as a person in his early 40s.")
By this time, Tetro had even developed a nom
de brush --Petrocelli--to create an illusion of respectability for his original art. Whether painting portraits or duplicating
Gauguin, however, the artistic progression of Tetro has been complete. He buys only old canvases to re-create old masterpieces.
He travels to France to purchase art supplies, like stretcher bars, unique to European canvases.
An original Tetro
portrait, he says, such as the one painted for Hafif, might sell for $5,000. A Tetro reproduction of a Chagall, even an emulation,
would fetch $2,000. A small watercolor would be worth $300. "For that you got a Yamagata," he says.
In the early '80s,
art in America found new populism.
Affordable paintings became the fad. Graphic arts begat fine art. The market broadened
into a multibillion-dollar business serving a largely naive Middle America through galleries with multiple branches in countless
shopping malls.
Said one Los Angeles dealer: "A lot of people were more concerned with whether a piece will match their
carpeting than whether it's authentic." Tetro found that those same people who once had shied from reproductions, now wanted
them. His work became "very marketable . . . and I was told that a lot of these paintings were going to be sold as excellent
copies for people who couldn't afford originals.
"Many people hang reproductions in their homes and try to pass them
off as real to their friends," he notes. "It's snob appeal. Which is, in the United States, probably the No. 1 reason why
people buy art." So Tetro got wealthy. Not terribly rich, he says, and certainly not to the level of opening a Swiss bank
account and buying Florida real estate. "But I made a good living," he said.
There certainly were earnings enough for
Tetro to invest six years and several hundred thousand dollars in a new and enormously ambitious re-creation--of a 1958 Ferrari
Testarossa race car. Two original TR58s were built. Neither survived their racing careers. So Tetro bought a fading and elderly
Ferrari street car for its chassis, engine and transmission. The frame was shortened and narrowed, the enginereturned to racing
specifications.
This, said Tetro, was not a typical replicar "where they put a shabby engine in it, put new chrome
wheels with shiny hubs on it. I went to finite detail in recreating everything exactly the way it was originally. "It is a
perfect re-creation."
An identical sense of detail, Tetro said, went into his artwork. His reputation for flawless
reproduction grew. Then, he said, "about four or five" art brokers began calling for lithographs, oils and watercolors. "Still,
I only sold them as reproductions or emulations done by me,"he repeated. "I was very specific about it."
Beyond that--observing
attorney Tanenbaum's instructions--Tetro won't comment on his case. He does say the arrest and the charges, the hearings and
20 months of waiting have crushed him. He is almost broke and has not painted for 18 months. Tetro isn't sure he ever wants
to return to an occupation that was at best imitative, at worst publicly humiliating.
"I would like to say to you,
right now, that I'm never going to paint again for a living. Yet I can't say that and be truthful." But if Tetro does return
to brushes and paint, "you can bet . . . I'd stamp 'copy' or 'reproduction' or 'emulation' all over the back of it."
If
there is one positive note in his present situation, Tetro says, it is the continuing support of friends.Such as banker Ketner:
"I like Tony very much. A gracious guy who has always been there when you need him."
Such as attorney George Porter:
"Tony is very likable, very flamboyant, very artistic . . . and very talented." Seven hundred of those close friends gathered
recently at the Clarion Hotel in nearby Ontario to celebrate Tetro's 40th birthday. The men were in tuxedos, the women wore
gowns--and the huge birthday cake was a work of art. It showed a one-eyed Tony Tetro painting a Picasso.
Copyright 1991 Los Angeles Times.
Published Sunday, January 20, 1991.
Mr. Tetro creates works for
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