Self-Portrait

This is a memoir of the star and subject of the Emmy-nominated documentary, "Art and Craft," the story of the search for America's greatest living art forger, Mark Landis.



For more than three decades, Landis donated artwork done by the world's greatest painters, to America's premier art museums, explaining that the valuable artwork had been in his family for years and needed a permanent home. Sometimes he showed up at the museum dressed as a Jesuit Priest, other times dressed as wealthy Southern landed gentry. His presentation was very impressive, but it was all a lie.



Sometimes Landis would ask the museums where they intended to display the artwork and they accommodated him by showing him exactly where his donated masterpieces would hang. Eventually a museum official at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art became suspicious. As a result, 30 years of art donations, which were accepted as authentic at the time by America's top experts on fine art, were investigated by the FBI and determined to be forgeries done by Landis, who used art materials purchased from Walmart to carry out the deception. To make his frames look old, he simply rubbed them down with coffee grinds and banged the frames around a bit.



Landis was not arrested for his forgeries because he never asked for money for the artwork and he never claimed them as donations on his income tax returns. In other words, he broke no laws with his deceptions. However, he did attract the attention of two New York-based documentary makers, Sam Cullman and Jennifer Grausman, whose 2014 treatment of the story, exposed his scheme.



By any measure Mark Landis is a master art forger, arguably the best con-man America has produced since Elvis's manager, Colonel Tom Parker. Unlike the art that he gifted, which tended to be bold and dramatic, it turns out that Landis is a diminutive, somewhat shy, late middle-aged Walter Mitty-type of man who lives in anonymity in small-town Mississippi, where he meets the legal standards for being a vulnerable adult. Despite the efforts of some to make him into a common criminal, his art fantasies are a threat to no one but himself. More likely, he falls in the autism spectrum and probably qualifies as a savant. According to Landis, he has an IQ of 150, putting him in the genius category. He is a prolific reader and has lived in the Philippines, throughout Europe, San Francisco and Chicago, where he attended the Chicago Art Institute.



Complicating the story is the fact that Landis has spent a good deal of his life in mental institutions and mental health group homes after being diagnosed as psychotic, specifically schizophrenic. The Menninger Clinic told his mother he would have to be confined to mental institutions for the remainder of his life. In Mississippi, he was placed in group homes for individuals with intellectual and developmental disabilities. Says Landis: "I can say I'm retarded. I'm in the club and that's what it was called back then."