Wolfgang Beltracchi orders a Peach Melba ice cream

There are married couples. And there are the Beltracchis. Helene and Wolfgang, “Mäuschen” and “Mucky.” He, the ingenious painter and forger—his wife, the muse and manager. The couple is like varnish and canvas, like red and white, two accomplices in the romantic sense—no matter where they happen to be holding hands.

Wolfgang Beltracchi, age 64, and Helene, 56, park their old Seat to stroll through Marseillan in the south of France. Motor boats are swaying in the harbour basin. The mistral has veered off the Étang de Thau lagoon, le ciel est bleu, the oyster beds rest in billowing waters. It is his first day off after weeks, or to be precise, after three months of work. How wonderful! He has never worked so hard in his life, Beltracchi explains. His artistic graft was taking its toll. The year is 2015, and he is not yet aware of what will happen and how much he would work in years to come. Will, would, future, futurity. Now is now, and coinages like “NFT” were not around back then. Art on the internet—“what the hell is that supposed to be?” he would have commented, laughing his head off. He would rather paint and build an interpretation of Shaun the Sheep, the British stop-motion film character, for a children's channel campaign in the twinkling of an eye.

In the first May week of the year we met at the Munich-based Artroom 9 gallery—back then owned by the jack-of-all-trades Curtis Briggs—which for the first time after Beltracchi’s criminal case put his paintings on display in Germany. His own paintings. Paintings that looked like a Dürer, an Ernst, a Léger or a Schlemmer, but showing his own signature emblazoned in the corner: “W. Beltracchi.”

The curious thing was that many connoisseurs, and even descendants of the artists whose work Beltracchi had inadmissibly “supplemented,” stated that he had often painted better than the original painters. Even experts who had seen the 14 paintings for which he was indicted in 2010 praised the art of his forgery. What an embarrassment for all those demi-god experts who once had no issue whatsoever with being taken out by the Beltracchis, being dazzled and pampered under the sun of the French south, enjoying the red wine, the seafood, the provenances, where even their eyes were feasting!

Beltracchi never just copied already existing paintings. Such copies, as the master describes it, consisted solely of “remorseful brush strokes.” No stroke had been confidently and swiftly executed, and people with a sharp eye would always have recognised the trembling, the hesitation. Beltracchi’s works, however, were never flawed like that. No remorse, no trembling, no hesitation. He wielded even arm-long brushes as resolutely as if he were Monsieur Degas himself, or Braque, or Matisse. Helene and he prepared so meticulously for each specific artist that Beltracchi literally felt their paintings and life within him when he painted, all the while using “his ears, his eyes, his hands” and his feelings. Sounds strange, hardly comprehensible to a person that could never depict anything without wobbling, not even tracing a coin. But he was able to do it all—as a child already. And later, even left-handed, when the respective painter (Raoul Dufy, for instance) was left-handed. It is not only this abundant talent for craftsmanship that makes Wolfgang Beltracchi a sought-after artist. It is also his intelligent coolness, the nonchalant aura.

“You claim you could paint a five-million-dollar Max Ernst in three days?,” star reporter Bob Simon once asked him for the US channel CBS. “Yes, yes, of course, sure,” Beltracchi replied on his knees, while rubbing the plank grain of an old bridge in the Bergisches Land area through the canvas. “Quicker too!”

In the past, when they used to live near Marseillan on the “Domaine”, an estate amidst vineyards, they regularly came to town to buy asparagus, take the children to school and have a glass of red wine at the Le Marine Bar. Then, in August 2010, when the “Midi Libre” reported that they had been arrested, their houses searched and their plus-ou-moins seven-million fortune seized, their friends met in that Marine Bar, raised their glasses and proclaimed: “Vive l'Artiste !” Charismatic tricksters have always had a certain sex appeal after all.

Something that has not changed to this day. As soon as the gorgeous couple starts strolling along the quay, the patron comes shooting out of the Maison de Camille and gives them a kiss. Beltracchi orders a Peach Melba ice cream and talks about being released, about prison and about the fact that he has been living and painting down here in the Languedoc again since mid-January. They had found a studio flat in Montpellier. There, in the former dance hall of a house built in 1880, he was now working on old stone floors and under high stucco ceilings. Paintbrush armies, chalk islands, seas of tubes; 250 square metres of “La Boheme”. The insolvency administrator had approved it, ten euros per square metre, warm rent. He had to work somewhere, after all, so that the creditors would at least get back part of their loss, which was perceived as big. Later, when the second success had long been cut and dried, they moved to Switzerland. Both have an instinct for lovely places and finding picture-perfect studios.

Excerpt from the text by Ulrike Posche