Ken Perenyi
Very interesting case this week about a talented artist who found himself in the world of art forgeries. Let’s find out how he got there and what happened when he was found out, I promise you this isn’t going to end the way you’re thinking.
First, Some Background
Before Ken Perenyi was an art forger he was just a person so let’s talk a little bit about his background. He grew up in Palisades Park, New Jersey in the late 1950s. He attended school but he absolutely hated it and says the only reason that he didn’t fail out or get held back was cheating on all tests.
As a child he hiked often at Fort Lee where he and his cousins would spend time exploring the cliffs and surrounding landscape. There was an old building that they could see from there, it looked like an old medieval house with a tower, but they were never able to get close enough to get a good look or see what was inside. They called it ‘The Castle’.
A few years later, when he was 14 in grade 9, he meets a man named Don Rubow, an artist’s assistant. It turns out that he was renting The Castle and was using it as a studio space and he and some friends were thinking about setting up a design studio there. Perenyi says that seeing the inside of the studio with all the paint and canvasses was a turning point in his life. He was fascinated. However, he was 14 and Rubow was 42 so they didn’t really have a relationship then.
Fast forward to 1966, Perenyi is 17 and driving around town in his new car when he sees Rubow walking with another man so he pulls over and offers them a lift back to The Castle. By reconnecting with Rubow he meets Tony Masaccio, an advertising executive in New York City, and a friendship blossoms. It’s not long before Perenyi is spending weekends in the city with Masaccio and his girlfriend, going out and meeting his connections in the art world. Most influential was Tom Daly, a designer and the creator of the most famous use of body painting in his piece Wanda.
Perenyi and Daly became fast friends and Perenyi learned about art and culture in a way that he had never been exposed to before. In 1967, after successfully convincing the army officer that he wasn’t fit to be a soldier and go to Vietnam, Perenyi was free to learn how to paint from Daly.
Forgery Career
So began Perenyi’s career in art. As his very first assignment from Daly, he suggested that Perenyi copy Christ by Rembrandt and he was shocked by the accuracy and skill of Perenyi’s copy. With the success of this first painting Daly kept finding more and more images in books for Perenyi to copy and he got better and better with each one. He was able to really pick apart each painting and identify which elements made up each artist’s style. Soon he also started aging his copies and paying attention to the canvasses, the wood, the canvas stretcher, and all the other little elements surrounding the painting itself that he knew experts would pay attention to when trying to determine if a painting was the real deal.
At this time he was very into restoring vintage cars, an expensive hobby, so he was always looking to make some quick money. He came across a book about Han van Meegeren (who I’ve also written about) a forger of Vermeer’s work and he decided to try his luck with selling some of his own forgeries. He took a portrait of a fictional man to an art dealer who he had met in the past named Ephron. Once he entered Ephron’s store he acted casual while he showed him the painting, telling him he had inherited it from his uncle and playing dumb about any potential value. This painting was unsigned so it wasn’t technically trying to be by one specific artist but he had aged it to make it appear old and potentially very valuable. At the end of the day he sold Ephron the painting for $800 cash and a genuine period painting in a frame from his store.
Perenyi now saw that he could fool even a dealer who was an expert in old master paintings. He was hooked. He started copying more and more artists and even started forging signatures on some of his works. He would pose as the unknowledgeable heir of the piece just wanting to see what it was worth and pretending to be surprised when he heard the price. I think he took pleasure at ‘beating’ the dealers at their own game and knowing that he was successfully fooling them.
After a little while Perenyi started to hone his method of selling the paintings as well, he made connections with a few fences who knew his paintings were forgeries and who agreed to sell them for him and split the profits. He started branching out in his painting style, and the artists that he would copy, to include John F. Peto, Raphaelle Peale, John F. Francis, Levi W. Prentice, James F. Butterworth, Antonio Jacobsen, William A. Walker, George Catlin, Henry Inman, Charles Bird King, Martin Johnson Heade, Alexander Calder, John F. Herring, James Seymour, and Sartorious. If that sounds like a lot, it’s because it is. He was deliberately trying to paint fakes that collectors were after at the time to make him the maximum amount of money.
He was still mostly selling paintings through fences but slowly some of his pieces ended up at auction. This emboldened him to start consigning pieces for auction himself, even at places like Sotheby’s and Christie’s in New York. “His biggest scores were both “Martin Johnson Heade” hummingbird and orchid paintings. The first he consigned to Christies-London and it was shipped to New York for sale. That [sale netted $ 90,000]. The second was consigned to Sotheby’s in 1994 and brought over $700,000 at auction” (Simonson-Mohle, 2014).
The Investigation
You may be asking yourself, like I was, how is this man creating all these copies, making hundreds of thousands of dollars on them and no one is catching on? Bunches of Rambrandt’s don’t just pop up out of nowhere. So it turns out that in the 1990s agents at the FBI’s art crimes division did actually do a five year investigation of Perenyi. They had identified some of his work at auction as possible fakes and traced them back to the source. As a side note, it’s not illegal to sell reproductions of an artist’s work but it is illegal to misrepresent them as a genuine work by that artist. Since Perenyi didn’t sign many of his paintings he was right on the borderline there. The agents worked with some of Perenyi’s old contacts to try and get him to talk (and be recorded) about their old schemes and selling the forged paintings. However, Perenyi was pretty wary of old friends reaching out out of the blue wanting to talk, he suspected that an investigation was going on and he never spoke to any of them. Instead he retained a good lawyer and simply waited out the investigation (didn’t know that was really a thing that you could do).
But get this, it worked. He was never indicted. In his book he speculates that it’s probably because the auction houses that he duped didn’t want the negative publicity of having his forgeries come to light, and their purchases of his forgeries so they just swept it under the rug and waited until the statute of limitations expired so the whole mess could just go away.
What Now?
As I said, Perenyi wrote a book about his life and his forgeries. I read a bit of it and have to say the tone of the whole thing is so gross, he is openly bragging about being able to fool everyone with his genius works of art and how rich he got from it. Still today he continues to pump out forged paintings (though now he’s upfront with the fact that they’re replicas) from his studio in Florida.
Works Cited
Simonson-Mohle, Brenda. “”Caveat Emptor”: Don’t Buy the Book on Perenyi’s Art Forgery Career”. Art Advisor’s Blog. 2014. https://artadvisor.wordpress.com/2012/09/01/caveat-emptor-dont-buy-the-book-on-perenyis-art-forgery-career/
Perenyi, Ken. (2022). Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger. Pegasus Books. https://books.google.ca/books?id=525mEAAAQBAJ&source=gbs_navlinks_s