Tony Tetro stands outside Margaritaville in Newport Beach, California, resplendent in his rumpled early-evening uniform—faded jeans, untucked Hawaiian shirt, white tennis shoes, white cotton socks. He might just have rolled out of bed in these very clothes, for his eyes are still red and crusty, his throat still shuddering in smoker’s hack. Temporarily separated from his beloved bourbon-on-the-rocks, Tetro indulges his addiction to Lucky Strikes, wearily leaning against the restaurant/bar as he attempts to follow through the open door a conversation on God only knows what between two twentysomething waitresses.
However concerned in private Tetro claims to be about his finances, in public he doesn’t seem to have a care in the world, especially today, after depositing a down-payment check of $6,000 from a mysterious, wealthy client who wants him to “emulate” the 1977 painting, Lincoln in Dalivision, by Spanish surrealist artist Salvador Dali.
It’s the biggest chunk of green he’s seen in four years since his release from jail and his move to a nearby two-story hotel with a turtle pond in the lobby. “I haven’t made a serious purchase of clothes in I don’t know how long,” he rasps, in a voice like a rake scraped through gravel. “I used to have my suits hand-made by an Italian designer. It’s not that I miss the money so much, I just wish I didn’t have to always worry about paying rent.”
The expression starving artist is admittedly overused, but the incongruity between Tetro’s lifestyle today and the one he lived before he was arrested for art forgery is resoundingly evident. Where once he cruised around Beverly Hills in a Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit, a Lamborghini Countach, or one of two Ferraris, today he drives a rented Mercedes obtained in a “buddy deal” for $350 per month. Where once he dined weekly at swanky dinner house Nicky Blair’s on Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard, now defunct, today he stands on buffet lines of happy-hour food at local Mexican restaurants. Where once 750 people in tuxedos and evening gowns celebrated his 40th birthday, this year, for his 50th birthday, he sat alone in a bar drinking bourbon on the rocks, blowing out a single candle set in a glazed doughnut.
Only his gift has remained constant. For Tony Tetro is an artistic prodigy, a man of virtually limitless talent. But instead of developing his own style and original work, he chose a career as an “emulator,” rendering lithographs, drawings and watercolors of Chagall, Picasso and Miro, oils of Rembrandt, Renoir and Monet, that were either indistinguishable from an original, or seamlessly slipped into an artist’s oeuvre—down to the aging, discoloration and distress of a work subjected to hundreds of years of stress. Arrested as an art forger in 1989, Tetro became in 1991 the only living American artist slapped with a court order mandating he clearly sign his name to the back of every work he creates, so they can’t be passed off as originals and sold for outrageous sums of money to unwary art collectors.
“He was just a brilliant mind that went astray—a Frankenstein,” once quipped Venice gallery owner Tom Binder.
Being Salvador Dali
When 19-year-old Antonio Tetro arrived in Southern California in 1969, he seduced the art world with an alluring combination of genius and bravado. With no formal art training, schooled only through reading books and visiting museums, Tetro quickly endeared himself to the wealthy jet-set with a talent so extraordinary, and so prolific, that his oil paintings and lithographs alone, some say, contributed significantly to the inflated prices of the art-market boom of the late 1970s and early 1980s. What started as simply a sideline easily mushroomed into a multi-million-dollar business that threw into question, for many art collectors, the distinction between a “masterpiece” and a “reproduction.”
Tetro shrugs off queries as to why he spurned creation of his own, original work. “I never had the desire to develop my own style,” he says simply. “I enjoyed the whole process of coming up with something absolutely authentic. I was obsessed with everything being perfect.”
In pursuit of perfection, he experimented with paints, and used formaldehyde and a special baking process, to produce craquelure, the surface cracking of oil paintings indicating a painting’s age. He traveled to Europe to purchase stretcher bars and linen canvases with specific weight, unique to the region where a particular artist worked. “Every watercolor, oil and acrylic by a particular artist was created during a certain period of time,” he says. “You have to know what they did during these times, and then come up with a painting that made sense. It’s like playing chess—you have to get into the thoughts of the artist.”
For example, Tetro dated one particular oil painting to 1953, when the artist, Salvador Dali, was engaged in the creation of a series of exploding heads. “Dali had a summer home in Spain,” Tetro explains, “and he would often use this particular seascape formation outside his home in the background of his paintings. I found a drawing he did of an exploding head, and superimposed it on the seascape. It was historically accurate. I enjoyed every minute of it.”
His reputation for flawless reproductions, as well as his bank account, grew to legendary proportions. He purchased a tri-level condominium in Claremont and wallpapered it with lizard skin and suede. He decorated the first level with Dali oil paintings, the second level with Picassos and the third with Miro lithographs—all created by his own hands. He invested several hundred thousand dollars to recreate a 1958 Ferrari Testarossa race car, bringing to the auto’s “emulation” the same care and precision he lavished on his art. “For well over 10 years, every cop in the valley, and even most of my neighbors, were certain I was a drug dealer,” he smiles. “And the more I defended myself, the more I wasn’t believed.”
Savaged by Rats
In late 1988, Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata walked into the Carol Lawrence Gallery on Sunset Boulevard and immediately noticed that one of his miniature water colors hanging on display was not his work at all, but the work of an art forger—albeit an extremely talented art forger. After months of undercover work, Beverly Hills police arrested Mark Henry Sawicki, owner of the Sherman Oaks art gallery Visual Environments, for dealing in forged miniature Yamagatas. Police executed a search warrant on Sawicki’s home and gallery, where they seized original paintings and purported limited-edition lithographs signed by Dali, Chagall and Miro.
With police now involved, Sawicki turned, agreeing to help the authorities gather evidence against Anthony Tetro, whose reputation in the Los Angeles art world as a master emulator/forger had approached dangerously public levels. Sawicki phoned Tetro and suggested they meet to discuss, among other things, the purchase of more Miro prints. Tetro agreed.
The next day, police mobilized a stakeout and wiretap outside Tetro’s skin-and-suede condo, and monitored his and Sawicki’s conversations electronically. Minutes after Sawicki’s departure, gendarmes stormed inside Tetro’s home, arrested him, and confiscated hundreds of pages crammed with signatures of his favorite master artists, as well as a forged certificate of authenticity Tetro still maintains was not his work, but another’s.
Four months later, Los Angeles District Attorney Ira Reiner convened a press conference to announce that Tetro had been charged with conspiracy to commit grand theft and sixty-seven counts of forgery. Sawicki was also charged with grand theft and forgery, but had already agreed to plead guilty and cooperate with the authorities in return for a sentence of probation.
“The forger in his case is the single largest forger of artwork in the United States,” Reiner said. “He’s been in business for a long time.”
An Unbearably Sad Thing
There’s something about a fifty-year-old man living in a hotel room that’s unbearably sad. And like most unbearably sad things, it seems incredibly elusive and complex. Consider the room Tetro has lived in for the past four years. There’s a small refrigerator and George Foreman grill in one corner, in the other corner a life-size sculptured mannequin intricately painted by artist Jose Pyrumarti, and pictures of his granddaughters scattered about. But it’s his “wordly” possessions, crammed into a small closet and several drawers, and the constantly drawn curtains that are unbearably sad, as if the guy hasn’t opened a window to the world in a very long time. But here’s the thing: Tetro doesn’t seem to mind. He considers the hotel room a good value, compared to what he’d pay for a Newport Beach apartment, and it’s got maid service, two restaurants and a view of the harbor. “I could do a lot worse,” he chuckles. “It’s just that I don’t make enough money to live comfortably in this town. Then again, I’m getting older and it doesn’t affect me as much.”
This attitude—like Tetro himself, like his work—seems both admirable and sort of nuts, considering there are those in the art-world scene who claim the guy’s a genius.
Tetro’s arrest for grand theft and art forgery in 1989 knocked his world and all its trimmings to the ground. He was forced to liquidate his assets to solidify finances for his defense. He sold his exotic cars, including the Rolls-Royce Silver Spirit for a bargain $32,000, and his condo. “I sold everything I owned and moved into a hotel,” he says. “I didn’t want to burden my daughter or anyone else.”
While awaiting trial, Tetro employed a personal publicist expert in celebrity repositions “so people wouldn’t think I’m a drug dealer, anymore.” He sat down for interviews with several newspapers and magazines, and for a BBC documentary, where he came across as brash and cocky. And even though he suffered, considerably, a piece of him seemed to take pleasure in the attention.
At trial, Tetro maintained he never represented his work as anything other than emulations. He created paintings for private clients who wanted works from famous artists but couldn’t afford originals; other buyers actually owned original masterworks, but placed a Tetro emulation on the wall while the “real thing” languished in a vault. But nowhere had Tetro indicated on any of his paintings that they were reproductions, not even with a stamp or invisible ink. There wasn’t even an almost imperceptible flaw in the work itself to distinguish it from the original. “My customers wanted these to be as authentic as possible, and if I had put ‘reproduction’ on the back, that would have defeated the purpose.”
As for the work he sold to dealers and galleries, it passed from his hands with the expectation that purchasers would be informed the art was not the work of the credited artists. If the sellers failed to deliver such information, he says, that was not his problem.
“If you knew how many times I got fucked by art dealers,” he says. “They never paid me up front, I was always commissioned. They made a fortune and I got arrested.”
The district attorney’s office preferred to portray Tetro as a forger. But to obtain a forgery conviction, the DA had to prove Tetro painted in the style of master artists with the intent to trick unwary buyers. And the DA’s evidence was questionable—nowhere, for instance, in his taped conversations with Sawicki, did Tetro refer to his work as “fakes” or “forgeries.”
After several days of deliberation, some jurors were not convinced of Tetro’s fraudulent intent beyond a reasonable doubt and a mistrial was declared. The DA then announced his intention to retry the case. Tetro had no more assets to liquidate, and his emulation business was dead—no one would come near him. The legal system had succeeded in draining him of cash, and so, on the eve of his second trial, Tetro pled no contest to six counts of forgery, one count of conspiracy, and one count of attempted theft. He spent nine months at the Los Angeles County Sheriff’s station at San Dimas on a work-furlough program, teaching high school students, taggers and gang-bangers how to paint.
“I could have gone back to court, but I ran out of money,” he says. “I was in court for four-and-a-half years. I paid over $2,000 just in parking fees. One of my attorneys billed me thousands of dollars for incomplete telephone calls and then had the gall to abandon me before my trial started. I didn’t make a dime during that period. I lived off what I had, and in the end I was broke.”
New Day, Same Bar
The dress code inside Margaritaville ranges from corporate-informal to tourist-tropical. An auburn-haired bartender named Marty pours Tetro a stiff bourbon-on-the-rocks, his usual. Tetro smiles, shifts in his seat, casts an eye at the stack of napkins on the counter. He grabs one and, with the Fisher Space pen he keeps in the front pocket of his faded jeans, begins to practice the signatures of Chagall and Miro. “There are things I would have done differently, looking back in Tetro-spect,” he says. “I wouldn’t have trusted so many art dealers. I would have asked for more money. Remember: for every dollar I made, someone else made two or three times that amount. Sure, I could start over, but it would be foolish. I don’t have anything to prove. It would be so much more dangerous for me these days, and I’m not going to risk it. They beat me. The best course is to not even think about it.”
So instead he goes about his days drinking bourbon, reading engineering magazines, and creating the occasional “emulation” for wealthy clients, like the Lincoln in Dalivision he’s preparing for a Silicon Valley entrepreneur. He also still has hundreds of “Chagall” lithographs that he hocks here and there for $500 a piece. And yes, his signature is on the backs of all of them.
“I don’t enjoy painting as much I used to, but it’s the only thing I can do,” he admits. “I just did a Rembrandt with a guy and his dog, and aged it 400 years. I also painted an exact copy of the Mona Lisa with my granddaughter’s face and no cleavage. It took me about a month. It’s as good as Leonardo’s. I haven’t lost it. But what I lack these days is the passion. Art is just a business to me now. I don’t even like artists and I can’t stand art dealers. They made fortunes off me, and they should be kissing my ass that I never ratted on one of them.”
At this moment, somewhere in the world, in some hushed gallery or opulent private residence, someone stands enwrapped in awe and veneration before a Tetro, believing s/he’s moved by the genius of a Rembrandt, a Miro, a Dali, a Chagall. Tetro’s eccentric career challenges the very essence of commonly received notions of artistic talent and monetary value. What does it mean, for instance, when a Tetro work bearing the name of Da Vinci is considered priceless, while the very same Tetro, signed by Tetro, is shunned as worthless? As Larry Steinman of the Carol Lawrence Gallery told the BBC, “there’s probably a Tony Tetro in every major museum in the world.”
