One of the most prolific art forgers in America is getting a show this weekend at the University of Cincinnati. Curators say they are putting on display more than 90 forgeries by Mark A. Landis, an eccentric painter who donated dozens of phony works to museums around the country for more than 25 years before being found out in 2008.
The tongue-in-cheek show, “Faux Real,” opens, appropriately enough, on April Fool’s Day, and includes copies of paintings ostensibly by masters, including a fake Picasso that fooled the Cummer Museum of Arts and Gardens in Jacksonville, Florida.
Many of the works in the show were lent by 15 museums duped by Mr. Landis over the years, but the artist himself also sent about 60 pieces to the university, along with photographs and a priest’s costume he sometimes wore when donating paintings. He has never been charged with a crime because he has never accepted payment for the works.
Aaron Cowan, the director of galleries for the University’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, said the show is intended to educate people about forgery and serve as a cautionary tale to museum curators. Students can examine some of the works on display under black lights and magnifying glasses, he said. “This brings up the discussion of how to protect your intellectual property,” he said.
Mr. Landis, 57, of Laurel, Miss., made most of his forgeries by copying images in museum or auction catalogs. In recent years, he made digital images of works and painted over them, Mr. Cowan said. He is believed to have given more than 100 forgeries – done in oil, watercolor, pastels, ink and even pencil – to at least 50 institutions, many of them too small to have the resources to vet the paintings. To hoodwink curators, he often posed as a Jesuit priest. Sometimes, he drove a Cadillac and pretended to be a wealthy donor with a complicated family story.
The scam began to unravel in 2008, when Matthew Leininger, who was then a registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art, spotted a pixilated image underneath the paint in a painting Mr. Landis had donated. Mr. Leininger is one of the curators for Cincinnati show.