Art of the Con

At the start of “The Thomas Crown Affair” an elementary schoolteacher is lecturing her class in front of a painting by Claude Monet at a museum not unlike New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Seeing that the students are bored and listless, the teacher takes a new tack.

“OK, try this,” she tells them. “It’s worth a hundred million bucks!”

That gets their attention--as it does that of Pierce Brosnan’s Thomas Crown, a wealthy, high-flying financier who, for sport and his own aesthetic enjoyment, steals a couple of Impressionist and Surrealist masterpieces, all the while romancing an insurance investigator (Rene Russo) whose company would rather not cover the museum’s losses.

The tony context of high art is just one of the changes in this remake of the 1968 film, which starred Steve McQueen as a brainy bank robber and Faye Dunaway (here in a cameo as Crown’s shrink) as the insurance investigator. But in reality the paintings, including that precious “San Giorgio Maggiore Soleil Couchant” by Monet that he folds into his briefcase (which should cause more than a few purists to wince), are worth little more than the pigment only recently applied to the canvases.

“I sell fantasy, what is that worth?” asked Christopher Warner Moore, president of the Paris- and New York-based Troubetzkoy Gallery, which reproduced the majority of the more than 200 actual masterpieces used in scenes of the museum’s galleries and in Crown’s townhouse, with its sleek interiors reflecting the tastes of a sophisticated art collector. “This is supposed to be the Met,” Moore says about the film’s key setting, “but for me it’s an imaginary museum and an imaginary collection.”

The imaginary museum and collections became necessary when the request of director John McTiernan to film scenes of the “Thomas Crown” remake at the Met was turned down. (The MGM film, with a reported budget of $55 million, opens Friday.) Harold Holzer, a spokesman for the museum, said the request was “respectfully declined” because the elaborate heists in the script portrayed security measures and breeches that had nothing to do with what goes on--or could go on--at the Met.

“It’s not that we’re censoring freedom of expression, but if we had allowed filming, it would almost appear as if we were endorsing their view of security,” he said, adding that the museum receives about two dozen requests a year for filming and generally approves about five or six.

Leslie Rollins, set decorator for the film, said that the decision gave him and production designer Bruno Rubeo free rein to create their own museum--whatever the viewer might infer from scenes showing exteriors of the Met itself. And when it came to showing on camera works by such masters as Monet, Rene Magritte, Pablo Picasso, John Singer Sargent and Vincent Van Gogh, they were aware that only a textured, layered application of vibrantly colored pigment on canvas would yield satisfactory results. Flat or computer-generated images simply wouldn’t work.

“The adult moviegoing public is quite sophisticated and expects nothing less than an accurate, realistic picture of life,” Rollins said. “We have to keep notching up what we do so we’re presenting something fresh and absolutely researched.”

To fill the galleries as well as the Crown townhouse, Rubeo and Rollins tapped a number of sources, including Moore and his battalion of painters, who work out of a Paris atelier. The firm, established in 1978 by the French-born Russian aristocrat Prince Igor Troubetzkoy, began replicating classical and modern masterpieces for luxury hotels and private clients. The latter included those who may have possessed the originals and wanted copies for the beach house, as well as others who desired the patina of elegance and sophistication conferred on the owner of such paintings but not the exorbitant price tag.

In 1991, the gallery, then run by the founder’s son, Arnaud Marie Troubetzkoy, and Moore--who had been in school together in Europe--expanded into film. At the recommendation of a consultant to the Met, Dante Ferretti, art director of “The Age of Innocence,” commissioned them to come up with more than 200 paintings for director Martin Scorsese’s lavish look at the lifestyle of American aristocrats at the turn of century.

The gallery has since provided replicas of important paintings for nearly 50 film and TV productions, including “Meet Joe Black” and “The American President,” and such upcoming films as “Mickey Blue Eyes,” “Bowfinger” and “Girl Interrupted.” Indeed, the latter, starring Winona Ryder, even takes its title from a Jan Vermeer painting.

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To Moore, “The Thomas Crown Affair” was a particularly appealing project because it featured a number of what he calls “hero” paintings--those that significantly figure in the plot and cannot be slighted or cut from the film. After all, the paintings represent more than just quarry to the art-loving thief.

Some of the paintings, like Crown’s favorite, Van Gogh’s “Afternoon Siesta,” with its simple haystacks, are meant as a doorway to the man’s soul, while others, like Tamara de Lempicka’s “Adam and Eve,” act as aphrodisiacs for the characters, with its figures standing like sensuous sentries over Brosnan and Russo on the stairs of the townhouse. Later, Magritte’s “Son of Man,” which depicts a man in a bowler hat whose face is obscured by a large green apple, literally comes to life at a crucial point in the movie. In one scene, the Surrealist masterpiece is the inspiration for a ruse by art thieves to confuse museum guards during a heist.

Other reproductions in the film include Edouard Manet’s “Regates,” and Camille Pissarro’s “Jardin Eragny.” The script for “Crown” had originally called for a Paul Cezanne painting to be featured in the initial heist, but Moore convinced the filmmakers that the Monet would be a better choice because the colors would photograph better and the size would make it more likely to be stolen.

“I’m French, so I’m not shy about having my say,” says the affable 42-year-old art executive, dressed casually as he takes a visitor on a tour of the artworks crammed into his East Side Manhattan office. Not surprisingly, most of them were featured in movies, from De Lempicka’s “Adam and Eve” to Sargent’s “Paul Helleu Sketching His Wife,” both from “Crown,” to Balthus’ “The Cat and Mirror,” in “Meet Joe Black.”

Born in New York to an American father and French mother, Moore was educated in France and became involved in a number of entrepreneurial ventures before joining the Troubetzkoy Gallery, running the American end of the business while partner Arnaud looks after their European interests. While he was never formally trained in art, Moore says that he gleaned its disciplines by osmosis from his art-loving family (a brother is a sculptor). Apart from the occasional touch-up, he leaves most of the painting to the Paris atelier.

Many of the paintings in the New York gallery carry price tags. That copy of “Adam and Eve”--the original of which Madonna reportedly purchased in a 1994 auction for $1.98 million--can be had for $4,291, and the copy of the Balthus, the original of which is in a museum and is probably worth $50 million, is on sale for $5,000. Of course, the size may be off as well as some of the color, but Moore says that even De Lempicka herself, if asked to make a copy, probably could not come up with an exact re-creation of the original.

“I don’t like the term ‘copy’ because it implies that it is exactly the same,” said Moore, adding that by law, reproductions of paintings cannot be the exact size of the original. “I prefer to call them ‘reproductions’ and the paintings are sold as non-original ‘reproductions’ with the full knowledge of the estates involved and stamped on the back as such. They trust us.”

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Negotiating with the respective estates of the artists whose work is being reproduced is one of the Troubetzkoy Gallery’s most important tasks, given the arcane intricacies of U.S. copyright laws. According to a law that went into effect recently, artwork in general goes into the public domain 70 years after an artist’s death, if he or she dies after 1978. If before, the work goes into the public domain 95 years after a work was first published in a book, magazine, pamphlet, poster, etc.

Artists’ estates protecting non-public domain artworks can be particularly fierce, according to Moore, with the Picasso estate being among the most difficult. It refused to cooperate with James Ivory and Ismail Merchant on their film “Surviving Picasso,” and, as a result, no works by the iconic painter were shown in the 1996 film.

“The Picasso estate didn’t like the approach; even the title itself implied a negative treatment, so they were predisposed against giving permission,” said Dr. Theodore Feder, president of the Artists Rights Society, which administers and oversees the rights to most 20th century artists, including Picasso. “For every request, there is a set of very individual and subjective judgments that are made by the estates, but most of the answers are, by and large, positive.”

Another famously negative response from the Picasso estate was the use of a reproduction of the artist’s seminal painting “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” in the film “Titanic,” last seen floating in Kate Winslet’s stateroom and presumably going down with the ship. (That, of course, begged the question, just what was that “Demoiselles d’Avignon” hanging in the Museum of Modern Art? A forgery?)

“The estate had rejected the request, and they went ahead and used it anyway,” Feder said.

Since the proper clearances had not been arranged, the Picasso estate sued, and the producers agreed to an out-of-court settlement. (The Troubetzkoy Gallery didn’t do the paintings for “Titanic.”)

Such publicized cases have made the studios far more cognizant of copyright infringement on paintings, says Moore, and more willing to comply with estates’ demands. Those sometimes include instructions to destroy the paintings following the filming, as the Wassily Kandinsky estate required of those in “Crown.”

Fees charged by the estates for the use of reproductions range from $50 to $5,000 a picture, depending on how it is shown in the film. MGM spent about $250,000 on the rental of paintings from Troubetzkoy.

Moore noted that one of the most difficult aspects of his job is the tight deadlines of supplying art for film production. “You frequently get calls wanting a dozen paintings within a week, and it usually takes four to six weeks depending on the job,” he explained.

Such was the case with “Bowfinger,” a comedy starring Eddie Murphy and Steve Martin, who is himself a top contemporary art collector. “He [Martin, who wrote the film] wanted large apocalyptic paintings by John Martin, the 19th century English painter, but they needed them fast. We worked night and day,” Moore said.

Moore said that if his artists achieve 85% to 90% accuracy, his clients are usually happy, although there are complaints. The Met’s Holzer, when asked his opinion of the paintings he’d seen in an early screening of “Crown,” replied that they were “daubs,” explaining that it’s an English term for “not very good work.”

Moore is unfazed by such criticism. “You win a few, you lose a few, but this is Hollywood, this is the movies, where a painting which is folded in a briefcase emerges in perfect condition in the next shot,” he said.

“Perhaps the term ‘art’ shouldn’t even be used in discussing this,” he added philosophically.

“The historical context of what that artist was living through at the time. You can accurately reproduce furniture, jewelry, maybe even sculpture. But paintings? No. Never.”