A forger of art tells all

(CBS News) Art dealers and collectors are all embarrassed whenever a painting that appears to be genuine turns out to be a FAKE! About the only person who doesn't seem embarrassed is the fellow who's one of the most accomplished art forgers of all. Our Cover Story is reported by Lee Cowan.

A earlier version of this story was originally broadcast on March 3, 2013.

The story you're about to hear is a confession -- of a talent tempted, a painter driven into a darker form of art.

His name is Ken Perenyi, self-taught for the most part.

"I learned to paint by looking very carefully at paintings in museums," he said. " I just felt that if I had paints and brushes, I could do that, too. I was convinced."

He learned well. His steady hand and his eye for detail are often compared to many of the 19th century masters.

But Perenyi didn't just use his paintbrush to please. For him, the canvas was also a con.

"It was me against the experts -- can I outsmart them again? Can I outwit them? Can I succeed? Can I make a fake and pass it off as an original?" he said.

Perenyi spent a lifetime ripping off art dealers and auction houses, by painting fakes so accurately few could tell the difference between his forgeries and the real thing.

"Risk is addictive," Perenyi said. "Whether it's gambling or the stock market. It's like going out for the hunt."

He's not apologetic about his misdeeds. In fact, he's downright proud.

He carefully nurtured his criminal craft in a way many cherish a fine wine, and has now written a tell-all book, "Caveat Emptor," detailing almost every dirty deal he did.

"You're certainly not asking for anybody's forgiveness here -- I mean, you're gloating about getting away with it," said Cowan.

"Well, I wouldn't characterize it as gloating. I would say I'm just being honest," he replied. "To this day, I'm still thrilled with the pictures I could paint."

Perenyi never meant to be a forger. He had hoped to be an artist in his own right when he started in the 1960s in New York. But his original work wasn't getting any attention. Broke and homeless, he turned to a small Flemish portrait he painted on a lark. It became the first fake he ever sold.

"As I was approaching the gallery, I started getting nervous. I was beginning to realize maybe, maybe this was crazy," he laughed. "But I forced myself to do it."

His sales pitch was always simple and calculated: He was very careful to never pass off his fakes as real. "You went in and sort of played dumb," said Cowan, "And said, 'I don't know what this is, I bought it at a garage sale, or I found it somewhere. What do you think?' and let them make their own judgments."

"In a sense, I guess I got a perverse pleasure out of that," Perenyi said. "I liked to present the painting and have the expert explain to me what I have."

"So you'd stand there watching them go over these paintings inch by inch?

"Oh yes. That was part of the pleasure of the whole thing."

He, of course, is not the first art forger. But Perenyi is perhaps one of the more prolific.

He learned to imitate an astonishing range of 19th century painters, like maritime artist James Buttersworth, known for the delicate lines on his sails.

"It's all done freehand. Nothing was drawn in with pencils or anything. It's actually done with a brush.You have to have an incredibly steady hand to achieve that," said Perenyi. "Even that little ship there, if you look very closely, has lines painted as fine as a human hair on it."

"How did you learn to do that?" asked Cowan.

"A lot of practice," Perenyi said.

The crown jewel of his forgeries was a Martin Johnson Heade. In 1994 it went on the Sotheby's auction block as an original.

That night he took home a receipt for $650,000, to be wired to his account. It was his biggest score on one painting.

It wasn't only the paintings themselves that he forged; he learned to fake time itself. "I often like to look at the back of my paintings and hang it this way. I think this is an illusion that I like to create. How well can you make something look really old that's all brand new?"

He became an expert at faking the forensics of a painting -- weathering wooden frames, staining a perfectly new canvas to make it look old. He mimicked chalk marks left by auction houses, and recreated stamps from dealers. "That's a new stamp," he said of one.

"I make those on copy machines and then stain 'em with tea and glue 'em on there."

But perhaps most important of all is his ability to replicate how oil paint cracks with age.

There are patterns (like a spider web, he says) that with heat and the right chemicals he can reproduce, like Father Time himself.

"It's an ongoing process. I'm still perfecting it today," he said.

He says "today" because he's STILL painting fakes. Only now, he sells them as fakes -- the look of the real thing, for much cheaper.

But why come clean now? It's because he almost got caught. The FBI had been investigating forgeries at the big auction houses -- Sotheby's and Christies -- and had traced a few suspected paintings back to Perenyi.

But he dodged their questions, saying he didn't know the origin of the paintings -- he had just passed them on.

"Were they ever wrong in any of their accusations?" Cowan asked.

"No. It was pretty hard to deny it."

And yet the FBI never filed charges; even Perenyi isn't sure why. All he knows is that now, no one can touch him. The statute of limitations on his misdeeds has run out.

"You lied to the agents," said Cowan.

"Yeah, I would say so, yeah. But in my world, that's survival. It's part of the game."

As you might imagine, it was no game to those in the art world.

Brenda Simonson-Mohle, an art appraiser in Dallas, called Perenyi "a thief on the loose." She read his bold confession with disgust.

"It does irritate me," she laughed. "I mean, it's bank robbery with a paintbrush."

"But if you ask him, he says it's pretty much a victimless crime."

"It's not really a victimless crime," Simonson-Mohle said. "Someone ends up with essentially fool's gold, you know, on their walls."

While he's up-front now about his fakes, he left a very long trail in the art world. Perenyi estimates there are about a thousand of his forged works still out there, duping would-be buyers to this day.

"It's like bumping into an old friend," Perenyi said. "You know, it's good to see where they've gone in the world."

"Don't we all suffer a little from having fakes out there?" Cowan asked.

"I don't think so; I think that I've made a great contribution to the art world," Perenyi said.

Beauty is the eye of the beholder, as they say. So whether you see him as a painter, or a con artist, Perenyi himself seems most proud of being both.

For more info:

• "Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger" by Ken Perenyi (Pegasus Books)
• kenperenyi.com
• Brenda Simonson-Mohle, Signet Art, Dallas
• FBI: Art theft
• FBI: Fine art forgeries