The Art of Deception

M. Wayne Cunningham is a past executive director of the Saskatchewan
Arts Board and the former director of Academic and Career Programs at
East Kootenay Community College.

A first-person novel that ranges from Montreal to New York to Bern to
Antwerp to Paris, with stops in between, The Art of Deception traces the
corruption of an artist’s soul. Max Willem begins his narrative as an
idealistic young student at Sir George Williams University. In search of
artistic truth and beauty, he progresses through sexual encounters of
varying intensity with models, friends, and acquaintances. He moves on
to experiments with copying works of art and to modest sales of the
imitations. Eventually, he becomes mired in pornographic representations
and embarks on a career as a full-fledged forger.

Max’s journey of deceit through the 1960s and ’70s takes him from
ecstasy and excess to despair and disillusionment, even to the brink of
madness. While he grapples with his “morbid fascination with
disguise” and rationalizes deception as an art form, he discovers that
his art dealer colleagues have bankrupted him financially, morally,
emotionally, and psychologically. They also plan to kill him because of
his increasingly erratic behaviour and his escalating threats to abandon
his role as a first-class forger. In a final act of defiant deception,
he recoups his stolen funds, steals a couple of priceless original
paintings he has been copying, and sets an ingenious trap to expose his
tormentors.

At times the pace of the novel is slowed by the amount of detail about
art history, the making and marketing of art forgeries, the psychology
of fashion, the selling of dreams and images, and the fads and fantasies
of European and North American culture. The denouement is gripping,
however, and the characters (especially the women) are well delineated
and believable. Challenging in both style and substance, Kokis’s novel
should appeal to readers who are interested in art and artists,
deception, and the darker recesses of the human psyche.