A ROLE AFTER HIS OWN ART

By JACK MATHEWS

May 31, 1987 12 AM PT

When the smug art collector Bertram Stone (John Lone) shows off his newly acquired paintings by Matisse, Cezanne and Modigliani in Alan Rudolph’s “The Moderns,” a French art critic takes one look and announces that all three are fakes.

David Stein, who plays the critic, should know. He painted them.

“It took about a week to do the originals,” said Stein, a professional “copyist” hired by the film company to supply the most visible props for “The Moderns.” “I didn’t take my regular fee, of course. This is a low-budget movie. I agreed to do it because it’s exciting.”

It helped that Rudolph, who has a taste for irony, offered Stein the role of the French critic. Stein, a Frenchman (real name: Henri Haddad) with a thick accent, said he wanted to learn something about movies since one is being developed about his life story. The working title: “Three Picassos Before Breakfast.”

Stein, 52, did prison time in the United States and France nearly two decades ago for selling forged Chagalls. It is not illegal to forge paintings, only to pass them off as originals. Stein now puts his own name, as well as the originator’s, on his copies.

For “The Moderns,” Stein was hired to do six completed paintings--two each of the Matisse, the Cezanne and the Modigliani--plus several “works in progress” that actor Keith Carradine will be seen working on in the film.

It was Carradine who accidentally stumbled onto Stein’s work and brought his name up to art director Steven Legler. Carradine’s agent at William Morris in New York is also Stein’s agent. The agent has some of Stein’s work on his walls and when Carradine asked about them, it became simply a matter of being introduced.

Stein said his normal fees for copies range from $5,000 to $20,000, depending primarily on the size. He doesn’t take gimmick orders--a girlfriend’s face on a Renoir body, for instance--and said most of clients are serious collectors who would rather have a copy than a hole in their collections.

The script for “The Moderns” specified the three painters Stein was to copy, but he used his own imagination. He said he copied a Modigliani, interpreted a Cezanne and created a Matisse. The only difference between the counterfeits and the originals in the movie is that the face of the Matisse’s nude is that of the woman (Linda Fiorentino) that both the forger and the buyer are in love with.

After Stein’s character convinces Stone that the paintings are counterfeits, Stone goes crazy and burns them in the fireplace. How did it feel to watch his work go up in smoke?

“It felt good, it felt very good,” Stein said. “I don’t look at art with the same feeling as a collector who puts up money.”