cheap copies of Rembrandts, Picassos, and Czannes. Beltracchi inherited his dad's skill with a brush, and took it to a new level: at 14 he astonished his father, he says, by painting a passable Picasso in a single day -- "a mother and child from the Blue Period" -- and adding original flourishes. Three years later, he enrolled in an art academy in Aachen, but ended up skipping most of his classes. It was the late 1960s, "the hippie time," Beltracchi says. He grew his hair long, purchased a Harley-Davidson, and smoked hashish and dropped L.S.D. with U.S. soldiers stationed at a nearby NATO base on their way home from Vietnam. "Many of them had gone a little bit crazy from the war," Beltracchi recalls. "Some of them became my friends." During the 1970s and early 80s, young Wolfgang Fischer led a nomadic life -- like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, Helene says. He spent a year and a half on a beach in Morocco, and lived in a commune in Spain. He drifted around Barcelona, London, and Paris, buying and selling paintings at antique markets. He lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam, where he put on psychedelic light shows at the Paradiso nightclub. He enjoyed some early success as a painter in his own right, contributing three works to a prestigious art exhibition in Munich in 1978. But, by his own admission, he was more drawn to the outlaw life. One day during his wanderings, he bought a pair