old masters, fresh paint?

This page considers forgery relating to the fine arts.

It covers -

• introduction
• gatekeepers
• incidents
• forensics
• memoirs and scams

     introduction

In introducing a 1999 Australian Institute of Criminology conference on art crime AIC Director Adam Graycar commented that

Irresponsible and distorted claims of fraud in the popular media have threatened the major multi-million dollar art industry in Australia. Art crime is often a hidden crime as many public galleries do not report theft which would show their security as being inadequate and private collections may not wish to call attention to their collections. The legitimate art market often unknowingly passes on stolen art, and the criminal art market operates in quite a different way to the general market for stolen goods.

Does a forged work (or even an incorrect attribution) matter? Those questions are considered in Sandor Radnsti's The fake: Forgery & Its Place In Art (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield 1999), Ian Haywood's Faking It: Art & the Politics of Forgery (New York: St Martin's Press 1987), Ken Polk's 1999 Who Wins and Who Loses When Art is Stolen or Forged (PDF), Bruno Frey's 1999 Art Fakes? What Fakes: An Economic View (PDF) and Why Fakes Matter: Essays on problems of authenticity (London: British Museum Press 1992) edited by Mark Jones.

Fake?: The Art of Deception (Berkeley: Uni of California Press 1990) is a splendid catalogue, edited by Mark Jones, of the landmark British Museum 'fakes' exhibition, complemented by Arnau's The Art of the Faker and Exhibiting Authenticity (Manchester: Manchester Uni Press 1997) by David Phillips.

A points of entry into the literature is Faking It: An International Bibliography of Art & Literary Forgeries 1949–1986 (New York: SLA 1987) edited by James Koobatian.

A perspective is provided by Violin Fraud: Deception, Forgery, Theft & Lawsuits in England and America (Oxford: Clarendon Press 1997) by Brian Harvey & Carla Shapreau.

     gatekeepers?

In introducing this profile we suggested that in practice there's an a price threshhold for collectibles - whether the used socks of Australian cricketing greats or a Mantegna canvas - beneath which there's little concern for provenance or forensic analysis. In the world of fine arts there's recurrent concern about the gatekeepers concerned with forged works priced above that threshhold.

Perceived poor performance by gatekeepers such as leading auction houses, curatorial institutions and authenticators reflects

• the subjectivity in aesthetic judgements
• the absence or incompleteness of information regarding provenance
• conflicts of interest among appraisers, with high profile examples including connoisseur Bernard Berenson (1865-1959) and Anthony Blunt
• the reticence of curatorial institutions to admit mistakes or embarrass donors
• what one critic characterised as 'auction house ethics', with leading outlets recurrently alleged to have misled customers, actively breached regulations regarding fair trading and imports/exports or failed to meet claims regarding authentication

For the trade in 'old masters' on which the paint is still wet see in particular Sotheby's: The Inside Story (New York: Random House 1997), Sothebys: Bidding for Class () by Robert Lacey and From Monet To Manhattan: The Rise of the Modern Art Market (New York: Random House 1992) by Peter Watson.

For Berenson see Ernest Samuels two volume Bernard Berenson (Cambridge: Harvard Uni Press 1979, 87), Colin Simpson's expose Artful Partners: Bernard Berenson & Joseph Duveen (London: Macmillan 1986) and Bernard Berenson & the Twentieth Century (Philadelphia: Temple Uni Press 1994) by Mary Ann Calo.

     incidents

Hans van Meegeren (1889-1947) concentrated on forgery of Vermeer, with his Christ at Emmaus being acclaimed by art historian Abraham Bredius in 1937 as

It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio! And what a picture! ... what we have here is a - I am inclined to say - the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft

Van Meegeren was exposed after his arrest for selling a Vermeer to Hermann Göring, defending himself by painting another 'Vermeer' in his prison cell - thereby escaping a conviction for collaboration but gaining a sentence for forgery and confiscation of proceeds equivalent to US$40 million.

Elmyr de Hory (1905-1976?), subject of a biography by Clifford Irving (the basis for Orson Welles' 1975 film F is for Fake), claimed that he'd successfully forged almost a thousand painings by contemporaries such as Chagall, Matisse, Modigliani and Picasso.

English artist Tom Keating (1917-1984) is reported to forged over 2,000 paintings by around 100 artists, starring in a television program after confessing in 1976. Eric Hebborn (1934-1996), sometime protege of brilliant scholar and KGB agent Anthony Blunt, admitted to forging over a thousand Old Master drawings attributed to Poussin, Bruegel, Rubens, Van Dyck, Pontormo, Castiglione, Mantegna and Tiepolo.

More recently UK artist John Myatt (1945- ) created works attributed by associate John Drewe to Chagall, Giacometti and Ben Nicholson. French dealer Guy Hain was imprisoned in 2001 for faking sculpture by artists such as Giacometti, Carpeaux, Barye, Fremiet, Brancusi and Arp - an estimated 4,000 pieces for revenue of over US$60 million.

In the 1994 'Canyon Suite' case 28 'undiscovered' Georgia O'Keeffe watercolors were sold for US$5 million after reported endorsement by the O'Keeffe Foundation and National Gallery of Art in Washington. They were dropped from the canon in 1999.

     forensics

An introduction to forensics is provided by Otto Kurz's classic Art forgeries and how to examine paintings scientifically (), his Fakes (New York: Dover 1967), Stuart Fleming's Authenticity in Art: The Scientific Detection of Forgery (New York: Crane 1976), Roger Marijnissen's Paintings: genuine, fraud, fake: modern methods of examining paintings (Brussels: Elsevier 1985) and Fakebusters (Chicago: SPIE/McCrone Research Institute 1999) edited by Walter McCrone & Richard Weiss.

     memoirs and scams

Insider accounts are provided by Eric Hebborn's The Art Forger's Handbook (New York: Overlook Press 1997) and Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger (New York: Random House 1993), criticised in Art of the Forger (New York: Dodd Mead 1985) by Christopher Wright. Tom Keating & Geraldine Norman collaborated on The Fake's Progress (London: Hutchinson 1977).

For Vermeer and van Meegeren see Anthony Bailey's Vermeer: A View of Delft (New York: Henry Holt 2001). For de Hory see Clifford Irving's gonzo-ish Fake: the story of Elmyr, de Hory, the greatest art forger of our time (New York: McGraw-Hill 1969) and Affairs of a Painter (London: Faber 1936) by his predecessor JF Joni. Dali's 'auto-forgery' is described in The Shameful Life of Salvador Dali (London: Faber 1997) by Ian Gibson.

There are accounts in The Modigliani Caper: Fraud, Fun, Fiasco and Remorse in Modern Italy (Austin & Winfield 1995) by Jon Bruce Kite. Max Friedlaender's Genuine & Counterfeit: Experiences of a Connoisseur (New York: 1930) offsets Berenson.




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