The dark arts of art forgery
By Jordan Green
Those who
investigate art fakes, forgeries and fabrications operate in a realm
where – similar to espionage and counterintelligence – a certain degree
of paranoia is healthy.
James Martin, a
trained painter who has studied art history and chemistry to become a
consultant in demand by both the FBI and a number of prominent art
museums, began his talk on forensic art history at Reynolda House Museum
of American Art on Sunday by asking if there were any artists in the
audience. Then, he asked if there were any attorneys present. There were
a couple.
“Attorneys working for
parties adverse to me?” he asked. One senses that this guy has
accumulated some enemies. “Any experts on faked and forged artwork?” he
asked. “Any producers of faked or forged artwork?” Martin noted that
materials such as Phillips-head screws (developed in 1936) and
polypropylene paint (invented in 1958) can establish a fake if the
original artwork dates back to an earlier period. After describing how
some people harvest the powder inside fluorescent tube lamps, mix it
with varnish and apply it to the surface of paintings to defeat an
ultraviolet examination, he half-joked, “I’m giving tips to forgers, but
only because you’ve told me there are none in the audience.”
And
similar to the burgeoning industry of cyber-security where the best in
the business hold some experience in hacking, the best artfraud
detectives hold the same skill sets as the fraudsters.
“Before I studied chemistry and art history, I studied art,” Martin said.
“And
one of the things I did was to copy the old masters. And I’m really,
really good at that. Which makes me really good at catching people who
fake paintings, too.”
Martin described
scholarly art authentication “as like a three-legged stool” that relies
on connoisseurship, provenance — defined as the documented history of
the art — and testing, which includes “technical examination and
scientific testing.”
The audience of upwards of 50, including members and guests of the museum, ate it up.
Martin’s
firm, Orion Analytical, owns a Raman microscope worth more than most
cars that can analyze a speck that is a thousandth of a millimeter. He
worked on an investigation that determined a purported Jackson Pollock
painting purchased by a hedge-fund investor for $17 million was, in
fact, a fake.
Art forgers can go to
extraordinary and creative lengths to perpetrate hoaxes. Martin laid out
the scenario of a forger intent on defeating a thermo-luminescence
dating process by collecting bricks from a 1000 AD Chinese archeological
site to assemble a fake antiquity dog sculpture. The forger might grind
up one of the bricks, mix the powder with Elmer’s glue and smear it
over the surface to cover the joins.
“So
if you took a sample of this and submitted it for thermoluminescence
dating, it would tell you that the brick, or that the ceramic, was a
thousand years old,” Martin said. “But it wouldn’t tell you that the dog
was created about five years ago. So one of the first things we do is
put a drop of solvent on it to look for the Elmer’s glue.”
Then
there’s the real-life case of Wolfgang Beltracchi, a German forger who
created an entire fake collection purported to be assembled by the late
art collector Werner Jaeger. The scheme, which Martin helped bring down,
involved Beltracchi posing his wife in period clothing as the Jaeger
matriarch with the paintings in the background to make it appear as
though the collection had been in existence in the 1920s.
Similarly,
John Drewe, working with forger John Myatt, created false exhibition
catalogues that he planted in the research library at the Tate Modern
museum in London to create a fraudulent provenance for the purpose of
throwing off investigators.
But art
criminals, like all criminals, make dumb mistakes. Case in point:
William Toye, who faked the paintings of Clementine Hunter, a 20th
century Louisiana folk artist whose paintings have appreciated from
about $10 to about $10,000.
“Toye loved
cats,” Martin said. “He had lots of cats. And his cats had a habit of
standing on the table where he made all of his fakes. So, as you might
suspect, every one of his fakes had cat hair embedded.”
