Art forgery fascination

[Dancefortwo]

Anyone else fascinated by forgers? I just watched a very interesting documentary on a German art forger named Wolfgang Beltracchi who was forging early modern artist and getting away with it.  These guys have lots of balls to do what they do.   I think a lot of people are amused by them because they pull the wool over "expert" art dealers eyes who in turn sell the fake paintings to art galleries who when they find out the art work is dubious don't want to admit they've been had.  It's highly entertaining.  

The Japanese have a national obsession with Van Gogh and have one of his sun flower paintings which was bought for something like one hundred million dollars back in the 1980's.  Word from several forgery experts is that it's a fake but the Japanese won't admit it.  It seems the bigger the sum is paid for an artwork the more an art gallery or buyer will double down on it's authenticity.   The Japanese firm which owns the Van Gogh sunflower painting won't allow it to be scientifically tested.    


Rich people being duped is very.....mmmmmm....what's the word?.......very satisfying.    

Anyone else find this fascinating?

[Thumpalumpacus]

It seems the bigger the sum is paid for an artwork the more an art gallery or buyer will double down on it's authenticity.   The Japanese firm which owns the Van Gogh sunflower painting won't allow it to be scientifically tested.

This is actually a thing. Gibson Les Paul guitars are commonly counterfeited in China and sold as real, and every so often on a guitar forum you'll see someone post an "NGD" (new guitar day) thread, only to have the fakery pointed out. It's not hard to see on many of them, the tells are fairly easy to spot, but sometimes these guys have a meltdown defending the "authenticity" of their purchase.

No one wants to admit being had, and the bigger the cost of being fooled, the less likely it is, seems to me, that the purchaser will acknowledge things.

I've seen a couple of these fake Gibsons in local pawnshops, and in the same room, the fakery stands out across the room.

[Deesse23]

Try Konrad Kujau

[jerry mcmasters]

I read an article- heck maybe it was here- awhile back about wine and fancy alcohol forgeries. Somebody gets the right old bottle, fills it with whatever, and seals it properly and presto, instant 100 year old scotch or whatever. Pretty smart seeing it's not something you buy to drink so it goes unnoticed.

[SYZ]

There was a licensed restaurant here in Melbourne some years ago that after closing collected all the  inevitable,
still half-filled bottles of reds that were left behind on the tables.  They mixed them all together, and stored the
resultant brew in plain glass flagons, and sold it for 4 or 5 bucks per glass as the "house" red.  They were eventually
sprung by Consumer Affairs Victoria.  And of course, this brew tasted like shit—but apparently the pikers who
bought it didn't know or were too embarrassed to complain.

[Vera]

Remember seeing this when I was still reading the guardian. Longish but interesting.

Shaun Greenhalgh has turned his hand to everyone from Leonardo da Vinci to Lowry. He’s been to prison, but has never revealed the whole picture. Until now

"Greenhalgh, who is now 56, tells me he remembers the process clearly. After practising the drawing on cartridge paper, he had mounted the vellum on an oak board from an old Victorian school desk lid, pilfered from the storeroom of Bolton Industrial Tech, where his father, George, worked as a cleaner. He had used just three colours, black, white and red, gum arabic earth pigments that he then went over in oak gall ink. Leonardo was left-handed. Fearing a betrayal by his own dominant right hand, Greenhalgh had turned the painting clockwise, and hatched strokes from the profile outwards, suggesting the work of a left-handed artist.

When it was finished, Greenhalgh tells me, he took the picture to an art dealer in Harrogate, where he offered it for sale – not as a forgery, but as a homage. The dealer disparaged its quality and paid just £80, an amount that barely covered the materials, let alone the labour. Still, Greenhalgh took the money. Two decades later, at a New York auction, the same painting sold for $21,850.

In 2007, while Greenhalgh was serving the first stretch of a four-year-and-eight-month prison sentence for art forgery, the painting changed hands again for a similar amount, this time attracting the attention of a number of art historians, who suspected that the painting could, in fact, be the work of a master. Among them was Kemp, who in 2010 wrote that he had not “the slightest doubt” that the painting was “the rarest of rare things… a major new work by Leonardo”. Subsequent carbon dating of the vellum, and evidence of the hint of a fingerprint that appeared to match Leonardo’s, provided the almost-clinchers.

Kemp was not alone in his belief. “Who else in late-15th-century Milan drew so beautifully with his left hand?” wrote the art critic Martin Gayford. One New York dealer estimated the painting to be worth $150m.

Looking at the cover of Kemp’s book, Greenhalgh couldn’t be certain La Bella Principessa was his. Five years later, in 2015, he spied a chance: an exhibition in Milan, where the painting was due to be exhibited at the Villa Reale di Monza. Greenhalgh travelled to Italy. Up close, he could see that someone with “a better hand than mine” had gone over the painting’s lines; but he was in no doubt that the piece was his. The butterfly braces on the rear, which he’d put there not to fix a crack in the panel but simply to make the work appear older, were the giveaway. “There’s no need for them,” he told me. “They’re purely cosmetic. And they’re mine.”"

[Alan V]

I don't have a problem with artists borrowing from or even imitating other artists. A work should succeed or fail on its own merits.

What I have a problem with is lying about it, and scamming people with lies.

Art history is a different concern from aesthetics. So sure, art collectors, investors, and museums will be interested in even poor works by major artists.

[Minimalist]

A common enough problem in archaeology.  Remember this one from some years back?

https://www.livescience.com/13657-exclus...fakes.html

Exclusive: Early Christian Lead Codices Now Called Fakes

"The image they are saying is Christ is the sun god Helios from a coin that came from the island of Rhodes. There are also some nonsense inscriptions in Hebrew and Greek," Peter Thonemann told the press. He believes the codices were forged within the past 50 years.

[Dancefortwo]

The thing with forgeries is that once a fake gets into a prestigious art gallery this gives the piece some provenance.  Art is bought and sold around the world and art galleries rely on the reputation of other art galleries to check their art works.  If a forgery can squeak past the eye of one galleries art expert then it's difficult to weed it out.  Then apparently art experts don't agree with each other and they use art to battle with each other.  
  
One guy in the video I posted above said a lot of art is a money laundering system.  What a weird but fascinating world.   Generally the forgers aren't reproducing the great masters because it's so difficult to do but often it's the lesser known artists who are forged.  One guy did some ink sketches in the manner of Van Dyke and it's in one of the top European galleries.   Even if he confesses to doing it they don't want to admit they made a mistake because it ruins their reputation.  So there it sits on the gallery wall, an ink sketch by Van Dyke. In reality it's by a 21st century artist.

[SYZ]

I'd reckon it'd be a piece of cake to forge any of Pieter Mondrian's absurd "art" works...




Composition B (No.II) with Red  1935


How would anybody know the difference?       

[Thumpalumpacus]

How would anybody know the difference?       

Brush strokes are very individual.

[Dancefortwo]

I'd reckon it'd be a piece of cake to forge any of Pieter Mondrian's absurd "art" works...




Composition B (No.II) with Red  1935


How would anybody know the difference?       

When you're looking at a Mondrian you're looking at this:



or this.....



The focus of the painting is in one place, the side of the painting with the man in a robe or the red lamps, or in the case of Mondrian, the big red square, and then the empty space of the rest of the painting has it's own intrinsic weight as balance.

[Mr Greene]

I'd reckon it'd be a piece of cake to forge any of Pieter Mondrian's absurd "art" works...




Composition B (No.II) with Red  1935


How would anybody know the difference?       

Canvas and paint composition would be telltales.
Working in a bank forged notes turn up with some regularity, Scottish and Ulster notes being the more common forgeries.

[abaris]

I read an article- heck maybe it was here- awhile back about wine and fancy alcohol forgeries.  Somebody gets the right old bottle, fills it with whatever, and seals it properly and presto, instant 100 year old scotch or whatever.  Pretty smart seeing it's not something you buy to drink so it goes unnoticed.

There has been a very big scandal over alcohol forgery in Austria in the mid 80ies. The wineries produced what they called premium wine that hadn't seen a single grape but lots of chemicals to account for taste.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1985_dieth...ne_scandal