Art forgery
Art forgery is the creation and sale of works of art which are intentionally falsely credited to other, usually more famous artists. Art forgery can be extremely lucrative, but modern dating and analysis techniques have made the identification of forged artwork much simpler.
This type of fraud is meant to mislead by creating a false provenance, or origin, of the object in order to enhance its value or prestige at the expense of the buyer. As a legal offense, it is not just the act of imitating a famous artist's key characteristics in a piece of art, but the deliberate financial intent by the forger. When caught, some of these forgers attempt to pass off the fakes as jokes or hoaxes on the art experts and dealers they were selling to, or on the art world as a whole.
To excel in this type of forgery, the forger must pass themselves off as incredibly trustworthy and charismatic in order to recruit the necessary middlemen such as art dealers, sellers, experts, etc. as the forger will rarely deal in person. Forgers are often proficient in the current methods of art forgery authentication in order to reverse-engineer their work to cover up any potential mistakes that could get them caught.
Since the 1950s and 1960s there has been a growing demand for indigenous art. Many people began creating and selling faked busts, ceremonial masks, carvings, and sculptures to prestigious institutions such as the British Museum. Some artists even went as far as to create artifacts from cultures of which very little information is known, like Moabite, a Semitic culture that was alluded to in the Old Testament. In the 19th century, an icon painter from Jerusalem began to create clay figures with mysterious inscriptions and sold them to the Altes Museum in Berlin after giving them this false origin.
History
Art forgery dates back more than two thousand years. Ancient Roman sculptors produced copies of Ancient Greek sculptures. The contemporary buyers likely knew that they were not genuine. During the classical period art was generally created for historical reference, religious inspiration, or simply enjoyment. The identity of the artist was often of little importance to the buyer. The first recorded art forgery was in the Italian Renaissance and has since modernized alongside society.During the Renaissance, many painters took on apprentices who studied painting techniques by copying the works and style of the master. As a payment for the training, the master would then sell these works. This practice was generally considered a tribute, not forgery, although some of these copies have later erroneously been attributed to the master.
Following the Renaissance, the increasing prosperity of the bourgeoisie created a fierce demand for art. Near the end of the 14th century, Roman statues were unearthed in Italy, intensifying the populace's interest in antiquities, and leading to a sharp increase in the value of these objects. This upsurge soon extended to contemporary and recently deceased artists. Art had become a commercial commodity, and the monetary value of the artwork came to depend on the identity of the artist. To identify their works, painters began to mark them. These marks later evolved into signatures. As the demand for certain artwork began to exceed the supply, fraudulent marks and signatures began to appear on the open market.
During the 16th century, imitators of Albrecht Dürer's style of printmaking added signatures to them to increase the value of their prints. In his engraving of the Virgin, Dürer added the inscription "Be cursed, plunderers and imitators of the work and talent of others". Even extremely famous artists created forgeries. In 1496, Michelangelo created a sleeping Cupid figure and treated it with acidic earth to cause it to appear ancient. He then sold it to a dealer, Baldassare del Milanese, who in turn sold it to Cardinal Raffaele Riario who later learned of the fraud and demanded his money back. However, Michelangelo was permitted to keep his share of the money.
Art forgery was documented as occurring in Imperial China and in contrast with the Western world, forgeries were seen in a much more positive light as the originals and faked works were seen as having the same level of prestige.
The 20th-century art market has favored artists such as Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee and Matisse and works by these artists have commonly been targets of forgery. These forgeries are typically sold to art galleries and auction houses who cater to the tastes of art and antiquities collectors; at time of the occupation of France by German forces during World War II, the painting which fetched the highest price at Drouot, the main French auction house, was a fake Cézanne.
Africa
The earliest disputed case of forgery in Africa is the Olukun, the Bronze Head from Ife. German ethnologist Leo Frobenius collected the artifact in 1910 and was forced by British authorities to return it to the Ife palace for safekeeping in 1934. Eventually the head made its way back to the British Museum and while being cleaned in 1940 was erroneously found to be made by sand casting instead of lost-wax casting, alerting the museum that between 1910 and 1934 a fake had supposedly replaced the original bronze head. In 2010, a reexamination and metallurgical analysis of the sculpture conclusively proved the piece to be made by lost wax casting. It is therefore currently assumed to be the original head collected in 1910.With many visitors to Africa in this time period, the art that was being created began to have more European aspects and inspiration behind them, such as crucifixion sculptures and Afro-Portuguese ivory carvings, and were often made with the intention of selling to tourists. These items went full circle in the case of authenticity; some suggest that it wasn't until these pieces became fetishized that they were authentic, while others say that even if they were made with traditional materials for a traditional purpose, they did not conform to traditional forms and therefore were not authentic.
Australian Aboriginal
Historically, Aboriginal artists were thought to be simply replicating the designs that existed since from the beginning of history and communicated to them by supernatural beings, ancestors, and/or ghosts. Because of this, individual creativity was not critically acknowledged and there was no reason why several people shouldn't participate in the creation of a single work. Today, if an artist is offered a prize or they sell a work under their name, they are presumed to be the sole creator of that work. If they have not been the sole creator but have credited themselves as such, they open themselves to the threat of misrepresentation and fraud.Emily Kame Kngwarreye, one of the most famous Aboriginal artists from Utopia, Northern Territory, has some of the most widely forged works circulating. In the early stages of her painting career, she had inspired a school of learners under her who began to put out their own work under her name, and around half of the "Emily" paintings in the art market were fakes. Later on, the elders in her community were worried about the loss of income from her work and appointed a member who was a talented painter to continue on selling paintings as Emily.
Clifford Possum Tjapaltjarri was another highly forged painter who had helped initiate the 'Dot Style" paintings common in Aboriginal artwork. After gaining notoriety in the art market, Clifford began to sign other artwork by Aboriginal artists with his own name in exchange for gifts of cash. Ginger Riley Munduwalawala was another artist who began to sign his name on other artists work in exchange for money, and even took photographs with the art, some of which he posed with a paintbrush as if he was in the midst of working on them for further credibility.
Meso-America and pre-Columbia
The earliest recorded artifact forgery from the Meso-American area was in the 16th century when the Spanish administration began to create false works in order to meet consumer demands back home in Spain. When Mexico opened their borders after their War of Independence, they became a tourist attraction and a popular destination for North Americans and Europeans. These tourists bought enough artifacts for their curio cabinets that it created a market for forgeries.In 1820, forgery workshops began to pop up, starting with the workshop on Tlatelolco Street in Mexico City. Later, the Barrios Brothers began their own forgery workshop near an archeology site in San Juan Teotihuacan. Favorite forged artifacts for these workshops were masks; specifically polished jade, greenstone, and stone masks. The stone masks that were created were meant to resemble the British Museum Xipe Totec masks. These stone masks and the Olmec-style masks have continued to appear in the art market since the 1930s.
Forgers
There are essentially three varieties of art forger. The person who actually creates the fraudulent piece, the person who discovers a piece and attempts to pass it off as something it is not, typically in order to increase the piece's value, and the third who discovers that a work is a fake, but sells it as an original anyway.Copies, replicas, reproductions and pastiches are often legitimate works, and the distinction between a legitimate reproduction and deliberate forgery is blurred. For example, Guy Hain used original molds to reproduce several of Auguste Rodin's sculptures. However, when Hain then signed the reproductions with the name of Rodin's original foundry, the works became deliberate forgeries.
Artists
An art forger must be at least somewhat proficient in the type of art he is trying to imitate. Many forgers were once fledgling artists who tried, unsuccessfully, to break into the market, eventually resorting to forgery. Sometimes, an original item is borrowed or stolen from the owner in order to create a copy. The forger will then return the copy to the owner, keeping the original for himself. In 1799, a self-portrait by Albrecht Dürer which had hung in the Nuremberg Town Hall since the 16th century, was loaned to. The painter made a copy of the original and returned the copy in place of the original. The forgery was discovered in 1805, when the original came up for auction and was purchased for the royal collection.Although many art forgers reproduce works solely for money, some have claimed that they have created forgeries to expose the credulity and snobbishness of the art world. Essentially the artists claim, usually after they have been caught, that they have performed only "hoaxes of exposure".
Some exposed forgers have later sold their reproductions honestly, by attributing them as copies, and some have actually gained enough notoriety to become famous in their own right. Forgeries painted by the late Elmyr de Hory, featured in the film F for Fake directed by Orson Welles, have become so valuable that forged de Horys have appeared on the market.
A peculiar case was that of the artist Han van Meegeren who became famous by creating "the finest Vermeer ever" and exposing that feat eight years later in 1945. His own work became valuable as well, which in turn attracted other forgers. One of these forgers was his son Jacques van Meegeren who was in the unique position to write certificates stating that a particular piece of art that he was offering "was created by his father, Han van Meegeren".
A forger of note specializing in ancient artifacts, Brigido Lara, created the Monumental Veracruz style and produced an entire culture's worth of artifacts that ended up in museums around the world. After his early work was bought and sold on the black market, looters asked him to fix artifacts that they had stolen, Lara joined a forgery atelier that produced forged artifacts. In July 1974, Mexican authorities arrested and sentenced Lara to ten years in prison, claiming that he had been looting ancient ceramic artifacts in Veracruz, which he had denied and was able to prove that he had created them himself by making more replicas in the seven months he spent in prison before being released. Upon his release from prison, the Xalapa Museum of Anthropology offered him a job preserving artifacts and creating more replicas for their gift shop.
Forgers usually copy works by deceased artists, but a small number imitate living artists. In May 2004, Norwegian painter Kjell Nupen noticed that the Kristianstad gallery was selling unauthorized, signed copies of his work.
American art forger Ken Perenyi published a memoir in 2012 in which he detailed decades of his activities creating thousands of authentic-looking replicas of masters such as James Buttersworth, Martin Johnson Heade, and Charles Bird King, and selling the forgeries to famous auction houses such as Christie's and Sotheby's and wealthy private collectors.