Afriend sent me a photo of a painting he thought could be a find, and he wanted my opinion. Could it be an original Corot? I responded by citing some of my favorite statistics. Newsweek magazine in 1940 said Corot made twenty-five hundred paintings, seventy-eight hundred of which are in the United States. In 1957, London’s Guardian put the numbers at five thousand and ten thousand. During my twenty-five years as an art dealer and gallery owner, my partners and I often came across Corot, but we were wary of the fakes and never dealt in his works. Two widely faked artists we were more knowledgeable about and did sell, however, are Edouard Cortès and Antoine Blanchard, both known for their Paris street scenes. I recall a phone conversation with a dealer who began by declaring he wanted to sell me a Cortès and had one hundred in inventory. By the end of the call, the number had grown to two hundred. Mathematical bravado aside, I believed he held quite a few pieces because his business location was near that of a known forger who had once talked up his expertise on Cortès. With Blanchard, a number of collectors offered us paintings to purchase, and often we had to tell them that what they owned were, in the idiom of art dealers, “wrong.” Savvy dealers will put the number of fakes at more than half of the paintings carrying the artist’s name.
Three cases of artists who are known to be subject to forgery are merely anecdotal evidence in the vast world of art. But there is much more that speaks to the presence of forgery. I got a sense for this as I talked with other dealers, watched the auction market bulge with the works of certain artists who appeared to be extraordinarily prolific, and occasionally fielded questions from well-traveled gallery visitors who asked, with a chuckle, how many of the Dalí and Picasso prints in existence I thought could possibly be authentic. Then, beyond practical experience, I took a scholarly approach, following my research bent as a philosopher and former professor, and, over the years, made an extensive study of forgery. The phenomenon has a long history and is indeed widespread. While much of the art found in commercial venues, museums, and in the hands of private collectors is legitimate, there are many exceptions. They occur regularly and can be found in all types of art and at all price points. To state it in capsule form, forgery is not everywhere in the art world, but the uncomfortable reality is that it can be anywhere.
Attention to its presence is instrumental in understanding art forgery, but there are other key factors as well. The matter of what constitutes forgery, and of what constitutes authenticity, is subject to equivocation. Whether a particular art object is actually an original by the named artist is not always determined merely by examining it as connoisseurs would for how it looks or as scientists would for the materials in its makeup. Definitions, theories, and legal statutes and decisions may come into play. And the values surrounding forgery, too, are equivocal. How forgers individually, and art fraud generally, are judged under the law as well as in public opinion varies according to moral perspectives, and the aesthetic and economic worth of forgeries, particularly of exceptionally good ones, draws contrary and competing estimations. To assemble a comprehensive picture of art forgery, then, involves several disciplines, from history and philosophy to law, psychology, and economics. This book presents such a study. I offer an overview of forgery’s past and present along with provocative questions about its nature and how it is evaluated. As the title indicates, art forgery shows many faces: it can be looked at from several directions, and when judgments are made about it, they range from condemnation to toleration to permissiveness.
Understanding the presence of forgery today begins with recognizing its past. Part I of the book traces the history of fake art from its onset in antiquity, explaining which artists and types of artwork have been widely faked, and naming culprits and relating their tricks of the trade. Over the centuries, numerous forgers became known to their contemporaries, and their misdeeds were documented. From Michelangelo in the Renaissance to Eric Hebborn, Wolfgang Beltracchi, and others in recent times, a few forgers have drawn major public attention, while many with less notoriety have produced large numbers of false works. I highlight thirty forgers from the last several decades. All of this emerges from a background of social conditions that breed forgery wherever they are found. Art forgery is a function of admiration for particular artists, collectors who want their works, and a market that makes those works available. These conditions have developed and expanded over time through increased public exposure to art through museums, along with the rise and proliferation of art dealers and the growth of wealth to a point where a greater number of people today than ever before can afford to purchase art as collectors. On the other hand, with the reach of forgery becoming more extensive, counteracting forces have appeared in response. A number of museums, large and small, have organized special exhibitions of fakes, highlighted by a blockbuster at the British Museum in 1990 of hundreds of fakes in its own collection that demonstrated a new attitude of institutions admitting the fallibility of their own experts. The Carabinieri in Italy and law enforcement agencies in other countries have established special units to combat art theft and forgery. An array of scientific techniques is available for detecting fakes by analyzing the materials artworks are made from. And the Internet, which has been an asset for fraudsters in selling their fakes, also has been a vehicle for finding them. Overall, my historical survey demonstrates that art forgery has been with us more than two millennia, while following a crescendo of importance and sophistication to reach a high point in the later twentieth and twenty-first centuries. And beyond being a freestanding history, it foreshadows various issues discussed in the following parts of the book and introduces key forgers and forgeries that appear there as examples.
History offers numerous clear-cut cases that conform to common understanding of what forgery consists of, such as fabricating a painting in the style of Monet and selling it as an original by the master, or making a mold from a Remington bronze and casting a look-alike from it that is presented as the real thing. But there are also cases that create confusion because what may identify an artwork, or the activity of its creator, with forgery is ambiguous. Part II is about the meaning of forgery and, more broadly, of authenticity. Various situations are introduced in which competing views about the nature of fake art demonstrate shades of gray where it may seem as if the classification of certain artworks lies somewhere between genuine and false. The term “forgery” itself can cause confusion when applied to art. Besides the dictionary definition commonly accepted in everyday language, there are legal statutes and certain experts and professional groups that employ their own, more specialized meanings. And beyond understanding the term “forgery,” questions arise regarding “authenticity.” When a work has more than a single creator, as in restoration, collaboration, and the posthumous production of prints and casts, what happens to authenticity if someone other than the artist of record is responsible for much (most, all) of the production? As with Rubens in the Baroque era and Warhol in the twentieth century, many examples exist of works by studio assistants that bear little of the master’s touch but the all-important signature. There are sculptural fragments that were hyperrestored to their former appearance while retaining their designation as genuine, and prints made long after the death of an artist from prototypes that remain in a weakened and altered state. Are these works authentic? Should they be called forgeries? The ambiguity they highlight has been problematic for centuries, while more recently concerns have arisen about appropriation art and cultural appropriation. When Jeff Koons or Richard Prince copies an image from another artist and justifies the new version as presenting a different meaning, what relationship is there between the authenticity of the original work and that of the new one? What separates appropriation from plagiarism, a close cousin of forgery? With cultural appropriation, the issue is whether it is legitimate to adopt an approach to art identified with an Indigenous people and describe the resulting works with the same label they do. Elizabeth Durack was denounced for her Australian Aboriginal paintings, while Jimmie Durham has drawn praise for his American Indian works. In what sense, or in what cases, does the cultural heritage or bloodline of an artwork’s maker determine its authenticity? I consider each of these problem areas in light of philosophical concerns and legal precedents as they apply in concrete cases.
Then, following the discussion of ambiguities in the nature of forgery and authenticity, I turn to values, moral and aesthetic. The focus in part III is again on emerging shades of gray. What moral values do forgers hold (as seen through their psychological profiles)? How does society judge forgery in conventional moral and legal terms as well as alternative views offering mitigation and apologetics? What is the aesthetic value in fake art of exceptional quality? Reports from forgers themselves reveal a range of motives for their activity, particularly revenge and pride, while they often deny or downplay the primary one of making money. After being discovered, they face various outcomes. Some avoid prison, as with Hebborn and Ken Perenyi, who were never arrested, and Edgar Mrugalla and William Toye, who received suspended sentences, but most spend time in prison of varying durations. After that, some become recidivists while others pursue art legitimately, and those who have gained notoriety parlay it into book contracts, television appearances, and exhibitions at respected galleries. Forgers’ works that are recovered also face a spectrum of outcomes, from being destroyed to being returned to their owners, archived, or exhibited as famous fakes and sold to collectors. Public reaction to forgers is mixed, including censure for their criminal activities as well as approval for challenging an art establishment that is seen as pretentious and overly commercialized. History’s most famous forger, Han van Meegeren, was declared the second-most popular person in the Netherlands by a public opinion poll after his trial in 1947. Another often-expressed view is that victims of forgery are well-heeled collectors who can afford to take a loss. In fact, many fakes are sold for a few hundred to a few thousand dollars to people without substantial means, but financial loss in general is accounted for in an alternative economic theory that sees the harm done to victims as balanced in the grand scheme of things by beneficial forces that include increased commerce for the art industry and greater pleasure for art lovers in having more artworks to appreciate. Finally, regarding the aesthetics of forgery, I take up the topic of the “perfect fake,” one so outstanding in quality that experts certify its authenticity. Should a work of this type be respected as equivalent to an original? If it is eventually discovered to be a fake, the aesthetic worth assigned to it plummets (along with its commercial worth), although the work itself is physically the same. What accounts for the difference? Philosophers and art historians have weighed in with various answers. This topic and others in part III demonstrate the overall message that the presence of forgeries in the art world is seen in equivocal terms: the works themselves are subject to competing judgments about their value, and the forgers who make them receive treatment ranging from condemnation to respect.
Before I go further, an explanation about terminology is in order. I use the word “forgery” in the way everyday language does when speaking about art, and in contrast with the more restrictive definitions that it was noted previously are preferred by some specialists. In particular, they distinguish a “forgery” from a “fake,” with one pairing of the terms separating a work that is false at its inception from the fraudulent alteration of an existing work and another pairing that differentiates copying an artistic style from making a replica of a specific work. Although these conceptual differences are important in understanding false art, attaching them to the terms “forgery” and “fake” to demarcate one from the other leads to confusion. I prefer, along with a number of experts, to avoid that problem and use the terms interchangeably, along with related words such as “counterfeit,” “false,” and “fraudulent.” Readers are spared the burden of grappling with specialized vocabulary to describe the main topic of the book.
Where my study does place a limit on the notion of forgery is in the types of art that are included. Broad-stroke examination of art fakes sometimes encompasses archaeological hoaxes, furniture, wine, designer handbags, and other items, and in aesthetics, discussion may extend to literature, music, and beyond. I concentrate on the making of paintings, sculptures, and other works the term “art forgery” typically invokes. And my attention is restricted as well in that it concentrates on the art of the Western world, although I occasionally look outside its parameters. Non-Western art, which also has been subject to forgery, is, for the most part, left as a study for others to conduct. But within Western art, I focus broadly on the widespread presence of forgery in history, especially in recent decades, and on various angles for perceiving the nature of forgery along with values associated with it. To refer again to my chosen metaphors, art forgery has many faces that make understanding it complicated and prone to shades of gray.