During the twentieth century, the underlying social conditions that invite forgery expanded. Public and private viewing was more available than ever for the general population, and collectors and dealers bought and sold in an ever-growing art market. By the 1910s, London was home to more than three hundred galleries, and the number of equivalent businesses in Paris (with a considerably smaller population167) was well over one hundred.168 More star dealers appeared, engaging in competition for the high end of the market. With commerce in art disrupted by two World Wars, and wealth being amassed by American industrialists, many artworks flowed westward across the Atlantic. Joseph Duveen is often quoted for his statement that “Europe has a great deal of art and America has a great deal of money,” which he and his counterparts heeded in selling numerous works to such figures as Henry Clay Frick, Isabella Stewart Gardner, J. P. Morgan, Andrew Mellon, William Randolph Hearst, and Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. Many of their acquisitions were eventually donated to establish or enhance museum collections. Among their dealers were the Wildenstein family, Jacques Seligmann, and the Rosenberg brothers, all of whom opened New York galleries in addition to their original European locations and dealt in both Old Masters and modern art. Duveen focused on historical works, and as perhaps the best-known dealer of his era, was bestowed with British knighthood, although eventually a number of the paintings he sold (including those authenticated by Bernard Berenson) came into question for their authenticity.169
By the latter half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century, a new group of financial moguls took their places as prominent art collectors. Their focus was on modern and contemporary art, although not exclusively. François Pinault (France), Bernard Arnault (France), Eli Broad (United States), Charles Saatchi (Britain), the Al-Thani family (Qatar), Reinhold Würth (Germany), and others who donated private holdings continued the tradition of establishing new museums for public viewing. These examples represent the upper end of museum growth, which extended broadly to many smaller institutions to total more than twenty-five hundred in the United States alone in the 2000s.170 And as a related form of display, corporate collections multiplied and expanded, making viewing available to employees and sometimes to visitors, as well as on a few occasions to the general public through special exhibitions. Corporate collecting is not a recent phenomenon; it is a centuries-old tradition for art to be displayed on the walls of boardrooms and to be used as a marketing strategy. But there was a great increase in corporate buying, and by the turn of the twenty-first century, despite periodic economic downturns there were more than two thousand collections in existence internationally.171
Art dealers, too, were in expansion mode. Leading names opened galleries in multiple locations, such as Gagosian (eighteen spaces in seven countries), Pace (nine spaces in five countries), Perrotin (ten spaces in six countries), and the Nahmad family with its far-reaching sales operations. Art fairs headlined by Basel, Miami, Frieze (London), and Maastricht became large international attractions. The Internet came into play with websites for dealers, and organizations such as artnet.com and others acting as information umbrellas to offer forums for galleries and auctioneers to connect with buyers, databases for past auction sales, congregations of artists to enhance their visibility, timely news about art, and other services. Added to all of this visibility for art and opportunities to buy it has been the growth of wealth and spending. Estimates (numbers vary from one organization to another and year to year) put the size of the global art market at $50 or $60 billion annually.172 Although much of that amount is accounted for by a relatively small number of works sold in the million-dollar-plus range, works valued at less than $50,000 (many of them far less) make up 90 percent of all items sold.173
What this snapshot demonstrates is that the conditions conducive to art forgery identified at the beginning of part I are present today to a striking extent. Artists are revered by name, with a few achieving iconic status that generates extremely high value. Collectors are actively involved in buying art, and numerous opportunities exist for them to do so. Although these conditions have existed for centuries, as has forgery, in recent decades escalation has been especially apparent. No more originals will be produced by any artists but those alive now and in the future (with certain exceptions for prints and sculptures made from existing plates and molds). With more collectors, and a fixed supply of artworks by the artists for which they compete, it is not surprising to see prices rise. The auction market again serves as an example, where record prices for single works in the 1960s and 1970s were in single-digit millions of dollars and by the 2010s had risen to the hundreds of millions.174 All of this has encouraged forgery at an unprecedented level.
Given these conditions, the expectation is for many fakes to have been added to the limited supply of original artworks. One perspective for understanding the overall phenomenon looks at what kinds of art are affected: which artists, mediums, genres, and price points. Another perspective is to focus on the forgers themselves and the kinds of artworks they made, as well as their estimated output. There is a long lineup of known forgers who collectively are responsible for fake art in large quantities. Some of them have become famous, and others range from the less famous to the obscure, with a question remaining as to how many more forgers there are who are entirely unknown.
In 2005, ARTnews magazine surveyed a group of experts to ask, “Who are the ten most faked artists in history?”175 The nearly unanimous choice for number one was Corot, whose reputation has been amplified by a quip that appeared over the years in modified versions in several major publications. Corot, Newsweek said in 1940, made twenty-five hundred paintings, seventy-eight hundred of which are in the United States. London’s Guardian in 1957 put the numbers at five and ten thousand, and Time in 1990 estimated Corot’s output more conservatively at eight hundred pictures, four thousand of which had made their way to American collections.176 That bit of humor pales next to the assertion of Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the early 1900s, that he was informed by a customs official that twenty-seven thousand Corots had entered the United States.177 Further estimates for the number of forgeries in existence go as high as one hundred thousand.178 One collection in France of twenty-four hundred Corot paintings, watercolors, and drawings was found to consist entirely of fakes.179
Whatever the true total is for Corot fakes, the designation of most faked artist might more accurately belong to Salvador Dalí. The market is flooded with forged prints bearing his name. In New York City in 1991, a single seizure by court authorities from an American source accounted for eighty thousand false prints, including fifty thousand of Dalí.180 A French source is known to have sold at least eighty-five hundred false Dalí prints through a California outlet in the 1980s,181 and in the late 1990s, it was found that one hundred thousand had been sold through the cumulative efforts of seven art publishers in France.182 Late in life, Dalí complained that there were thousands of limited-edition fakes of his work, but he had contributed to the problem himself by signing stacks of blank sheets of paper that were used for printing after the fact. He earned $40 per sheet, and it has been claimed that with aides sliding them in and out in front of him, he could sign one every two seconds. Estimates of how many sheets were signed range from fifty thousand to three hundred fifty thousand.183 Some of the presigned sheets became legitimate prints, and others were used for counterfeit creations. They share the market with a large number of photomechanical reproductions made in a similar fashion to posters and sold as originals. A fake signature is easily added: Dalí’s legitimate signature came in many variations that often make it difficult to say that his scrawled name is not authentic. The monetary toll all of this has taken on the art market—the amount paid for Dalí fakes—was estimated in the 1980s by New York’s attorney general to be $625 million.184
Another name found in the survey of the most faked artists is Auguste Rodin. While famous for his bronze sculptures, he also produced ten thousand drawings, more than four thousand of which are held in the Musée Rodin in Paris.185 And there is a large volume of forgeries. Nearly one thousand drawings were done by Ernest Durig, who claimed an association with the artist and said the works were gifted to him.186 Durig may also have produced a few fake Rodin sculptures, although most have come from other sources. Some of the bronzes are copies similar to those sold by legitimate vendors, including the Musée Rodin, while others are created from original molds used without authorization and from aftercasts that have been inscribed with false foundry marks. Several thousand pieces are thought to have been made, many of them still in circulation.187
Maurice Utrillo’s name is also featured among the ARTnews top ten. He has been disparaged by many art critics, but his loose impressionistic Paris scenes were popular early in the twentieth century and command substantial prices today. One of his copyists declared, “Utrillo has no talent. I paint better than he does,”188 and forgeries made by another were accepted as Utrillos, while genuine Utrillos were sometimes thought to be forgeries. The artist himself often was unable to tell his own work from inauthentic look-alikes, while a dealer-friend of his with a better eye compiled a list of one thousand false paintings.189
The remaining names on the ARTnews list include Giorgio de Chirico, Honoré Daumier, Vincent van Gogh, Kazimir Malevich, Amedeo Modigliani, and Frederic Remington. Many others could be cited to rival them or be close in the running. The list was merely an expression of opinion, although an informed one. There are many stories of counterfeit Russian avant-garde paintings mimicking Malevich, Wassily Kandinsky, and others from the early 1900s. When the Soviet Union collapsed, art that had been banned as bourgeois modernism suddenly became available and rose in popularity and value. Some experts estimate that more than half of the existing paintings of that genre are forgeries,190 prompting one to remark that “if you burned all the fakes of Russian avant-garde now hanging in galleries and private collections around the world, the West would obtain a valuable new energy source.”191 The French Impressionists, too, have been targets, as would be expected with their fame and high prices. One man alone was found to have sold six hundred fakes in Switzerland in a two-year period. He was connected to a gang of smugglers who accounted for hundreds more in other countries. Even more notorious are fake prints of Picasso, Miró, Chagall, and Rembrandt. Along with the false Dalís, there are so many in existence that galleries and auctioneers sometimes refuse to deal in prints by those artists.
The artists noted here as major targets include some of the most prominent names in history, and their works sell at the high end of the art market. The business of forgery extends much further to take aim at less famous names and lesser monetary values as well. Antoine Blanchard, a twentieth-century French artist who painted bustling street scenes depicting life in Paris circa 1900, has been popular with British and American collectors for several decades. During his lifetime, his works sold for modest but rising prices, and today list in galleries from around $15,000 to $30,000. Opportunists noted his popularity even when prices were low, and more than half of the considerable number of paintings bearing his name are not authentically his.192 What makes his case particularly interesting, besides the large volume of fakes on the market, is that “Antoine Blanchard” is a pseudonym the artist adopted (real name Marcel Masson) but may not have registered legally, a circumstance that could have emboldened copyists to use the name.
Another often-forged artist with values similar to Blanchard’s is Johann Berthelsen, a mid-twentieth-century American painter known for his snowy scenes of New York City. Today the artist’s son, Lee Berthelsen, who painted with him for many years, serves as an authenticator. He estimates the number of fakes to be in the hundreds at least. When asked once to review fifty-five paintings for a retrospective that was being planned, he found fifty of them to be inauthentic. The forgeries first appeared in the 1950s when Berthelsen’s paintings were carried by respected dealers at inexpensive prices, and more recently, there appears to be an influx of fakes from China and Russia. The artist’s son also has recounted that on two occasions he knows about (suggesting the likelihood there were others), his father was recruited by respected galleries to produce forgeries of popular artists, but he declined.193
Further down the economic ladder, with artworks that sell in the range of a few hundred to a few thousand dollars, forgery is also a common presence. The artists who are copied are recognizable to regional buyers or to those collecting in lesser-known genres and mediums. The Highwaymen, so called because they often sold their works from the trunks of their automobiles along major highways, were a loose-knit group of more than two dozen African American artists in Florida in the 1950s through the 1980s who made oil paintings of local landscapes with bold colors and bright skies. They worked quickly (sometimes a dozen or more pieces by a single artist in a day), sometimes leaving their products unsigned. Original prices ranged below $50 and the number of works sold has been estimated to be one hundred fifty thousand or more.194 In recent years, Highwaymen paintings have become popular as collectible items, encouraged by several books about them195 and the group’s (twenty-six named painters) induction into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame in 2004. Many of their paintings are available at art shows, small auction houses, and online, especially through eBay. Along with the artists’ rising popularity, there have been numerous warnings of Highwaymen forgeries. The group’s size and its particularly large output, along with claims that some artists not on the Hall of Fame list are still true Highwaymen, and the fact that numerous originals went unsigned, make authentication murky even though some of the artists are alive today.
A collectors’ niche in a similar price range to the Highwaymen, and with many reports of fakes, is cartoon and animation art. Magazine articles, blogs, expert collectors, and dealers have announced alerts about faked drawings and animation cels on the market. One gallery carrying thousands of works was accused by the widow of Charles M. Schulz (creator of the Peanuts comic strip), and the directors of two leading museums of cartoon art, of selling fakes.196 eBay has been named as another source, with an expert on The Simpsons estimating that 90 percent of the television show’s cels found on the site are fakes.197 Another expert declared that “Most Disney Drawings on eBay are Forgeries!”198 Although fraud in this sector of the market does not generate headlines like those given to forgeries of famous artists selling for high prices, cartoon and animation art have numerous and avid followers as well as qualified experts, and are subject to being falsified.
The works of cartoon and animation artists, along with those of the Highwaymen, Berthelsen, and Blanchard, although not at the center of the art world’s attention, nevertheless have derived their popularity and sales from established reputations. They trade on name recognition among certain populations of collectors. Successful artists, as known quantities, are likely targets for forgers, who follow the attention gathered by someone else and redirect it to their own ends. Fraud is built on the perception of established value. At least that is the conventional pattern. But in a counterintuitive twist, a virtually unknown painter in 2009 was dubbed “Britain’s most forged artist.”199 Mandy Wilkinson, who in her late thirties had labored for a decade and a half placing paintings in exhibitions but without gallery representation, found that bright abstract works in her style and bearing her signature were being made in a Chinese copy shop (marked as copies) and distributed in several countries as originals. Her obscurity enticed opportunists to sell paintings made with brush on canvas and signed on the front, whereas Wilkinson’s originals were done with palette knife on board and signed only on the back. Some pieces were marketed door-to-door by women impersonating the artist.200 Hundreds of buyers were duped, and thousands of fakes were on the market. The culprits had not chosen this artist because her works had an established place in the standard sales model. They plucked her from nowhere and created her value, contrary to standard practice for art fraud.