Part I Forgers: Fakes and Forgeries Introduction to Part I Noah Charney
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Part I Forgers: Fakes and Forgeries Introduction to Part I Noah Charney American art forger John D. Re, recently convicted of fraud, having forged and sold scores of paintings, since 2005, ostensibly by the likes of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, for a total of around $1.9 million, was not trying to be subtle.1 With the fruits of his illicit labors, he bought a submarine, docked it at a public marina and invited The New York Times to profile him. You’d almost think that he was asking to be caught. As a professor specializing in art crime, having for many years taught a postgraduate course on art forgery (and having recently published a book on it, The Art of Forgery),2 I’ve studied the cases of dozens of forgers whose careers span thousands of years. Re is the first to have used his ill-gotten gains to buy a submarine. This was not a very good idea on Mr. Re’s part, if he wished to continue his lucrative criminal career in secret. But my extensive research into the minds of art forgers tells me that he very likely did not. For most known art forgers, from Michelangelo (yes, that Michelangelo) to Elmyr de Hory, triumph, fame and fortune actually came after they were caught. The ostentatious submarine was not ultimately Re’s undoing, though his flamboyant high profile suggests a level of hubris ill-advised for professional criminals who wish to remain under the radar (or perhaps, in this case, sonar). He was finally found out because one of the buyers sent a purported Pollock for authentication, and was told that it contained materials that had not yet been invented when Pollock was painting. In criminological par- lance, these are referred to as “time-bombs”: anachronisms that can give away a forgery. The buyer then sent 45 paintings, all acquired from Re and supposedly by Pollock, and received word that not one was authentic, all containing time-bombs, such as the use of a paint that was not available This chapter comprises the original content of an article first published in The Jour- nal of Art Crime (Spring 2012), together with an update that references more recent publications by the authors on the topic as well as additional observations as a postscript. 2 Noah Charney 3 when the work was supposedly created. This may seem like a careless error on Re’s part, or a brash assumption that no one would forensically examine his forgeries. But, in the case of quite a few famous forgers, these time-bombs were knowingly inserted. For the remarkable thing about the psychology of so many art forgers is that they wish to be caught. The majority of the hundred-odd forgers whom I have studied share a remarkably consistent motivational profile. Most began as failed artists, whose original works were somehow dismissed by the art world. They turned to forgery to act out a sort of passive-aggressive revenge against the art com- munity, which they perceive as a collective entity that has conspired to deny their talent, and which they will “show up” by creating works that will be praised and accepted, as their originals were not. Passing off a forgery pro- vides a twofold sense of artistic fulfilment. On the one hand, if a forger’s work is taken to be that of a great master (Picasso, for example, who is the most-forged artist in history), then the forger considers that they are just as good as Picasso. On the other, the forger demonstrates the fallibility or foolishness of the so-called experts, who cannot tell their forgery from an original – the implication by extension being that these experts were foolish to dismiss the forger’s original creations in the first place. But both of these victories are private. Unless the forgery is revealed as such then, for all intents and purposes, to the world at large, the work in question is authentic. It is only when the forger is caught and speaks out about their fraudulent oeuvre that the experts are shown to have erred, and the forger is praised publically for his talent. The media loves art forgers, seeing them as congenial, quirky pranksters, more than criminals. To be fair, many are, and they are certainly less damnable than art thieves and antiq- uities looters, with their links to organized crime and even terrorism. Art forgers tend to work alone or in pairs (a forger and a front man who passes off the works as authentic through one of a series of confidence tricks, usu- ally far more ingenious than Mr. Re’s superficial story about stumbling across 70 abstract expressionist masterpieces). Without the connections to orga- nized crime, art forgers rarely wreak havoc beyond their immediate victims (wealthy collectors or institutions), and their income does not fund the drug and arms trades, as can be the case with stolen and looted art. Their relative harmlessness, on the grand scale of criminal activity, and their undoubted ingenuity and occasional real talent, means that the media and general pub- lic alike see them as admirable, Robin Hood types, pulling the wool over the eyes of the wealthy elite (with the implication that the wealthy elite deserve to have their wool pulled by a working-class prankster). Numerous forgers have gone on to achieve riches and fame after serving a minimal prison sentence, welcomed by the general public. Wolfgang Beltracchi has best-selling memoirs and is a sought after speaker. John Myatt has his own TV series on Sky Arts in which he teaches amateur painters how to forge, and George Clooney bought the film rights to his life story – he now sells 4 Forgers: Fakes and Forgeries “original fakes,” signed with his name but in the style of famous artists, for six figures. This type of crime, it seems, can pay. With little disincentive, in terms of harsh sentences and public condem- nation, even if you are caught, and with a measure of personal revenge successful only if you are caught, it stands to reason that some forgers would not mind going public, while others, even if at a subconscious level, might actually wish to be found out. Many have intentionally come for- ward. Michelangelo allowed his biographer to tell the story of his teenage career as a forger of “ancient Roman” statues, which sold for much more than his originals would, before he had made a name for himself by sculpt- ing his Pieta. Ken Perenyi recently released a fine memoir, Caveat Emptor,that describes his decades-long career as a forger – before his book came out, few had heard of him; suddenly he was profiled in The New York Times as perhaps America’s greatest forger. The Santa Clausian British forger, Tom Keating, coined the term “time-bombs” and inserted them intentionally (such as the use of titanium white pigment in works purported to have been painted cen- turies before it was invented) for several reasons: to have something obvious to point to that experts missed (so as to show them up), to protect himself (unsuccessfully, it turned out) against accusations of fraud (he assumed that such an obvious anachronism would shift the blame away from him and onto the authenticator for making such an error), and in order to be able to reveal himself as the artist, should he wish to do so. Like John Myatt, he was awarded with a popular TV series on ITV in Britain, in which he forged on-camera. Icilio Federico Joni fooled the greatest connoisseur of Renais- sance art, Bernard Berenson. Rather than being upset, Berenson determined to meet the artist whose “Sienese Gothic” altarpiece had taken him in, and the two became friendly. Joni took to intentionally planting his latest forgery so that Berenson would be called in to authenticate it. And the German post- war forger, Lothar Malskat, was outraged when no one believed that he had painted what seemed to be newly discovered medieval frescoes in a German church. Even when he pointed out the time-bombs he had inserted (a paint- ing of a turkey which, being indigenous to North America, had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages, and a portrait of Marlene Dietrich, who definitely had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages), no one believed him. So he took the dramatic step of suing himself, in order to have the pub- lic, courtroom stage in which to demonstrate that the frescoes were indeed his own, and not centuries-old. Until he comes out with a memoir, or some equivalent, we will not know whether John Re fits into this psychological profile of so many of history’s most successful art forgers. But with his conspicuous consumption, par- ticularly involving his submarine (which was written up in 2007 in The New York Times, under the headline “A Sea Toy James Bond Would Envy”),3 suggests that he was either foolhardy or, at some level, was willing to be caught. For only then could this part-time painter, who liked to dabble in the Noah Charney 5 abstract expressionist style, achieve recognition for having fooled a number of collectors, who genuinely thought that he painted as well as Pollock.4 This first part looks at fakes and forgeries, which are technically dif- ferent: forgeries are wholesale objects, made from scratch in fraudulent imitation of something else, whereas fakes are pre-existing objects that are altered in some fraudulent way to increase their value. This is the techni- cal, criminological definition, though in practice, the terms are often used interchangeably.