Week 4 class 2

Forging art, forging history

Famous art forgers:

Van Meegeren – fake Vermeers sold to Nazis

Elmyr de Hory – subject of Orson Wells’ film “F for Fake” – fake Modigliani’s sell for $30K – problem of “fake fakes”.

Dealer John Drewe and painter John Myatt, convicted in Britain in 1999 – 200 Braques, Matisses, Giacomettis, Le Corbusiers, Nicholsons and Dubuffets. Not very good fakes (used vinyl emulsion paint thickened with KY jelly to show the brush strokes).

Key was not quality of the paintings but of their forged provenances. Experts at Tate, V&A, MOMA and Sotheby’s duped into authenticating the pictures (only 73 have been found).

Drewe’s apartment contained documents, stamps, authenticating seals from Tate, V&A, ICA, receipts, forged antique letters from past owners, certificates of authenticity from estates of Dubuffet and Giacometti and a seal from Servite Mary order of monastic priests.

Drewe was declared a “menace to “Britain’s cultural patrimony”.

Myatt: duping delight “Yes, it was fun saying “Yah boo! We’re pulling the wool over your eyes! To the so called experts but going to prison was not fun”.

Began in 1976: boss asked him to knock up 2 Dufys to fool his friend- then put ad in Private Eye offering “genuine fakes”.

John Drew dealer, sold the forgeries.

The key was provenance: Drewe donated 20,000 to the Tate Gallery in 1987, allowing him access to the archives. Gained access to V&A archives by claiming to be an academic. Once inside archives, would insert photos of Myatt’s work into official histories of painters. Would type out fake documents, and sales vouchers on old typewriter with aged paper.

Stole catalogue of exhibition at Hanover gallery in London and replaced it with fake version including some of Myatt’s paintings.

Some buyers became suspicious. One US gallery owner who had paid GBP 105,000 for a Giacometti hired a specialist firm to check that the painting was legit. Unfortunately firm run by Drewe, who reported that the painting was genuine and included an invoice for GBP 1,140 for the “investigation”.

What do art forgeries tell us?

Intrinsic/extrinsic methods of detecting authenticity

History of the signature

Artist signatures – ancient Greek vases – medieval artists never signed works (stonemasons sometimes used marks)

Signature in Renaissance – Jan van Eyck

Signature and authenticity

Signature and value

Duchamp, Boggs, Dali – signatures

Duchamp: Tzanck Check (1919), Cheque Bruno (1965), Czech check (1965) and Monte Carlo Bond (1924).

Financial documents make artworks equivalent to monetary tokens

“I don’t want to copy myself, like all the others. Do you think they enjoy painting the same thing fifty or a hundred times? Not at all, they no longer make pictures; they make checks”.

Mass-production and works of art (D did sign “limited edition” repros of his readymades)

Boggs: Transaction, sells receipt to a collector who tracks down owner of Boggs bill and negotiate a deal “so as to complete the work”.

De Chirico: forged his own early paintings!!

Benjamin, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical reproduction

Duchamp – LHOOQ, Warhol: 30 are better than one

Forging history

Anthony Grafton, Forgers and Critics, p. 68 “ The forger … treats his reader as a flight simulator treats a pilot; he offers a vivid image of the specific text and situation that he seeks to represent, but only a vague and obviously unreal one of their periphery. Like the pilot in training, the reader in question is mesmerized by the deliberately projected, scrupulously detailed image at the center of his gaze, and the illusion works. Once he steps back and contests it, its vague areas and false perspectives emerge with dramatic starkness and surprising ease. Simulation is not reality, after all –- though its emotional and physical effects can be wrenching enough when its victim wears the proper blinders”.

Quarrel between Heraclides of Pontus and Dionysius the Renegade in 4^th century BC.

D forged tragedy – Parthenopaeus, ascribed to Sophocles. H., also a forger, quoted it as genuine. D. proclaimed that it was his own work, and proved it by finding the following acrostics in initial letters of lines:

“An old monkey isn’t caught in a trap.

Oh yes, he’s caught at last, but it takes time”

And: “Heraclides is ignorant of letters”/

Duping delight as motivation for forgery.

1950. Paul Coleman Norton: new Greek fragment drawn from homilies on Gospel according to Matthew – story: discovery of ms. Tucked into Arabic Koran in mosque in Morocco – visited during WW II in course of operation Torch.

Text includes addendum to passage in Matthew 24 where Jesus tells disciples that those who are assigned the portion of the hypocrites will be condemned to “weeping and gnashing of teeth”.

Added section: disciple asks “what will become of the toothless?”

Jesus responds: “Oh ye of little faith – teeth will be provided”.

Motifs: object found in inaccessible place, then copied, now lost

Official documents consulted in far off place in obscure language

Donation of Constantine: 8^th century document – tale of how the Emperor Constantine, cured of leprosy by Pope Sylvester, showed his gratitude by conveying the entire Western Empire to the church and departing for Byzantium

Annius of Viterbo (Giovanni Nanni), 1432(7)-1502.

Glorification of Viterbo though fake Etruscan inscriptions.

Thomas Chatterton – fake medieval English poems