Art forgery

DEFINITION: Deliberate manufacture and sale of misattributed works of art with intent to defraud.

SIGNIFICANCE: With individual works of art by acknowledged masters selling for millions of dollars, art forgery is a high-stakes business involving finances, academic reputations, and national pride. Despite great advances in scientific methods of analysis, identification of the most meticulously crafted forgeries still depends on the subjective aesthetic judgment of experts. The authenticity of some works remains uncertain despite exhaustive study, and many fakes undoubtedly escape detection altogether. Forensic analysis can also prove an artwork genuine.

The crime of art forgery is nearly as old as art. Archaeologists have unearthed objects with faked inscriptions from the ruins of ancient Babylon and Egypt. A passion for Greek statuary led the Romans to produce numerous works in the style of classical Greek artists. During the Middle Ages, artists embellished religious relics to reinforce the impression that the objects had biblical origins. The Renaissance produced another flurry of reproductions of Greek and Roman statuary. Commercial art forgery, however, really blossomed in the eighteenth century. With the rise of private collectors and public collections of works of art, demand for examples of choice antiquities and works by popular artists greatly exceeded supply, prices skyrocketed, and unknown artists discovered the monetary advantages of passing off copies of the works of the masters as the real thing.

Scope and Limits of Art Forgery

In general, a reproduction or modern work in historic style is not considered to be a forgery unless it would deceive a knowledgeable buyer. A search of any flea market or low-end antique shop will turn up numerous small art objects, purportedly old, that bear obvious signs, through materials and workmanship, of their recent origin in Asian factories. Sometimes the deception is more elaborate, as in the case of one scheme in which an importer commissioned not only bronze “Tiffany” belt buckles but also a forged catalog, dated 1950, advising collectors of the scarcity and value of an item the Tiffany company never made.

Folk art is another gray area. An item newly handmade in a traditional manner assumes aspects of a forgery if it is deliberately altered to simulate age and traditional use. The countries or regions of origin of such items may also be misrepresented, as with “African” carvings from Indonesia or “Amish” quilts from India. The inauthenticity of fake antiques and folk art can usually be detected readily through analysis of materials (such as wood species) and telltale traces of artificial aging.

Some forgeries involve overzealous restoration of or addition of spurious elements to otherwise authentic pieces. A fad for collecting fifteenth- and sixteenth-century majolica ware during the late nineteenth century spawned a whole industry, first of re-creating missing parts for damaged excavated pottery and then of fabricating entire pieces. Two brothers apprenticed to this trade, the Riccardis, used their skill at faking antique ceramics to perpetrate one of the most notorious art frauds in history, the monumental Etruscan warriors displayed for three decades in New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art. Analysis of the glazing and construction techniques used on the pieces raised suspicions, and thermoluminescence testing confirmed the pieces as modern.

The most spectacular examples of art forgery have been those in which forgers have created completely new pieces that have passed as the works of famous artists. Successfully carrying off such a forgery requires a high degree of technical skill in the medium used by the artist being imitated, knowledge of the materials and techniques appropriate to that artist’s period, careful study of comparable pieces by the artist, and the creation of a plausible chain of provenance (history of ownership) that explains how a previously unknown work by an acknowledged master came to be on the market.

Most nations have enacted laws against exporting national art treasures and archaeological artifacts, and many also have internal laws regulating traffic in such items, such as the regulations prohibiting private excavation and sale of pre-Columbian ceramics within the United States. These laws aid art forgers by making the origins of artworks difficult to trace and by creating reluctance on the part of collectors to publicize their holdings or to consult experts.

Wars and civil upheaval create windows of opportunity for both art thieves and art forgers. Multiple copies of authentic artifacts stolen from museums or private collections often appear on the black market during such chaotic periods. Later, when experts attempt to return these items to the original owners, they must distinguish originals from replicas; they may even conclude that all of the recovered works are fakes, raising the possibility that the original exhibited works were forgeries all along.

Detecting Art Forgery

The question of forgery usually arises when works of art are sold or transferred. Collectors and museums are understandably reluctant to amass that tends to show that their existing holdings, especially showpiece items, are fakes. If they engage experts to examine controversial pieces, it is usually their hope that the findings will support the works’ authenticity.

To determine whether a work of art is genuine, the dealer or buyer first has it examined by an expert in the artist, the art form, or the period; the expert compares it with known authentic works and looks for telltale signs of the forger’s art, such as lines painted on canvas to simulate the cracking that occurs in old paintings. A labored and hesitant technique indicates a copy, but not necessarily a deliberate forgery. A specialist can detect anachronisms in the clothing and furnishings depicted in an artwork.

Judgments concerning conformity of a particular work to a known artist’s style are highly subjective. The same expert who praised the style and artistic quality of a piece while believing it to be genuine may as vociferously point to its artistic worthlessness when it is exposed as the work of an impostor. Experts who work for dealers may have a vested interest in overlooking subtle indications that something is not right, and a few are actually in league with forgers. Experts also examine ownership and sales records to determine whether the provenance of a work has been falsified.

Some researchers use computers to compare complex visual images in an attempt to detect art forgery. A team at Dartmouth University developed a program for analyzing the frequency and density of brushstrokes in digitized images of paintings. Use of this program to compare different portions of a large painting attributed to the late-fifteenth- and early-sixteenth-century Italian painter Perugino (Pietro Vannucci) reinforced expert opinion that several artists contributed to the work. One advantage of this kind of analysis is that the analyst does not need to have the actual work of art in hand.

Most scientific detection of art forgeries relies on techniques that determine the age, chemical makeup, and probable source of the materials used as well as on various means of determining the works’ internal structure. For wooden sculptures and paintings on wood or canvas, radiocarbon dating of minute fragments places the substrate within a century but cannot distinguish an old copy or a modern fake executed with antique materials. The notorious Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, working in the 1930s, used seventeenth-century canvases from which he had scraped originals by obscure artists. Eric Hebborn, in the 1950s and 1960s, used blank pages removed from antique books to forge drawings in the style of the old masters. Both men mixed their own paints and inks from materials available in the seventeenth century; Hebborn also carefully reproduced period pens and brushes to ensure the right quality of line. Suspicion fell on Manhattan art dealer Ely Sakhai when he purchased large numbers of inexpensive late-nineteenth-century paintings not intended for resale. Sakhai, who was convicted of fraud in US federal court in 2004, purchased genuine Impressionist paintings from auction houses, commissioned forgeries of the works from an artist, probably in China, whose name remains unknown, and sold the fakes to Japanese collectors. The fraud came to light when Sakhai and one of his victims simultaneously tried to sell the “same” painting.

Dendrochronology, or tree-ring dating, can be used to date some wooden objects. The pattern of rings in the wood indicates the years in which the tree was alive; for example, a violin with a spruce sounding board from a tree felled after 1890 obviously cannot be an authentic Stradivarius, as the last Stradivarius violin was made in the early part of the eighteenth century.

Penetrating X-rays can be used to reveal images covered by a final coat of paint, including the artist’s preliminary sketches, portions of a painting that have been reworked, and entirely different pictures. Using X-ray technology, an expert can detect such telltale signs of forgery as an under-image of obviously later date than the surface image and retouching intended to introduce the characteristic stylistic peculiarities of a known artist into a mediocre painting by an unknown hand.

Thermoluminescence dating is a useful technique for determining when pottery was fired. Crystalline minerals stored at room temperature accumulate electrons in elevated energy states; when subjected to high heat, the minerals release this energy in the form of light, the intensity of which is proportional to the amount of time since the object was last heated.

Tests involving X-ray emission and X-ray fluorescence are two recently developed techniques used to determine the chemical composition of objects without destructive sampling. When subjected to a high-energy beam of radiation, compounds reemit radiation at a lower frequency in bands diagnostic of the elements and molecules present. Because the presence of certain compounds narrows the time frame in which a work could have been created, this method is helpful in identifying restorations and additions.

Analyses of trace elements and stable isotopes are used to identify the sources, and sometimes the ages, of materials used in artworks. Modern smelting methods generally produce much purer metals than were available in earlier times. Competent art forgers know that lead carbonate, rather than titanium oxide or zinc oxide, was the white pigment used by painters before 1920, but unless they have access to the same natural sources of lead carbonate used by Europeans in the seventeenth century, they will not be able to duplicate the profile of trace elements. Such was the case with Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi. According to CNN in 2023, Wolfgang no longer had any of the zinc left that served as a major component of the white paint produced for the forgeries they created, so he bought a different zinc pigment. Wolfgang successfully foisted his creation Red Picture with Horses as the work of expressionist painter Heinrich Campendonk and sold the painting at an auction for $3.6 million. However, careful analysis of the painting showed evidence of titanium, which had only been used as pigment since the 1920s, and the painting's origin had been dated to 1914. The couple served several months in prison.

Trace impurities also help distinguish old silver items from modern reproductions. Elements with more than one stable (nonradioactive) isotope can pinpoint the quarry or mine from which raw materials came; thus, for example, analysis of stable isotopes can distinguish whether a white marble sculpture in classical Greek style is Greek, Roman, Renaissance Italian, or modern in origin.

Sometimes scientific analysis vindicates a dealer’s or collector’s claim that an artwork is genuine. In one case, a Roman marble bust that was believed to be a nineteenth-century forgery on stylistic grounds proved to be genuinely ancient. Analysis showed that a nineteenth-century dealer in antiquities had “improved” on the work by sculpting away some of the original drapery. In the early twentieth century, the financier J. P. Morgan purchased a collection of silver plates depicting religious scenes that were supposedly excavated in Cyprus and dated to the third to fourth centuries CE. Experts labeled the plates modern forgeries on stylistic grounds. When they were later reassessed using trace element analysis as well as analysis of production techniques and manufacturer’s marks, however, they proved to be seventh-century eastern Roman artifacts made in a deliberately archaic style.

Art Forgery as a Criminal Defense

Art forgers themselves are rarely successfully prosecuted for creating fake art. Because the crime lies not in creating something indistinguishable from a valuable original but rather in marketing it as such, forgers can argue that buyers were deceived by the dealers who sold their works. Frank Kelley, a prolific forger of Impressionist paintings, protected himself by signing his forgeries in white lead, which was readily detectable in X-rays. Because of the high level of skill required to forge fine art and a lack of public sympathy for wealthy collectors, successful art forgers may attain the status of public heroes.

Creating and marketing bogus art treasures is simple commercial fraud, typically a much less serious charge than theft, trafficking in stolen goods, conducting clandestine archaeological excavations, or smuggling. Consequently, art forgery operations may be exposed when a party accused of one of these crimes confesses that the goods are fake.

Bibliography

Chervenka, Marc. Antique Trader Guide to Fakes and Reproductions. 3rd ed., Krause, 2003.

Hebborn, Eric. Drawn to Trouble: Confessions of a Master Forger. Random House, 1991.

Holland, Oscar. "The Husband-and-Wife Forgers Who Fooled the Art World." CNN, 7 Feb. 2023, www.cnn.com/style/article/wolfgang-helen-beltracchi-forgers/index.html. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

Hoving, Thomas. False Impressions: The Hunt for Big-Time Art Fakes. Simon & Schuster, 1996.

Jones, Mark, ed. Fake? The Art of Deception. U of California P, 1990.

Kirpalvov, Anastasiia, S. "Art Forgery: Eight Things to Know About the Classiest Crime." The Collector, 22 July 2023, www.thecollector.com/art-forgery-things-you-should-know/. Accessed 13 Aug. 2024.

Spencer, Ronald D. The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts. Oxford UP, 2004.