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The art of forging is still in its golden age

2022-08-01T10:41:15.339Z


The copies continue to be present on the market, taking advantage of the limited training of some collectors and the desire for the 'trophy' work


The history of art is the history of a forgery.

The more money the market moves, the more fraudulent works appear.

The runoffs of political time also help.

After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the end of the former Soviet Union, there was a tidal wave of forgeries of Russian Constructivist paintings.

The West wanted them and the lack of documentation of the works was justifiable in a cracked empire.

“Some Eastern European art historians were willing to certify anything for money,” says Kilian Anheuser, scientific director of Geneva Fine Art Analysis, an expert authentication laboratory.

"To this day, early 20th-century Russian art remains highly problematic."

More information

The big business of counterfeiting Spanish medieval art invades museums and galleries

The real framework where cheating happens mixes time and money.

The memory of the forger and the desire of the collector.

Amedeo Modigliani became fashionable after his death (1920) and false ones began to appear.

The "good" counterfeiter is cunning.

Balance effort and profit.

A drawing on old paper requires minutes.

An oil painting on the right canvas—using the right technique and pigments—takes a long time to prepare.

In return, he promises high profits.

Another option is to get a vintage painting and add your signature.

And the last way is the “pastiches”.

Join, for example, different fragments of archaeological ceramics to create a new work.

“In Naples it has been very common to use marble from the subsoil and catacombs to create

hard stone tables

17th century.

The only way to discover reality is to analyze the glue that has been used to join the different parts”, reveals the antiquarian Nicolás Cortés.

Everything is falsifiable.

In Spain, after the ban on the ivory trade, an avalanche of fake currents has emerged that try to resemble a Hispanic-Filipino school, or similar.

There are also

blushing

mistakes , like

Taller de Goya

.

The genius never had it.

False 'Original Sin' of the Master of Maderuelo that was in the hands of an antique dealer from Madrid at the beginning of the 20th century.

Although the most common fakes —reveals Kilian Anheuser— combine an apparently simple technique with a high value in the artist's market.

“There are innumerable forgeries of the first abstract paintings and of creators such as Jackson Pollock, Picasso or Modigliani”.

But one of the "most spectacular" in history is the so-called

Spanish Master

(

The

Spanish Master ).

No one knows his name.

But EL PAÍS has managed to place it in Barcelona between the middle and the end of the 20th century in the world of first-rate antiques.

Even the German channel DW dedicated a documentary to him in 2014 (

The Mystery Conman, The mysterious swindler

).

His forgeries of Roman antiquities have circulated in museums and auctions for decades.

Impressive portraits of Caesar or Alexander the Great.

The system was ingenious.

He would cast sesterces of bronze to create the sculptures which he would then overlay with a patina of aging.

But fakes happen in the past and in the present.

In mid-June, the director of the National Gallery of Slovenia, Pavel Car, had to resign, after an investigation revealed that 160 works -Picasso, Degas, Munch, Turner, Chagall, Van Gogh or Matisse, among others- loaned by the Boljkovaca family (hoarded by the disappeared Josip Boljkovac, Croatian Minister of the Interior, between 1990 and 1991), were, at least in large part, apparently false.

If authentic, they would have exceeded 1,000 million euros.

At the end of that month, the FBI confiscated the 25 works attributed to Jean-Michel Basquiat from the Heroes and Monsters

exhibition at the Orlando Museum of Art (Florida)

.

The quality and origin of the pieces lit up suspicions.

Goodbye to a business of 100 million euros.

A week earlier, a Palm Beach dealer was charged with selling

Basquiats

,

Warhols

,

Matisses

, and

Lichtensteins .

false.

The new golden age of fake?

Christie's auction house denies this.

"We have not seen any increase (...), and scientific research has evolved a lot in recent years," defends a spokesman.

"My gut," says Martin Kemp, emeritus professor of art history at Oxford University, "tells me that newer art is more likely to be forged."

The Old Masters are more "vulnerable" to scientific evidence.

Forged Picasso work.

Europe Press

Current cases (leaving behind the famous Elmyr de Hory) such as that of Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife, Helene, who began to produce hundreds of fakes in 1993, with which they became rich before in 2011 it cost them six and four years of prison, respectively, or that of the legendary New York Knoedler gallery, which spent 17 years selling fake

Pollocks

and

Rothkos

for 80 million dollars (it closed that same 2011), show that fraud is part of the art ecosystem.

Even actor Alec Baldwin produces an eight-episode podcast called

Art Fraud

.

In the trailer you hear: “The best fakes are still hanging on people's walls.

They don't know, they don't even suspect, that they are fake."

Not even the Prado Museum is immune.

In the 1990s, she took down two canvases (

The Degollation

and

The Bonfire

) acquired as

goyas

.

The Aragonese genius is one of the most forged artists in the world.

In the 19th century, some "posts" were even established in the Carrera de San Jerónimo where it was possible to "find" them.

Young painters created violent and small-format images.

The big ones would have figured out the trick.

Another complicated moment was the legacy of the Catalan politician Cambó.

In 1940 he donated

Angel Musician,

a small fresco, attributed to the Renaissance painter Melozzo da Forlí (1438-1494).

It was the only one existing outside the Vatican.

An expert from the museum moved it there.

And he showed it to Gianluigi Colalucci (1929-2021), who directed the restoration of the Sistine Chapel (1980-1995).

It was recovered.

But he never vouched for the attribution of it.

A self-portrait by Rembrandt entered in 1941 was also discarded. The fake fabrics are robes worn by ghosts from bygone ages.

The impunity of the false

In the Spanish legal system there are no specific criminal types for counterfeiting works of art.

There are two options: place them as crimes related to intellectual property or fraud.

The latter, perhaps, requires a closer look.

There has to be deception and what lawyers call “patrimonial displacement” must take place.

In other words, the goal is to make a profit.

In the art market, the usual ways of constructing this deception range from the obvious (signing a painting) to the most complex staging to trick the victim.

Although the jurisprudence takes into account the diligence of the buyer when he makes the acquisition.

“Despite the fact that the volume of counterfeits is not negligible, based on what art operators say, there is also no evidence, based on published statistics,

that prove that there is a large number of criminal convictions”, observe legal sources.

The law paints little.

Source: elparis

All life articles on 2022-08-01

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