Could The Masterpiece Be A Fake? Profit, Revenge And 'The Art Of Forgery'

Transcript

DAVE DAVIES, HOST:

This is FRESH AIR. I'm Dave Davies, in for Terry Gross who's off this week. If you had the artistic talent to create impressive paintings or sculpture, could you imagine devoting that skill to copying the work of past artists and trying to pass your creations off as authentic? Our guest, art scholar Noah Charney, says you'd be surprised how many people have done just that over the years, some successfully selling hundreds of fakes as the real thing. You'd also be surprised, he says, at how many art forgers want to get caught, so they can embarrass the art world that wasn't interested in their original work but was too dim to tell forgeries from true masterpieces. Charney's new book is an absorbing look at the techniques, colorful characters and consequences of art forgery dating back to the Renaissance. Noah Charney's an art historian and writer and founder and president of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art, a nonprofit research group devoted to issues of art crime. He's written numerous articles and a novel called, "The Art Thief." His new book is, "The Art Of Forgery."

Noah Charney, welcome to FRESH AIR. You know, I learned from your book that it was really only around the Renaissance that art collecting in the modern sense developed, and that before that, people cared about works of art more for what they were than for their origin. And one of the best stories of forgery involves the famous Michelangelo, who was not copied - he was the forger. Tell us what happened.

NOAH CHARNEY: It's an amazing true story 'cause most people don't realize that Michelangelo began his career before he was the Michelangelo, as a forger of ancient Roman sculptures. And that was at a time in the Renaissance when an ancient Roman sculpture was far more valuable than a work made a few weeks ago by this character, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who no one had ever heard of. And so he, in cahoots with an art dealer, contrived to make a marble sculpture called "Sleeping Eros," and it was buried in a garden and dug up, broken, repaired and sold as an antiquity to a cardinal who was an expert in antiquities and should probably have known better. But the cardinal, after a few years, started to get suspicious and tried to return the sculpture to the dealer. But by this time, Michelangelo was the most famous sculptor in Rome, so the dealer was very happy to take the sculpture back. And he sold it very easily on as now a Michelangelo original.

DAVIES: So essentially, the forgery was discovered. Did it damage his reputation?

CHARNEY: To the contrary, it was actually - embellished it. And Michelangelo was the first to admit this story because in order to demonstrate his capability as a great artist, artists have always copied the art of past periods. And artists studying with a master in their studio, their job would be to replicate the master's style as closely as possible so that you really couldn't tell the difference. And it only becomes a problem if you try to pass off the work you create as the work of someone else, and you could commit the crime of fraud. But even to this day, there's no crime called forgery. Forgers commit crime of economic fraud, but it's no problem to copy or to imitate another artist's style.

DAVIES: You know, today, there are a lot of scientific tests that can help you determine at least the age of a painting and some other relevant information. But in the past, people relied on experts - art connoisseurs - to help authenticate works of art. What kind of expertise did they bring, and how reliable was it?

CHARNEY: One of the odd things about the art world is that there has never been any objective determination of expertise in a specific period or artist. You could have a Ph.D., or even two, in Rembrandt and that doesn't necessarily mean that you can identify a Rembrandt from a copy after Rembrandt, or something done by someone in his studio. In the world of wine, you need to go through elaborate steps to become a master of wine over many years and fulfill these objective tests. The art world doesn't have that. So expertise has always been a matter of personal opinion, and it's been quite subjective. It's very unscientific. And yet for centuries, expertise has been the primary way to authenticate something. The secondary way is provenance research - looking into the documented history of the object. But knowing this, criminals can insert themselves into the history of the object and pass-off forgeries with remarkable ease because the art world, unfortunately, is often inadvertently complicit in authenticating forgeries.

DAVIES: All right, so some connoisseurs got quite famous for doing what they were doing, but there are many cases where they were just fooled, right?

CHARNEY: There were a lot of cases where they're just fooled. And even extremely knowledgeable experts get fooled now and then. It's a sort of trap that the most successful forgers plant in order to ensnare experts. And the best of the forgers, it's the confidence trick rather than the object itself that convinces. You look at a lot of these pieces in a vacuum and you wonder, how is anyone fooled by this? But the confidence trick and various renditions of what I call a provenance trap is what really authenticates these pieces.

DAVIES: What are some of the physical things, apart from the quality of the art itself that you would look for in a painting to help determine its authenticity?

CHARNEY: Well, it depends on the type of painting. But if we're talking about an oil painting, one of the things that has to be replicated in order for it to appear old is called craquelure. And craquelure is the web of cracks that appears naturally in oil paint over time as it expands and contracts, and it literally looks like little webbing on the surface. And you can study that and you can determine whether it was artificially induced to make it look old quickly or whether it appeared naturally. And there are various tricks to try to make it appear that it was old when it was artificially induced, but that's usually a good clue for oil paintings.

DAVIES: How do you recreate craquelure?

CHARNEY: Well, we actually have some accounts voluntarily presented by famous forgers for their own recipes for how to make forgeries. And a handful of the forgers in the book volunteered themselves - they were never caught - because they wanted the notoriety. And one of them is Eric Hebborn - and if I'm allowed to have a favorite forger, it would be him.

DAVIES: OK.

CHARNEY: He's the only forger in this pantheon of forgers in this book who I would argue was at the same artistic skill level as the people he imitated. And he published a book called "The Art Forger's Handbook," which was literally - it was like a cookbook of recipes for how to create forgeries and artificially age them. And one of the techniques is to take an oil paint and cover it in a shortening, like Crisco or Bakelite, and you literally bake it in an oven at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, and it artificially induces something that looks like craquelure. He also explained how you could paint on craquelure, which is very painstaking, but he was able to successfully pull it off.

DAVIES: What else - labels, inscriptions on frames, or on the material that it's painted on?

CHARNEY: Well, it's very important to look at the back of objects, particularly paintings and prints. And there's a lot of information on the back that people tend not to look at, things like old auction stamps. There might be stamps by previous owners. There might be information on the support itself - where the canvas was purchased. These sort of details are very important, but people tend to look at the front of a painting but not turn it over. They're particularly loath to take something out of its frame if it's nicely matted and framed. And this you really need to do, especially if you're buying, for instance, 20th-century lithographs. Those are the most frequently forged objects in all of art. And unfortunately, laser printers and Photoshop - you can forge these without any artistic skill, thanks to computers. And if it's matted-up and framed, you can't tell a lot about it. And it's very difficult to distinguish a lithograph from something that was printed out a few weeks ago, so it's important to take things out of the frame and look at the back and see if there are any markings that suggest age and suggest the origin of the object.

DAVIES: And wormholes tell a story?

CHARNEY: Wormholes do tell a story, and that is one of the most difficult things to reproduce. These are literally holes that tiny insects can make, and they're irregular. They squirm around, and they eat their way through paper or panel and - incredibly difficult to do anything that is that organic and irregular if you're trying to reproduce it with mechanical tools. So that is one of the best ways to try to age something. But there are forgers who have shot panels with buckshot to try to replicate the holes, but then you'll have the holes on the surface, but they won't curve around organically as if a worm had made them.

So for each tool of a forger, there's a way that we can spot it. But the trick is really that it rarely gets to the point of in-depth analysis or even forensic testing. The nature of the art trade is such that if it looks pretty good and experts agree on it and if the provenance, the documented history, looks good then nobody bothers with a scientific testing. And it probably shouldn't be that way, but it's been that way for a very long time.

DAVIES: And when a forger actually paints a work of art intended to look like that of a master, can you tell a difference in brush-strokes?

CHARNEY: Yes, you usually can. And brush-stroke analysis is one of the tools that experts will use and that scientists can use, too, although science is rather late in coming to the analysis and authentication of works of art. It tends to be more mystical than that. The great scholar, Walter Benjamin, wrote a famous article that said, we don't understand why great art is great, but it has some sort of aura that people respond to. And the shorthand is, that if we could scientifically explain away what we found beautiful or moving about it then it would sort of detract from the mysticism of it. And in terms of authenticating things, it's a lot down to personal opinion of experts. They'll look at brush-strokes, but, you know, within any one artist's oeuvre, their style might change. They might've had a funny day. They aren't always exactly the same when they paint, and so finding brush-strokes that look a bit different isn't a specific determination that it's a forgery. There are lots of works that are copies after original works. There are works that were made by people in the studio of the master with the master's supervision that are almost certainly sanctioned by the master, but they're not originals. And it wasn't long ago that at Museo del Prado in Madrid, they found a "Mona Lisa" that looked just like the original. And they would've said it's a copy after the "Mona Lisa," except that it had under-drawings that matched the original, which suggests that the concept of it was developed alongside the original, and it was almost certainly painted by one of Leonardo's pupils alongside the original while he was painting it.

DAVIES: So in a case like that, where there's a studio system - the master supervises students who are copying a work, that work gets out into the art world - how different is that from a work by the master?

CHARNEY: It's a great question because we tend to think of artists as individuals creating the work of art in their entirety, and that is not the way it has been for many centuries. That's a very romantic notion of how art is created. And in fact, centuries-long process is the studio system, and all of the great, old masters ran art studios. And depending on how much you paid them, they would create, themselves, a relevant proportion of the work of art. So if you want a Rubens, for example, you pay him the maximum amount then he paints everything himself, and he designs it too. You pay him the minimum. It's still called a Rubens, but he supervises and designs the object, but it might be entirely painted by his pupils. And in practice, it's usually a mixture. Faces, eyes and hands are almost always done by the master 'cause they're considered the more difficult, if you're talking about portraits. But backgrounds, architectural elements, still lifes, those were almost never painted by the master, and yet anything coming out of the master's studio is considered the work of Rubens. So when people get upset about artists like Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst, who design works and supervise it but they have a team of people in a factory making it for them, that's actually in keeping with a centuries-old artistic tradition.

DAVIES: Our guest is Noah Charney. His new book is, "The Art Of Forgery." We'll talk more after a short break. This is FRESH AIR.

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DAVIES: This is FRESH AIR, and if you're just joining us, our guest is Noah Charney. He knows about art and art crime. He has a new book called, "The Art Of Forgery."

You write that a lot of forgers are artists who didn't quite succeed in their independent careers and so they took to forgery, in part, to get back at the art world that rejected them. I love this phrase of yours, revenge is a dish best served at auction (laughter).

There are a lot of examples of this. Eric Hebborn is among the most famous. What got him into forgery?

CHARNEY: Eric Hebborn is an example of the majority of forgers that I look at, and they do fit this psychological profile. He was a failed original artist and he decided he was going to get back at the art world that rejected his original creations, but he had a more specific origin story. He had been at a flea market and he spotted what he thought were some good drawings, and he bought them and he brought them to a gallery called Colnaghi in London. And the people there said, yeah, these are pretty good. You got a good eye. We'll take them off your hands. And he doubled his money, so he was quite pleased. But then a few weeks later he was walking past the gallery and he saw those drawings in the window for thousands of pounds, and he felt that he had been ripped-off by these sort of stuffy gallerists, and he decided he was going to back at them.

DAVIES: Well, was that because they recognized that they were the authentic works of masters or, I mean, did they just know more than he did?

CHARNEY: They just knew more than he did and, of course, this happens. If you run a gallery, your job is to buy works of art that you think are maybe undervalued and sell them at a profit. But he felt that he was being taken advantage of, and he decided that he was going to take advantage of them in return.

DAVIES: So what did he do?

CHARNEY: Well, he started out by creating drawings that appear to be preparatory sketches for famous paintings. And this is a very clever idea. And what he was doing was creating lost works. And you may know that, for pre-modern artists, we usually know of many more works than our extent than we can identify. And, in some cases - for old masters, Renaissance, medieval artists - as much as two-thirds of their oeuvre is missing, lost, and there's always hope that objects might resurface. And Eric Hebborn was creating objects that match this description. His trick was to choose a famous painting and to create a drawing that looked like a preparatory sketch for it. And the reason that drawings don't often survive is that it's a recent concept that drawings are collectible. For most of the history of art, drawings were made as a preparation for the final. They're like blueprints - you keep the building, but you might not necessarily keep the blueprints. And so every once in a while, these drawings resurface, but it's only recently that they were considered something collectible to display on your wall. So it's very clever of him to choose something that we know existed. We don't have examples of it, and so he's creating a work of art that functions as a piece of provenance.

DAVIES: And how successful was he? How many forgeries did he manage to sell?

CHARNEY: He was hugely successful, and he's really the most skillful and the most passionate about his art. And he's one of the few forgers who created works that were forensically identical to the originals. And now, most forgers don't need to do that because if it looks good and if the provenance trap is convincing - if the story is convincing enough - then nobody bothers with scientific testing. But, he created at least a thousand forgeries, probably more than that. And there are probably some of his works sitting on gallery walls and we just don't know.

DAVIES: And when you say they're forensically identical, did you say, to the originals, what do you mean?

CHARNEY: They are. Let me give you some examples - and we know in detail 'cause he very helpfully wrote a book called, "The Art Forger's Handbook," which has been found in the studio of many forgers arrested since it came out, and he gives recipes for how to make forgeries. So for example, he would buy early modern books to reuse pieces of paper from it to create early modern drawings, so that if the paper was tested forensically, it would date to the right era. He would also create his own inks. For example, there's a type of ink called oak gall, and it's acidic, so if you make a drawing with this oak gall ink and it sits on paper for long enough, it will slowly start to erode the paper and it'll have little grooves where the lines are, and he knows this. And so he says, if you want to make oak gall drawing that looks 500 years old, you're going to need to dip your quill in sulfuric acid and trace your lines so that it eats away at the paper so an expert will see these grooves, and it will suggest the age of the presence of this ink on the page. That level of detail is astounding to me, and I appreciate, from an art history standpoint, that he would have it that level of detail and passion for his subject.

DAVIES: When forgers are caught, how often are they criminally prosecuted?

CHARNEY: Most forgers are caught on the charge of fraud, and for that to happen, someone has to be defrauded out of money or perhaps their reputation. And what tends to happen - and the way that they're caught - is that they accidentally leave some sort of anachronism in one of their works of art. For example, the famous German forger, Wolfgang Beltracchi - who got out of prison just a few weeks ago - he was caught because he used a pigment called titanium white in a painting that had been made, supposedly, before titanium white was invented. And so that's what gave away the game. But on the other hand, there are forgers who intentionally insert anachronisms in order to be able to reveal themselves later on.

DAVIES: They want to get caught?

CHARNEY: They want to get caught because they want the notoriety. And there's a very funny story that's maybe my favorite story in the book about a German forger after the Second World War named Lothar Malskat. And Malskat was a restorer who was hired to restore medieval frescoes in a German church that had been damaged by an allied bomb. And when he got there, he realized that they were damaged beyond repair and the archival photos didn't show him enough detail of what they originally looked like, but that didn't stop him. He went right to work and he eventually revealed what appeared to be a great cycle of lost medieval frescoes, and this was a rare bit of good news in postwar Germany. The German government was so excited, they printed four million postage stamps with the detail of these frescoes on them.

DAVIES: (Laughter).

CHARNEY: But Malskat was not satisfied with this private victory, and he announced that he was the artist, the forger, but nobody believed him. So, he took the very unusual step of suing himself. He was the defendant and the prosecution because he wanted a public, on-the-record forum to explain that he was, in fact, the artist. And nobody still believed him, even when he was on the stand. But then he was able to point to a few anachronisms that he had inserted just in case no one believed him. And these were supposed to be medieval frescoes, but he had inserted a painting of a turkey, and turkeys are indigenous to North America, so there were no turkeys running around medieval Europe. And he also inserted a portrait of Marlene Dietrich, and she definitely wasn't running around medieval Europe.

DAVIES: (Laughter). Well, Noah Charney, it's been fun. Thanks so much for speaking with us.

CHARNEY: Thanks for having me.

DAVIES: Noah Charney is an art historian and writer, and founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art. His new book is, "The Art Of Forgery."

After a break, we'll hear from film director Alfonso Gomez-Rejon. His new movie, "Me And Earl And The Dying Girl," won the Grand Jury Prize at this year's Sundance Film Festival. I'm Dave Davies. This is FRESH AIR. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright NPR.