[CPProt.net] London: Double trouble. Play about a famous art forgery case

Sat Apr 9 08:39:40 CEST 2005

 Double trouble
By Charlotte Mullins
Published: April 8 2005 09:34 | Last updated: April 8 2005 09:34

The star of the new London play by scientist Carl Djerassi is almost as old
as art itself. It is art’s antithesis, the fake. Phallacy is based on the
true story of “Youth from Mt Magdalene”, a valuable Roman bronze of a
lifesize nude man. For many years, the “Youth” was the centrepiece of the
classical collection in Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches museum. But in 1986 it
was revealed to be a 16th-century copy. And yet it remained a beautiful
artwork, one that had deceived experts since entering the collection in
1806.

So just what is wrong with a fake? Certainly not enough to stop forgery
becoming a multi-million dollar business. Across Europe, America and Asia,
anywhere from 15 per cent to a staggering 80 per cent (in Africa and China)
of artworks offered for sale are thought to be fakes. Cases such as the gang
of French and Belgian forgers jailed in 2001 for reproducing Cesar’s
“compression” sculptures make headlines. And the Impressionist forgers John
Myatt or Elmyr de Hory became so well known that their works are sought
after because of the forger rather than the forged.

The stakes are so high that academics researching provenance and
authenticity of works by artists such as Modigliani have received death
threats when a work’s authenticity is called into question, and catalogue
authors have been offered bribes from collectors to keep particular
paintings or sculptures in their publications. When a real Modigliani
painting sells for more than $14m, perhaps this isn’t surprising.

The repercussions of forgery are manifold. Most obviously, the value of a
work is drastically affected. Often it is an object’s place in history that
determines, in large part, its price. In 1983, the J. Paul Getty Museum in
Malibu bought a statue of a youth from the Greek Archaic period for a
reported $8m. It is now thought to be from the same hand as a known modern
fake, and is practically worthless.

Ninety years earlier, another famous museological gaffe occurred in Paris,
when the Louvre acquired the 3rd-century BC “Tiara of Saitapharnes” for
200,000 gold francs. It turned out to have been made in 1880 by Israel
Rouchomovsky, the Russian goldsmith, and was stripped of much of its value.

Perhaps the clearest case of historical loss of value is the Shroud of
Turin; believed for centuries to have been the shroud of Christ, in 1988 it
was found to be a medieval forgery. Radiocarbon dating placed it around
1260-1390, although attempts to discredit this finding continue.

In all of these cases, one thing did not change when they were exposed as
fakes - the work’s physical appearance. But our perception of beauty is
necessarily affected by the knowledge that the piece is no longer the “real
thing”. The artists did not supervise the casting, make adjustments to the
figure once cast, or choose the patina. They did not decide upon the
pigments and grind them, select the subject matter or apply a certain glaze.
Neither did they conceive of the idea for the work. This is the crucial
difference between the fake - worth the cost of its materials, if that - and
the original, potentially worth millions. Our relationship with the artist -
our proximity to their impetus, their creative impulse -is lacking in any
fake.

Forgeries destroy our understanding of the unique cultural climate from
which a work arises, and so the power of art to transform that climate is
eroded -only the original paintings of Caravaggio could lead to Mannerism’s
demise; only Picasso’s 1907 proto-Cubist “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon” had the
power to become the cornerstone of modern art.

Walter Benjamin described the power of the original artwork as its “aura”.
In his seminal essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”
(1936), he writes: “Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is
lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence
at the place where it happens to be.” The “aura” is the reason millions
cluster around the dark and mysterious “Mona Lisa” at the Louvre each year
rather than looking at da Vinci’s most famous painting in books or online.

In our world of unstoppable mass-production, the essential power of an
artwork - something a forgery can never possess - is its uniqueness. There
are artists who have enjoyed upsetting this applecart of originality and
exploring what Benjamin’s so-called “aura” really means. These include
Marcel Duchamp presenting a mass-produced urinal as a signed artwork called
“Fountain” in 1917, and Jake and Dinos Chapman, who replaced one “aura” for
another when they recently bought “Disasters of War”, a suite of prints by
Goya, for £25,000, painted monstrous cartoon masks on each figure and
proceeded to resell the suite for £150,000.

Andy Warhol built his career on exploring the boundaries between the
historical exclusivity of the artwork and the mass-reproduction of popular
culture. He screenprinted his canvases, a production method devoid of the
artist’s touch, and used newspaper photographs as subject matter. Not
surprisingly his work has been frequently forged. The forgeries began in his
own lifetime, most notably by his friend, the poet Gerard Malanga, who
created works “by” Warhol based on the artist’s Pop Art poster “Che
Guevara”. Ten years later Warhol noted in his diary the real problem with
such forgeries: “They made my prices go down because people are now afraid
to buy paintings because they feel they could be buying fakes.”

Dealers and collectors would often contact Warhol to have him authenticate
his own work, but how do you spot a fake if the artist is complicit - Warhol
actually went on to claim the “Che Guevara” pictures were his - or dead?

In the first instance, it has to be conceivable that the work is a fake.
Take the Cottingley fairy pictures of 1917. These amateur photographs with
painted fairies taken by children convinced even Arthur Conan Doyle, creator
of Sherlock Holmes, and were not disproved until 1983, when the girls
involved finally confessed. Though they are obviously fakes to our knowing
eyes, such was the desire at the time to capture the supernatural that
people believed what they wanted to believe. Likewise the Piltdown Man, an
attempt to fake the missing link between man and apes. The “remains” were
found in England in 1912; their authenticity was not questioned until after
the second world war.

When there is suspicion that an artwork has been faked, scientific advances
such as x-radiography, radiocarbon dating, drochronology (tree ring dating)
and thermoluminescence (a method of dating pottery), have revealed
inconsistencies in dates and production methods. In 1930, an early
Botticelli, “Madonna of the Veil”, was bought for $25,000 and authenticated
by Roger Fry, a respected art historian. But a young Kenneth Clark
disagreed, pointing out that the allegedly Renaissance Madonna looked
suspiciously like the film stars of the 1920s. On his hunch, scientific
research revealed that the woodworm holes in the panel had been drilled in,
and that the Madonna’s robe was painted with Prussian blue, which was not
used until the 18th century.

There is a risk of over-zealous investigation of forgeries, however. In 1968
the Rembrandt Research Project was set up in Holland to investigate the
growing number of works that were alleged to be by Rembrandt. From an
initial tally of 630 paintings thought to be genuine, the figure now stands
at less than 300. But many of the works now dismissed as copies probably
came from Rembrandt’s studio, were painted by assistants in his style under
Rembrandt’s watchful eye, and signed as if by him, with his approval. This
was standard practice. While works produced in this way may not be as
mesmerising or technically well painted as those done primarily by the
artist, should they be expelled from under the umbrella of Rembrandt’s
authentic work?

Artists continue to operate studios in a similar way - Antony Gormley
encourages his dozen assistants to let their personalities shine through as
they weld and forge his sculptures for him; Damien Hirst employs others to
complete his spot paintings, even allowing them to choose the colour of the
dots. If we accept the argument for Rembrandt’s studio works, should we then
also exclude works from Gormley’s or Hirst’s oeuvre? Of course not. The
concept of each work, whether by Rembrandt, Gormley or Hirst, is theirs - it
is the execution, not the idea, that has been delegated.

The sculptor Henry Moore also employed an army of assistants (including
artists Anthony Caro and Richard Wentworth) to scale his hand-sized models
up to the six-metre stone and bronze sculptures that occupy public plazas
around the world. One such sculpture was “Arch” (1980), in Kensington
Gardens in London. Built out of travertine, it was dismantled after 16 years
when it became unsafe as a result of the stone twisting in the damp climate.

Last month Carlo Bilotti, a billionaire art collector, offered to pay to
have another “Arch” made in a marble suitable for the British weather. The
copy would then be placed in Kensington Gardens, and the restored original
would be given to his home town of Cosenza, in Italy. But will the copy be a
valid replacement? No. Restoring the original and reinserting it into the
park is to be applauded, but Bilotti’s idea leaves the park with a mere
copy, while the original - worth hundreds of thousands of pounds - leaves
the country.

In Djerassi’s play Phallacy, the “Youth” turned out to be a Renaissance copy
of a Roman original that had disappeared. While the copy immediately lost
1,400 years of history and its “aura” as an original artwork, it became one
of the earliest known Renaissance casts of a large-scale antique bronze. It
has its own place in history, created almost 500 years ago at a time when
the market for Roman sculptures was such that Michelangelo, who at that time
was at the height of his powers as a sculptor, felt the need to do a little
faking of his own. As Dr Regina Leitner-Opfermann, the (fictional) director
of antiquities in Phallacy, (factually) recounts: “Michelangelo once made a
superb, life-sized Cupid and then had it buried in a garden in Rome. When
they dug it up, it was bought by Cardinal San Giorgio as a Roman antique at
a super-inflated price.” She adds later, “He [Michelangelo] even did it a
second time with the head of a Satyr, breaking off one of his teeth to make
it look older.

”But,” she concludes, “his object was money, not fame.” As with the creation
of all fakes, it all comes back to money in the end.

Charlotte Mullins is the editor of the V&A Magazine. 

“Phallacy” runs at the New End Theatre, Hampstead, London NW3, until May 14.

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