[MSN] Bruce Museum Exhibit Looks At Rip-Offs Of The Masters

[Museum Security Network Mailing list]

Art Imitating Art

 Bruce Museum Exhibit Looks At Rip-Offs Of The Masters 
June 17, 2007 

By MATT EAGAN, The Hartford Courant 
 John Myatt says they called him Picasso in prison. Myatt was the brush
behind one of the most famous art frauds of modern times. During the 1980s
and '90s, he painted works in the style of Picasso, Joan Miro, Alberto
Giacometti and others.

Along with his partner, John Drewe, Myatt was able to create paintings that
fooled major auction houses into paying out as much as 30,000 pounds for
what they believed was a genuine work by a major artist.The scheme was
uncovered only after Drewe, who produced the fake documentation for the
works, left his wife for another woman but failed to take the fake papers
with him. His wife turned them in to police, and the two were arrested.

Such frauds remain the fear of everyone in the art world, especially at
museums, where the most basic guarantee made to customers is that the art on
display is genuine.

Artists such as Myatt, and the illusory works they create, are the subject
of "Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception," an exhibit running through
Sept. 9 at the Bruce Museum in Greenwich.

Myatt, who testified against Drewe at a 1999 trial and went to prison for
four months, will appear at a dinner lecture Wednesday night to discuss his
experiences and his now-legitimate work as a producer of replicas. If
nothing else, the exhibit makes clear that as soon as someone decided to
create art, someone else decided to fake it. There are attempted forgeries
from all eras, from a Cycladic head supposedly from 2,500 B.C. to works that
rip off Norman Rockwell, Andy Warhol or Jean-Michel Basquiat.Nancy
Hall-Duncan, the exhibit's curator, says determining what is authentic is a
great challenge when one takes into account the many fake, forged, copied,
misattributed and replicated works in existence.

In the simplest terms, a fake attempts to replicate an existing work. A
forgery mimics the style of another artist in a deliberate attempt to
deceive others.

Simply attempting to replicate another artist's work is not a crime until
one claims it to be an original.

In fact, copying the works of the masters has long been a method of teaching
students advanced techniques.

As science has advanced, so have methods for detecting cheats.

According to research scientist James Martin, art detectives now use a
variety of sophisticated methods such as ultraviolet illumination and
electron micrographs to unmask frauds. Through these methods, it's sometimes
possible to uncover something that doesn't belong, such as a pigment that
was not available at the time the actual artist was working.

But usually these tools are only used once the sharp eye of a connoisseur
has raised questions about a painting's authenticity.

"Connoisseurship is the time-honored analytic process by which informed
viewers offer their opinion on who created a work of art, when and where,"
says Peter Sutton, the Bruce Museum's executive director.

But connoisseurship is not always perfect.

Consider Han van Meegeren, who, beginning in 1933, painted one of the
world's most famous forgeries, "Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus," in the
style of Johannes Vermeer.

Van Meegeren clearly had artistic ability, but his scheming was notable more
for its attention to detail and his ability to imagine a work tantalizing
enough to entice scholars to set aside their nagging doubts and give in to
hope.

First, the technical details. Van Meegeren began with an authentic
17th-century painting by an unknown artist and erased the work with pumice.
He used badger hair brushes and pigments that existed at the time Vermeer
was painting. He tried several methods to dry the painting, which can take
several decades naturally before settling on a synthetic resin dissolved in
alcohol and synthetic lilac oil. This was close enough to Vermeer's linseed
oil.

But van Meegeren's success was as much about wish fulfillment as anything
else. He preyed on the dreams of scholars by mimicking an artist whose work
was rare (only 34 paintings by Vermeer were known to exist in the mid-1930s)
and by giving them a piece from early in the artist's career.

The forgery did not fool everyone, and today, for art scholars, it's
difficult to imagine it fooled anyone - but it did.

"It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds
himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great
master," wrote scholar Abraham Bredius after the painting was revealed.

The work sold in 1937 for 520,000 Dutch guilders ($4.7 million today) and
was donated to the Boijmans van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam.

The scam nearly cost van Meegeren his life.

After World War II, art scholars began tracing the lineage of looted works.
They traced this so-called Vermeer to van Meegeren and charged him with
collaboration. Rather than accept a death sentence, van Meegeren admitted to
forging dozens of paintings and demonstrated his techniques from his jail
cell in order to prove he had not collaborated with the Nazis.

He died of a heart attack six weeks after his sentencing.

The fate of his painting was finally settled in 1966, when the Mellon
Institute in Pittsburgh studied the residual radioactivity and determined it
was a modern work forgery and not a Vermeer.

Which is why it's at the Bruce Museum.

FAKES AND FORGERIES: THE ART OF DECEPTION is open through Sept. 9. The Bruce
Museum is at 1 Museum Drive in Greenwich. Museum hours are Tuesday through
Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 1 to 5 p.m. The museum is closed
Mondays and major holidays. Admission is $7, $6 for seniors and students,
free for children under 5.

For information, call 203-869-0376, or visit www.brucemuseum.org.

Contact Matt Eagan at eagan at courant.com.

http://www.ctnow.com/