[MSN] Fakes and counterfeits. James Fenton on the art of forgery - and getting away with it. The jailing of Shaun Greenhalgh, the Bolton forger, for conspiracy to defraud art institutions is instructive.

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Fakes and counterfeits
James Fenton on the art of forgery - and getting away with it 

Saturday November 24, 2007
The Guardian 


The jailing of Shaun Greenhalgh, the Bolton forger, for conspiracy to
defraud art institutions is instructive. "Forgeries," as Otto Kurz wrote in
his 1948 handbook Fakes, "hunt in packs." That is, they are rarely made as
unique specimens. The amazing Greenhalghs, the Bolton family of Shaun and
his octogenarian parents, were able to pass as owners of an incredibly rare
Egyptian statuette from the Amarna period (a traditional area for forgery),
but began to come unstuck when they also turned out to own a couple of
Assyrian bas-reliefs. Once a single forgery from their garden workshop had
been detected (by means of a cuneiform spelling mistake), it became possible
to identify the atelier.

Generally speaking, we are susceptible to forgeries, ready to be hoodwinked,
when the forger has understood and devised what it is we would most like to
own. Something from the age of Akhenaten, the Tel el-Amarna pharaoh, would
be super-desirable, and if there are only two statuettes in the world at all
comparable to the fake on offer, then the desirability is enough to warp the
judgment of the purchaser.
Incredibly odd stories about provenance should be enough to warn us, but we
often read about wildly valuable objects that have turned up in unusual
places - the Book of Hours in the car-boot sale. So we can easily be
seduced. And besides, the Greenhalghs seem to have been rather professional
at creating fake provenances, as well as fake objects.

There is a neat moral point about falling victim to forgeries in general
(not in the Bolton case). We are never more likely to be vulnerable to a
cheat than when we ourselves are trying to diddle someone out of a
masterpiece. You go into a shop and see a Rembrandt on the wall (so you
think). You casually ask the price. The vendor mentions a figure that,
though not small, is very cheap for a Rembrandt. At this point, the sensible
thing might be to get an expert to examine your "Rembrandt" and give an
opinion. But you are too greedy to do that. You want to own the thing first,
and not alert anyone else (least of all the vendor) to your find. But this
means that you are on your own; and if you are on your own, you are
vulnerable.

You are also vulnerable if you are in a hurry. Fraudsters know this very
well, and they often like to rush the customer, to take advantage of that
moment of greed and bad judgment. And then there is the business of secrecy:
the vendor gives the impression that the transaction must remain highly
confidential, otherwise the deal is off. But secrecy means isolation.

The classic example came in 1983 when Hugh Trevor-Roper, Lord Dacre, was
obliged to examine the Hitler diaries in a bank vault, for a limited time,
in secret. He was under pressure from the Murdoch organisation to come up
with a decision on the authenticity of the diaries, and perhaps it was a
kind of vanity that made him think: if I pronounce them genuine, they will
become so. Days afterwards he had second thoughts - too late. For when his
doubts were conveyed to Rupert Murdoch, the boss replied: "Bugger Dacre."
The presses were set to roll, and roll they did.

Forgery is an ancient skill, and there are old accounts of the techniques
involved: the smoking of paintings to make them look antique, the
manipulating of the canvas to give a cracked surface, the use of tea and
soot to create a patina. Picasso and his circle, as young men, amused
themselves by producing dibujos fritos, fried drawings, which were exactly
what they sound like, drawings fried in oil to give them an ancient air.

I was surprised to learn that the 17th-century Italian painter Luca Giordano
was a skilled counterfeiter. He painted a scene of Christ healing the
cripple, in the manner of Dürer. One of his own patrons bought the work and
proudly showed it to Luca, who could not resist uncovering his signature.
The patron went to court, but lost the case, so Otto Kurz tells us: the
verdict was that no one could blame Luca Giordano for painting as well as
Dürer.

One suspects stories like this of being apocryphal: they are standard
biographical methods of conveying a sense of an artist's skill. In this
case, however, the painting turned up, and it is indeed, according to Kurz,
signed both with Dürer's monogram and (along the edge, so it would be hidden
by the frame) by Luca Giordano. But, we are told, it is "executed in a style
plainly betraying the Italian baroque".

And that is another thing about fakes: however convincing they seem at the
time, in due course they tend to betray the taste of the age in which they
were made. We find it hard to imagine what anyone ever saw in van Meegeren's
forgeries of Vermeer, and we probably wouldn't understand why Luca
Giordano's painting ever looked like a Dürer. That's the effect of time.

One should be very careful before disposing of a fake, since scholarship
does change, just as taste changes, and many fine works have been rescued
from museum storerooms. And it is useful to keep fakes for the sake of
reference.

Some of the most successful forgeries have been in the area of the
decorative arts, including a beautiful kind of Renaissance jewellery using
enamel and pearls. There is a case full of this kind of fake in the National
Gallery of Art in Washington - it is put on display because it is of such
high quality that it really is worthy of admiration. It was detected only
when the forger's studio contents came to light, with pattern books and so
forth.

The Reliquary of the Holy Thorn, now with the Waddesdon bequest in the
British Museum, came from the Austrian Imperial Treasury. It was sent to the
Viennese goldsmith Weininger for restoration. Weininger made a copy, which
he gave to the Treasury, and kept the original. "The swindle was not
discovered at once," Kurz says, "by the officials in charge of the treasure
and could not be obvious to those who bought the original, as the Treasury
was not accessible to the public." A good example of secrecy working in the
forger's favour.

http://books.guardian.co.uk/reviews/crime/0,,2216089,00.html