Why the Art World Continues to be Vexed by Forgeries
It was almost too good to be true: An untitled work by Mondrian, long believed to have been destroyed in a World War II air raid on Berlin, was suddenly spotted in a gallery in Brussels, just last year. Could this be the real thing? Was this the work that the Nazis had put on show at the notorious Entartete Kunst exhibit in 1937, to denounce what they considered “degenerate art?” The man who saw the painting, Léon Hanssen, felt it was a distinct possibility. “It really made an impression of a painting from 1923 that was as original as you can imagine,” he was quoted in The New York Times. “It was as if you could shake hands with Mondrian.”
Alas, it was not to be. When Hanssen, like me a professor in the humanities, decided to investigate, he discovered that the provenance was like Swiss cheese: full of holes. A Mondrian it was not; an imitation or forgery — perhaps. This despite the fact that the anonymous owner of the painting had previously lent it to three major art institutions, including the renowned Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, as a genuine Mondrian without anyone batting an eyelash. The story, which broke last week, once again exposed the pitfalls of trying to authenticate a work of art — even 20th century works, for which one would think that the history and provenance should be easier to verify.
Why does this continue to happen? Part of the problem, I believe, is that it is very difficult for us to look at a work of art objectively. Even as art historians, our subconscious is influenced by the cultural experiences and assumptions of our times. The German philosopher Ernst Cassirer argued in his book Philosophy of Symbolic Forms (1929) that all our experiences are hopelessly biased by the cultural baggage of symbols and meanings endowed by our Zeitgeist, the spirit of our times. Sounds fanciful? Let me tell you a story that shows what Cassirer was talking about.
In 1945, after the end of World War II, the Dutch artist Han van Meegeren was put on trial. His crime: to have sold a genuine Vermeer, entitled Supper at Emmaus, to the voracious Nazi collector and Deputy Führer, Hermann Göring. That Göring had cut a swath through Europe, stealing every major painting he could put his pudgy hands on, is well known. But the Dutch are very touchy about their Dutch Masters. For van Meegeren, to have sold this Vermeer treasure, was tantamount to treason.
Whereupon — you may find this difficult to believe — the artist was put in the unenviable position to prove to the court that the painting was a forgery; that he had painted it himself, using 17th century techniques, in what was then considered Vermeer’s inimitable style. Looking at this canvas now, it is hard to believe that anyone could have considered this work a genuine Vermeer. The subtle manipulation of light, the quality of texture, the breathtaking depth that are the hallmarks of Vermeer’s style — they are nowhere in evidence. It’s simply a bad painting. But that’s not how the historians and art experts of the 1940’s saw it. Virtually everyone was convinced it was a genuine Vermeer — perhaps because subconsciously, it seemed to evoke the iconography of 1940’s illustrative art.
Which brings us to Leonardo da Vinci. Unlike modern artists, Leonardo never signed, dated, or titled his paintings. Which is why authenticating Leonardo paintings and drawings is a real chore that has become a cottage industry in itself, with few art historians agreeing on the full repertoire. At best, there are about 15 paintings — fifteen! — that are universally acknowledged to have been painted by Da Vinci over his nearly 50-year career. That’s about as many paintings that Vincent van Gogh could turn out in a week! So any time there is the rumor of a new Leonardo discovery, that news tends to hit the art market like a tsunami. Each new discovery has the potential to completely upset the careful da Vinci chronology that art historians have painstakingly developed over the last 100 years –thereby placing their careers and reputations at risk.
So it was with the discovery of a portrait of a young woman in Renaissance dress, executed in colored ink and chalk, and drawn on vellum (an extract of an animal hide, like a lambskin). This rather unremarkable work had been sold at auction in 1998 for little more that 14,000 pounds. But the renowned Leonardo expert Martin Kemp saw something else entirely. In 2010 he published a book, La Bella Principessa (“The Beautiful Princess”), which argued that this portrait was a Leonardo “autograph,” drawn by his hand. The sitter? None other than Bianca Giovanna, the illegitimate daughter of Duke Ludovico Sforza of Milan.
As it happened, the Duke was very fond of his daughter, legitimate or not. In 1496 he married her (at the tender age of thirteen) to a young nobleman named Galeazzo Sanseverino. Kemp, as well as the art historian Carlo Pedretti, believe that this portrait was executed by Leonardo at the occasion of her wedding. Alas, the poor girl developed a severe stomach ailment (or perhaps an ectopic pregnancy) just a few months later, which ultimately led to her death. That added a unique poignancy to the attribution: here is this fair Renaissance maiden, still innocent on the threshold of womanhood, mere months before her tragic death.
When my co-author, Chris Brown and I were researching our new book, Young Leonardo, covering Leonardo’s Milanese period, we saw lots of problems with this attribution. For one, the drawing uses a shading technique to offset the girl’s profile that is suspiciously reminiscent of 19th century drawings that borrowed this effect from the new invention of photography. Sure enough, when it was sold at Christie’s in 1998, it was billed as a “19th century work by a German artist painting in the style of the Italian Renaissance.”
What’s more, the girl’s expression is flat and lifeless — utterly devoid of that sense of inner psyche that distinguishes Leonardo’s other portraits. Further tests determined that the chalk pigments used in the drawing appear to date from the late 17th century — for a modern artist, somewhat easier to imitate than genuine early 16th century pigments.
But then came the final twist: a notorious British forger, Shaun Greenhalgh, confessed that he drew the portrait in 1978 as a Renaissance-era forgery. As reported in Artnet, his model was not a princess, but a pretty clerk he had spotted at the check-out counter of the local supermarket, named Sally. “She was a bossy little bugger,” Greenhalgh wrote in his book, entitled A Forger’s Tale.
According to Scotland Yard, Greenhalgh sold many other fakes to museums and private collectors, collecting more than 1.5 million pounds in the process — a little less than Van Meegeren, who is believed to have scored over $ 30 million with his forgeries.
Autograph, copy, or fake? The tricky game of authenticating art continues ….
