When you’re helping to settle an estate of a client with a large art collection, it can be very disturbing for the client’s heirs to learn that a piece of work your client owned is a fake. This discovery can drastically change the value of what’s been left to the beneficiaries. Unfortunately, the problem of forged artwork has proliferated in recent years, as improvements in photomechanical reproduction techniques have made it easier for forgers to produce deceptive fake prints. “A real good reproduction can fool a lot of experts,” said John Szoke, a Manhattan dealer in Picasso and Edvard Munch prints.1
For example, recently, I was approached by an investment advisor to view and value a painting (a family heirloom) by the artist Hans Holbein. When I arrived at the home, the family had gathered to learn about their potential legacy. The room was somber. The Holbein was laid out on the dining room table. The frame was old, and the painting was aged and crackled.
The particular image of the Madonna was familiar but, unfortunately, facing in the wrong direction. Holbein was left-handed and usually portrayed his subjects facing left and the Madonna holding the child in her left arm. In this case, the figure faced right. And, the original is in the Pitti Palace in Florence, Italy. An apprentice in his studio would have copied the master this way to leave no question as to attribution.
It was still of value, approximately $4,000, but not as much as anticipated due to the Madonna facing and the brush strokes going in the wrong direction.
The most prevalent fake prints are those falsely attributed to Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol, experts say. But, forgers have also brought to market multitudes of fake Pablo Picassos, Paul Klees and Gerhard Richters, as well as phony works attributed to Marc Chagall, Joan Miró, Salvador Dalí and Henri Matisse.
Other Examples
There are many examples of fraudulent artwork, some of which I’ve witnessed myself.
Dalí sets the stage. It began in 1974 at a routine French customs border inspection. It developed into the discovery of an international shipment of 40,000 sheets of paper bearing nothing more than the iconic signature, Salvador Dalí.
By 1985, Dalí and his secretary admitted to selling five times that number of signed, blank sheets of paper. Although that number seems totally out of line, it’s possible that’s indeed how Dalí intended it—as the flamboyant artist once said, “What is important is to spread confusion, not eliminate it.”2
Within the art community, it’s precisely this uncertainty that has shaped the Dalí print market as among the most treacherous in the world.3
Head with Horns. A prized and rare sculpture by Paul Gauguin that the J. Paul Getty Museum in California acquired for a reported $3 million to $5 million was deemed a fake.
The sculpture, Head with Horns, has been reattributed by researchers to an unknown artist and pulled from the museum’s permanent display, according to Art Newspaper and Le Figaro. The institution acquired the work in 2002 from Wildenstein & Company, the powerful French-American art dealing dynasty that’s now embroiled in a litany of lawsuits.4
Honest Abe. A client with an interest in Lincoln’s memorabilia asked for an appraisal of a rare and beautiful item, a personal note to his wife from Abraham Lincoln. It was warm and confidential. The paper was suitable, the ink was appropriate and the signature was excellent. It was too perfect.
A call to the director of the Lincoln Presidential Library in Springfield, Ill. was greeted with, “Alan, hold on a second, I actually have the original in the vault.”
Abe was honest, but someone surely wasn’t.
Wine tasting. In 2006, Sotheby’s in New York sold $7.8 million worth of wine to a buyer. At that time, it was the second highest total ever for a Sotheby’s wine auction. The assemblage included, among other extreme rarities, an 1811 Château Lafite, three bottles of 1847 Château d’Yquem and two magnums of 1921 Château Pétrus. All of those bottles, and many others purchased from the same source, were fakes.
One of the 1921 Pétrus magnums had scored a perfect 100 from the world’s leading wine critic, Robert Parker. But, Pétrus didn’t bottle any magnums in 1921. And, even if some of its wine merchant customers who bought the wine in barrel had actually filled magnums—and there was no record of that, either—where were all these bottles suddenly coming from? There were also bottles with wrong corks, a château name printed in the wrong direction and doctored labels (a glue expert would later determine that some had been attached with Elmer’s).
There are no even vaguely reliable numbers compiled on the value of bogus fine and rare wines that change hands every year, but the ballpark estimate is around $100 million.5
Watch your whiskey. Laboratory tests at the Scottish Universities Environmental Research Centre on 21 different bottles of rare Scotch whiskey, potentially worth around £635,000, have confirmed them all as modern fakes.
Based on these results, Rare Whisky 101 (RW101), one of the world’s leading experts in rare whiskey, has estimated that around £41M worth of rare whiskey currently circulating in the secondary market, and present in existing collections, is fake. That’s more than the entire U.K. auction market, which RW101 had predicted to exceed £36M at the end of 2018.6
On the other hand, the Gooding collection, which I appraised, includes rare offerings, such as a 60-year-old Macallan Valerio Adami 1926. Only
12 bottles of the single malt Scotch were bottled with a label created by the pop artist Valerio Adami. Last year, a bottle from the Scottish distillery sold for
$1.1 million at auction.
AI May Help
Artificial intelligence (AI) can spot art forgeries through one brushstroke.7 But, detecting art forgeries can be difficult and expensive. An art historian might use infrared spectroscopy, radiometric dating, gas chromatography or a combination of such tests. AI, it turns out, doesn’t need all that: It can spot a fake just by looking at the strokes used to compose a piece.
Researchers from Rutgers University in New Brunswick, N.J. and the Atelier for Restoration & Research of Paintings in the Netherlands document how their AI system broke down almost 300 line drawings by Picasso, Matisse, Modigliani and other famous artists into 80,000 individual strokes. Then, a deep recurrent neural network learned what features in the strokes were important to identify the artist.8
The researchers also trained a machine-learning algorithm to look for specific features, like the shape of the line in a stroke. This gave them two different techniques to detect forgeries, and the combined method proved powerful. Paintings are about to become more difficult to counterfeit.
The Issue With Experts
Authenticity is often judged by third parties, including scholars, museum curators, dealers, auction houses, families of artists or a Catalogue Raisonné. The experts or foremost authorities are those elevated to those positions by institutions and scholars.
In George O. Doherty and Emelia A. Doherty v. Commissioner,9 two of the foremost authorities on the paintings of Charles M. Russell couldn’t resolve the question of authenticity of a donated painting. In 1969, the Dohertys bought Attacking Stagecoach, which may or may not have been painted by Charles M. Russell, for $10,000. They donated an undivided 40% interest in the painting to the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Mont. in tax year 1982 and the remaining 60% in tax year 1983. In those years, they claimed charitable contribution tax deductions in the amounts of $140,000 and $210,000. The Internal Revenue Service, backed by its expert, maintained that the painting was a forgery and only worth $100. The court noted that the credentials of the two experts were beyond question, yet they had reached different conclusions. The court felt that it couldn’t rule on the issue of authentication and concluded that the painting had a value of $30,000, recognizing that the dispute had affected the painting’s fair market value.
Provenance and Title
Different types of theft lead to “fake” ownership. Sometimes, it’s a simple matter of burglary. Other thefts are due to the illegal importation of works and items from a foreign country, plunder from archaeological sites or items seized illegally or immorally by governments, such as confiscated works by the Nazi regime during the Holocaust. Check with the International Foundation for Art Research (www.ifar.org) and The Art Loss Register (www.artloss.com) if there’s a questionable provenance or break in the chain of title.
Practical Pointers
Connoisseurship, the act of determining the authenticity by identifying an artist by stylistic attributes, is and has been a sizable challenge. When you’re faced with an estate that includes paintings, print or sculpture, you should always seek documentation. This provenance often provides assurances that the work is genuine. For older pieces by more established artists, provenance can also support an artwork’s authenticity through its past ownership.
Ask for a signed certificate of authenticity by a recognized authority. If the original purchase was directly through the artist, finding a signed certificate or receipt can be of utmost importance. If the purchase was through a gallery, an original sales receipt from a gallery can also count towards provenance.
Turn paintings over to the obverse, as there are often writings or papers attached to the frame or painting itself that will establish authenticity and provenance.
In terms of an estate, although an appraiser isn’t an authenticator, a proper appraisal while the owner is living will allow for appropriate documents to be more easily identified and, if there are issues, you can do some investigation. If forgeries are discovered, the client may distribute her assets more equitably.
Endnotes
1. www.nytimes.com/2020/01/24/arts/design/fake-art-prints.html.
2. www.quotetab.com/quote/by-salvador-dali/what-is-important-is-to-spread-confusion-not-eliminate-it.
3. www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-salvador-dali-accidentally-sabotaged-market-prints.
5. www.forbes.com/sites/richardnalley/2014/06/18/csi-bordeaux/#704b810432a8.
6. The Whiskey Investor (Dec. 20, 2018).
7. Jackie Snow, “This AI Can Spot Art Forgeries by Looking at One Brushstroke,” MIT Technology Review (Nov. 21, 2017).
8. Ibid.
9. George O. Doherty and Emelia A. Doherty v. Commissioner, 16 F.3d 338 (9th Cir. 1994).