– Albrecht Dürer

A Note on the Title of This Blog: Da Vinci’s Area Code

Rumor has it that the great British forger Eric Hebborn – on whom there is a good deal in later postings – drew a Leonardo da Vinci imitation and out of sheer mischief hid a telephone deep in the design.

In his autobiography, Drawn to Trouble (Random House, 1993), he expresses his disdain for the art trade by stating, “The difference between a gentleman and a dealer is simply this: with the rarest of exceptions to prove the rule, they are mutually exclusive. One cannot enter deep into the ungentlemanly muck and mire of art dealing and keep one’s hands clean. Count Antoine Seilern, both an aristocrat and a great collector, knew this instinctively and would not admit into his house any picture dealer, however grand, except by the tradesmen’s entrance.”

A person or persons unknown murdered Hebborn in 1996.

Introduction

You’re possibly thinking, “Art forgeries and swindles…Interesting, but it doesn’t concern me.”

Wrong.

If you think art fraud victimizes only the rich and the superrich, think again. Its victims are no longer confined to dotty dowagers or oil-rich cowboys with more money than taste. Art swindlers of every description are casting a wider and wider net, reeling in small investors and unsuspecting retirees along with big fish. And the advent of Internet online auctions has democratized the crime even further, moving art sales and potential fraud from the carpeted salons of fancy auction houses to millions and millions of homes.

Experts now claim that forgeries are more prevalent in the modest price range, affecting works priced from $2,500 to $3,500. Every day, unsuspecting consumers fall prey to dishonest telemarketers and door-to-door salespersons, rapacious dealers and promoters, swindlers hustling bogus art-investment schemes or selling mechanically reproduced posters as original prints. They’ll sting you for every penny they can get: one hundred dollars, one hundred thousand dollars, a million.

And judging from the growing number of victims, the bad guys are very good at what they do. A recent article in the UK’s Guardian newspaper quotes experts’ estimations that ten to forty percent of the marketed art attributed to significant artists is bogus. New York’s International Foundation for Arts Research calculates the worldwide market in fraudulent art at six billion dollars annually.

Online art fraud statistics alone are overwhelming. According to the Internet Fraud Complaint Center (IFCC), a partnership between the FBI and the National White Collar Crime Center, almost half of all reported crimes concern online auction sites. The latest available figures (2002) show 48,252 total complaints of fraud for the U.S. alone – a threefold increase over the previous reporting year – with a median value of nearly $300 per complaint. Internet auction fraud makes up forty-six percent of that figure, for a loss to consumers of over $20 million.

And yet the swindles are so easy to short-circuit.This blog will relate how forgers and fraudsters perpetrate their crimes, which makes for entertaining anecdotes. But there’s more to it than entertainment. The stories also provide a practical demonstration of the fraudsters’ modi operandi, helping us recognize the tricks of their trade and avoid them.

FAQs

 Before getting into the thick of it, let’s answer a few common queries. I’m often asked, “What are the oldest examples of art fraud?”

It’s hard to imagine a pair of hirsute primitive creatures admiring a cave drawing and one asking the other, “Is it an original?” It’s therefore safe to say that forgery began with the modern concept of exclusive authorship and ownership, both closely tied to financial value.

Albrecht Dürer (1471–1528), probably one of the earliest victims of forgery, was the toast of Nuremberg and one of Germany’s most acclaimed artists. His paintings, drawings, copper engravings and woodcuts were much in demand in his own lifetime, and thus very expensive – and attractive to forgers. Writing from Venice to a friend in 1506, Dürer complains, “I have many enemies who copy my works in churches and wherever else they can get hold of them.”

Dürer took his grievances to the authorities and they ruled in his favor, proclaiming that to reproduce his monogram or signature was illegal. But the picture itself, at that time, was free from copyright protection, and therefore anyone could reproduce it and sell it. One Italian copyist is said to have made over eighty facsimiles of Dürer’s Life of the Virgin alone. He and a host of German forgers made fake Dürers of such high quality that they systematically fooled the most discerning experts. Things got worse after Dürer’s death, with the value of his work increasing in consequence and causing forgeries to proliferate at a greater rate than ever. In 1528 his widow had to buy woodblock printing masters from the forgers to prevent them from making any more copies. Perhaps some fakes escape detection still: rumors persist to this day that museums throughout the world display Dürer forgeries described as original works by the master.

A second and often companion question is, “What’s the difference between a copy and a forgery?” The answer is simple: disclosure.

It’s legal to sell a copy, as long as it’s not described as an original. In some countries, such as France, the work of copistes is highly regulated. Among other things, the copies cannot be of the same dimension as the originals, they cannot carry a forged signature, and they must be clearly marked as false somewhere on the back of the canvas or board. In other countries, like Canada and the United States, copying art is largely an unregulated free-for-all, like almost everything else in the art trade.

But one thing is universally true: if you knowingly describe a replica as an original work, you’re crossing the line between copying and forgery. Still, just to make life more complicated, that line is often quite blurred.

For a long time, art schools encouraged their students to copy the works of the masters in order to learn painterly skills. Large groups of painters at their easels, diligently copying Mona Lisa from “life,” were a common sight at the Louvre well into the early twentieth century. These were not Sunday painters. They were art students, and the better examples of their works found themselves hanging on the walls of relatives’ living rooms along with other copies from the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, and in time found their way to the stalls of flea markets and antique dealers’ shelves, where they can still be found.

Which leads to a new problem, fraudulent misattribution. Here’s how the swindle works. The perpetrator scours flea markets, antique stores and junk dealers’ stocks for what we can describe as “genuine” copies. This is a copy – most often of a classic subject by an Old Master, a Madonna and Child, say, or an Adoration of the Baby Jesus – made by a contemporary of the master. In other words, it’s nothing more than an imitation, but the frame, the canvas and the pigmentation are consistent with the epoch of the original. Prices and quality vary greatly for these works, but you could certainly purchase one for anywhere between $500 and $5,000, perhaps a little more in North America.

Having purchased such a copy, the perpetrator claims it’s an original Old Master, clamoring high and low that it’s a genuine Rembrandt, da Vinci, van Dyck, Giorgione, whatever. To support this attribution, he collects a dizzying array of documentation, including detailed scientific reports, long-winded essays by so-called experts, and appraisals for astronomical sums. (We’ll see later how crooks can always find someone, somewhere, to ornament their swindles with bogus documentation.) What he’s done is compile a huge stack of documents of convenience prepared by accomplices, systematically avoiding the opinion of the people who really matter, namely scholars and authenticating committees.

Does the perpetrator of this fraud want to sell his misattributed painting for millions? No, that would be impossible. Anyone with the sort of money required to buy one of these bogus paintings – one ambitious fellow set a value on a work of almost $300 million – would have careful expertise brought to bear, and that would blow the cover off the swindle. The perpetrator seeks out people who will “invest” in the painting, promising prodigious returns when the work is eventually sold.

As an appraiser and provenance researcher, with much of my work centering on forensic investigations related to art fraud, there’s not much I haven’t seen. But let’s first take a look back…

NEXT WEEK, PART TWO:

A 500-Year-Old Whodunit

Was Michelangelo guilty of art fraud? Some experts think so.