COULD THE MASTERPIECE BE A FAKE? PROFIT REVENGE, AND THE ‘ART OF FORGERY’ ( FRESH AIR interview with art scholar Noah Charney, 2013 )
You'd also be surprised [...] at how many art forgers want to get caught, so they can embarrass the art world that wasn't interested in their original work but was too dim to tell forgeries from true masterpieces.
Most people don't realize that Michelangelo began his career before he was the Michelangelo, as a forger of ancient Roman sculptures. That was at a time in the Renaissance when an ancient Roman sculpture was far more valuable than a work made a few weeks ago by, Michelangelo Buonarroti, who no one had ever heard of.
He [Michaelangelo] in cahoots with an art dealer, contrived to make a marble sculpture called "Sleeping Eros," and it was buried in a garden and dug up, broken, repaired and sold as an antiquity to a cardinal who was an expert in antiquities and should probably have known better. But the cardinal, after a few years, started to get suspicious and tried to return the sculpture to the dealer. But by this time, Michelangelo was the most famous sculptor in Rome, so the dealer was very happy to take the sculpture back. And he sold it very easily on as now a Michelangelo original.
Michelangelo was the first to admit this story because in order to demonstrate his capability as a great artist, artists have always copied the art of past periods.
To this day, there's no crime called forgery. forgers commit crime of economic fraud, but it's no problem to copy or to imitate another artist's style.
Expertise has always been a matter of personal opinion, and it's been quite subjective. It's very unscientific. And yet for centuries, expertise has been the primary way to authenticate something. [...] Criminals can insert themselves into the history of the object and pass-off forgeries with remarkable ease because the art world, unfortunately, is often inadvertently complicit in authenticating forgeries.
Even extremely knowledgeable experts get fooled now and then. it's a sort of trap that the most successful forgers plant in order to ensnare experts. and the best of the forgers, it's the confidence trick rather than the object itself that convinces.
If we're talking about an oil painting, one of the things that has to be replicated in order for it to appear old is called craquelure. And craquelure is the web of cracks that appears naturally in oil paint over time as it expands and contracts, and it literally looks like little webbing on the surface. And you can study that and you can determine whether it was artificially induced to make it look old quickly or whether it appeared naturally.
One of the techniques is to take an oil paint and cover it in a shortening, like Crisco or Bakelite, and you literally bake it in an oven at a certain temperature for a certain amount of time, and it artificially induces something that looks like craquelure.
it's very important to look at the back of objects, particularly paintings and prints. And there's a lot of information on the back that people tend not to look at, things like old auction stamps. There might be stamps by previous owners. There might be information on the support itself - where the canvas was purchased. These sort of details are very important, but people tend to look at the front of a painting but not turn it over.
