T107
Autor: C-CELL | Publicado: 2017-06-09T21:50:00-07:00













THE FORGERY OF PAINTINGS by Fredric M. Menger, Emory University, Atlanta, GA 30322 USA






My interest in paint began during a visit to the Scotland Yard crime lab in London. They were working at the time on a burglary case in which someone pried open a window, entered a house, and robbed it. A suspect was arrested and found (as occurs often in such cases) to have a small chip of paint in the corner of his shirt pocket. When I looked at the paint under a microscope, I saw four layers of paint: a thick green layer, a yellow layer, and two distinct white layers of different thickness. The paint-pattern was identical to the paint on the window of the burglarized home. It was like a “paint-fingerprint,” and it served later, I was told, to convict the suspect. I recall wondering at the time how paint analysis was used in art forgeries, and given below are a few things I found out.


In 2011 Wolfgang Beltracchi was sentenced in Germany to several years imprisonment for forging a large collection of paintings in the style, and with the signatures, of great artists such Picasso and Monet. Paintings by the masters are worth multi-millions of dollars, so that selling well-crafted imitations can be a very profitable although highly illegal business. Beltracchi was an expert forger who took great care to make his fakes look authentic. Thus, he studied meticulously the painters he copied by going to museums where their work was displayed. He even visited the homes of the artists in order to learn their mindset. Beltracchi was able to paint with his right hand or left hand, depending upon the handedness of the artist he was copying. Brush strokes were not to betray him! Fake labels on the backs of old paintings were attached using a homemade glue of bone and other natural materials. He also was careful to use paints that were prevalent at the time of the artist’s life, but it is here where he made a fatal error. At one point Beltracchi was attempting to copy the style of artist Heinrich Campendouk (1889 - 1957) who used zinc oxide for a white pigment. Beltracchi also used zinc oxide in his forgery but, unknown to him, his paint had been manufactured with a trace of titanium dioxide contamination.   Simple chemical analysis of a chip of paint from the forgery exposed the fraud. Released early from prison after only four years, he was asked by a reporter if he could guarantee never to do this again. He replied, laughingly, that one thing was certain, he would not again use paint with titanium.


A successful forger must himself be an artist who can produce paintings good enough to fool the experts. This takes a bit of genius.  The forger is also faced with the problem of selling the forgery. This usually involves creating a fake “provenance” (or past history) of the painting. Here is how Beltracchi did it: He collaborated with two granddaughters of Werner Yaeger, a wealthy industrialist. These women lied and claimed they had inherited the paintings from their grandfather, who in turn had ostensibly bought them from a prominent art dealer, Alfred Flechtheim. Counterfeit Flechtheim labels were attached to the back of the paintings. A highly respected art expert, Werner Spies, was fooled by all this false information, and he issued certificates of authenticity that made it easy to sell the paintings.


In another case, the forger painted a picture in 1962 that he claimed was the creation of a well-known artist earlier in the century.   Upon close inspection, an art-investigator found a single polypropylene fiber embedded in the paint. The fiber had not been commercially available to the public until 1958. Case closed.


Forgery goes back centuries. In 1496 Michelangelo (of St. Peter’s Basilica fame) sculptured a marble statue (a sleeping cupid), partially broke it, buried it to make it appear ancient, and sold it as an antiquity. In the early 1900s, art dealers would test the authenticity of a painting by rubbing alcohol on the paint, and then poking it with a hot needle.   New paint can be punctured much more easily than older paint. Some forgers, aware of this test, mixed Bakelite, a hard plastic, into the paint.    Other methods of deceit include using a special baking process to simulate the network of fine cracks (called “craquelure”) that cover paintings of the old masters. Experts, however, can tell the difference between artificial cracks, which are rather uniform in appearance, and genuine craquelure that has irregular patterns.


F614 was the name given to a self-portrait of Vincent van Gogh that was brought to Marie-Claude Corbeil, a chemist at the Canadian Conservation Institute, for authentication using X-ray analysis. It was known from letters written by van Gogh that he used an “asymmetrical” canvas, i.e. one that had different number of horizontal and vertical threads. Although the threads do not block X-rays, the canvas was covered by a so-called priming layer (painted initially onto the canvas to make it smoother). This X-ray-visible layer is thicker in the open spaces between the threads than where the threads overlap. By this means the X-rays could detect the thread arrangement which was seen to have identical numbers in both directions. F614 was worthless. Ultraviolet and infrared spectroscopy, atomic absorption, and microscopy have all been used to track down art forgeries.


The case of Ely Sakhai is worth telling. He would buy a little-known painting from a famous artist, make a copy, and then sell them both. The fake was sold in Asia, the real painting in New York or London. His operation earned him $3.5 million according to the FBI. Unfortunately for Sakhai, an owner of a fake painting in Tokyo, and an owner of the corresponding authentic painting in New York, decided to sell the paintings at the same time and at the same auction house. Because of this unlikely coincidence, the career of Mr. Sakhai ended abruptly.






Marc Chagall's La Nappe Mauve. Left, original;1 Right, forged version by Ely Sakhai.2 




I will close this report with one last forger, a Mark Landis. He would arrive at a museum or church and introduce himself as Father Arthur Scott. He dressed the part, wearing black clothes, a clerical collar, and a Jesuit pin on his lapel. His purpose for the visit was to donate a small expertly faked painting in memory of this mother or other relative. Who would not accept such a gift? After all, the donor looked like someone you could trust; the painting appeared authentic; and (best of all) it was free. Over forty museums were approached by Landis, and many of them displayed the paintings as authentic works. Landis obviously did not operate the scam purely for money. He was apparently satisfied just by seeing his artistry accepted as authentic. It is even unclear that he broke any laws.  In any case, when the paintings were eventually discovered to be forgeries, museums were alerted, and the FBI art-crime team was put on the case. But Mark Landis suddenly disappeared and has managed to evade arrest. Like many forgers, he was a person who merely wanted a little acceptance from the public. And he delighted in the incompetency of the so-called experts who regarded his work as originating from our great masters. One rather hopes that he is never caught.


1) http://www.christies.com/lotfinder/Lot/marc-chagall-1887-1985-la-nappe-mauve-5915669-details.aspx

2) http://www.phaidon.com/agenda/art/articles/2015/may/20/foiling-the-forgers-with-noah-charney-gauguin/