It’s All Fake Art At The Courtauld This Summer

On June 17th, Art and Artifice: Fakes from the Collection opened in the Gilbert and Ildiko Butler Drawings Gallery and Project Space at the Courtauld Gallery in London. Affiliated with a renowned postgraduate school of art history, the Courtauld challenges the notion of accidental forgery with an entire showcase intentionally devoted to deliberate artifice.

This show bears similarity to a National Gallery exhibition called Close Examination: Fakes, Mistakes and Discoveries held in 2010. It also evokes The Museum of Lost Art, a 2018 book by art historian Noah Charney, in which missing or displaced art is grouped together as if in a single show. But the irony and attention to detail in this show is one-of-a-kind, rarely seen or celebrated in such a way.

Because the Courtauld’s museum is affiliated with an art history education arm, some of the seven paintings and 25 drawings were donated to consciously demonstrate what makes a fake. Others in the showcase, which include misattributed works to Sandro Botticelli, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, John Constable and Auguste Rodin, were gifted to the museum and later unauthenticated through subsequent research.

The biggest tell is chronology.

The most thoroughly documented and publicized example is Virgin and Child (also known as Madonna of the Veil), purchased in 1930 by Lord Lee of Fareham for $25,000 and gifted to The Courtauld Gallery, London in 1947. According to published research by the National Gallery in London, scholars such as the Medici Society and art critic Roger Fry lauded its mastery. But the Madonna did look quite a bit like Jean Harlow, an eminent film star during the era.

The pigments were tested once the Courtauld acquired the work, revealing that the Madonna’s robe was painted with a Prussian blue that indicated it was at least post-18th century pigment, and finely ground by a machine in the modern era. Decades later, in 1994, 19th century pigments, some as late as 1862, suggested the painting was at least 350 years too late. Further inconsistencies around framing and strategic cracks, discolorations, and drilled wormholes suggest it was “intended to deceive”.

The painting was thus attributed to forger Umberto Giunti (1886–1970), who taught in Siena at their Institute of Fine Art, and was believed to have sought inspiration at the Uffizi Gallery in Florence.

Myriad stories of deception continue throughout the showcase. A Nazi-friendly Vermeer forger (Han van Meegeren), a boastful Brit named Eric Hebborn, and still more stories abound in the captions, making this show worth seeing, if only to learn the tricks of the forgery trade.

For all the artwork on view, there are still many more fakes and forgeries out there, even in recent times. An infamous case was that of Knoedler Gallery’s Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko, and Robert Motherwell forged works, wherein the pigments were successfully dated to modern times and traced to a Chinese national named Pei-Shen Qian who was then living in Queens.

In Europe, Wolfgang Beltracchi duped equally influential collectors, having his wife pose in sepia-toned photos to create provenance of a long lost relative.

Then there was the recently publicized case of Norval Morrisseau, the Canadian Ojibwe artist whose legacy was co-opted by multiple complexities, notably an alleged fraud ring perpetuated by Gary Lamont. Morrisseau’s estate struggles with the ‘House of Morrisseau’ works versus those by the ring, not to mention fielding allegations by inaccurate media depictions and haters from all camps.

Ultimately, the Courtauld show is most interesting for its conceptual roots. No one work can truly embody what it means to be fake, but a discriminating eye and a penchant for poignant stories has the power to clean up a potentially very dirty market.