art fraud

art fraud, the deliberately false representation of the artist, age, origins, or ownership of a work of art in order to reap financial gain. Forgery of a famous artist’s work is the best-known kind of art fraud, but fraud may also result from the knowing misattribution of the age or origin of a work of art—if, for example, an art dealer were to falsely assert that a statue was from 5th-century-bce Greece or that a vase was from the Chinese Ming dynasty, for the purpose of making a greater profit, because works from those particular regions or time periods are deemed more valuable on the contemporary art market. Art theft for resale is also a form of art fraud.

The copying of famous works of art dates to the origins of the history of art collecting and therefore to the beginning of the history of art. In the ancient world, replicas of famous works were made in order to satisfy demand by collectors for such works. The bronze Spear Bearer (c. 450–440 bce) by Greek sculptor Polyclitus, for example, achieved great renown for its perfect proportions and beauty. As a result, it was often copied in marble for Roman collectors in subsequent centuries. The copies, which are all that survived into the 21st century, made no pretense of being the original or having been made by Polyclitus.

The notion of intellectual property—the idea that artists’ works belong to them—dates at least to medieval Europe, though history records examples of the concept as early as ancient Greece. It had taken hold sufficiently during the Renaissance for Michelangelo to take umbrage when his work was misattributed. It was reported that when he discovered that another artist was receiving credit for sculpting the famous Pietà (now in St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome), Michelangelo returned with his chisel and added his signature across the centre of the sculpture, on the prominent sash across Mary’s upper body (in Italian): “Michelangelo Buonarroti, Florentine, made this.”

In the 18th and 19th centuries, the mania for classification and study of the past resulted in an upsurge in forgeries as the art market adjusted to accommodate the new interest in the artistic past. That interest in the classification of the past also led to the founding of academic disciplines such as the history of art. The study of art history and the creation of agreed-upon bodies of work for artists and eras, as well as advances in science, made possible in the 20th century the winnowing out of forgeries, fakes, and misattributions from authentic works. As art historians gained more knowledge about the past and the styles, materials, and working conditions of artists and historical epochs, inauthentic and fraudulent works were more readily exposed.

Detecting fraud

Despite those advances, the detection of fraudulent art remains a complex undertaking. It is particularly difficult to weed out forgeries in the work of modern artists whose large numbers of works and superstar statuses make them especially attractive to those who commit fraud. Pablo Picasso, for example, was a prolific artist, creating a huge number of works on canvas and on paper as well as sculptures and ceramics. Considering his vast output and the varying styles and media in which he worked, scholars have had difficulty establishing a definitive corpus for him. The prestige associated with owning a Picasso and the difficulty of attribution, especially for a drawing, made and continues to make fraudulent representations of his work hard to police.

Salvador Dalí, another 20th-century artist who created a large number of works on paper, has also been a target for fraud. Dalí further complicated matters when he signed blank pieces of paper before the print runs of his work. By applying his signature to something that had not yet been created, he himself subverted the notion of authenticity.

In the late 20th century, art fraud was propelled by a rise in the popularity of art as an investment. With more collectors and museums vying for an ever-smaller number of works by noted artists or from esteemed eras in the history of art, motivations for fraud were exponentially increased. At the same time, modern science made it possible to authenticate works of art to a greater degree than at any time in the past, though even those scientific tests led at times to ambiguous results.

Forgers of older artworks sometimes attempt to override forensic methods by using or plausibly imitating authentic materials. One of the best-known cases is that of forger Han van Meegeren, who used a modern paint mixture but mimicked an older technique to a sufficient degree that his paintings were certified, as he intended, as originals by the 17th-century Dutch master Johannes Vermeer. Even though further testing can reveal that a paint’s age has been masked, museums and collectors often simply accept initial results.

Another reason that art fraud is difficult to control is that the art market is enormous, unwieldy, and greatly varied, embracing items from Victorian buttons to 6th-century Greek vases and from medieval pilgrim badges to contemporary photographs. Business is often conducted under the veil of secrecy, with buyers wishing to remain anonymous to avoid the attention of burglars and other opportunists. It would be logistically impossible to monitor all of the transactions between dealers, private collectors, and museums that are in the business of acquiring art. Suspected art forgeries are generally considered on a case-by-case basis, because they can usually be identified only by an expert in the field. But it is not unusual for two experts to have wildly different opinions of the authenticity of the same object, based in each case on reputable evidence.