
Britain's master forger - YeGoblynQueenne
https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2017/may/27/wasnt-cock-a-hoop-fooled-experts-britains-master-art-forger
======
pthreads
“The problem is that I can’t find my own style,” he says. “Whenever I think of
an idea for a piece, I know who it’s copying. I always see something of
someone else in everything I do. I don’t have an original style.”

That is quite fascinating to me. Until I read that paragraph I was wondering
why he wouldn't do originals given his talent. The article also reminds me of
a talented American forger. I forget his name but he managed to fool people
for a long time. But, if I remember correctly, he was never prosecuted because
he never sold any of his paintings. He would donate it to museums as
originals. Boy, were they embarrassed when the forgeries came to light.

~~~
knight17
Very fascinating. I think it is Mark Landis that you have in mind:

"It obviously isn't a crime to give a picture to a museum, and they treated me
like royalty. One thing led to another, and I kept doing it for 30 years,"
says Mark Landis, one of the most prolific art forgers in US history.

\- America's most generous con artist
[http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31818367](http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-31818367)

I think this would make a really good film. An artist who is clever, talented,
persuasive, calculating, and just want to do some good by donating 'forged'
art to museums.

~~~
pthreads
That's him. Best part: "Two years later, the University of Cincinnati put on
an exhibition of Landis's counterfeit works. It was curated by Leininger, and
opened - deliberately - on April Fool's Day. Landis was the guest of honour."

I believe there is a documentary on him.

------
techrich
This is the bbc documentary about it, very worth a watch!

[https://youtu.be/S-v3sDXmRHk](https://youtu.be/S-v3sDXmRHk)

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anigbrowl
Art forgers should be praised rather than imprisoned. Being a painter myself
I'm very interested in them from a technical point of view; you'll learn a lot
more from a forger than you can from most critics.

The fact is that the demand for art (as a Veblen Good) far exceeds the supply,
and dealers are not the most scrupulous of people. The _last_ art dealer in a
chain of ownership in a forgery is always very angry about the deception and
the damage to the art world yadda yadda - because s/he has had to return the
money from that sale and suffer the reputational damage of having been fooled,
although that is not so bad, as authenticators are contracted in and the
dealer will get sympathy from fellow dealers plus some free publicity. So the
angst is more about opportunities foregone than a significant loss in most
cases. Between the forger and the last dealer in the chain there are usually
several others who did very well for themselves, everyone knows this, and
nobody talks about it.

Here's how the forgery market works. It may sometimes be a previously unknown
painting as in the example of the fake Leonardo from this article, but more
often than not forgers produce a 'lost' painting - one that is known to have
existed at some time but has since disappeared. It may have been destroyed, it
may be owned by someone unaware of its true value who thinks it's just a
pretty piece of junk, it may have been stolen (but they're usually hunted
for), it may have been forgotten about in an old disused building, or it may
have been painted over by the original artist who didn't think it was that
great and either hated it or was too broke to buy a fresh canvas, both of
which are common occurrences. It's known to have existed from photographs, or
from letters, or because it was painted in another painting, like this
example: [https://www.wikiart.org/en/georges-seurat/the-
models-1888](https://www.wikiart.org/en/georges-seurat/the-models-1888) in
which Seurat quotes his more famous painting _Dimancha a la Grand Jatte._

Every famous artist has a _catalogue_ , which is the record used by historians
and dealers to index _everything_ the artist is known to have ever produced,
its size, materials, special features (eg if it has a handmade frame or a big
wine stain on the back of the canvas or whatever), date of origin, associated
paperwork such as a bill of sale, current location and so forth. The catalogue
includes available details of lost and missing works and to be entered in the
catalogue every work must be authenticated by a professional who knows the
artists' work, history etc., and knows all the different things to look for.
Think of it as a bit like a blockchain for art. Now, authentication is
necessarily subjective, although the technical methods are always improving
(spectroscopy of various kinds, cross-references with other pigments known to
have been preferred by the same artist, stroke analysis and so on). Once
something is authenticated it can be sold, and I'm sure you don't need me to
sketch out the various economic incentives in play: if not, consider the sale
a few weeks ago of a previously unknown painting by Basquiat that solds to a
Japanese collector for $110 million.

A _great_ deal of the value of a painting is not only in the art work itself
but in the story of the painting which is what gives it cultural significance.
Art dealers are marketers and like all marketers they specialize in finding
suppliers, matching them with buyers, and crafting _a narrative that will
arouse the buyer 's desire._ I cannot overstress the importance of this. The
art value of a piece consists of its aesthetic impact, _maybe_ its
representational accuracy (much less important since the invention of the
camera, for obvious reasons), and its historical interest as a reflection of
the conditions under which it was produced. Articulating these factors is the
creative contribution of the dealer.

For example, here is a painting by X - maybe you like it, maybe not. Here is
the same painting, painted by X in the last year of her life. Oh, that's sort
of interesting and tragic. Here is the same painting by X, painted in the last
year of her life before she died of AIDS. Oh, that says something about both X
and the times she lived in. Here is the same painting by X, painted in the
last year of her life before she died of AIDS, because she could not afford
medical treatment for her condition. Oh, very tragic, now you're sort of
emotionally involved, aren't you? Here is the last painting by X, painted in
the last year of her life before she died of AIDS, for which she could not
afford medical treatment because her country was subject to sanctions and only
way she could have got treatment was to leave the country, oh my god, that
poor woman. Here is the same painting by X - who was so short of money that
she used her own AIDS-infected blood as the background color for the
image...is it not imbued with tragedy? Does it not somehow _breathe_ with the
rapidly diminishing _life of the artist herself_? Whatever image you had in
your head at the beginning of this paragraph, you feel differently now, don't
you? Maybe saddened, maybe contemptuous, maybe disgusted, but the act of
imagination has changed you.

This is the difference between craft and art: the artist spends themselves in
putting gobs of paint on canvas, strikes of chisel on stone, notes in a
composition, words on a page, arrangement of detritus on a dais, to evoke some
feeling in _you_ that you have have never had before, that you may feel more
fully alive.

The dealers, then, are kinds of artists themselves; they take a work, of
lesser or greater power, and some facts about it that sketch its provenance,
and from these they create a rich tapestry of feeling and cultural
significance. And in a world of mass and increasingly automated production (a
revolting case in point:
[https://www.nextrembrandt.com/](https://www.nextrembrandt.com/)) it is this
uniqueness and the air of historical significance that attaches to it that
exemplifies true scarcity rather than the artificially induced kind. Our
economic thought is fundamentally erected upon a rapidly eroding foundation of
scarcity, and so, paradoxically, it is only through an increase in the supply
of scarcity that we can mop up the oversupply of wealth that threatens to
drown the system in the signifiers of its own abundance, and wash away the
power structures we have erected thereon.

I put it to you, then, that forgers are the greatest artists of all, for they
create not merely the canvas but the dream of meaning that surrounds it, and
this is why they are decried as wicked and dangerous and put in prison:
because if the public were to learn how to dream their own dreams of meaning,
what other upheavals might result?

~~~
pmoriarty
99% of what you wrote was about art dealers and the art market. I really
struggle to see what bearing any of that has on your central claim that _"
forgers are the greatest artists of all"_.

As an artist myself I find that claim almost insulting. A forger might have
great technique, but in as far as he copies art rather than creates it from
scratch himself, he's just acting as a sophisticated xerox machine or camera.
I really don't see what lifts that sort of mechanical act even to the status
of art, much less a greater art than that of the artist who created the
original.

Also, to suggest that the marketing by art dealers or art's reception by
consumers has any bearing on the "greatness" of the art they're buying and
selling is less than convincing. Sure, there is more and less popular art, and
art that rich people (many of them mere speculators) are willing to pay a lot
for (often simply because they calculate they'll make a profit when they
sell). But what on earth does that have to do with how great the art is?

If Van Gogh's art had remained as obscure and unappreciated as on the day he
died (having only sold a single painting in his life, and that to his
brother), would his art have been any less great?

It seems ridiculous to me to claim that the vagaries of the art market
determine how great an work of art is.

To me art dealers and other middle-men are parasites and signs of inefficiency
and friction in connecting consumers directly to producers (artists), and a
necessary evil because so many artists hate business and want to focus on
their art. That critics and dealers play a role in determining how popular art
gets is symptomatic of the art world's pathology, not something to be praised.

~~~
jacquesm
It's arguably _much_ harder to create a copy of a painting that can pass as a
master than it is to create a new painting. It's a bit like the difference
between a bad pianist playing his own songs and a concert pianist playing
something he didn't compose but knows so well he can no longer play it wrong.

There is enormous skill involved in the latter, and yet you could easily
belittle concert pianists as 'nothing more than biological player pianos' by
your analogy.

~~~
pmoriarty
It takes a lot of technical skill at copying, yes. But that's not enough for a
number of reasons.

First, that's not the same as the skill in creating the artwork to begin with.
For example, an artist make create an original painting from a live model or
from his imagination. The copier may have no such ability, or may have a very
weak ability at doing that. They might be great at taking an artwork that's
already made and copying it, though. Pretty different skills.

Then there's the choice of subject matter, the composition, what of
him/herself the artists brings to the art, the artist's own style (not the
style of some other artist he/she is copying) are all things that a pure
copier does not have and can not bring to the creation of the copy with it
ceasing to be a faithful copy.

Now, if the forger is, like the subject of the article in question, creating
some of his own works in the style of another artist, without outright copying
their work, then they are being more of an artist in their own right rather
than just a copying machine. But they're still far removed from making their
own art -- something the forger in the article was all too well aware of.

 _" I view my life as a failure. I went the wrong way. I could have done
something useful. If I could have my time again, I’d like to be a teacher at
an art college."_

 _" The problem is that I can’t find my own style," he says. "Whenever I think
of an idea for a piece, I know who it’s copying. I always see something of
someone else in everything I do. I don’t have an original style."_

Some non-artists might not be able to understand this distinction, but it's
crystal clear to most artists.

~~~
theoh
That distinction is very familiar to me. Forgeries are pastiches. Leaving
behind the business of painting, a lot of art these days -- performance,
conceptual --would be equally difficult (or easy) to forge because it
communicates a particular attitude or state of affairs, truthful or phony.
Graphic designers ("commercial artists") or advertising art directors know
that their business is communicating a particular desired state of affairs,
regardless of whether it actually "obtains" as they say in philosophy.

If you accept that all the things we call art are very broadly and
fundamentally concerned with that (making a convincing statement, not
necessarily a likeness of reality) then it's really clear how a class of
skilled imitators can exist who can't come up with the "opinions" themselves.
Why anyone should care whether a particular work is a product of original
thought or not is the big, dangerous issue that forgery raises.

------
joyofdata
[http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3212568/](http://www.imdb.com/title/tt3212568/)

It's a documentary about Wolfgang Beltracchi - an artist who made millions
forging paintings and eventually went to prison for it. You just have to like
the guy.

The flick is currently available on Netflix Germany.

------
askvictor
There's an excellent documentary by Orson Welles called 'F for Fake' on art
forgery if this sort of thing interests you.

------
skookumchuck
If you can't tell the difference, is there any difference?

~~~
kleer001
And you've just summed up the entire ouvre of Phillip K. Dick.

My take is that there's ever only structural and/or decorative differences
between two instances of a type and those differences can be measured
objectively.

