Three times weird

1  Artist claims he never painted a work and the courts don’t believe him

Peter Doig has made it clear that a painting owned by an ex prison warder was not by him. In fact, says Doig, who did serve time himself, it was by another Doig (no relation) serving time at the same time as Doig, as it were. But the courts disagree and now Doig (the Peter variety) is being sued for denying authorship and is being required to prove he didn’t paint the work. OK
 
2  Artist says he never painted the work and the BBC reckons he’s wrong

A BBC reality show about fakes has claimed that a Lucian Freud painting that the artist has disowned was, in fact, painted by him. SO THERE.
 
3  Artist claims that fakes painted by a forger who has confessed to making them are in fact his

Korean painter Lee Ufan, after inspecting 13 forgeries of his work in a Seoul police station, has claimed, even though the forger has admitted to banging them up, that he could find nothing wrong with them.  SAY WHAT?

Images: top to bottom, Doig, Freud and Ufan

It’s either a fake or a damn clever original

Looks like the practical joke of the year will be courtesy of the University of Auckland’s Gus Fisher Gallery. For one week in November the Gallery will present an exhibition of hand-painted replica masterpieces. This Barbarians-at-the-gate moment comes via Masters student Nate Dunn whose style is long on omg gauche. You can read his outpourings on the ups and downs of getting Replicating Genius off the ground on the exhibition’s blog. As in up, ‘What I love about all these new experiences is that not only do I meet interesting people, but each time I do, a little more of the art world becomes less scary to me’ and down, ‘Emailing venues and applying for spaces ensued, and of all the venues I emailed, I didn’t hear back from a single one’.  

Dunn sees the Gus Fisher exhibition as an opportunity to prove the viability of  ‘a proper museum’ of replicas. The whole project is apparently driven by Dunn’s Masters thesis that is ‘an argument for the creation of a museum of replica paintings’. He’s raising funds for the exhibition on Pledgeme offering rewards like an invitation to ‘a pompous opening night event…’ and a chance to ‘…rub shoulders with other fancy Auckland art supporters.’

The University of Auckland is really being a good sport about all this. You may recall it recently threw its weight behind another fake show featuring ‘life-like’ photographic copies of Rembrandt. This time round there’s some academic rhetoric thrown in as its gallery, the Gus Fisher, claims to ‘foster creative and academic research, encourage curatorial practice…’. And of course who can afford to miss out on the publicity a stunt like this is bound to bring.

Postscript: There is the slightest chance that the whole enterprise is for real and so is itself a fake, as in a fake parody. Oh, oh, if the Replicating genius project is for real, 3D printed copies of various heads will have to roll.

Court out

The Brett Whiteley fake trial which we posted about nearly six years ago has finally ground to a conclusion. Surprise, surprise, the guy who was painting Whiteley copies in his garage was found guilty along with the dealer who sold them on to the rich person. Come June, they'll all be back in court to discuss sentencing.

The trial did bring out some classic statements, so all that time spent was not a complete waste. Expert witness Professor Robyn Sloggett, the director of the University of Melbourne's Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation, for instance, reached deep into her professional lexicon and told the court that while Whiteley had an ‘extraordinary ability to paint birds’ the one in the fake painting looked to her like ‘a wet rag thrown out of a window.’ Just in case the court found this a bit technical, she added that the birds also looked to her ‘like they had been painted by a child …. It’s almost paint by numbers.’ And then to drive the last nail into her complex argument, ‘It’s just not how he worked.’ Experts.

Wendy Whiteley, the artist's ex-wife who had lived with him through most of his productive painting career ,was also clear that the works were not from Whiteley’s hand. ‘He never painted average paintings … because he wasn’t an average artist.’ And so that was that.

But the last word really goes to Whiteley himself who could have saved everyone a lot of time when he said, ‘Never trust an art dealer who'll sit in a room for more than ten minutes with a crooked picture.’ Mind you it’s possible he was thinking of another kind of crooked.

Image: bird in flight aka ‘wet rag’

Trio

Here’s a story we're sorry we missed when we were working up the timeline for the 1987 exhibition When Art Hits the headlines. It front-paged the Otago Evening Star on 26 October 1961 and comes via University of Otago researcher Ali Clarke who tracked down this tale of the Colin McCahon triplets (you can read her original version here)

Over 50 years after pulling the stunt, a couple of ex Otago students admitted to knocking up three copies of Colin McCahon’s Painting 1958. One of that work's claims to fame is that it had shared first prize in the Hays Art Competition in Christchurch the year before to almost universal distain. The co-winners were the more popular Francis Jones and Julian Royd whose reputations have not exactly endured.  Some time after being offered as a gift to the Christchurch Art Gallery and rejected rather publicly, McCahon’s work was put on display in the University of Otago University Student Union.  Some of the students were not impressed in the usual I-could-do-that way and two of them made three copies that they planned to hang with the McCahon. Viewers would then be challenged to pick which was the original.  They saw immediately that it was in fact easy to tell which was the McCahon so they hid it in a broom cupboard to keep the hoax alive.  Lots of laughs at the expense of contemporary art and artists followed until the painting was rehung and the students went back to work. Colin McCahon himself was less than impressed but as the perps were unknown, legal action was ruled out. Although childish, it's still a more benign stunt than the one pulled by the Director of the Dunedin Public Art Gallery 11 years later. He asked the public to paint their own McCahons in the foyer while the Colin McCahon survey show was on in the Gallery. The ‘good’ old days.

Image: the three 'McCahons' as published in the Otago Evening Star (...and thanks for the head's up Z)

Art and money, money and art

“ I got addicted to being a philanthropist.” So said art forger Mark Landis who took taking art museums to the cleaners to new heights. “I went on philanthropic binges in mother’s car.” His idea was simple. Instead of selling his forgeries to museums, he’d donate them. He figured that the museum folk would be so keen to get that Picasso or Lautrec or Cezanne into their collection that they wouldn’t look too hard at the provenance or, indeed, at the art itself. He was right. “He knew right where to hit us, our soft spot art and money.” Leininger rather wonderfully calls the reproductions that he copies his work from the ‘originals’ and, for all the deceit, he turns out to be surprisingly humble. “I’m not really an artist,” he insists. “I like to do arts and crafts in front of the TV.”

We posted on suspicions that Landis (dressed as a priest) was up to something like this back in 2010. Now a documentary by Sam Cullman tells the full story. Art and craft follows Landis as he meets up with his nemesis, an equally obsessive registrar from the Cincinnati Art Museum. You can find out more about Art and craft here.

Image: Mark Landis in Art and craft

The art thing

"The positives of Rembrandt Remastered far outweigh its minor setbacks."
Emma Jameson describing an exhibition of Rembrandt reproductions in EyeContact

“If that’s not a fake it’s a damn clever original.”
Groucho Marx

Out for a duck

Never a blog to avoid the deeper issues in the construction of giant sculptures, here’s an update on a duplicate duck deception that's ruffling feathers in Philadephia. The Philly duck is a copycat of the more famous giant duck made by Dutch artist Florentijn Hofman. He has duplicated this idea more than twenty times around the world by sending plans to have his duck created and inflated. Hofman is extremely put out by the ‘fake’ Philly duck, particularly as the folk in Philadelphia are claiming that it has nothing to do with his one. 'I was shocked', Hofman told reporters. ‘They don't have permission to show my duck.’ This isn’t the first time Hofman’s giant duck idea has been cloned: giant ducks have proved very popular in China. But for Hofman to ‘own’ the big duck concept isn’t so straightforward either. As one American IP lawyer put it, ‘A rubber duck is an extremely common thing, and making a very large one does not necessarily give someone copyright rights in that artistic expression.’ Even more here.

Images: top, one of Hofman’s ducks. Middle, a Chinese version and bottom, the Philly duck

Court out

Can’t get enough of this series on art collectors posing on furniture. This time it’s Australian collector Louise McBride who is currently involved in a case against the auction house Christie’s. The trouble started when McBride purchased the Albert Tucker painting Faun and parrot on the advice of her friend (maybe ex friend now) art consultant Vivienne Sharpe and then goes to re-sell it. Oh, oh, not so easy. It now looks as though the painting might be a fake. Usually this situation plays out with oh-how-embarrasing-let’s-settle-out-of-court but McBride happens to be a barrister and she’s not backing off. This of course means the rest of us get to hear of all the machinations that go on backstage when the rich and art meet. Brilliant.

Top in the embarrassment stakes is the revelation that Christie’s catalogued the Tucker painting's provenance as having been purchased by a Mr Ivan O'Sullivan from the Tolarno Gallery in Melbourne in 1969. Whoops! Tolarno wasn’t even up and running until 1978. Next is the appearance of one Peter Grant. He owned the Irascible Gallery and it turns out that the Tucker passed through his hands at some stage. Unfortunately this is the same Peter Grant who we posted on some years ago in a story about Brett Whiteley, Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson fakes. None of this did a lot for the integrity of the provenance of Faun and parrot. 

But Christie’s defence team has also had the opportunity to put the boot in. Now we’re hearing all about how McBride transferred works from her private collection into her pension fund which you are really not supposed to do. We’ll keep you posted but in the meantime you can read the most entertaining version of the story here.

Talking books

“You can’t imagine what it’s like to paint like – Bernard Tufts. His painting hasn’t developed as much. It’s as if I’m faking Tufts now because I’m painting the same Tufts as I did five years ago! In a way, I have to make more of an effort to be myself than I do to be Derwatt."

Bernard Tufts, artist and forger of Derwatt paintings in Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Under ground

The good old faker spirit

"I looked upon my activities as a contest of wits with world experts, it was intoxicating and I enjoyed every moment of it."

American art forger, Ken Perenyi

Copycat: extreme division

Diana Craig takes Michael Parekowhai’s series The consolation of philosophy: Piko nei te matenga as her own with colour photographs of flower arrangements in the same style of white vase, the same placement in the image, the same large format and the same framing.

Image: Diana Craig's photograph From my mother’s garden in the window of Small Acorns in Wellington

Statues in the news

The American Government has just released a stamp featuring the Statue of Liberty. “So what,” you might ask, “don’t they do that all the time?” They do but usually they use the 125 year old original that welcomes people to New York. This time someone grabbed the first pic they laid their hands on and it turns out it was of the 14 year old Statue of Liberty lookalike outside the New York-New York casino in Las Vegas. The mistake was discovered by a stamp collector not a sculpture buff.

Image: Left, the 'Statue of Liberty' in Las Vegas. Right, her stamp

Size matters

One element that brings a lot of humour to the art museum business is the marketing department. As the years have gone by these departments have drifted away from the core of museum activities to the point where their knowledge of the business often registers somewhere between scant and whatever. As a result public communication by museums often teeters on the hilarious. We saw a great example the other day on one of the billboards celebrating the new Auckland Art Gallery.

First up were the works on display. The exhibition illustrated seems to be some sort of Colin McCahon survey with the feature work being McCahon’s Victory over death 2 that is in the collection of the Australian National Gallery. You can imagine the ANG’s chagrin at this large scale reproduction when you consider they do not reproduce the painting on their website with the explanation: “Unable to display image due to Copyright Restrictions”.

Given the Auckland Art Gallery has one of the greatest collections of works by McCahon, it's hard to understand why it wouldn’t feature one of its own works, perhaps even one that hasn’t been seen for a while. Through the door on the billboard’s virtual gallery we can also see a slice of a Jump painting but hang on, what’s that large red abstract? It’s a Rothko, painting du jour for anyone wanting to plug a generic modern-art hole. This one is Light Red Over Black 1957 and is in the collection of the Tate in Britain.

On the left hand wall are two more ‘McCahon’ paintings, Clouds 3 and another that looks like it was either made by a drunk monkey or has been so distorted that any McCahonishness has long gone. And what about the scale? These two works are famously on paper and weigh in at 1.1 x .75 meters. Based on the Rothko they are shown here at nearly twice that size and shadowed as though they are stretched canvases. And then all the work in these new galleries is hung weirdly close to the floor with not a barrier in sight – definitely not the real museum world of international loans.


The purpose of these billboards and their virtual gallery depictions is to pump up expectations for new spaces and exciting new displays of art. As it's turned out what they offer is a WTF moment for anyone who takes visual art and the Auckland Art Gallery seriously.

Canvassing

In the ever-rolling repeat (blip) repeat (blip) repeat of popular art-is-weird news stories, the fake paintings sold door-to-door is an old favourite. Partly this is because Chinese art skills have produced an endless supply of knock-offs or super-cheap made-in-minutes ‘oils’. 

Hundreds of thousands of these are created annually in the small city of Dafen in the Guangdong Province of southern China. Way back we posted on these painters ability to do very competent copies of contemporary painters but they also make work in many different styles to sell door-to-door round the globe. And it is these latter works that usually create the most fuss as measured in column inches.

The latest version we’ve come across was in the NZ Herald. The story was, “Scammers trying to flog off cheap art works for hundreds of dollars in the Western Bay of Plenty". The report breathlessly continues, “investigations have revealed the art works to be mass produced in China, worth $3 to $6.50 each.” Give that investigator a gold handled magnifying glass.

In any case, the mark-up (i.e. something produced for $3 and sold for $300) won’t strike anyone who buys art as being particularly notable, or anyone who buys spare parts for a car for that matter. If you want to avoid having people at your door, you can order your own bad art  direct from a large selection of art-to-go merchants. 

Image: Art to go factory in Dafen

Art to go

 As we’ve seen before, when architects want to de-bland their virtual interiors, they often reach for contemporary art to give them a lift. Here’s Colin McCahon at work again, this time for Cheshire Architects and their Rhubarb Lane development in Auckland. The paintings on the right wall are After such a matter of life and death (left) I one (middle) and a panel from the Second gate series on the right. Nicking work from the Auckland Art Gallery and Te Papa's collections (I one and Second gate series) without attribution to hang on a mock-up of a luxury apartment feels a bit market-forces-gone-mad. Or are we seeing the birth of a new trend? Virtual fakes.
Thanks for the spot B

Unreal

Chances are if someone were to walk into one of our public art museums unannounced and offer to sell them an artwork, there would be much checking of the work before any cash changed hands. Faking art is not a big business in New Zealand (although that's not to say that it doesn’t happen). 

But what if the person that knocks on your museum’s door is offering to give you the masterpiece? Maybe not so much checking. Apparently that’s exactly what’s been happening in the US over the last 20 or so years. Some guy (either disguised or genuinely kitted out as a Jesuit priest and going under the name of Father Arthur Scott) has been offering fake paintings to museums as gifts, and having them accepted. Why is he doing it? Probably for the same thrill fakers always get from their work; the pleasure of fooling the experts and usually topped up by the pleasure of receiving a big chunk of change as well. 

Image: an example of an easily identified fake. You can read the full and sorry story here.

Other OTN fake art stories:

Aussies hard at it

Film about faking art

Heist

When is a McCahon not a McCahon

Clairmont

The China Syndrome

When good copycats turn bad

Are there a few fake McCahons out there? Has anyone knocked up a bogus Cotton or put a dodgy Hammond out into the market? Over the years there have been rumblings about works that ‘don’t seem right.’ Just last year art dealer John Gow went public, convinced a McCahon Waterfall painting was suspect and after a fuss the work was withdrawn from auction. That incident aside, genuine fakes, or ones that are brought to account, are fairly rare.

Not so much in Australia where a number of wrong works have been discovered recently and some of them even destroyed after a court order. The preferred artist for copycatting appears to be Brett Whiteley which is not surprising given his prices at auction. The latest it’s-a-fake accusation has been laid at the door of Orange Lavender Bay which was sold for $1.3 million to a …wait for it ….a Sydney car dealer. It gets better. The guy who sold it to him was named Playfoot and he, in turn, got it from a Mr. Gant who was the bloke who sold the three fake drawings (by Charles Blackman and Robert Dickerson) that were bonfired. Like most suspect works, Orange Lavender Bay looks like a lesser version of another original Whiteley painting. It has been pronounced a fake by the Whiteley estate and failed forensic testing.

Images: Top Brett Whiteley Big Orange (Sunset), 1974. Bottom, not Brett Whiteley Orange Lavender Bay

Snort

In an art-is-where-you-find-it moment, a not-very-competent replica of the World Cup trophy turned up at Colombia's Bogotà airport on its way to an address in Madrid. Turned out the ‘trophy’ was made of a paste of cocaine powder and acetone which put its value at around $2.2 million, on the street that is.

The sky is falling

A couple of years ago we posted on the copy painters of China. Even then they were into copying what seemed to us to be unlikely contemporary artists like On Kawara and we jokingly warned of the possibility of copies of NZ works being produced. Now, via a conveniently anonymous tip, we have heard rumours that paintings by a New Zealand artist have been commissioned in China for sale in New Zealand. Of course fakes are not new to the New Zealand art market but skilled copiers like those in China may well be able to turn out paintings that convince unsuspecting punters. Hopefully the authenticity sieve of our auction houses and dealers will save all but the foolhardy from a wetting.

Signature style

Here’s a lookalike story from the dark side. Master con man John Drewe and artistic accomplices like John Myatt are the subjects of Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo’s investigation Provenance: How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art. The book examines how Drewe managed to get forgeries of works by artists like Jean Dubuffet, Nicolas de Stael, Marc Chagall, Graham Sutherland, Ben Nicholson and Alberto Giacometti accepted as genuine by the British art establishment. His mastery of the all-important archival documentation of the works and judicious gifts to institutions were among his tools. Salisbury and Sujo conclude that over 100 of the fake paintings are still in circulation. On a TV chat show, anxious to prove that not all his principles had gone down the drain, John Myatt made a play for artistic credibility. He told the interviewer that if someone came to him with one of his fakes and he knew that if he admitted he’d painted it they would lose “a whole lot of money”, he’d keep mum. “What kind of person would I be if I ever took pleasure in something like that? If someone comes to me with a painting I know I’ve done, to my dying days, I’ll deny it.” On behalf of collectors everywhere, thanks John.