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In a couple of weeks the second art crime symposium kicks off at Wellington’s City Gallery. The art crimes under discussion don’t involve the production and presentation of bad art but rather the theft, forgery and trafficking of any art. No doubt there’ll also be room to talk over some of the serious (the armed theft of a Tissot painting from the Auckland Art Gallery), the opportunistic (the removal of a £1,000 painting in 1908 from the NZ Academy of Fine Arts and consequent payment to an ‘A G Ransom’ to get it back), the destructive (the slashing of the Robert McDougall Art Gallery’s painting Glasgerion by G Sheridan in 1944) and the ludicrous (Dr Jack Rucinski convincing Robert McDougall director John Coley that he had found Psyche, a painting that went missing in 1942 - when he certainly had not).
Hopefully there will also be time enough to explore the logistics of one of the most audacious art thefts in New Zealand’s history: the disappearing of a life-sized set of seven nativity figures nicked from a storage facility in Taihape. Joseph, Mary and Jesus et al were the work of Martin Roestenburg, the sculptor who also made the too-big-to-be-stolen giant statue Our Mother of Lourdes in Paraparaumu.
The symposium starts on 15 October and you can book here.
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
“ 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
