Forged Paintings and Forged Provenance
Image: Black Rectangle, Red Square, originally date 1915, entered in the Düsseldorf public collection in 2014 as a gift from the Dr. Harald Hack Foundation, a private collection. The work has since been revealed as a forgery after initial tests of the paint samples revealed that the painting could have not been produced before 1955.
Provenance is the first major step in the authentication of an artwork; the documented history of ownership, custody and origin enables researchers to establish a traceable lineage. The importance of provenance in the authentication of artworks has invariably rendered it a target for enterprising forgers and unscrupulous collectors.
Conventional means of provenance forgery include either the complete fabrication of ownership and exhibition history, with documentary evidence oftentimes conveniently unavailable or destroyed, or it is not uncommon for now lost works to be ‘recovered’, the owner of a forged picture frequently attempting for their work to assume the provenance of the lost work. Contemporary practices of attaching digital tags stored on a blockchain to physical artworks attempt to mitigate this issue for future generations. The role of the blockchain, as a tamper-proof and immutable ledger where data can be stored, assumes particular significance in the context of art authentication through Hephaestus Analytical’s unique integration of provenance research, expert connoisseurship, scientific tests and AI stylometric analyses. It remains crucial that their conclusive authentications of artworks correspond to the unique artworks tested. This is achievable through indelibly linking the physical object to a digital record and, perhaps, as authenticity becomes more dominant of a topic in the art world’s cultural discourse, market participants will become less perturbed by the thought of attaching a physical tag to an artwork.
Fraudulent collectors and dealers have, however, employed far more creative techniques of forging an artwork’s provenance than the first two examples suggest. The British forgery duo John Drewe and John Myatt, who together forged around 200 works in the 1980s and ‘90s to an approximate total value of £25m, are known to have doctored archival materials in major institutional libraries including the Tate, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Institute of Contemporary Art, London. This was done so that researchers would inevitably find materials of forged works in known historical documents and catalogues. As the German author Friedrich Teja Bach (2018) has aptly noted, while institutions have been careful to ensure that scholars, or people claiming to be scholars, are unable to take materials out of archives – little to no attention is paid to what has been brought in.
Equally original means of provenance forgery have been found in the context of the early twentieth-century Revolutionary Russian and Ukrainian avant-garde art, a period particularly flooded with forged and misattributed works. Forged catalogues have, for example, been produced for exhibitions that never took place of Russian avant-garde works. As Konstantin Akinsha noted in his recent (2022/2023) IFAR journal article, ‘The Scourge of Russian Avant-Garde Fakes’, a compelling technique of forging an artwork’s provenance involved enterprising dealers targeting the homes of old women who had mirrors or framed works hanging on the walls of their homes. Forged paintings by Kazimir Malevich and Pavel Filonov are known to have been manufactured to fit these unfaded areas exactly, the crooks inviting foreign buyers to the homes of the babushka and sharing a story to suggest the owner’s naïveté as to the ‘real’ market value of such works.
These few examples highlight the vital role of thorough provenance research and due diligence in the art market. A mere glance at a seemingly complete history of ownership is not, by any means, a viable standard in due diligence.
