Sotheby's denies forgery claims

Following allegations that a piece of Chinese calligraphy sold at auction in New York in September 2013 is a fake, Sotheby's have been compelled to issue a statement insisting that the artwork in question is genuine.

By way of background, the Wall Street Journal explained last month:

An ancient Chinese scroll, which went under the hammer for $8.2 million at an art auction in New York, has become the focus of an intense debate between the auction house that sold it, the wealthy collector who bought it, and a trio of museum experts who have denounced it as a fake.  

 

The public spat began Saturday when three art experts from the Shanghai Museum alleged that the calligraphy work, titled “Gong Fu Tie,” [pictured above] was a forgery. Purchased at a Sotheby’s auction in September by collector Liu Yiqian, the piece is attributed to the Song Dynasty poet Su Shi, who lived from 1037 to 1101 and is known by the literary name Su Dongpo.  

The three specialists scrutinized the work in the Xinmin Evening News, a state-owned newspaper based in Shanghai. They added that they plan to release a research paper giving more details about why they believe the piece to be a counterfeit. 

Last week, the three experts published their findings in the China Cultural Relics News. They maintain that the calligraphy is a forgery produced using a special technique from the late Qing Dynasty. In response, Sotheby's insisted that the piece is genuine, and have said that their experts will also provide a more detailed response within 10 days.

This very public debate over the authenticity of an artwork sold at auction to a private collector is quite unusual. It seems particularly rare for a major museum to stand up to such a big auction house. However, it remains to be seen whether the intervention will have any effect on a sale that has already taken place.


Source: Wall Street Journal, 23 December 2013, Want China Times, 4 January 2014

Due diligence in art transactions: are informal authentications enough?

A painting said to be by Jackson Pollock and that was
discredited in 2003.

The scandle of art forgery involving the NY-based Knoedler Gallery is now turning  into a defamation suit at the New York State Supreme Court in Manhattan.

Ann Freedman, the former president of the now-closed Knoedler & Co. Gallery, has filed a defamation lawsuit against the famous art dealer Marco Grassi. He doubted on the New York Magazine whether the Knoedler dealer did any due diligence on the works she previously bought from Glafira Rosales, which turned out to be all fakes. 

Ms. Rosales, a Long Island art dealer, claimed to had got them from a previous collector she refused to identify. 

The Knoedler Gallery sold these works over the next few years to trusting collectors at high prices, based on the Rosales' assumptions that it was the collection of around forty unknown works of famous Abstract Expressionists such as Mark Rothko, Robert Motherwell and Barnett Newman.

The outcome was devastating to the art world, since it was discovered that the artworks were painted in a studio in Queens by a Chinese artist for few thousand dollars for each one. The Knoedler Gallery closed after 160 years of business, after many collectors had filed lawsuits for fraud and breach of warranty or some of them had requested their money back, as Jack Levy did in 2002. The Goldman Sachs co-chairman had bought an untitled Jackson Pollock for $ 2 million, bringing it to the International Foundation for Art Research for authentication. IFAR refused to attribute the painting to Pollock and Mr. Levy asked his money back.

Now the defamation suit challenges Mr. Grassi statements on the New York Magazine where he said that "A gallery person has an absolute responsability to do due diligence, and I don't think she did it. The story of the paintings is totally kooky. I mean, really. It was a great story and she just said, 'this is great".

Ann Freedman affirmed she was diligent in her transaction by receving informal authentications. In many case, the opinions that Ms. Freedman gathered were not official authentication, but opinions from 20 experts among which curators from the Museum of Modern Art, the National Gallery of Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, that told her the paintings were all authentic based on their own evaluation. 

Is gathering informal authentication sufficient for complying with due diligence in art transaction?

Source: Wall Street Journal, September 11, 2013

Forging Art

Need any tips?

A new book by Jonathon Keats (art critic, journalist, novelist and artist) might be right up your street.

"Forged: Why Fakes Are the Great Art of Our Age", which was published last month, is said to "[explore] art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects their stories to broader themes about the role of forgeries in society. From the Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto who faked a Raphael masterpiece at the request of his Medici patrons, to the Vermeer counterfeiter Han van Meegeren who duped the avaricious Hermann Göring, to the frustrated British artist Eric Hebborn, who began forging to expose the ignorance of experts, art forgers have challenged 'legitimate' art in their own time, breaching accepted practices and upsetting the status quo. They have also provocatively confronted many of the present-day cultural anxieties that are major themes in the arts. Keats uncovers what forgeries--and our reactions to them--reveal about changing conceptions of creativity, identity, authorship, integrity, authenticity, success, and how we assign value to works of art. The book concludes by looking at how artists today have appropriated many aspects of forgery through such practices as street-art stenciling and share-and-share-alike licensing, and how these open-source "copyleft" strategies have the potential to make legitimate art meaningful again."

It sounds like a really interesting read.

Master forger takes revenge on the art world

After their arrest nearly a year ago, German art dealers Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi have struck plea bargains in their dramatic forgery trial. The husband and wife team, along with Helene's sister Jeanette, were accused of selling more than 40 forged paintings over a period of 14 years, one of which is said to have sold for $7m. They claimed the works to be by painters such as Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger and Max Pechstein, among others.

Above: a genuine fake Campendonk, which fetched 2.9m euro at auction

Now Wolfgang Beltracchi has reduced his sentence by pleading guilty, and appears to be enjoying his time on the soap box into the bargain. 'I created an original, an unpainted picture by each artist,' Die Welt reports him saying, 'I painted paintings which really shouldn't have been missing from the artists' oeuvres.'

In traditional forger's style the painter, who had minor success painting in his own name, blames the greed of the art world for the scandal and says he wasn't in it for the money alone - despite having made an estimated $20m from the scam.

Thank you, Elizabeth Emerson, for preparing this piece.
For further reading see Art Media Agency here; Artfix Daily here

Giacometti art scam verdict

The first verdict in the one of the largest art frauds in Europe was delivered last week. Relating to the case of more than 1,000 fake sculptures by Alberto and Diego Giacometti which were uncovered by police in Germany in 2009, the FT reports:

“The trial of five suspected forgers has been going on for months in Stuttgart, and now a first verdict has been handed down in court. Three of those in the dock – two art dealers from Wiesbaden and the wife of a Mainz art dealer – have pleaded guilty to fraud and forgery and were sentenced to two years’ prison, suspended, plus a fine for two of them. The others, the Mainz art dealer, and a self-proclaimed “count”, Lothar Wilfried Senka, have admitted some of the charges but deny others; this case continues.

...Stuttgart prosecutor Dr Mirja Feldmann says that the “count”, identified in media reports as Senka, claims the sculptures came from Giacometti’s brother Diego. Feldmann also told me that the Mainz art dealer has admitted that he thought that the sculptures were fakes, but says that he owned the plasters and never had any intention of selling them. He also admitted issuing provenance certificates. A verdict is expected this spring.”

Considering that the total value of the pieces would have been hundreds of millions of pounds, if they were genuine, and that a number of dealers and collectors had already acquired large numbers of the sculptures for an estimated total of €9 million, a suspended prison sentence seems like a rather light penalty given the extent of the fraud.

A selection of the sculptures which were seized:

Source: The Financial Times, 25 February 2011