Art Crime

Terrorists, Tomb Raiders, Forgers and Thieves

Noah Charney, Noah Charney, Noah Charney

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137407573
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology of Religion
• Index: Social Sciences

Since the Second World War, art crime has shifted from a relatively innocuous, often ideological crime, into a major international problem, considered by some to be the third-highest grossing criminal trade worldwide. This rich volume features essays on art crime by the most respected and knowledgeable experts in this interdisciplinary subject.

Part I

Forgers: Fakes and Forgeries

Introduction to Part I

Noah Charney

American art forger John D. Re, recently convicted of fraud, having forged and sold scores of paintings, since 2005, ostensibly by the likes of Willem de Kooning and Jackson Pollock, for a total of around $1.9 million, was not trying to be subtle.¹ With the fruits of his illicit labors, he bought a submarine, docked it at a public marina and invited The New York Times to profile him. You’d almost think that he was asking to be caught.

As a professor specializing in art crime, having for many years taught a postgraduate course on art forgery (and having recently published a book on it, The Art of Forgery),² I’ve studied the cases of dozens of forgers whose careers span thousands of years. Re is the first to have used his ill-gotten gains to buy a submarine. This was not a very good idea on Mr. Re’s part, if he wished to continue his lucrative criminal career in secret. But my extensive research into the minds of art forgers tells me that he very likely did not. For most known art forgers, from Michelangelo (yes, that Michelangelo) to Elmyr de Hory, triumph, fame and fortune actually came after they were caught.

The ostentatious submarine was not ultimately Re’s undoing, though his flamboyant high profile suggests a level of hubris ill-advised for professional criminals who wish to remain under the radar (or perhaps, in this case, sonar). He was finally found out because one of the buyers sent a purported Pollock for authentication, and was told that it contained materials that had not yet been invented when Pollock was painting. In criminological parlance, these are referred to as “time-bombs”: anachronisms that can give away a forgery. The buyer then sent 45 paintings, all acquired from Re and supposedly by Pollock, and received word that not one was authentic, all containing time-bombs, such as the use of a paint that was not available when the work was supposedly created. This may seem like a careless error on Re’s part, or a brash assumption that no one would forensically examine his forgeries. But, in the case of quite a few famous forgers, these time-bombs were knowingly inserted. For the remarkable thing about the psychology of so many art forgers is that they wish to be caught.

The majority of the hundred-odd forgers whom I have studied share a remarkably consistent motivational profile. Most began as failed artists, whose original works were somehow dismissed by the art world. They turned to forgery to act out a sort of passive-aggressive revenge against the art community, which they perceive as a collective entity that has conspired to deny their talent, and which they will “show up” by creating works that will be praised and accepted, as their originals were not. Passing off a forgery provides a twofold sense of artistic fulfilment. On the one hand, if a forger’s work is taken to be that of a great master (Picasso, for example, who is the most-forged artist in history), then the forger considers that they are just as good as Picasso. On the other, the forger demonstrates the fallibility or foolishness of the so-called experts, who cannot tell their forgery from an original – the implication by extension being that these experts were foolish to dismiss the forger’s original creations in the first place.

But both of these victories are private. Unless the forgery is revealed as such then, for all intents and purposes, to the world at large, the work in question is authentic. It is only when the forger is caught and speaks out about their fraudulent oeuvre that the experts are shown to have erred, and the forger is praised publically for his talent. The media loves art forgers, seeing them as congenial, quirky pranksters, more than criminals. To be fair, many are, and they are certainly less damnable than art thieves and antiquities looters, with their links to organized crime and even terrorism. Art forgers tend to work alone or in pairs (a forger and a front man who passes off the works as authentic through one of a series of confidence tricks, usually far more ingenious than Mr. Re’s superficial story about stumbling across 70 abstract expressionist masterpieces). Without the connections to organized crime, art forgers rarely wreak havoc beyond their immediate victims (wealthy collectors or institutions), and their income does not fund the drug and arms trades, as can be the case with stolen and looted art. Their relative harmlessness, on the grand scale of criminal activity, and their undoubted ingenuity and occasional real talent, means that the media and general public alike see them as admirable, Robin Hood types, pulling the wool over the eyes of the wealthy elite (with the implication that the wealthy elite deserve to have their wool pulled by a working-class prankster). Numerous forgers have gone on to achieve riches and fame after serving a minimal prison sentence, welcomed by the general public. Wolfgang Beltracchi has best-selling memoirs and is a sought after speaker. John Myatt has his own TV series on Sky Arts in which he teaches amateur painters how to forge, and George Clooney bought the film rights to his life story – he now sells “original fakes,” signed with his name but in the style of famous artists, for six figures. This type of crime, it seems, can pay.

With little disincentive, in terms of harsh sentences and public condemnation, even if you are caught, and with a measure of personal revenge successful only if you are caught, it stands to reason that some forgers would not mind going public, while others, even if at a subconscious level, might actually wish to be found out. Many have intentionally come forward. Michelangelo allowed his biographer to tell the story of his teenage career as a forger of “ancient Roman” statues, which sold for much more than his originals would, before he had made a name for himself by sculpting his Pieta. Ken Perenyi recently released a fine memoir, Caveat Emptor, that describes his decades-long career as a forger – before his book came out, few had heard of him; suddenly he was profiled in The New York Times as perhaps America’s greatest forger. The Santa Clausian British forger, Tom Keating, coined the term “time-bombs” and inserted them intentionally (such as the use of titanium white pigment in works purported to have been painted centuries before it was invented) for several reasons: to have something obvious to point to that experts missed (so as to show them up), to protect himself (unsuccessfully, it turned out) against accusations of fraud (he assumed that such an obvious anachronism would shift the blame away from him and onto the authenticator for making such an error), and in order to be able to reveal himself as the artist, should he wish to do so. Like John Myatt, he was awarded with a popular TV series on ITV in Britain, in which he forged on-camera. Icilio Federico Joni fooled the greatest connoisseur of Renaissance art, Bernard Berenson. Rather than being upset, Berenson determined to meet the artist whose “Sienese Gothic” altarpiece had taken him in, and the two became friendly. Joni took to intentionally planting his latest forgery so that Berenson would be called in to authenticate it. And the German postwar forger, Lothar Malskat, was outraged when no one believed that he had painted what seemed to be newly discovered medieval frescoes in a German church. Even when he pointed out the time-bombs he had inserted (a painting of a turkey which, being indigenous to North America, had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages, and a portrait of Marlene Dietrich, who definitely had not been seen in Europe in the Middle Ages), no one believed him. So he took the dramatic step of suing himself, in order to have the public, courtroom stage in which to demonstrate that the frescoes were indeed his own, and not centuries-old.

Until he comes out with a memoir, or some equivalent, we will not know whether John Re fits into this psychological profile of so many of history’s most successful art forgers. But with his conspicuous consumption, particularly involving his submarine (which was written up in 2007 in The New York Times, under the headline “A Sea Toy James Bond Would Envy”),³ suggests that he was either foolhardy or, at some level, was willing to be caught. For only then could this part-time painter, who liked to dabble in the abstract expressionist style, achieve recognition for having fooled a number of collectors, who genuinely thought that he painted as well as Pollock.⁴

This first part looks at fakes and forgeries, which are technically different: forgeries are wholesale objects, made from scratch in fraudulent imitation of something else, whereas fakes are pre-existing objects that are altered in some fraudulent way to increase their value. This is the technical, criminological definition, though in practice, the terms are often used interchangeably. Fakes and forgeries tend to be quite distinct from other categories of art crime because, in the main, they do not involve organized crime, but are perpetrated by individuals or pairs – art theft and antiquities looting is generally the realm of organized criminal groups, and therefore is more “serious,” because it funds and fuels their other activities, including the drug and arms trades. They are, however, a serious fraud crime unto themselves (for a great deal more detail, see Noah Charney The Art of Forgery), and raise fascinating issues, both artistic and philosophical.

The voice of art critics tends to be underrepresented in scholarly and professional publications, and this is a great shame. Critics are “in the field,” as it were, in the art market, among galleries, museums and collectors. The theoretical insight about art, and the ranking of aesthetics, is of particular interest when it comes to questions of authenticity and forgery. For this reason, Blake Gopnik’s thoughtful and introspective essay is of great value. Gopnik has been one of New York’s leading art critics for several decades, and is known for writing that is part philosophy, part art criticism, part art history, but always lucid, intelligent and compelling. In his chapter, Gopnik revisits his most controversial piece of writing, a New York Times op-ed called “In Praise of Forgery.” By looking back on his past work (something that we authors rarely have the opportunity, or humility, to do), he plumbs deeper and unearths some fascinating ideas, such as the concept that the art market did not “spur the discipline of art history,” as is commonly thought, but the other way around: that art history helped to influence the art market, but did so before it was established as a scholarly field. This is something that I discuss in my book on the influence of Giorgio Vasari, to whom we owe a great many things, among them the way we value art, how we categorize it historically and stylistically, and how museums are curated. Gopnik’s essay, which would find a happy home in a book on the philosophy of aesthetics, also breaks ground by discussing the artwork itself as a mere material memento of a creative moment, an idea – meaning that it was the idea that was important, with the resulting artwork of secondary interest. This borrows theory from 20th century conceptual art, with Joseph Beuys wandering a gallery with timber wolves as the act, and the only “collectible” element being photographs and videos of the performance, and applies it to all art, from ancient through the Renaissance and beyond – a truly eye-opening idea.

Criminologists Duncan Chappell and Saskia Hufnagel examine one of the highest-profile, and most flamboyant of recent forgers, Wolfgang Beltracchi. Beltracchi and his gang passed off dozens of forged paintings, and made international headlines when actor Steve Martin ended up with one of his paintings. Beltracchi and his wife are not only unrepentant but have thrived on their post-arrest publicity, penning a pair of best-selling memoirs. This chapter provides a concise case study of the Beltracchi Affair and its place in the pantheon of forgery schemes.

Simon Cole examines the similarities between fingerprint analysis as a means of identifying a person, and art connoisseurship as a means of identifying the authorship of an artwork. To do so, he finds a case in which the two meet: that of Peter Paul Biró, whose story was famously told in a 2010 New Yorker article by David Grann. While we tend to think that finding a fingerprint is cut and dried evidence of someone’s presence (at a crime scene or in making a work of art), Cole shows that even experts consider it much more subjective than we might believe, more akin to an art expert’s fallible estimation of who made a given painting than a hard-edged, objective fact. Indeed, as he states, “virtually all legal scholars and forensic scholars now agree that all forensic evidence is inherently probabilistic,” which will come as a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on Contributors
• Part I: Forgers: Fakes and Forgeries
• Part II: Terrorists: Policing, Investigation and Terrorism
• Part III: Tomb Raiders: Archaeology and Antiquities Looting
• Part IV: Thieves: Art Law, War and Policy
• Index