ART FORGERY

ROSEMARY HILL IS ONE OF MY FAVORITE writers in London Review of Books. This time around, her September 7, 2023, article ‘Art and Artifice’ reviews what she calls “the Courtauld Gallery’s immensely entertaining exhibition Art and Artifice: Fakes from the Collection (until 8 October).” 

It’s a pity that the Courtauld and I are a vast continent and ocean apart, because the show sounds like good fun. I encourage you to search out this LRB and enjoy Hill’s commentary. Here I glean a tidbits about particular forgers. 

Tom Keating/Sexton Blake. A particularly enterprising one was Tom Keating, a Brit who even invented the monogram Sexton Blake via little S.B.s in the bottom right corners of his works. 

A double forging, as Hill notes the phony name Sexton Blake is rhyming slang for “fake.”

Hill’s S.B. discovery came about when she found a watercolor she liked in “a pleasantly ramshackle antique shop” (the best kind, I’d conjecture). “When I got home,” she says, “I saw there were brown mould spots on the sky area and I asked a picture framer I knew, who also did restoration, to see if he could stabilise it. He returned it to me with a curious expression, somewhere between a smile and a smirk. There was, he explained, no mould. The brown spots had been painted on deliberately.”

“My anonymous little picture,” Hill added philosophically, “had acquired an author and a story. It was part of the newspaper sensation of the 1970s and 1980s which saw Keating’s criminal career exposed, largely through the diligence of the art critic Geraldine Norman, who had become suspicious about the number of Samuel Palmers coming on the market. She later helped Keating write his autobiography and he went on to have a career as a minor celebrity with his own television show.”

Now there’s an enterprising rascal.

A Philosophical Aspect. “On the whole,” Hill writes, “I liked it as much as an image, but I felt fonder of it as an object for knowing its history.” She then turns to whether knowing the latter should affect its aesthetic judgement: “In the philosophical debates about the psychology of perception that raged in the late 18th century, Uvedale Price made the point that a slight sketch by a great artist is always more sought-after than a finished piece by an obscure one entirely because of its associational value.” 

The Constable Family. Hill shares a tale about a small unfinished watercolour seascape of John Constable contrasted to “his big ‘six-footer’ canvases. If, however, paper analysis reveals it to be a work of the 1840s, probably by Constable’s son Lionel, it suddenly looks rather thin and uninteresting.”

Just such a forgery in the manner of John Constable appears in the exhibition, “with a caption explaining that Constable’s family came under pressure from dealers after his death in 1837 to attribute as many works to him as possible.”

“The aesthetics of association,” Hill observes, “translate into hard cash.” 

Bequeathed by Unwary Collectors. Hill notes, “It is hard to see how Mark Gambier Parry, whose bequest included a specimen of 19th-century Venetian tourist pottery from which someone had scraped off the factory mark, could ever have believed it was a piece of Renaissance majolica with a contemporary portrait of the doge Marco Barbarigo.”

Wikipedia cites that “Barbarigo was elected as Doge of Venice in September 1485 to succeed Doge Giovanni Mocenigo, who was possibly poisoned. Marco died in August 1486, less than a year after becoming Doge, probably in a violent dispute….”

Hmm….

Bakelite Faking. Han van Meegeren is another forger of note. Wikipedia describes his innovative technique: “He came up with a scheme of using phenol formaldehyde (Bakelite) to cause the paints to harden after application, making the paintings appear as if they were 300 years old. Van Meegeren would first mix his paints with lilac oil, to stop the colours from fading or yellowing in heat. (This caused his studio to smell so strongly of lilacs that he kept a vase of fresh lilacs nearby so that visitors wouldn’t be suspicious. Then, after completing a painting, he would bake it at 100 °C (212 °F) to 120 °C (248 °F) to harden the paint, and then roll it over a cylinder to increase the cracks. Later, he would wash the painting in black India ink to fill in the cracks.”

Kids, don’t try this at home with mom’s Bakelite treasures. It got Van Meegeren in lots of trouble eventually for, among other things, passing off forgeries to art connoisseurs like Hermann Göring.

What’s more, Hill notes that the Van Meegeren’s “ ‘Vermeers,’ painted in the 1930s and 1940s, with their angular faces and hard shadows, now look positively Art Deco.”

Speaking of which, I recently learned of another interesting exhibit, this one at New York City’s Poster House: “Art Deco: The Commercializing of the Avant-Garde,” opening September 28, 2023. Another show for another day. ds

© Dennis Simanaitis, SimanaitisSays.com, 2023