Genuine Fakes, pt. II

This other post discusses originality, quality, and artistry and the impact it can have on a person's viewing experience, and also an artist's legacy. At the end of the post, I introduced an element that puts tests notions of originality, quality, and artistry: the forgery, a work presented with the intent to deceive.

Art forgeries are usually plots devices in popular entertainment (see this episode of the CBS drama, "The Mentalist"). I don't really think the general populace thinks about art forgeries because most people don't think about how art is made, nor do they think about how art changes hands throughout the centuries. And in general, the art market mystifies everyone - including those who work in it. Art experts estimates about forgeries vary from 15-30% of all art on the market are fakes, and one estimate even claims up to 60%. Fakes have come in the form of antiques, paintings, sculptures, sketches, and archaeological "finds." (Check here and here for some more history of counterfeit art.) There was enough fraudulent art activity that an FBI Art Crime Team was formed to help recover stolen art and detect fakes.

How does someone become an art forger, and how does a fake get onto the market? In the case of British art forger John Myatt (in picture at left), it was a combination of financial need and an unsavory "friend." As Myatt tells the story, he was a high school art teacher with two kids, struggling to make ends meet. For fun, he had painted a few imitation paintings for friends. In 1983, he placed an ad in a newspaper that advertised "genuine fake" paintings, and was contacted by a man named John Drewe. Drewe eventually commissioned more than 200 paintings by Myatt in the style of the modern greats: Monet, Camille Pissaro, Mark Chagall, to name a few. Drewe took these works to the auction houses, and the works were put on the market - some selling over $150,000.

Myatt created the art, but Drewe faked provenance (history of ownership) and documentations. He would put them in old frames and spill coffee on the canvases to make them appear old. What shocked Myatt the most was how his blatantly 20th century materials (including intimacy lubricant KY Jelly) managed to sneak past the "experts" at Christie's and Sotheby's. According to Myatt, faking the history of the painting was easy: just go to the libraries at Cambridge or Oxford, find a book about the artist and then tell the auction houses that the painting is mentioned in there. And there apparently was very little follow-up. And Myatt kept painting for Drewe and stayed deliberately naive about where the paintings were going or where the money was from.

Myatt and Drewe got caught when Drewe's marriage fell apart. His wife called the cops. And the cops arrested Myatt and Drewe. According to prosecutors, Myatt made about about £90,000 and Drewe profited £1.5M. Myatt cooperated with authorities, and spent one year in jail. He claims his inmates called him "Picasso."

Myatt is still creating forgeries, only this time, it's a real business called "Legitimate Fakes." I briefly met Myatt when I studied at Cambridge, he was a guest speaker and taught a practicum about creating fakes. He was very lively, and funny in that dry/self-deprecating British way. What struck me as the most interesting was his disdain/cynicism for the art market and art historians. He told us all that what art historians did was "useless. If you want to get in the mind of Monet, paint like Monet. I know what went on inside his head because I've had to make all the same choices as him." Myatt did a wonderful imitation of Monet's signature; he explained to us that you can do the signature as long as he signs the back of the canvas.

(And obviously, as an art historian, I disagree with Myatt's assessment. Art history isn't really about getting into the the mind of the artist - you can't even do that for living artists! There are many different intents, functions, methods, and techniques to the discipline. But that's for another post.)

Is Myatt an artist? Is he a "good" (quality) artist? Where is his place in art history: as a forger or an artist? Can someone be both? If you find his works pleasurable to look at, does that devalue or call into question the notion of the famous artistic genius? Does it even matter, you just like what you like? Here are some comparisons of Myatt's work (on the left) and the originals (at right):

Left: John Myatt, Harlequin,

Right: Joan Miro, The Beautiful Bird Revealing the Unknown to a Pair of Lovers (from the Constellation Series), 1941, gouache, oil wash and charcoal on paper. 18 x 15".
Museum of Modern Art, New York City.

Left: John Myatt, Jasper Johns: Mixed Metaphor, 1960

Right: Jasper Johns, False Start, 1961, oil on canvas, 68 x 53".
Sold at auction in 1988 for $16M.

For curators, art dealers, auction house workers, and scholars, determining authenticity is a central concern: how can we charge millions of dollars or write hundreds of pages of research if the piece in question is a fake? It is a matter of ethics and legality. We are continually developing new technology and techniques to test authenticity. Scholars are delving into archives and painstakingly reconstructing artists' biographies so that our ideas are also authentic.

And yet, some artists make fakes, conformity and reproduction a central part of their aesthetic: Jeff Koons, Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol all come to mind. I'm envisioning a future where the conceptual tension arises when artists are trying to make forgeries, and forgers are trying to pass of their work as authentic. When compared to a few books based on fake works or art sales of forgeries, that seems like the worse option.