Previous Posts: February 2014

Three daunting facts confront anyone interested in buying one of Amedeo Modigliani’s distinctive elongated portraits. They tend to have multimillion price tags; they are a favorite of forgers; and despite an abundance of experts, no inventory of his works is considered both trustworthy and complete.

Christian Parisot, for instance, the author of one catalog and the president of the Modigliani Institute in Rome, is due in court this week in Rome on charges that he knowingly authenticated fake works.

Marc Restellini, a French scholar compiling another survey of Modigliani’s work, jettisoned part of his project years ago after receiving death threats.

And even those who swear by a listing of 337 works created by the appraiser and critic Ambrogio Ceroni acknowledge it has significant gaps. The effort to establish an authoritative record of Modigliani’s work “resembles nothing so much as a soap opera,” Peter Kraus, an antiquarian book dealer, wrote in an essay published a decade ago.

As in the latest case, the decision often rests with an artist’s descendants, who are indefinitely allowed to exercise the “moral rights” of their forebears under French law. Similar committees decide whether works apparently by Edgar Degas, Pablo Picasso and Man Ray are genuine. Yet, as Valentin puts it, “The children, grand-children or great-grandchildren of an artist are not necessarily the best experts.”

Mould argues that the system ought to be reformed. “The son of a brain surgeon is not someone you would trust to work on your brain,” he says. “After all, they hold a very powerful right: they can turn something bought for £5 in a flea market to £1 million. Conversely, as in Martin’s case, they can turn £100,000 to nothing.”

Why do the committee not let this one go? I cannot think of it's relevance to British history or find it to be an exciting example of portraiture to make it's mark in a UK national collection. The public lost out by by the cancellation of the Lichtenstein show.

Fakes are nasty things but they do have educational benefits. As murky artefacts they testify to society’s heroes and its villains. But we are hardly going to destroy all those fake medieval splinters of the True Cross, or bin all those phony metatarsals of St Barnabas because they confuse our understanding of Christianity.

It is also important to know thine enemy. Identifying fakers requires knowing their traits and identifying a corpus of works of reference, like the fascinating oeuvre of Van Meegeren the Vermeer faker in wartime Amsterdam – another artist we outed in a former programme - whom we can now with retrospect see added a touch of early Hollywood to his 17th century religious personages.

And what will this do to those who may well have works by Chagall which, for whatever reason, have failed to make the art history books to date? If I owned a would-be Chagall I would now not think twice, but three times or more before sending it to Paris. Ugly acts like the one proposed by the Committee can have the effect of damaging the progress of art history.

It might be said that the right of an artist's descendants to destroy a work that they consider to be a fake is closely related to their right to enjoy an income from the sale of genuine works for 70 years after their ancestor's death - the so-called Droit de Suite, which the EU has now forced the United Kingdom to adopt as Artist's Resale Right.  Do you see where this is leading....? 

Presumably only the signature makes the painting a fake.  Maybe that could be taken off?

I totally agree with your discussion on destruction of fakes. In order to avoid further circulation of the work would not be sufficient for the committee to publish online a catalogue of ascertained “fake” pictures, and maybe put a big “fake” rubber stamp on the back of the work?

Circa 1989 a friend/acquaintance was working in a London gallery and someone walked in and offered her a Chagall picture. She bought it for about £1000 and discovered that the only way to verify it was to send a photo to an expert in Paris, France. The expert contacted her and requested that she should bring it to him for further verification etc. In due course she and her husband went to Paris, whereupon the Gendarmerie appeared and explained that the artwork was fake and that it would be destroyed. 

Indeed, when is a painting a fake and when is it in the style of an artist or a copy.  Our museums are replete with paintings described as "school of" or "after".  Should all student and studio copies be burned as well.  A fake Vermeer could be an original Van Meegeren, who was an accomplished artist whose Vermeer style paintings enjoy a good market now.

I watched last night’s program with interest. I have a book on Chagall and out of interest I turned to the index to see if the dancer’s name Kawarska appeared. It was not there but I immediately saw the name Karsavina, Tamara. I turned to the page and was surprised to see that indeed she was a ballet dancer (in fact I have since learnt that she was extremely famous, the original firebird). Now I also saw that Chagall was in St Petersburg studying under Leon Bakst in 1908-1909 or thereabouts and that therefore it is very likely that Chagall had contact with Karsavina. So could it be that the name Kawarska is just a garbled version of Karsavina?

Another point is to do with the phthalocyanine question. It was brought into commercial use in the 1930’s but again I was interested to learn from the internet that it was discovered in 1907. It would be worth researching into whether it could have been available to Chagall as early as 1909-1910.

You and the team were great as always , though I think once you saw their stair carpet and realised someone had designed that interior , the game was up !

but £100,000..amazing !  I know zero, but the eyes the eyes..so wrong..