Over the last few decades there has been a disconcerting increase in the number of forged paintings. In retaliation, there has been a rise in the use, efficiency and ability of scientific techniques to detect these forgeries. The scientist has waged war on the forger.“The Scientist and the Forger” describes the cutting-edge and traditional weapons in this battle, showing how they have been … been applied to the most notorious cases. The book also provides fresh insights into the psychology of both the viewer and the forger, shedding light on why the discovery that a work of art is a forgery makes us view it so differently and providing a gripping analysis of the myriad motivations behind the most egregious incursions into deception.
The book concludes by discussing the pressing problems faced by the art world today, stressing the importance of using appropriate tools for a valid verdict on authenticity. Written in an approachable and amenable style, the book will make fascinating reading for non-specialists, art historians, curators and scientists alike.
Contents: “Establishing the First Link in the Art Chain: “Attribution: The Connoisseur and the Art HistorianThe Ely Zakhai Case and a Gauguin Forgery”Microscopy Related Techniques: “The Van Meegeren ForgeryFrancisco Francia’s ‘The Virgin and Child with an Angel’ a ForgeryAuthentication of a Manet PaintingRussian Avant Garde Forgeries, the Kandisky and Popova Forgery CasesThe Unexpected Dramatic Case of the Chagall Forgery”Scientific Techniques Reliant on Mass Spectrometry: “The Trotter AffairThe Jackson Pollock AffairAuthentication of Vermeer’s ‘Saint Praxedis’The Fernand Leger ForgeryLeonardo’s ‘La Bella Principessa‘“Some X-ray Based Techniques: “Authentication of a Hitherto Unknown Van Gogh Floral Still Life”Infrared Reflectography: “Authentication of Leonardo’s Salvator Mundi”Digital Techniques for Art Authentication: “Authentication of Vincent Van Gogh’s ‘Sunset at Montmajour”Study of the Panel and the Frame: Dendochhronolgy: “The Beltracchi Forgeries”The Beguiling “Odalisque” “Is the Courtroom the Proper Venue for Authentication?”Three Portraits, Two Women: Can Science Decide?”“Psychology of the Viewer”“Psychology of the Forger”“Reflections on the Turbulent World of Art Authentication”
Readership: General reader, curator, connoisseur, art-historian, psychologist, scientist and financier.
Key Features: There is no existing publication to date that brings together the material presented in this book and which responds to heightened interest in and demand for information on forgery-related subjects as reflected in ever-expanding media coverageThis book will appeal to a broad readership: general reader, curator, connoisseur, art-historian, psychologist and the scientist in view of the interdisciplinary nature of the work. It might also be of interest to the financier as large sums of money are involved in the purchase of paintings by famous mastersThis book covers a wide spectrum of interrelated subjects: the current state of forgery in painting touching upon some of the most singular cases, the potential and limits of new research methodologies, psychological parameters related to forgery as well as to viewership and finally the current efforts in redressing a situation of greed and fraud in the art market. Adding novelty, is the very contemporary character and diversity of the cases presented (“from European to Middle Eastern artworks
more
If you’ve watched CSI or any of the other TV forensic procedurals, you know that science has jumped into the crime-solving pool with both feet. Advances in DNA analysis, latent-print recovery, forensic botany, and a host of other processes have helped clear decades-old cold cases, exonerate the wrongly accused, and catch villains who would’ve escaped just a few years ago. Your average big-city detective would now no more leave her criminalist at the station than she would her sidearm or badge.
Science has gone boho to help answer one of the thornier questions in art: is that painting real? This is the story Dr. Jehane Ragai tells us in The Scientist and the Forger: Insights into the Scientific Detection of Forgery in Paintings (249 pages; Imperial College Press, 2015).
Art forgery has been a problem since Roman workshops started making knockoffs of Greek statues two thousand years ago. Until relatively recently, though, detecting fakes has been the sole province of art connoisseurs who could make a piece worthless or priceless with an opinion – even if that opinion turned out to be wrong. Art historians dig through an artist’s papers (if s/he left any) to find a mention of a painting or sculpture; specialists in the suspected artist’s work or artistic school use stylistic analysis to look for repeated motifs or tell-tale quirks. However, in the end these people are, well, people, and subject to the same prejudices and baser motives as anyone else. Han van Meegeren’s fakes fooled the premier Vermeer scholars of his day, even though his works weren’t all that; the experts were so hot to add to Vermeer’s oeuvre that they overlooked the red flags all over the paintings.
Things have changed a bit since then. Dr. Ragai organizes her tour of the new tools by the base technology involved: microscopy, mass spectrometry, X-rays, infrared reflectography, dendrochronology, and a grab bag of digital techniques including multispectral imaging.
In many cases, what she describes fits Arthur C. Clarke’s third law (“Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic”).
• Infrared reflectography can look beneath the paint to see the artist’s underdrawings, or the remains of the picture the forger scraped off to reuse the canvas.
• Dendrochronology can identify not only the type of wood in a frame or panel, but how old it is and where it was harvested.
• Multispectral imaging can isolate each layer of paint on a canvas, showing how the artist built the image and letting researchers see, for instance, the actual paint colors under bad restorations or degraded varnish.
• Weave analysis can identify the age and general source of a painting’s canvas, and can even determine whether two paintings use canvas cut from a single bolt – a sure sign of forgery if paintings are attributed to artists who worked on different continents or in different decades.
• Cross-section analysis takes a tiny core sample of the paint and identifies the chemical composition of each layer of paint. It can even reveal the thin layer of dust between a painting’s surface and the forged signature added later.
The author illustrates many of these techniques with case studies that explain not only the results, but how scientists and art experts used those results.
As powerful as these tools are, they’re not all in common use yet. Some require skilled operators that are in short supply. Others are very expensive, out of the reach of all but a few university labs or the largest art museums. Also, many of these tools are still accepted by the art industry and in case law about as well as fingerprint analysis was at the turn of the 20th century. One of the chapters describes how, in the case of a supposed Boris Kustodiev Odalisque, battling experts managed to blow enough smoke around the technical findings to get a civil judge to disregard them in his verdict. There are still no universal standards of practice or codes of ethics in the field of technical art analysis, which leaves the way open for interested owners or gallerists to shop for the lab results they want to see.
This is an academic book; don’t expect character development or plot twists. However, Dr. Ragai is a clear and engaging writer. She takes a subject that could be a cure for insomnia and makes it interesting and, crucially, easy for laypeople to understand. The book’s full of illustrations, including reproductions of the paintings that star in the case studies, something not all art books do. There’s also a comprehensive glossary, wide-ranging sources noted at the end of each chapter, and an index that’s actually useful (something missing in many of the art-crime books I’ve read).
Whether you’re marking time until CSI: National Gallery comes along, or you need the latest scoop on what not to do while you’re producing your next counterfeit Picasso, you need this book. But it’s also a good pick if you’re into art crime, forensic science, or just seeing scientists doing the damnedest things.