The art of exposing a fraud

You’ve heard the stories. The painting bought for two bucks at a garage sale, that obscure drawing gathering dust in Grandma’s attic. Someone takes a look, has a eureka moment, and the lucky owners are happily counting wads of green.

Who are those people? And how can they be sure that a Van Gogh is a Van Gogh or a Picasso actually a Picasso?

It turns out that they can’t. Or rather, they can, but not always, and even when they do, some other bunch of experts may disagree later.

What it takes to authenticate a work of art, what collectors’ obligations are, why art scholars are shaky about going public with opinions and how the courts deal with questions of attribution are explored in “The Expert Versus the Object: Judging Fakes and False Attributions in the Visual Arts” from Oxford University Press.

A collection of essays and interviews by art historians, curators and other experts in the field, it was edited by Ronald D. Spencer, a specialist in art law.

“Think of it for a second,” Spencer said from New York.

“You’re a scholar, you’re earning not much money as a professor somewhere, and your local museum is spending $20 million on a work that you believe is not by that artist. What do you do? Do you speak up and take a chance on getting sued by the owner of the painting who’s selling it to the museum or is taking a tax deduction for $20 million? Big problem, you see.”

Offering opinions

“A painting of The Massacre of the Innocents languished in an Austrian monastery as the work of Jan van den Hoecke, a Rubens follower. Recently reattributed to Rubens himself, it sold at auction for $76 million. Given such stakes, proffering an opinion on authenticity can be a perilous affair.”

-- Sharon Flescher, executive director, International Foundation for Art Research

Creating fakes

“There used to be an old joke about Corot: that in his lifetime he painted 4,000 pictures, of which 5,500 were in America! ... [Franz] Kline’s work, with its free energetic style, was something that a lot of people thought they could do. ‘Well, this is easy; I can tear up a New York phone book and splash ink on it.’ The fact is that works by Kline’s own hand have an energy that can’t be replicated, an energy that is immediately apparent today.”

-- Samuel Sachs II, former director, the Frick Collection, New York

Critiquing critics

“Rembrandt delighted in ridiculing the judgments of art critics. In his famous drawing in the Lehman Collection, a pompous lay connoisseur is sprouting ass’s ears as a young man offers his own crude critique of the expert’s judgment by defecating out of sight behind the panel.”

-- Peter C. Sutton, specialist in Northern Baroque art

Relying on science

“The more scientific toys made available for the examination of works of art, the more I am convinced that there is no substitute for a trained human eye.”

-- Eugene Victor Thaw, retired art dealer-collector

Documenting falsehoods

“It is also an axiom within the auction house that the more documentation provided for an unpublished work of art, the less likely it is to be authentic.”

-- John Tancock, senior vice president, Impressionist and Modern Art Department, Sotheby’s, New York