For almost two centuries, this reliquary fooled the experts. Its provenance included Count Renesse-Breidbach and J.P. Morgan. In 1980, technical investigation showed the rock crystal at the center to be authentic but the rest is of Nineteenth Century craftsmanship. Collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art.
:Senior curator of the Bruce Museum Nancy Hall-Duncan never expected to find one of the art world's most notorious forgers and the FBI Art Crime Team among the lenders she had selected to contribute to a future exhibition. Yet when planning commenced for an exposé-style show documenting fakes and forgeries within the art world, Hall-Duncan realized that these non-traditional sources would prove invaluable in fully presenting the gravity of the issues at hand.
Originally intended as a small but thoughtful exhibition, "Fakes and Forgeries: The Art of Deception," on view at the Bruce Museum through September 9, has exploded into an unexpected blockbuster.
At one point, the 60 artworks included in the show, with their suspicious signatures and tainted attributions, might have been sneaked into the museum through the back door and under the cover of night. It is quite the opposite story today as "Fakes and Forgeries" brings to the forefront a host of startling counterfeit works, each revealing the circumstances of its deception and in some cases allowing a peek at those who perpetrated the sham.
Inspired by Bruce Director Peter C. Sutton's work on authentication issues, the exhibit contains items from such famous study collections as the Conservation Center, Institute of Fine Arts, New York University and the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR), New York City. While it is generally accepted that most major collections contain works that are not authentic, constraints on the market and political issues make it a delicate area to probe.
Arguably the most famous forgery, "Christ and His Disciples,” is painted in the style of Vermeer. Van Meegeren, the forger, cleverly couched it as an early work by the artist, a period that was a lacuna in art scholarship. Painted in 1937, it was not definitively declared a forgery until after World War II.
Many museums tend to keep their fakes and forgeries under wraps, often alluding to them as works "in the manner of" or "from the circle of." Others are more open, finding the educational benefits to be overriding. With the support of the FBI and numerous prestigious institutions, Hall-Duncan was able to present a myriad of confiscated works of art that have never before been exhibited.
John Myatt, the Twentieth Century's "most ingenious and damaging art con" — now running a legitimate business called "Genuine Fakes" — lent two of his own "originals," providing a degree of immediacy to the exhibition.
Organized chronologically according to the art movements they mimic, "Fakes and Forgeries" includes medieval manuscripts, paintings in the manner of Fifteenth Century artists, decorative objects and jewelry of the Renaissance and Baroque periods. There is a fake Winslow Homer, a Seurat, a Corot, a Matisse, a couple of Picassos. Juan Gris, De Kooning, Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat are also represented — some more authentically than others, yet all forged.
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