Some counterfeiters try to enter the "soul and mind of the artist." Some delight in the chemistry of baking paint and creating wormholes.
Some start with real pictures and then "restore" them until they look as if they’re by a different artist.
From ancient vases to conceptual art—if someone made it, someone else has tried to bamboozle the world with a copy of Italy, Salvatore Casillo, who founded the University of Salerno's Museum of Fakes, recently commented, "if you’re a good enough counterfeiter, you eventually get your own show." Casillo was right. Several good-enough counterfeiters have recently had their own shows.
Icilio Federico Joni, who was known as the prince of Sienese fakers and specialized in Renaissance paintings until he died in 1946, got his own show last year.
He was the star of "Authentic Fakes" at the Santa Maria della Scala museum in Siena, where he is considered something of a folk hero. Joni was so good that Old Master experts have called him one of the art world's most spectacularly inventive forgers. Meanwhile, Joseph van der Veken, who died in 1964, got his own show, "Fake/Not Fake: Restorations, Reconstructions, Forgeries," which ended last February at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, Belgium. "From what we can tell, he always said he never put anything on the market that was a fake," Till-Holger Borchert, the museum's conservator, said in a telephone interview. "On the other hand, things came on the market and were sold as a Bouts or Massys or Memling or others." And John Myatt, a convicted forger who once said, "You wake up in the morning and you just feel like today is a Picasso day, today is a Monet day," spent four months in jail and then exhibited his fakes at a gallery in England in 2003.
By then the forgeries contained a microchip so that they could not be mistaken for the real thing. Prices for the fakes ranged from around $1,000 to $10,000. He has used K-Y jelly to add body to his brushstrokes. Even the infamous Vermeer forger, Han van Meegeren, who died in 1947, got a show of his works, both real and fake, at the Kunsthalle in Rotterdam in 1996.
There is also a market for van Meegeren fakes. His "Vermeer" Last Supper sold at auction for $88,000 some years ago. Among those who fooled some people recently but did not get away with it was a New York dealer who bought authentic pieces by such artists as Chagall, Renoir, and Gauguin at auction and then sold forgeries of them. For example, according to the FBI, the dealer bought an authentic Chagall in 1990 for $312,000, had it copied by a forger, and sold the forgery for $514,000 in 1993. Five years later he sold the authentic Chagall for $340,000. Last year in Florence Musella's squad seized hundreds of fake paintings, including some purportedly by Andy Warhol, which were offered for sale by a television station. He said that last August the Carabinieri found thousands of fake works, mainly prints, all over Italy, of Warhol, Mario Schifano, Enrico Baj, and others. One of Italy's more prolific fakers was Icilio Federico Joni. He began his career in the late 19th century by making imitations of the tavolette de Biccherna, wood covers used for the Sienese tax accounts that were made from the mid-13th to the end of the 17th centuries. One of Joni's most famous productions was Madonna and Child with Angels, which was acquired by the Cleveland Museum of Art in a bequest of James Parmalee as a work of Sano di Pietro (1406–81). It was discovered to be a forgery in 1948. The museum found that the cracquelure of the Madonna’s blue coat was produced by baking, which was a favorite method of Joni’s, and that modern nails secured the framing elements of the panel.
There are no streets named after Joseph van der Veken in Belgium, but, like Joni, he is considered a supremely gifted restorer. David Bull, a New York conservator and former chairman of painting conservation at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., says van der Veken's technique was at times quite miraculous. Was he a faker of 15th- and 16th-century Flemish art?
The late Max Friedlander, the legendary art historian, thought so. But not everyone agrees. The recent show at the Groeninge Museum in Bruges, "Fake/Not Fake," did not give a yes or no answer. There were eight paintings and 25 drawings in the show. "One got the impression that he not only was a good conservator but had a keen eye on how to promote himself," says Borchert, who curated the exhibition. His image was that of a handy craftsman who was a master at restoring primitives. "Our point is that it is quite difficult to define authentication. We see old works restored to an extent that the original appears to have been hampered. We are looking at work that is more the work of the restorer than the artist. We explore the twilight zone between falsification on the one hand and modern-day restoration on the other hand." "The degree of restoration made it a problem to determine whether the work is original or fake. Some works indicated 20 percent restoration, others 80 percent. At what percentage is it a fake? That's a good question. Tell me." Any conclusion to the show? "We have put the question to the public: What you are looking at is not necessarily what you think you are looking at." Borchert says that after the panel of the Just Judges of van Eyck's masterpiece Adoration of the Mystic Lamb, painted in the early 15th century, was stolen in 1934, van der Veken volunteered to paint a copy. "It's extraordinary what he did," said David Bull. "I was told that cracks had formed in the paint and that paint was lifting from the surface in exactly the same way as the original."
