Art Forgeries |
---|
"What we have here is a - I am inclined to say - the masterpiece
of Johannes Vermeer"
- Abraham Bredius
Okay; there are art forgeries and then there are artful forgeries. I'll just highlight a good example or two here and leave further investigation as an exercise for the reader. Hans van Meegeren was busted after World War II for selling a Dutch national treasure in the form of a Vermeer painting to the Nazi Hermann Göring. He defended himself by demonstrating that he had painted the "Vermeer" himself and had conned Göring. He managed to avoid a treason conviction, but ended up doing time for forgery - Göring wasn't the only person who'd been duped by his fake Vermeers. When, in 1937, the art historian Abraham Bredius saw one of van Meegeren's fake Vermeers, Christ at Emmaus, he wrote: It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration, just as it left the painter's studio! And what a picture! ...[W]hat we have here is a - I am inclined to say - the masterpiece of Johannes Vermeer of Delft. The forger Elmyr de Hory managed to pass off hundreds or thousands of "masterpieces" on the world's galleries and museums - his story was originally told in the book "Fake" by Clifford Irving, who later wrote the Howard Hughes autobiography fake, and both of these stories were later captured in the film F is for Fake by Orson Welles - you know, the fellah who scared everyone with The War of the Worlds radio show way back when. The world's a weird place. More akin to the faked authors in our Fake Folks section is the case of "disumbrationist" painter Pavel Jerdanowitch, who turned out to be a fellow named Paul Jordan Smith who had cooked up the whole thing to make fun of modern art. In a similar vein, an Australian woman by the name of Elizabeth Durack passed her paintings off as the work of "Eddie Burrup," a nonexistant aboriginal artist. The directory of Flinders Art Museum said that the thousands of art-lovers who saw Burrup's work at the "Native Title Now" exhibition of aboriginal art became "directly involved in the deception," so congratulations goes out to all of them as well. Will Blundell recently "confessed to being the hand behind paintings that look like the work of artists from Monet to Picasso, Sidney Nolan to Brett Whiteley - a life's work that would be worth more than $100 million if genuine." If you want to find out more about art forgery, check out The Art of the Fake ("Egyptian Forgeries from the Kelsey Museum of Archeology"). |
| |
---|---|---|
See also: | ||
|
![]() | email ICJE |