Detecting Forgery in the Art World - Test 6

C1 Advanced · Multiple Matching · C1 Advanced Trainer 2, Cambridge University Press

You are going to read an article about art forgery. For questions 1–10, choose from the sections of the article (A–D). The sections may be chosen more than once.

The suggestion of a smile about the lips; the translucent headscarf over the forehead; the barely visible eyebrows; the muted colours blended in the sfumato style. It took John Myatt four months to complete his latest task: a replica of the world’s most famous painting, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. Myatt, who spent time in prison in 1999 for forging works by, among others, the great 20th century artists, Alberto Giacometti and Ben Nicholson, has no intention of trying to pass off his work as the real thing. He produced it for a film about the theft of the Mona Lisa in 1911. ‘I’m delighted with it,’ says Myatt. ‘I even got the cracking right,’ referring to the tiny lines that emerge over time in the surface of oil paintings. He reproduces the effect by carefully applying two sets of varnishes – one quick-drying, one slow, to open up the cracks. Even though he has done it before, he says, ‘it’s a heart-stopping moment because the results largely come down to the atmosphere in the room, and so forth.’

Artistic deception has fallen under the spotlight in recent years. First came the shock that a well-known gallery in the US had been unknowingly selling forged works for millions of dollars – and as a result, went bankrupt. Next came the news that Sotheby’s, the renowned international auction house, had been caught out when it auctioned a work supposedly by the 17th century Dutch painter Frans Hals for £8.4m. When doubts emerged, Sotheby’s arranged for it to be sent for scientific analysis, revealing the forgery and prompting the auction house to reimburse the buyer. That a forger could create lookalikes of such high quality caused great concern among dealers, collectors and art lovers, who had previously assumed that the technical difficulty of reproducing historical masterpieces acted as a natural defence against fakes. ‘Great forgeries of old masterpieces were thought to be virtually impossible,’ says art expert Frank Crossland. He adds that the recent scandals are in some ways positive. ‘They’ve made us realise we need to be much more careful about authenticity.’

One of the core tasks of an art analyst is to ensure that the materials present in a painting or sculpture were available at the time the work is said to have been made. The German forger Wolfgang Beltracchi was unmasked when he inadvertently used titanium white, a material first created in 1916, for a forgery dated two years earlier. Then there is an inappropriate frame or canvas: Myatt says the forger’s ‘standard procedure’ is to obtain an inferior painting from the correct period and remove the paint, leaving a suitably aged, but clean, canvas still stretched with pieces of wood from the correct era. But even if the individual materials in a work check out as historically appropriate, alarm bells may be set off by the way they are assembled. ‘The best analysts need to know about the chemical characteristics of different types of paint, so they need to be scientists,’ says Crossland. ‘But they also need to know how particular artists went about their work, the subjects they were interested in, and so on. So they need to be historians and art lovers too.’

Part of the problem is the mass of published literature, essential for educational scholarship but accessible to forgers, setting out exactly how artists throughout history have worked. Forgers also keep up to date with the testing instruments. While galleries and auction houses now use digital microscopes and handheld XRF spectrometers that identify works’ constituent chemical elements, some forgers are reportedly working on simulations of each close inspection. ‘This seems to be more or less the current standard,’ says one art analyst. Careful to avoid giving the criminals any help, he declines to talk about specific cases. Myatt, however, is more open: he is convinced the latest successful forger of historical paintings is someone trained in art restoration who has seen great works pass through their hands over many years. He says it takes years before ‘you can look at the way the paint leaves the brush, the “handwriting” of an artist, and really understand it.’ Such insights lead him to take the view that any hopes that the cat and mouse game between the art establishment and the forgers is about to end are based more on wishful thinking than hard facts.

Detecting forgery in the art world

the belief that forgery will continue to be a problem in the future

the diverse nature of skills required in forgery detection

a sense of pride in an achievement

a reluctance to reveal how something is done

a reason underlying a belief that certain types of forgery were unlikely

a technical process which is difficult to control

details that can reveal whether or not a painting is authentic

forgers’ familiarity with detection techniques

distinctive features of a particular work of art

how forgery can cause serious financial problems

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