Art forgery is a captivating and intricate practice that has existed throughout human history. With the ability to deceive both experts and enthusiasts alike, art forgery involves the creation or alteration of artworks with the intent to pass them off as genuine masterpieces. Artists and craftsmen skilled in mimicking the styles, techniques, and materials of renowned artists meticulously reproduce or modify existing artworks to deceive art collectors, dealers, and museums. The motivations behind the forgeries can vary, ranging from monetary gain and fame to personal satisfaction or even political reasons. This illicit endeavor has plagued the art world for centuries, challenging the authenticity of treasured cultural artifacts and raising questions about the nature of art itself. Unraveling the tales of skillful imitators, their cunning techniques, and the impact of their counterfeit creations sheds light on the fascinating world of art forgery.
It’s worth looking up Han van Meegeren.
He was a painter very into the classical traditional style and his career never really got off the ground, with critics disregarding his work as just blandly imitating the classic works. So he got fed up and decided to prove that they didn’t know what they were talking about and he was just as good as the old masters.
He spent a lot of time getting the chemical composition of the paint right and how to fake the age. Then he made a painting in the style of Vermeer (painter of Girl with a Pearl Earring), and passed it on to a critic he particularly detested through an intermediary as a recently discovered work of the artist. The critic was fooled entirely, with him and other experts going off into great detail “confirming” it was a Vermeer. Now Van Meegeren had planned to pop out of the woodwork and go “aha, so much for the experts”, but then the thing sold for millions of dollars. As a dude who’d been struggling for a good while he decided to pivot his career to just forging.
Guy was only found out because during WW2 and the nazi occupation of the Netherlands he traded a forged work for a bunch of genuine Dutch classic works that the nazis had looted. Then when the war was over he was brought up on charges for colluding with and handing over a national treasure to the nazis. So rather than go down as a nazi supporter or anything he instead went “Actually, about these Vermeers that have been miraculously discovered over the last couple decades.”
As an artist, I find the reverence for forgery and forgers in this entire chain to be utterly contemptible. Forgery is nothing more nor less than gaining wealth by deception; and contrary to the attitudes of many, it very much does occur with living artists whose reputations and fortunes take a direct financial hit from it.
There is literally ZERO excuse to engage in forgery. Forgers are NOT heroes; they’re liars and grifters, and they should face sanctions equivalent to the theft of the vast sums of money they’ve ripped away from their victims – because theft it was, through fraud. If you want to produce a work in the style of a great master, then do so – but admit that it’s your own work, not theirs; because the moment you try and claim otherwise, you become a fraudster. Doesn’t matter if you gave the work away for free; if you let it be identified as genuine, then you callously allowed reputational damage to an innocent expert and cost them their reputation and livelihood. There’s always a cost to forgery, and it’s never small.
As an artist who has personally had their work copied without credit and passed off as someone else’s design before being commercially sold as such, I know from intimate personal experience how financially, reputationally and psychologically damaging forgery is to a living artist. And forging a dead artist only changes the nature of the victims, who now become art historians and art valuers (their reputations take a mighty hit for misidentification of a fraud as a genuine work) and purchasers who lose millions of dollars in asset worth because their painting/sculpture is revealed to be a fake.
Just because you don’t see the victims, doesn’t mean they don’t exist. Crimes are crimes for damned good reasons; and criminals are not people to be applauded simply because you can’t see the trail of devastation they leave in their wake; or because you hate the victim, or think that all victimhood ended with the death of the primary victim. Forgery is never a victimless crime; which is why it’s a CRIME.