#Art forgery

[hydeordie]

All the art news I wanted to talk about this week

[justforbooks]

The new tool in the art of spotting forgeries: Artificial Intelligence

Instead of obsessing over materials, the new technique takes a hard look at the picture itself – specifically, the thousands of tiny individual strokes that compose it

In late March, a judge in Wiesbaden, Germany, found herself playing the uncomfortable role of art critic. On trial before her were two men accused of forging paintings by artists including Kazimir Malevich and Wassily Kandinsky, whose angular, abstract compositions can now go for eight-figure prices. The case had been in progress for three and a half years and was seen by many as a test. A successful prosecution could help end an epidemic of forgeries – so-called miracle pictures that appear from nowhere – that have been plaguing the market in avant-garde Russian art.

But as the trial reached its climax, it disintegrated into farce. One witness, arguably the world’s leading Malevich authority, argued that the paintings were unquestionably fakes. Another witness, whose credentials were equally impeccable, swore that they were authentic. In the end, the forgery indictments had to be dropped; the accused were convicted only on minor charges.

The judge was unimpressed. “Ask 10 different art historians the same question and you get 10 different answers,” she told the New York Times. Adding a touch of bleak comedy to proceedings, it emerged that the warring experts were at the wrong end of a bad divorce.

It isn’t a comforting time for art historians. Weeks earlier, in January, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent, Belgium, was forced to pull 24 works supposedly by many of the same Russian artists – Kandinsky, Malevich, Rodcheko, Filonov – after the Art Newspaper published an exposé arguing they were all forged. Just days before, there was uproar when 21 paintings shown at a Modigliani exhibition in Genoa, Italy, were confiscated and labeled as fakes. Works that had been valued at millions of dollars were abruptly deemed worthless.

The market in old masters is also jittery after an alarming series of scandals – the greatest of which was that paintings handled by the respected collector Giuliano Ruffini were suspect. A Cranach, a Parmigiano, and a Frans Hals were all found to be forged; institutions including the Louvre had been fooled. The auction house Sotheby’s was forced to refund $10m for the Hals alone. Many experts are now reluctant to offer an opinion, in case they’re sued – which, of course, only intensifies the problem.

Adding fuel to the fire is another development: Wary of being caught, more and more forgers are copying works from the early to mid-20th century. It’s much easier to acquire authentic materials, for one thing, and modern paintings have rocketed in value in recent years.

For many in the industry, it is starting to look like a crisis. Little wonder that galleries and auction houses, desperate to protect themselves, have gone CSI. X-ray fluorescence can detect paint and pigment type; infrared reflectography and Raman spectroscopy can peer into a work’s inner layers and detect whether its very component molecules are authentic. Testing the chemistry of a flake of paint less than a millimeter wide can disclose deep secrets about where and, crucially, when it was made.

“It’s an arms race,” says Jennifer Mass, an authentication expert who runs the Delaware-based firm Scientific Analysis of Fine and Decorative Art. “Them against us.”

But what if you didn’t need to go to all that trouble? What if the forger’s handwriting was staring you in the face, if only you could see it? That’s the hope of researchers at Rutgers University in New Jersey, who have pioneered a method that promises to turn art authentication on its head.

Instead of subjecting works to lengthy and hugely expensive materials analysis, hoping a forger has made a tiny slip – a stray fiber, varnish made using ingredients that wouldn’t have been available in 16th-century Venice – the new technique is so powerful that it doesn’t even need access to the original work: A digital photograph will do. Even more striking, this method is aided by artificial intelligence. A technology whose previous contributions to art history have consisted of some bizarre sub–Salvador Dalís might soon be able to make the tweed-wearing art valuers look like amateurs.

At least that’s the theory, says Ahmed Elgammal, PhD, whose team at Rutgers has developed the new process, which was made public late last year. “It is still very much under development; we are working all the time. But we think it will be a hugely valuable addition to the arsenal.”

That theory is certainly intriguing. Instead of obsessing over materials, the new technique takes a hard look at the picture itself: Specifically, the thousands of tiny individual strokes that compose it.

Every single gesture – shape, curvature, the velocity with which a brush- or pencil-stroke is applied – reveals something about the artist who made it. Together, they form a telltale fingerprint. Analyze enough works and build up a database, and the idea is that you can find every artist’s fingerprint. Add in a work you’re unsure about, and you’ll be able to tell in minutes whether it’s really a Matisse or if it was completed in a garage in Los Angeles last week. You wouldn’t even need the whole work; an image of one brushstroke could give the game away.

“Strokes capture unintentional process,” explains Elgammal. “The artist is focused on composition, physical movement, brushes – all those things. But the stroke is the telltale sign.”

The paper Elgammal and his colleagues November 13, 2017 examined 300 authentic drawings by Picasso, Matisse, Egon Schiele, and a number of other artists and broke them down into more than 80,000 strokes. Machine-learning techniques refined the data set for each artist; forgers were then commissioned to produce a batch of fakes. To put the algorithm though its paces, the forgeries were fed into the system. When analyzing individual strokes, it was over 70% accurate; when whole drawings were examined, the success rate increased to over 80% . (The researchers claim 100% accuracy “in most settings.”)

The researchers are so confident that they included images of originals and fakes alongside each other in the published paper, daring so-called experts to make up their own minds. (Reader, I scored dismally.) One of Elgammal’s colleagues, Dutch painting conservator Milko den Leeuw, compares it to the way we recognize family members: They look similar, but we’re just not sure why. “Take identical twins,” he says. “Outsiders can’t separate them, but the parents can. How does that work? It’s the same with a work of art. Why do I recognize that this is a Picasso and that isn’t?”

The idea of fingerprinting artists via their strokes actually dates back to the 1950s and a technique developed by Dutch art historian Maurits Michel van Dantzig. Van Dantzig called his approach “pictology”, arguing that because every work of art is a product of the human hand, and every hand is different, it should be possible to identify authorship using these telltale strokes.

The problem, though, was that there was too much data. Even a simple drawing contains hundreds or even thousands of strokes, all of which needed to be examined by the human eye and catalogued. Multiply that by every work, and you see how impractical it was.

“It just wasn’t possible to test it,” says den Leeuw, who first became aware of pictology as a student. “I saw many attempts, but mostly it ended in ideas that would never be.”

But can AI now do what humans failed to, and give an art historian’s trained eye some sort of scientific basis? “Exactly,” says den Leeuw. “Very often it’s a gut feeling. We’re trying to unpick the mystery.”

Though Mass says she’s unlikely to throw out her fluorescence gun just yet, she admits to being impressed. “A lot of people in the field are excited by AI It’s not a magic bullet, but it’ll be another tool. And it’s really valuable when you’re dealing with a sophisticated forger who’s got everything else right – paint, paper, filler, all the materials.”

There are issues. So far, the system has been tested mainly on drawings from a handful of artists and a brief time period. Paintings, which generally contain thousands more strokes, are a tougher challenge; older paintings, which might contain numerous layers of restoration or overpainting, are tougher still. “It’s challenging, but it doesn’t mean we can’t do it,” Elgammal says. “I’m confident.”

What about style, though, particularly where an artist changes over time? Think of Picasso’s wildly varying periods – blue, African, cubist, classical – or how in the 1920s Malevich abandoned the elemental abstraction of his black squares for figurative portraits that could almost have been painted by Cézanne (pressure from Stalin was partly responsible).

Another expert, Charles R Johnson, who teaches computational art history at Cornell, is less persuaded – not so much by the AI as by the assumptions that lie behind it. “A big problem is that strokes are rarely individualized,” he says. “Overlap is difficult to unravel. Plus, one must understand the artist’s style changes over their career in order to make a judgment.”

In addition, Johnson argues, many artist’s brushwork is essentially invisible, making it impossible to unpick; it might be better to focus computer analysis on assessing canvases or paper, which can be more rigorously verified. “I remain quite skeptical,” he says.

Elgammal and den Leeuw concede there’s a way to go. Currently they’re working on impressionist paintings – infinitely more complex than Schiele and Picasso line drawings – and hope to publish the results next year. Even with the drawings, the machine can’t yet be left to learn on its own; often the algorithms require human tweaking to make sure the right features are being examined. Artists whose output isn’t large enough to create a reliable data set are also a challenge.

Asking Elgammal if he’s worried about being sued. He laughs, slightly nervously. “That’s something I think about.”

It’s a reasonable question, particularly pressing given the number of fakes that are circulating: What if your database accidentally becomes contaminated? Many people argue that the art market is hopelessly corrupt – so much so that some economists doubt whether calling it a “market” is even fair. Could the algorithm become skewed and go rogue?

“It’s like any system,” Mass agrees. “Garbage in, garbage out.”

Does she think that’s a possibility? How many fakes are out there? “Put it this way,” Mass says, “when I go into auction houses – maybe not the big ones, but smaller, local ones – I think ‘buyer beware.’ It might be between 50 and 70% .”

Rival solutions are coming down the road. Some have proposed using blockchain technology to guarantee provenance – the history of who has owned a work. Others have called for much greater transparency. Everyone agrees that the system is broken; some kind of fix is urgent.

Of course, there are big philosophical questions here. When someone goes to the effort of finding exactly the right 17th-century canvas, dons an antique smock, and paints a near-flawless Franz Hals, it should perhaps make us reconsider what we mean by the words ��real” or “fake”, let alone the title of “artist”. Yet the irony is inescapable. It is hard to think of something more human than art, the definition of our self-expression as a species. But when it comes down to it, humans aren’t actually that good at separating forged and authentic in a painting that has all the hallmarks of, say, a Caravaggio but is merely a stunt double. Relying on our eyes, we simply can’t tell one twin from the other. We might even ask: Why do we care?

Forget cars that pilot themselves or Alexa teaching herself to sound less like the robot she is – AI seems to understand the secrets of artistic genius better than we do ourselves.

The irony is that, while machines might not yet might be able to make good art, they are getting eerily good at appreciating it. “Yes, it’s true,” he says thoughtfully. “When it comes to very complex combinations of things, humans are really not so good.” He laughs. “We make too many mistakes.”

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at Just for Books…?

[merelygifted]

A screenshot of the website promoting 200 Yen as a painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat. Screenshot/Eminence Rise Media

US Tech Company May Have Tried to Exhibit Unauthenticated Basquiat Painting at Major Museums

An intermediary said to be acting on behalf of the American tech company Co2Bit Technologies was reportedly planning to exhibit an unauthenticated Jean-Michel Basquiat painting at the Museum of Modern Art in New York without the institution’s permission.

Co2Bit privately exhibited another painting of dubious provenance as genuine in a major museum.  ARTnews reported last month that the company helped to show a painting with disputed attribution to Russian modernist Kazimir Malevich at the Centre Pompidou in January.  The Centre Pompidou told ARTnews last month that it had not granted permission to exhibit the artwork.  ...

...  Co2Bit’s stated mission is to use AI and blockchain technology to assess environmental impact. [Ed. Note: How ironic is that?!]  The company purchased the supposed 1915 Malevich painting, titled Suprematism, for a price “in the seven figures” from disgraced Israeli art dealer Itzhak Zarug before hiring several experts to authenticate it.  However, one of the experts, Patricia Railing, denied this, claiming she’d never heard of Co2Bit.

A series of now-deleted press releases published by Eminence Rise Media, a New York PR firm, on GlobeNewswire promoted Suprematism, stating that it was due to be “unveiled by museums around the world.”  The same PR firm also promoted the supposed Basquiat painting, titled 200 Yen, in three releases posted between December 2023 and February 2024 that have also been deleted.  One release said that New York Art Forensics appraised the artwork for $90 million and claimed it was set to “be unveiled in top museums across the United States soon.”  Neither of the press releases for Suprematism or 200 Yen mentioned Co2Bit.

Eminence Rise Media declined to comment on if it had been hired by Co2Bit and said that it would only comment on 200 Yen if ARTnews deleted mention of the PR firm in the publication’s reporting on the Malevich-Pompidou story.

“It has come to our attention you [sic] slandering and accusing this company in regards to the Malevich painting, where we had nothing to do with that painting,” the company wrote in an email. “In spite of you [sic] confirming Co2Bit as the company responsible for it, your false and phony accusations is [sic] unethical on your end as a journalist. If you have some integrity, you must delete our name from it. Please make it right and we will be willing to communicate further.”  ...

Maybe you should learn to communicate in an actual language, eminence front, er, rise.  What a put-on!

[qquigley]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinhold_Vasters

[panicinthestudio]

Over 1,000 paintings seized, 8 people arrested in Norval Morrisseau art fraud, March 3, 2023

More than 1,000 paintings were seized and eight people face a total of 40 charges resulting from a years-long police investigation into the forgery of artwork by Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau.

CBC News

@allthecanadianpolitics

[genuineforgeries]

drawing in the style of Giovanni Battista Piranesi, drawn by forger Eric Hebborn.

[davidpotash]

Painting For Cash Numbers

Who doesn’t love a good art forgery story? It’s an intriguing mixture of high-end culture and old-time deception. Do we root for the forger? The artist? The police and investigators, charged with insuring the integrity of what must be an extremely messy business? These and other questions came to mind in reading Tony Tetro’s memoir, Con/Artist: The Life and Crimes of the World’s Greatest Art…

[crudelise]

got a new obsession over the weekend...

[gwydionmisha]

Meanwhile... Banksy Fakes | Costco's Butter Crisis | Cheese Heists | Million Dollar Banana

[merelygifted]

The museum sued its ousted director for financial and reputation damages over the show raided by FBI agents last year.

The Orlando Museum of Art is pursuing a potential settlement in its case against ousted museum director Aaron De Groft and the owners of the paintings included in last year’s scandal-ridden “Heroes & Monsters: Jean-Michel Basquiat” show, per new court documents and a report in the Orlando Sentinel Tuesday.

According to the filing with the Orange County circuit court, in August the museum sued De Groft and the group who collectively owned a series of paintings contentiously attributed to the late artist Jean-Michel Basquiat. The museum has alleged that the two parties leveraged the show to lend legitimacy to the works so they could be sold afterwards, despite well-publicized doubts to their attribution. De Groft has been accused of working out a deal to pocket a cut if the works found buyers.  ...

...  De Groft and the owners of the supposed Basquiats have denied wrongdoing and maintain that the pieces are real.

In its lawsuit, the museum has claimed significant financial and reputation damage due to its hosting of the 2022 show “Heroes & Monsters”, which was shuttered early in June that year when FBI agents seized its contents—25 paintings attributed to Basquiat—from the premises in view of visitors. De Groft was ousted by the board of trustees only four days after the raid.

De Groft and the paintings’ owners unveiled the paintings to the public in February of 2022, claiming that the works were created around 1982 by Basquiat while he lived and worked in the Los Angeles residence of dealer Larry Gagosian. Per their story, the works were sold without Gagosian’s knowledge to a private collector, who forgot them in a storage unit for decades. An FBI affidavit provided evidence to the contrary, including an interview with the purported original owner of the paintings who swore he had never patronized the famed artist.  ...

[forensicfield]

Art Forgery: Understanding and Detecting Counterfeit Artworks

Art forgery involves creating artworks that are falsely represented as genuine, often employing sophisticated techniques to replicate the style and techniques of famous artists. Read More About it. #artforgery #forensicscience #crimescenceinvestigation

Continue reading Art Forgery: Understanding and Detecting Counterfeit Artworks

[friendly-neighbourhood-librarian]

Provenance - Laney Salisbury & Aly Sujo

In 1986, John Myatt was struggling to get by as a single father and part-time art teacher. Having some talent in mimicking the styles of other artists, he began selling commissioned copies of well-known paintings to supplement his income. The charismatic professor Dr. John Drewe soon became his best customer.

In 1997, Myatt and Drewe were put on trial for art fraud and convicted. Their 9-year operation left a permanent mark on the art world, not only because of Myatt's impressive fakes (some of which may still be out there passing as genuine) but because of Drewe's forged provenances and documents: it is virtually impossible to guarantee that all of the works he altered or fabricated were found and removed, leaving many galleries, museums, and archives with compromised collections.

(For those who don't know, like I didn't, provenance is the documentation that is used to prove that a painting or work of art is genuine; it usually consists of records of who owned the work, when it was sold to whom for how much, etc., tracing the line as far back in history as possible.)

This book is a fascinating story of a real-life con, a window into the modern art world, and an intriguing glimpse into the mind of a pathological liar.

Spoilers about my favourite part:

The trial lasted six months, during which John Drewe fired all of his lawyers and insisted on defending himself, proceeding to spiral off on wild tangents about increasingly implausible conspiracy theories and wasting the court's time. At the end of it all, after a verdict was reached and the sentence decided, the judge tied things up by turning to the jury, thanking them for their service and patience, and then excusing them from jury duty for the rest of their lives. Basically saying, "I'm sorry you had to endure all that, you've done your civic duty and you should never have to do that again." The trial was that much of a mess!

[aparrotandaqrow]

The best framework imo to think about the "art theft" accusations and so on is actually not copyright law (and fwiw I see very few people actually talking about copyright when it comes to AI art theft; they're talking about theft), nor fair use. The best framework is art forgery.

It is not a crime to learn from other artists, and then in a style influenced by them, make your own art and sell it. It is however a crime to make art that looks distinctly like someone else's, misrepresent it as their work, and then sell it. The financial aim is a key component of the crime, as is the fraud.

When AI art is made in a specific style, not clearly labeled as AI, and then sold, a reasonable buyer who recognized the style but didn't know the artist's whole work could reasonably think they were buying a piece by that artist. And then they would have been defrauded out of their money and the original artist defrauded out of a potential customer.

And when you look at it through the lens of art forgery, it's very clear why so many artists oppose it. Nobody wants their work to train the next art forger who very well might use it to steal from them.

on the other end the copyright argument against ai art is just so bad. I hate how that's the most common one people use, like I'm sorry but an interpretation of copyright law that classifies images made with generative ai as "plagiarism" or "theft" would be a worst-case scenario for everyone except the walt disney corporation

[carnivalofglee]

An interesting piece about spotting fake art.

https://www.dailycartoonist.com/index.php/2024/02/11/sham-schulz-original-peanuts-art-auction/

[elliepassmore]

Artifice review

5/5 stars Recommended if you like: historical fiction, WWII stories, stories of resistance, art, heists

I was super excited when I found out Cameron was writing another historical fiction novel. I haven't read Bluebird, but I was already fascinated with the Podgórska sisters' story and loved how Cameron depicted it in The Light in Hidden Places. I think this book probably falls more in line with Bluebird since it's based loosely on real events but doesn't really deal too much with real people the way Light does.

The tension and danger are immediately apparent from page 1 of this book, and it's clear how much Isa is risking by selling forgeries. While this book isn't a thriller, there were a lot of heart pounding moments as Isa and her friends worked to avoid the Nazis and collaborators and did everything in their power to save the Jewish babies slated for execution. At the same time, this story isn't meant to be all action, and Cameron really drives home the tragedy of the situation and heart-wrenching decisions people had to make (such as, who decides which babies get saved? What does that decision look like?). And I really liked seeing the brave souls who put their lives on the line to make sure those decisions were worth it.

The art aspect of it is also really interesting. I have a basic art history education, largely grounded in archeology, but there's some modern stuff in there too, and I found the conversations and thoughts Isa had about the art she saw and needed to replicate really interesting. She knows so much about these artists and their technique, and I enjoyed getting to hear a more accessible interpretation of their work and technique than what you typically find in an art history class. Likewise, all the details about art forgery were really fascinating. There's so much work that goes into it, plus the fact that the forgeries Isa, her father, and van Meegeren are dealing in aren't forgeries of existing work necessarily but rather forgeries that could reasonably have come from the artist they're forging. It's such an interesting way to look at forgeries, yet so obvious at the same time.

Isa herself is not a member of the Resistance. She has her father to worry about and isn't able to leave him to work with the Dutch Resistance. That being said, she hates the Nazis. Like, with a glowing vengeance, and gets a great deal of pleasure out of tricking them with the forgeries. When Truus comes to her, Isa is hesitant, but also determined, even though it means risking her father and their art gallery. Considering Isa's characterization, it makes perfect sense that she'd want to help Truus not only evade the Nazis but help save lives. She also has a bit of a bleeding heart, which is one of the reasons she helps Michel, though that situation is a bit more give-and-take than Isa simply being nice. She's also using him to help with the forgery/baby scheme. All that being said, Isa not being in the Resistance means she's ignorant to some of the ways it works and some of the tricks the Resistance and the Gestapo uses (though really, I'd expect more of her re: the Gestapo). I definitely had moments where I was groaning internally at how careless Isa had been without even realizing, but at the same time, considering how little training she has in Resistance, she does a pretty good job.

Truus is obviously in the Resistance and very anti-Nazi, alongside her boyfriend Willem. She clearly has a fire in her and is willing to risk life-and-limb, and get her uninvolved friend involved, in order to rid the Netherlands of Nazis and save the Jewish babies she's been tasked with saving. Despite her understanding a great deal of the nuances surrounding the Nazis and the Resistance, Truus can be somewhat oblivious at times to the things her friend is going through and it takes her some time to recognize some of those things (i.e., Isa simply cannot leave her father alone for long periods to help). I think there are a lot of misunderstandings that happen there, on both Truus and Isa's side, but overall I liked Truus.

Willem was harder to get a read on and I didn't really like him for most of the book. At first he comes across as hard and antagonistic. Some of this is understandable since, as mentioned, Isa isn't in the Resistance and giving her information can put the entire group into jeopardy, but in other parts he's just hard. I began to warm to him a bit more about halfway through the book when we get to know him a little better and understand that Willem isn't just hard and distrustful, he also carries an incredible amount of guilt and pain. By the end of the book I was a full Willem supporter and I'm glad he and Isa ended up being buddies.

Michel is the Nazi soldier looking to defect who accidentally shows up at the gallery right when Truus and Willem do. Oops. Isa is determined to hate him from the get-go since he's a Nazi, but it turns out they actually knew each other from when they were younger and there's that fact that he's trying to prove to her that he genuinely wants to defect. Considering he can't defect until all the pieces are in place and since Isa comes into contact with the Nazis while trading art, it's somewhat hard to get a grasp on who Michel is when he's one person in private and an entirely different one when around his superiors. I actually did like Michel pretty quickly, but it was definitely hard to trust him and Cameron lays the groundwork of that mistrust well, since something is clearly afoot with the Resistance ring Truus and Willem belong to.

This story is so heartbreaking in so many different ways and it touches on the effects of Nazism on Dutch life, art both classic and modern, the Jewish community, and the queer community. From the beginning it's clear that Isa is haunted by the ghosts of the people she knew who were killed by the Nazi regime, and throughout the book it's made clear time and again the damage and awfulness of the Nazis stealing Dutch art and Dutch Jews. That being said, there are moments of peace and beauty in this book too. Times when Isa is able to find beauty in the sunrise or an old painting her mom or dad did. There are also times when solidarity and community are at the forefront, and not just with the little group here, but also in bigger moments, such as when a crowd of shoppers turns away after a Nazi is shot so the Resistance agent can get away and a Jewish family can be rehidden.

I really enjoyed this book and found the art forgery parts particularly interesting. There's a lot going on here with brutality vs. beauty as well, I think, with how we cannot know people's internal lives until they tell us themselves. Light in Hidden Places is better imo, but Artifice is definitely a good read!