In art fakery, gray areas can cloud the picture

NEW YORK —  In a world engorged with fakery, we look to art as a haven of authenticity: What could be more irreducibly genuine than a piece of canvas stretched and daubed by the hand of a master and hung from a hook on a wall?

We look in vain. In art, as in news, effects-laden movies and “reality” TV, it’s difficult to decide what is authentic -- and how much it matters.

In Switzerland, an entrepreneur supervises a team of forgers manufacturing fake Monets, Renoirs and Van Goghs and claims a prestigious clientele. In Rome, a blockbuster Caravaggio exhibition consists entirely of life-size digital reproductions. In San Francisco and Toronto last fall, crowds flocked to museums to see Degas’ iconic bronze ballerinas, bathers and horses -- all of them cast years after the artist’s death. Fakery is as old as the art trade. Collectors in imperial Rome placed a premium on classical Greek sculpture, and unscrupulous Roman forgers ensured that supply always would meet demand (wink, wink).

A beautiful artwork does not cease to be beautiful once its authorship is cast in doubt, but it can cease to be precious. August Uribe, a specialist in Impressionist and modern art at Sotheby’s, offers the example of a purported Monet that hung above a collector’s mantel for decades. Called in to evaluate the painting, Uribe had to demolish the owner’s dreams and decree that the beloved heirloom was a piece of junk.

“At the end of the day, we’re not curators here, we’re merchants. We have to play by the rules,” Uribe said.

Money isn’t the only reason it’s important to establish authenticity. Scholars value definitive identity for its own sake and for what it can illuminate of history and culture.

“Fakes distort and falsify our understanding of an artist and of history,” said Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, which offers an authentication service. “The marketplace is the driving force behind a lot of it, but scholars are interested, too. Ultimately, you want to feel that you know who Monet is: his trajectory, his developments, his influences.”

To help navigate the fluid distinctions between what is genuine and what is not, keep in mind four broad categories of questionable art: the outright fake, the misattribution, the unauthorized multiple and the work deliberately designed to sow confusion.

Daniele Donde, based in Lugano, Switzerland, makes fakes to order. The bulk of the hand-painted faux masterpieces he sells are commissioned, he says, by collectors who want replicas of masterworks they have been forced to sell.

Donde is unapologetic about his products, each of which bears a false signature but is accompanied by a certificate of inauthenticity. He distinguishes between a copy and a “falso,” or forgery: The copy can be made from a postcard and has no merit, while the “falso” is a work of art in its own right, a brushstroke-by-brushstroke reproduction using the same dimensions, techniques and colors as the artist did in the original.

“The art of the falsario,” or forger, he said, using the word from his native Italian, “is to create something that is indistinguishable from the original. The forgery has the same artistic value of the original, even if the original will sell for $10 million and mine goes for $10,000. In 50 years, my paintings will be in all the museums.”

The forger of the Getty Kouros -- if such a person exists -- deserves kudos for a job well done. In 1985, the Getty Museum acquired what it believed to be an ancient statue of a mysteriously smiling Greek youth. It soon emerged that the provenance papers stating its ownership history had been faked, and scientific analyses of the sculpture raised more questions than they answered. Scholars still are sharply divided about the Kouros, and the museum has labeled it as “Greek, about 530 B.C., or modern forgery.”

Most questionable artworks were never intended to deceive, but rather were misattributed by scholars.

Modern fakes that initially pass for Old Masters eventually start to look their real age, said Flescher of IFAR. “Often, when you have fakes, even the ones that fool people at that time a generation or two later give themselves away. With distance they start revealing stylistic anachronisms.”

Connoisseurship has been supplemented by ostensibly irrefutable techniques -- pigment analysis, dendrochronology, infrared reflectography -- but attribution is still not a hard science. Beginning in 1968, a five-member panel of scholars based in Amsterdam spent decades sifting through the global stock of Rembrandts, and eventually pronounced many of them inauthentic. The commission later reversed some of its decisions.

The question of attribution also is complicated by the fact that in some periods and places it was common for master artists to distribute the brushwork among a workshop full of assistants. While demoting a painting to a “school of” label can mean a precipitous drop in prestige and value, it does not necessarily follow that a work needs to have been painted by just one artist’s hand to count as genuine.

In the case of multiples, such as photographs, prints and bronze sculptures, the issue of authenticity becomes even murkier. An arbitrary number of authorized copies, determined mainly by market considerations, are made from the negative, the plate or the mold. The difference between an authorized edition and a pirated one is often just a matter of record keeping.