Art Fraud and Other Picture Postcards
Feb. 22nd, 2012 11:29 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
elrhiarhodanIn my recent story, I Have Borne The Burden of Myself, Peter calls Neal into the office on a Sunday to go over an art fraud case. I probably should have mentioned it in the author notes, but I based the story on a real, on-going investigation that I first read about almost two years ago.
It's a story that's hard to summarize, but basically a second-tier art dealer has been selling previously unknown and uncataloged works by the giants of Abstract Expressionism: Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willam De Kooning and others, through the venerable Knodler Gallery. The story originally caught my eye not because I like Abstract Expressionism, but because a friend of mine from high school once had a job at the Knodler.
What makes the story compelling (and interesting to fans of White Collar) is that the experts cannot agree on whether the paintings are authentic or forgeries. One of the things you'd thing was a dead giveaway - paint from the alleged Pollack was not invented until years after the painting was made - is not absolute proof. You can't go strictly by patent dates - a paint may have been formulated and given to an artist to use years before the actual patent was filed.
Which brings to mind Neal's forgery of The Entrance of the Masked Dancers and Kramer's subsequent authentication. I guess it would be too much (and would have spoiled the plot) to expect Kramer and Peter to have sent a pigment sample in for testing. It sort of strains even my rather elastic sense of credulity to accept that Neal would just happen to have a complete set of oil pastels from the 1890s laying around.
Anyway, I digress. If you want to read a very interesting summation on art fraud, check out this article in today's New York Times.
And another bonus Neal-as-Artist:
It's a story that's hard to summarize, but basically a second-tier art dealer has been selling previously unknown and uncataloged works by the giants of Abstract Expressionism: Robert Motherwell, Jackson Pollack, Mark Rothko, Willam De Kooning and others, through the venerable Knodler Gallery. The story originally caught my eye not because I like Abstract Expressionism, but because a friend of mine from high school once had a job at the Knodler.
What makes the story compelling (and interesting to fans of White Collar) is that the experts cannot agree on whether the paintings are authentic or forgeries. One of the things you'd thing was a dead giveaway - paint from the alleged Pollack was not invented until years after the painting was made - is not absolute proof. You can't go strictly by patent dates - a paint may have been formulated and given to an artist to use years before the actual patent was filed.
Which brings to mind Neal's forgery of The Entrance of the Masked Dancers and Kramer's subsequent authentication. I guess it would be too much (and would have spoiled the plot) to expect Kramer and Peter to have sent a pigment sample in for testing. It sort of strains even my rather elastic sense of credulity to accept that Neal would just happen to have a complete set of oil pastels from the 1890s laying around.
Anyway, I digress. If you want to read a very interesting summation on art fraud, check out this article in today's New York Times.
And another bonus Neal-as-Artist:
