Fake Beauty: The Artistry Of Forgery | Perspective

paper was light gold in medieval times [Music] i want tobacco sugar [Music] that everything we thought we knew about the world might turn out to be completely wrong [Music] what is beauty we see it in people in landscapes in experiences but what exactly is it in this series we explore beauty our instinct for beauty is older than we are it seems it existed tens of thousands of years before we even had language we go back in time to discover the first works of art ever created then trace beauty's evolution through to the present day we travel the length and breadth of the world to discover different cultural attitudes to beauty [Music] and we find out about the future when robots and artificial intelligence will determine our aesthetic tastes we investigate the value of beauty the power of beauty and the other side of beauty how to make it and how to fake it my name's dominic frisbie and i'm a writer from england and i've been asked to make a television series in which we rediscover our sense of beauty my journey begins here [Music] [Music] [Music] this is london and i'm standing just next to the institute of contemporary arts just over here we have the national portrait gallery beyond the british museum in this direction the tate gallery over here the victoria and albert museum this is the art capital of the world but have you ever wondered of all the art that's bought and sold and on display not just here but all over the world how much is genuine according to one study as much as 50 percent is forged you've heard about fake news today's programme is about fake beauty history is full of fraud and forgery and for some reason human beings have always delighted in tales of tricksters and con men there's something about them that captures the imagination we like it when somebody beats the system and gets one over on the pompous and powerful the more powerful and the more evil the tricked the more we like the trickster and so we travel to holland to tell the story of perhaps the greatest trickster of the lot [Music] this is the municipal cemetery of devonta a quiet dutch town about an hour's drive from amsterdam and here at this almost anonymous looking tombstone lie the ashes of perhaps the most notorious forger who ever lived this is the man who duped the nazis [Music] was born into a middle class family in 1889 his love of art came at an early age but his father didn't approve and so van meehan took to painting on the quiet when his father caught him he would make him repeat i know nothing i am nothing i am capable of nothing his teacher at school imbued him with a love of dutch artist vermeer his teacher loathed brash contemporary impressionist styles and taught vanmeharen to paint in the style of the dutch golden age after school his father insisted he study architecture which van meeheren did but he also took art classes on the side [Music] this boathouse here in delft where he studied is one of the buildings he designed and he used to love racing boats here on the canals but he never finished his course instead shortly after marrying his first wife who he met at this very boathouse he went to art school full time he left with all sorts of awards in 1917 he had his first public showing and by the 1920s had become a popular and respected painter [Music] then came the bad reviews dutch art critics were more interested in cubism surrealism and other movements of the time one critic said van meeren's talent was limited to copying others another said he has every virtue except originality van mehren wrote a series of angry articles in retaliation and a kind of rage grew inside of him at the failure of the art world to recognize his genius he set out to prove that he could not only equal but surpass the dutch masters and with this in mind in 1932 now with his second wife he moved to the south of france is more or less the prototype of forgio he started out of revenge as a young guy he he made great portraits of of people and people liked his work but the critics said well mr fermachen your work is good but it's it's not that good so he thought so i'm not that good i will show you that i'm better than you think for five years he studied the dutch greats not only their works but their techniques and their lives vermeer from here in delft in holland was the ideal candidate not only was his work scarce and valuable there was a period from his life from which no work remained it was believed he was in italy at the time so van meeran set out to create vermeer's religious italian period his first offering was the supper at a mouse [Music] when van mejeren's vermeer was first displayed in holland it took the dutch art community by storm dr abraham bradius perhaps the most pompous critic of the day a man for whom van mehren may have had considerable distaste gushed he said it is a wonderful moment in life to discover this hitherto unknown painting he declared it a masterpiece he said in no other painting by the great master do we find such sentiment a storm of excitement in this hitherto undiscovered masterpiece followed and in 1937 dirk hanema director of museum boyman's purchased the separate mouse for the equivalent of about five million dollars [Music] van mehren used the money to buy a lavish estate in nice where he painted some of his greatest forgeries at the onset of war he moved back to holland and by the early 1940s he was worth a fortune he used his money to buy property after property by the canals in some of the most exclusive districts of amsterdam but he was also drinking heavily he'd acquired a taste for sleeping pills and the quality of his work was declining von migran forged vermeer and he did so by finding a blind spot in a theory by an art critic named abraham british who had for his entire life theorized that there had been a religious period in vermeer's work and no work had ever been found that substantiated this claim so von migran made work that fit the theory that british had espoused and british authenticated it because he was so delighted to find proof of what he had always believed the work was abominable looked absolutely nothing like anything you would imagine a vermeer to look like but despite its dubious quality as it had been authenticated by a so-called expert the supper at a mouse became an accepted part of the vermeer collection and thus was the door opened for further forgeries from vermeer's italian religious period one of these christ with the adulteress would enter the history books hermann goring notoriously ruthless after hitler the most powerful man in nazi germany he was also a passionate collector of art and his collection most of it plundered was enormous a german art dealer approached goring and said he had a contact in holland who might be able to get him a vermeer not only a vermeer one from his religious italian period goring jumped at the idea and eventually traded 137 of his own works of art for this vermeer which became his most prized possession he displayed it he showcased it he even declared it the crown jewel in his collection hello hey arthur hello hi tell me about the techniques that um van metron used to to imitate vermeer tell me about the methods he used he experimented for a long time he took months and months and he kept experimenting with a mixture of bakelites which was an early plastic 1920s plastic and uh an oil paint yeah penguins and oil and he mixed this and he tried again and again to see what happened and this would get if you would bake it in an oven you get a special oven made and he would bake it off and see what happened and and in the end he got this result he wanted this old looking painting and it was you know he hit it right so would he paint it with this old paint or would he paint it first and then put it through this process to make it to aging he painted it with this big light mix and then you know it was heated to you know extensively and then uh it it it cracked in the way he wanted it to crack and he rolled it up to get even more cracks and then he rubbed in ink so it would look like it was dust of ages and ages okay and he used all these techniques to just get it to look really old and people believed him and this was years practicing this technique i would think i thought it was more like months and months almost a year and he used the right colors he knew he had to use a type of yellow and a type of blue that was very convincing for mirror color okay [Music] after goring was tried at nuremberg he was sentenced to death an american soldier smuggled him some cyanide with which he committed suicide the day before he was supposed to be executed on that same day another soldier said to him by the way your vermeer it was fake at the end of the war goring's jewel was discovered hidden behind some panels in his home the painting was traced back to the german dealer who gave them van meeheren's name [Music] suddenly vlan mehran found himself on trial for being a nazi collaborator and a plunderer of dutch cultural property he was faced with the sentence of death i painted the picture he said it isn't of amir it's a van mehren nobody believed him to prove his innocence van mehren offered the court a proposition he would forge a vermeer in front of a panel of experts and witnesses the court agreed and over the next six weeks van mehren painted his final vermeer jesus among the doctors and he did it while he was drunk and high that was the only way he could work he said [Music] [Music] when you make a forgery you have to copy the lines of of the the authentic masters but if you copy it line by line people see it it has to be more fluent and a lot of foragers drink to make more fluent lines so some of the forges when they start to work their first drink a few beers take a few pills and then they go do what they want to do experts said it was of such a high quality that van mehren couldn't possibly be lying and the charge was dropped [Music] he was sentenced to a year in prison if i die in jail he said they will forget my paintings will become vermeers once more i didn't do it for the money i did it for the art but the day before his incarceration was to begin he died of a heart attack he was 58 and here on his tombstone is written his name and the years he lived nothing more was he a hero was he a villain was he a victim it's left blank the forger adds real value in to the world by getting caught not because he or she necessarily wants to but when that happens does so very often in terms of calling into question all of the mechanisms of authority that tend to be taken for granted the forger is in a sense a great artist by virtue of the act of forgery but only when the forger gets caught only when the forger ultimately fails to do what he or she set out to do does the forger ascend to a higher plane during the course of his trial van maheren said something rather profound yesterday this painting was worth millions of gilders and experts and art lovers would come from all over the world and pay money to see it today it is worth nothing and nobody would cross the street to see it for free yet the picture hasn't changed what has [Music] after the war formation became quite famous he died but formation before becoming a forger had made his own style his own work so some people wanted to collect the original formations but the only one who could authenticate these pieces was the son of confirmation and he thought when i'm the only one who can authenticate the pieces of my dead why don't i forge some of those pieces [Laughter] so formation was forced by his own son like father like so the greatest forges are almost always skilled artists who feel somehow rejected by the art world perhaps they're masters of a style that isn't in fashion but for whatever reason their work goes unnoticed unappreciated a critic deems it inconsequential they don't get the recognition they feel they deserve and they have a point to prove excluded by the very world they want to be a part of they're going to get their own back when an artist gets caught having made a forgery very often the excuse is that the art world has been too harsh and somehow has not allowed that artist to do what he or she believes is great work and that may be true though if you look in many cases at the sheer amount of work that these artists make under other names and the sheer amount of money that they make at it you have to question whether that is the case so art forgery like any sort of crime or in fact like any sort of activity inherently has many different motivations that vary from person to person and even within an individual [Music] art crime is almost as orbit art itself before the the paint was dry on within the the pyramids in egypt um looters already were entering to steal and forgery we know that for example in 200 bc when the romans started to collect greek art like faces and statues the mark was fluted with fakes and at the time people had no not much knowledge or technical skills to to distinguish fakes and authentic pieces but they didn't care that much at the time we know from cicero that he was more interested in how these pieces looked in his house than whether they were fake or real so it started forgery started around 200 300 bc so that's quite a long time ago the motivation is almost always financial in ancient rome ancient greek statues became extremely popular and to satisfy demand some romans took to forging them in ancient rome you find many copies of ancient greek statuary and our instinct today is to look at the roman copies as being lesser as somehow being as if they were forgeries but that to me doesn't seem right because the romans were not looking at the greek originals as being original in some sort of a privileged sense what really mattered was the design and therefore the roman copy was for the romans often superior because it could take the greek design and could perfect it for the roman environment for whatever garden the statuary would be placed in and moreover could make it more perfect it could improve upon the condition of the original and so when we look at a roman copy it really is important i think that we not look at it entirely from our own context of seeing these works as somehow being copies fakes or forgeries but rather that we appreciate that the design is what mattered and therefore that we try to appreciate the design as instantiated in these copies in the dark ages in medieval times there was an extremely brisk trade in religious relics many of which were of dubious provenance during the dark ages the middle ages there was not much interest for art people had other things on their minds the plague was there was not much money around so art collecting was not a real issue at the time but people collected relics like bones from saints and um some saints there were so many bones attached to some of these saints that these people must have had two or three bodies during their lifetime so there were a lot of fakes around of course during the renaissance many painters took on apprentices and actually taught them to paint in their own style the master would then sell these works as payment for his teaching this was considered tribute and not forgery and indeed the distinction between what is tribute what is homage what is pastiche and what is outright forgery is often rather blurred traditionally we tend to think of a forgery as a form of fraud that is to say that it is distinct from homage where an homage is generally speaking done in public where it is explicitly a copy or a version of an original therefore a forgery always has a subversive quality to it it has a quality of questioning the original which runs much more deep i believe than an homage can do because an homage simply can bring out qualities in the original and relationships between the original and the copyist or the artist who has undertaken the homage the forgery can bring out all sorts of latent qualities that have to do with how we received the original and how we relate to it today in italy the renaissance had created a new prosperous middle class and they wanted art ancient roman statues became extremely popular but there were only so many genuine ancient roman statues that could be unearthed supply had to meet demand by alternative means we go to the renaissance and that's a very special period first of all art collecting became a real business popes kings merchants started to collect art there was money there was great art so there was money and what was more important some artists for the first time in history became famous before the renaissance it was not about the artist it was about the piece of art most of those art was religious and those pieces were inspired by god and dedicated to god so it was not about the artist they didn't even sign those works of art but in a renaissance we see that some of these artists become pop stars michelangelo and other people they start to become famous people wanted their work so this mix of a lot of money around and artists who become famous people that's the perfect mix for forgeries however it seems that even some of the renaissance rock stars themselves might have started out as forgers [Music] once upon a time right behind me here in the heart of london stood the largest palace in the whole of europe the palace of whitehall but unfortunately in 1698 it burned down and among the many items destroyed in the fire was a little-known statue by a young michelangelo called the sleeping cupid when michelangelo was just 21 his patron lorenzo de medici died his hometown of florence was in political turmoil and the young struggling artist found himself strapped for cash and at the time ancient roman statues were selling rather well so the young michelangelo thought he would sculpt one in the ancient style and when he came to sell it he was told bury it in the ground treat it so it looks old send it to rome there they'll think it's an antique and you'll get more money for it so that's just what michelangelo did one of the most interesting stories about forges during the renaissance is michelangelo the greatest of all we know that in the time of of michelangelo people wanted authentic roman statues they didn't like his work that much of michelangelo so they they said we want authentic roman pieces so what did michelangelo do he forged roman statues he made them he put them well in acidic ground to give them appearance of great age and then he sold them as authentic roman statues so can you imagine that somebody somewhere in the world is looking at a roman statue of what he thinks is a roman statue worth 10 000 euros which in reality is a michelangelo being worth tens of millions so sometimes a forgery can be worth more than an authentic piece michelangelo had a kind of agent in rome called baldassare del milanese and del milanese found a buyer for the sculpture a cardinal no less one cardinal riario who paid the princely sum of 200 duckets but michelangelo didn't know any of that he just took his cut and forgot about it two years later michelangelo went to rome looking for a patron he'd been recommended to visit cardinal riario and he took with him his letter of recommendation the cardinal showed michelangelo his collection rather proudly and there right in the middle of it was the sleeping cupid i sculpted that said michelangelo and the scam was rumbled that's when it was discovered that michelangelo had only been paid 30 ducats the dealer had pocketed the other 170 the cardinal demanded his money back but not from michelangelo the fact that michelangelo had been able to mimic so brilliantly the ancients had impressed the cardinal and he would become michelangelo's patron skill was considered more important than originality in those days when ideas were just part of the collective and michelangelo's career took off first he sculpted bacchus then pieta within three years david was commissioned and within 10 he was standing on a scaffolding brush in hand with his arm outstretched towards the ceiling of the sistine chapel where he painted his iconic work del milanese meanwhile had to give the cardinal a refund but when michelangelo's career took off he sold the sculpture for even more money as a genuine michelangelo how many more michelangelo's are there out there masquerading as ancient roman statues quite a few i suspect michelangelo was an art forger when people would loan him works by past masters he often liked the drawings so much that he would not only copy them for his own education but he would keep them for himself and he would give back the copies that he had made passing them off as if they were the originals and so today we don't know which of these works are his as opposed to the masters who he claimed they had been made by and as a result anything that we look at from that period could be in fact michelangelo and therefore we need to look at all work from that period a little bit more closely thinking not only about our appreciation for who made it based on what name is on it but also what hand was responsible for it and that makes us i think more attentive to all artwork most forgers fall into their habit they don't set out to be forge as it just happens by some accident of fortune often the need to earn a living perhaps they find themselves painting reproductions imitating copying and they discover they're rather good at it when the money starts coming in it's very hard to turn down that money's nice and that's when they're trapped i believe that fakes are the great art of our age that forgeries are the masterpieces of our time not because of their inherent qualities in terms of the paintings or the sculptures in their own right but because of the act of forgery and the effect that it has when a forger is exposed on how we look at that work and how we look at ourselves to me art is ultimately most interesting in our time where it provokes anxiety about ourselves about our society makes us look at our world and scrutinize ourselves a little bit more closely and when a forgery is exposed that's exactly what happens while artwork in a museum say an expressionist masterpiece or say a work of pop art may in some way suggest various ways in which our society is unsettled or unsettling may illustrate that fact the forgery actually is working with the unsettling qualities as the very material of the fakery that is to say that the forger is using us as the real material of the masterpiece and is using us also as the audience of it so that when we see that we've been bamboozled what we find are all the ways in which by way of our deception we were not attentive enough we were not paying attention to phenomena or to attributes of our society that we should have been and these attributes may range from the degree to which we tend to invest too much of a sense of value in authority to the degree to which we may think of authenticity as being a very simple sort of operation all of this is up for re-examination when the forger is at work and that to me is why forgers deserve our begrudging respect and so to switzerland to meet one of the foremost companies in art analysis and verification to discuss art forgery today art forgery is much more widespread than most collectors would expect since 209 since i'm in this industry we've seen a massive international forgery scandal every year and every time auction houses the big galleries the art dealers would tell you that's the last time that was a one-off that's bad luck it won't happen again but in fact every year you have a new forgery scandal so i think it's pretty widespread sgs is in the business of inspection and verification it acts as a kind of quality control for traded goods anything from chemicals to agricultural produce making sure they meet certain standards more recently it has got into the business of art and that's because there is more fake art trading hands than perhaps ever before there are three main reasons why we find so many forgeries on the market today the first reason is the value of art if an artwork is worth tens or hundreds of millions of dollars of course for the forger it's very tempting because by working just a few days or a few weeks you can make a big sum of money a very good salary as a painter by doing fakes the second reason is that many people buy art nowadays as a form of investment and these people probably don't have the same level of knowledge and education than collectors had in the past and these people are probably much easier to cheat on than a very educated collector the third reason is that modern contemporary art forms like abstract art may be perceived as easier to forge or to copy when you compare an abstract composition to a complicated old master painting by guardi or caneletto or tiapolo of course it's more tempting for a forger to copy an abstract composition because it's simpler it looks simpler [Music] sgs analyzes up to 400 artworks every year and as many as 80 percent of them turn out to be fakes forgeries or misattributions this female nude signed by french painter of the early 20th century falvest movement albert marquet was sold with a certificate dating the painting to 1912 [Music] when the owner wanted to renew the certificate the albert marquez authentication committee refused [Music] [Music] sgs began their examination using techniques which included spectroscopy infrared reflectography x-ray radiography and pigment analysis [Music] [Music] another composition was found underneath upside down [Music] a tractor with farmers during the harvest season [Music] attractive enough but notice the tyres on the tractor tires such as these weren't used until the 1930s or 1940s thus the terminus post quem the earliest possible date for the canvas is then there is no way the market on top could have been painted in nineteen twelve thanks to infrared reflectography and extra radiography we found out an underneath composition this this painting representing a totally different subject representing attractor attractor with the harvest scene and the details that we can see in the infrared reflectography allows to demonstrate that the characteristic of this starter are not compatible with a model from 1912. [Music] this painting of a doge was believed to be of the 16th century venetian school but was it a genuine 16th century work or a later copy [Music] the painting had been heavily restored and ultraviolet light was used to determine which parts were original and which parts restored [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] once this was established the original parts were examined and pigments were discovered which weren't used until the 19th century making that the terminus post-queen this was no 16th century work [Music] one of the most interesting and recent cases we have had here at sgs art services was brought to us by madame manuela de kirkov she bought a painting made by her grandfather renegade and it has a piezage and it's dated from 1953. when the painting arrived very evidently we could see paint losses that revealed very bright colors that were contrasting with the current composition that we see in pistache the analysis that we performed on paisage were able to uncover underlying composition [Music] when i received the x-ray from sjs i discovered a cubist landscape with two figures and it was a surprise and suddenly studying more this x-ray i suddenly remember that there was somewhere into my archives of pictures of renegade who was painting a cubist painting [Music] it was possible to compare with photographs from the archive and have an exact match of the painting that was underneath it was also authored by renegade from his cubist period that he then later reused this canvas in the 50s to make the composition that we see today there is no technology presently available that would enable us to separate these two paintings however it's unlikely juliet would have wanted that to happen he probably painted over many cubist paintings while the cubist paintings there are also many many possibilities because the flat surface or because he was not liking his cubist period anymore [Music] for whatever reason juliet chose to paint over his previous efforts perhaps we should respect that decision and leave these paintings covered how many more covered works are there the answer to that we will likely never know nor will we ever know just how big the fake art market is not all forgeries get detected despite best efforts to safeguard against misattribution and scams the spate of scandals which have rocked the art world in recent years with prized paintings being declared near worthless fakes means there is insecurity fear and paranoia amongst museums collectors and auction houses alike fake works masquerading as originals continue to litter the market we will never know just how many are fake forgery is deceit and the aim of a forger is not to be found out [Music] the value of fake art on the market is probably impossible to determine exactly what i can say is that in the massive forgery scandals we've seen the international forgery scandal we've seen in the last years they have caused millions of dollars of damage to collectors auction houses art dealers the estimates of forgeries on the market range between 20 and 30 percent so that means that almost all museum collections or private collections are full of eggs just as methods of detection improve and evolve so do the forges themselves then always be one step ahead and the higher valuations in the art market go the greater the length to which forges and their agents will go to get a piece of this extraordinarily lucrative action particularly if the aspiring artist that is the forger considers himself overlooked and wants to get his own back there will be forgery for as long as there is a market for art perhaps in the future attitudes towards originality will change and ideas will once again be considered part of the collective just as they were before the renaissance and the skills of craftsmanship will be ascribed greater value art itself is a reproduction of life perhaps art by its very nature is therefore false [Music] some years ago i decided that i wanted to be immortal as so many artists want to be but i've never really been any good at painting or drawing so i couldn't take the usual means so instead what i did was i applied for a copyright on my mind with the idea that i could continue to think after my own death by licensing my mind to an artificial intelligence and i don't know right now what to think of that because i'm still alive but maybe after i'm dead and i am able to think about it i'll have a better idea of what it means to be alive and what it means in terms of the degree to which we are what we think as opposed to the embodied selves that we think of ourselves as being when we think of ourselves as being alive you

Channel: Perspective

Views: 11,894

Keywords: Arts, The Arts, Theatre, Music, Full EPisode, Full documentary, documentary, performing arts, the sense of beauty, full documentary movie, documentary movie, full movie, the sense of beauty documentary, sense of beauty, full documentary, the sense of beauty documentario, il senso della bellezza, science documentary, documentary movies, free documentary movies, can beauty be dangerous, the dangers of beauty, forgery, art forgery documentary, art forgery forensics

Id: CH78icePU-w

Length: 52min 31sec (3151 seconds)

Published: Sat Oct 30 2021