My Fake Picasso Went to Auction at $1.4 Million

this is just a little storeroom so you've got a caravaggio six and a half foot basket there's another emoji there only there oh is this a picasso i mean i do picassos sometimes i can do two or three in a day before breakfast you know because they're they're not that difficult and i gave one to a friend of mine he sold it someone bought it and they took it to the auction and they valued a million [Music] forgery is one of the greatest challenges the art world faces today with fakes and misattributions estimated to be as high as 50 of all works in the art market sold 6 million too to combat this there has sprung a multi-billion dollar industry of authentication services however away from the premier arts circuit there is a blind spot where forgeries get through with ease i'm on my way to meet david henty and billy the brush mumford two convicted forgers who have made thousands selling their fakes on ebay the two lads like to go to this car boot sale to find historical materials appropriate to whatever they're forging although they claim to have hung up their forgery boots they're going to show me how they would fake painting then i'm going to take that painting to one of london's premier authentication services to see if they can clock it's a fake greek philly sydney hiya how you doing hi how are you doing hi philly nice to meet you take me through this license plate van gogh's i've got i've got i've got van gogh as well yeah and i've got all the van gogh options yeah yeah well i'm also i'm just buying one then for 63r forger what have you got here philly's got a load of catalogs so i'm going to be looking through these later on this afternoon and thinking oh if i get little canvas like that you know i'll stick something on you know you get some good ideas for me we're going to go down to the market now but just before that um unfortunately i served uh some time in a prison about two or three minutes away so we might go via there before billy was caught under the police's operations sketch and sentenced to two years he had forged one thousand pieces that had made their way across the globe detectives have only managed to find 40 so far meaning there's a lot still in circulation so how did you get into art forgery well i was dismissed from st martin's in 1968 it was something to do with me being intoxicated in a life drawing class it was the either get a job or um use what limited artistic skills i had and that's the road i went down do you still uh forge art no not at all wouldn't touch you with a barge pole do you do any art um yeah i doodle sometimes yeah do they look any similar to any other pieces of art sometimes sometimes yeah so have you served any time for art forgery i serve time for forgery forging passports right i went into the um the prison art department before i just go in there read about art and learn about it but the teachers there said no you've got to actually paint when i came out i thought this is what i want to do but it's very difficult to sell your own work but then i painted a lovely little paul henry irish artist i put it on i've got a thousand pounds and i was getting i'm gonna say too much because i've straightened the tax man out now i had the criminal tax investigation because i was making so much money there we better go billy okay we better go we're gonna miss all the old canvases you certainly are what's your favorite thing about the art world oh the money mark rothko a wonderful american abstract painter said that to be an artist you have to steal a space on a rich man's wall and i love that i don't forge famous artists per se i do the one that they could have painted when i used to do ebay and stuff like that there was a caveat saying there's no paperwork or provenance with this painting so sold in the style of after the artist that way you're covered by law you could go to the auction and put it in and not say anything and if they go yes then it goes through you know and billy and i get all the the art catalogs and quite often you'll open it up and you'll see so do you think uh auction houses kind of profit off not asking questions yeah yeah yeah i mean if they can turn a blind eye they want it to be right because if it isn't right they ain't going to earn a dime so how would we go about finding the tools if you want to get it past the forensics you have to use um age-appropriate materials that's one for you isn't it yeah yeah this is it does it have a look yes yep thanks yeah windsor and newton it's an old one about 1910 1915 perfect perfect for a little uh little painting i could do a larry on there yeah it's good it's like an early lower yeah how much are they these are old ledgers look at that one of larry's um things that he did he'd drawn any of it you know any letters in his pocket and envelopes and stuff they turn up every now and again and if they're from the 50s or 60s and they've got a good chance of being a lowry drawing that was a good buy mate i should do a little masterpiece from here later oh and sweet home [Music] the whole purpose of coming here is for david to have a look at some frames how much of this billy nice selection david let's get them out before we talk dave i cannot talk money in the door in case i faint at the price says rusty nails where did they get like that with a saltwater aspect why would anyone want rusty nails pitched the hell out of me i think it's time passenger time really i i don't think it's a chemical process no don't lump them all together though they're individual prices david individual price this one beautiful 90 quid you're adding it up 70 quid what first year this one and a quarter don't this one here for my friend as a gift nothing gornish that's nice yeah that's a little italian paint in there are you in these on yeah good what's that 375. yeah i thought yeah 40 quid 23 mazda pleasure to meet you all i wish i could say it was a pleasure to me come here you schmuck [Music] should i take in these ones in here yeah if you wouldn't mind i've got to be so careful with that god just don't say that hello oh come on rook rocky oh wow yeah this is insane this is just a little storeroom with some my uh paintings in there so you've got caravaggio caravaggio i think there's another one oh there's caravaggio there as well salvador mandy who went for the most money ever at auction it did 450 million yeah six and a half foot basket you could take that and do the forensics on it yeah and it would come back as genuine really yeah there's another emoji gliani there basket how often are you doing these paintings every day i get up every day and then i work seven days a week just because i really enjoy it oh is this a picasso i mean i do picassos you know sometimes i can do two or three in a day you know they're not that difficult and i gave one to a friend of mine he sold it someone bought it and they took it to the auction and they valued a million they had quite a lot of interest in it but um came out in the papers that this forger said it's his the guy who owned it started them threatening and he told um a friend of mine that goes in there that buys stuff you know tell him i'm going to get someone to burn his house down i'll put your house my house here put a uh firebomb for the letterbox so i reported it to the police and i've got all cameras put up in the front of my house and stuff i just said on twitter i said do due diligence you know if you're selling a million pound painting get it authenticated itself and was all the tv cameras were there and uh the news channels and i said it flopped i think they said they sold it for 8 000. amazing quite a view yeah yeah it's good did you often work out here yeah if i can i love to work out here just because it's uh yeah it's nice it's peaceful you know and i painted a little seascape so how much like have you studied larry then to to understand how he paints like down to a tee so i've been to his the lowry gallery um i bought every book i can find um about lowry when you've stepped in their shoes you understand a bit more than uh than an academic you're actually living it but this one i'm making up oh so i'll put a bit of sky so it could be like a lost lowry that's just ended up at auction well it might well do do you think they're like any problems with art forgery well i think there's a lot of problems with uh people making money off of dead eyes you know and that didn't make any money in their own lifetimes you know there's more of a problem with that with a thought you know you're an ordinary girl you love picasso or you love mo diglia you haven't got 5 million or 10 million or 100 million but i still want to paint him i don't want to print a lifeless print so you know is that wrong i think the basic thing is i don't i don't care about the money i love the art when i go to bed at night i can't wake you up in the morning if i'm working on you know something i really really like you're in your own world basically if i was a multi-millionaire i'd still get up in the morning and paint pictures obviously technology's advanced do you think that makes it harder to make good forged forgeries no no no no i think you can beat the uh the forensics and the rest is about good craftsmanship really so what do you think well passable [Laughter] okay well give me a call when it's ready and i'll take it to the lab okay and i'll let you know how it goes as long as we get half something okay so i dropped off david hensey's lowry the other day and they're going to run a few tests so fingers crossed for david hello i'm sydney there it is here it is so here's the lowry um basically dismantled in taking it out of its frame the tape's still quite sticky which means it wasn't on there for a long time taking the painting out he's clearly used one of these old notebooks 1955 so no question about it this is old this isn't particularly impressive now we're going to take that and have a look down the microscope straight away we can see that it's it's very yellow looking and this is typical of forgeries because you want the object to look old and if you just paint it in nice fresh bright colors it's going to look new there's no obvious cracking and yes we've got an obvious fake patina you see it right away we did find what we think is a pet hair they have tea dogs old master artists we're really careful about their materials and you don't find dog hairs so now that we've um with our tiny scalpel taking our tiny samples we're going to take them to the lab and see what we've got hi we brought a stub with some samples from the lowry painting so what's this machine it's actually one of our best tools for looking for forgeries it does the best job of anything in this room for looking for modern 21st century pigments is there any way that anyone could trick these machines no so now we'll go have a quick look at our imaging room where we'll be taking an x-ray as well as the lowry the way this works is the the painting's placed in the chassis and then the camera moves so it's like google earth you get lots of little tiny images that are then put together in a computer and you can zoom in and zoom out it's like having a microscope without a microscope so one of the most famous quotes which is actually on david hunty's website is i am a simple man and i use simple materials ivory black vermillion prussian blue yellow ochre flake white and no medium however we found cadmium red instead of vermilion we're accumulating evidence and the evidence it's not looking good it's not pointing in the right direction here's our x-ray of the lowry as you can see it's kind of not very controlled looking strokes and looking at other lowries um we see that there's kind of a control so david was often selling heat on ebay do you think that means that there's a bit of a blind spot for getting these kind of lowries through yeah i mean it's for all sorts of things people love to make discoveries but it's really buyer beware if you're not an expert if you're getting a bargain it's probably not a bargain i think for the market he's shooting at for doing something to sell on ebay he's going to fool the average punter who's not an expert but copying things for profit that's deception and that's where it becomes a criminal act forgers will speak about channeling you know the the dead artist as if it was some sort of psychic gift they had which is all hugely dodgy it's just justification for profiting on someone else's genius so it's david henty fears he he's not an artist he's a criminal yeah basically um and he's a bit overrating himself to say judge is the best copyist in the world okay won't let him know hi david how are you it's sydney hi hey i'm good i just left art analysis i think it went well oh really well we sound surprised there's one problem with like the paint the type of white paint and there was the vermilion apparently the vermilion was wrong i didn't know that i didn't think they'd pick up on it i mean i didn't do it to fool anyone really no of course not david [Laughter] there's literally no way you could have got past her honestly yeah there's enough no way bye david oh he's so sweet i thought he was going to get a bit miffed but um that's easy i've encouraged him to keep keeping [Music] you

Channel: VICE

Views: 1,143,741

Rating: 4.8840413 out of 5

Keywords: Art, counterfeit, fake art, art forgery, spotting fake art, forgery, fakes, frauds, scam, scammer, blag, blagger, black market, con, conman, sham, Sydney lima, picasso, L.S. Lowry, Lowry, criminal, police, trick, documentary, documentaries, docs, interview, culture, lifestyle, world, exclusive, independent, underground, videos, journalism, vice guide, vice.com, vice, vice magazine, vice mag, vice videos, film, short film, movies, VWN, Vice World News, world news, news

Id: I8WupeLTxow

Length: 15min 36sec (936 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 26 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/asian_identifier]

there's a whole village that does this in China

[u/gladfelter]

Forgery in the arts is something I have no problem with. If people are paying a lot of money, it isn't for the art, it's for the exclusivity. It's a positional good. I could care less if billionaires are cheated out of their desire to make their millionaire friends jealous. The whole thing is disgusting.

I guess I'd feel a little sympathy if a living artist struggles due to forgery of their work, but that's not how the system works. The value typically only goes up significantly after the artist can no longer dilute the supply by creating new pieces. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been artists who have been assassinated by collectors of their work to inflate the market value.

[u/Palin_Sees_Russia]

She looks a lot like Margot Robbie