Rebroadcast: Fraud and forgery in the world of fine art

So what we’re going to do when we come back though, Richard, is I want to talk to you about why an artist like Jean Michel Basquiat is also so frequently forged.

Part II

CHAKRABARTI: Sticking with Basquiat here for just a second here, I’ve read that he’s one of the most faked artists. Why is that?

POLSKY: They’re relatively easy to fake if you don’t know what to look for.

CHAKRABARTI: If you don’t know, okay, so you are the authenticator of Basquiat here.

What would you look for?

POLSKY: Oh, that’s a trade secret.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

POLSKY: Can’t tell you that. But here’s a funny segue. Okay. Let’s go back to square one. The art world, or I should say the art market, is unregulated. Okay? That means anyone can become an art dealer. Do you realize, Meghna, tomorrow you could wake up and say, I’ve had it with broadcasting and NPR and On Point.

I’m going to do something else with my life. I’m going to become an art dealer. I’m going to open a gallery. And all you have to do is find a space, paint the walls white, you throw a plant in the corner, you hang a few pictures, you’re in business. And the public assumes you know what you’re doing.

Art history. You have good business ethics. You have taste. Maybe not. And this is why there’s so much, there’s so many problems. There’s so much fraud in this world. Because nobody had to pass a test. Obviously to become a physician, you have to pass your medical boards. To become an attorney, you pass the bar exam.

Even to do nails or cut hair, you have to be licensed. All right? But to sell you a million-dollar Basquiat, no, I don’t have to be.

CHAKRABARTI: To be honest, you don’t have to pass the test to be a journalist either, if I’m perfectly honest. (LAUGHS)

POLSKY: There you go. Okay. So you and I are in the same boat there. That’s right.

CHAKRABARTI: But I take your point.

I have to say though, I very much appreciate your realism here, Richard. But I’m also, but nevertheless, you’re in a world, you are an art authenticator, there must be something. Okay, don’t give away your trade secrets, but there must be something that gives you the ability of some training. I don’t know, that gives you the ability to be an authenticator versus me who might squirt some paint on a canvas and leave it outside and call it a Basquiat.

POLSKY: No I hear what you’re saying. I have about 45 years of experience in this business. And the way you become a connoisseur, or an expert is you have to immerse yourself in that world. There’s a saying that if you want to become a wine expert, you have to drink a lot, okay? In art, you have to look a lot.

You have to spend a lot of time in person with these works of art. And that means a lot of travel. Jackson Pollock is one of the artists I authenticate. I’ve seen almost every major Jackson Pollock drip painting in person. The one I haven’t seen actually is in a museum in Tehran, in Iran of all places, which is a fantastic story if you have time to hear it.

But the point is, you have to look a lot. You have to read. You have to talk to people. You have to travel. You have to see the art, there’s no getting around it, and this is how you learn about it. And there’s a lot of joy in it, it’s a lot of fun looking at these things. But the idea is to walk away and take that feeling with you.

So then when a painting is put in front of you, it’s almost like having a sixth sense. You go, wow, that’s not a Basquiat, no way. That’s not his line, that’s not his sense of color, that’s not his touch. And it takes years and years to get to that point. The art world has always, not just in modern times, but I would argue always been one that was subject to the vicissitudes of very rich people, right?

But on the other hand, there is a common experience, that sort of seeing the world in a different way, that you talked about, that great art engenders in all of us. And I think for that reason, there is, there has been a long-term interest in having some sort of means by which to trust authenticate, authenticators and authentications.

Weren’t there art authentication boards for many of these painters for a long time?

POLSKY: Now you’re getting into the crux of this. When a major artist dies, they leave behind often a very valuable estate. The greatest example is probably Andy Warhol. When Warhol died, they said his estate was worth $500 million, give or take $10 million here or there.

No one knew. But that was a lot of money in the ’80s. It still is. Okay? And because Warhol’s technique involved a photo mechanical process, what they call a photo silkscreen. If you knew what you were doing, they weren’t hard to reproduce. Alright? A lot of fakes and forgeries started creeping into the market.

Because of that, the Warhol Estate put together an art authentication board. And a board, in theory, should be a group of experts. People who worked with Andy, people who were his art dealers, perhaps someone who wrote a book about him. People who knew their stuff. In reality, what often would happen, like with Basquiat, is family members would get involved.

In Basquiat’s case, his father, who’s now deceased, his name was Gerard, he was a sophisticated person, he was an accountant. He ran the Basquiat Art Authentication Board. And this is when things get a little dicey, because these people, these family members mean but they’re not experts. So you see it all.

But getting back to the Warhol Board, they did create a situation where the public had the opportunity, free of charge, to bring a painting to them. And have them examine it and make a determination. The tricky part there was you had to sign a piece of paper where if the Warhol board thought your painting was not correct, they had permission to take a red stamp, red indelible ink, and stamp the back of it with the word denied.

And then now, then it was over. Your painting was worthless. And this created a lot of problems down the road.

CHAKRABARTI: A lot of problems such as people disagreed with the evaluation.

POLSKY: Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. We don’t have time to go into it, but eventually it led to a lawsuit that the Warhol people just decided we’ve had enough of this.

And it was like a domino effect. The art authentication boards for Keith Haring, for Basquiat, for Roy Lichtenstein, Isamu Noguchi, it went on and on, they all closed up shop. Nobody wanted to get sued.

CHAKRABARTI: Oh, okay. Yeah, because I suppose it’s a pretty big hit to the wallet and the ego when someone comes to an authentication board, and says, I think I have something that may be worth $10 million and then they get a big rubber stamp, red thing denied on the back of it.

But I want to give you a second to tell us a little bit more of the story because I understand that you told our producer that in fact there was another kind of rubber stamp that says, I certify this is a painting by Andy Warhol.

POLSKY: Okay, now we’re getting into the minutiae of the situation.

When Warhol died, there were thousands of paintings left in his estate. They estimated there were 4,000 that were unsigned, believe it or not. Warhol’s policy was he wouldn’t sign a painting, we’re going back to the ’60s now, until it was sold. Or until it left the studio for an exhibition. Okay, he did that to prevent theft.

Because his factory was a pretty wild place in the ’60s, and a lot of things went missing. Alright. So anyway, as you fast forward, when he died, this would have been 1987. Alright. He had a business manager named Fred Hughes, who I met once. Very cool guy. He was an Anglophile. He had beautiful Joseph Lobb shoes.

He wore his wristwatch over the cuff of his shirt. The epitome of cool. But he was smart, too, and a great business manager. Anyway, Warhol dies. You have all these people coming to the estate saying, Jeez, I think I have a Warhol painting. It’s worth a lot of money. Will you look at it and make sure it’s real?

And Fred took on the thankless task of authenticating these by himself. And if he found in your favor, he’d take a rubber stamp with his signature, stamp the back of it, and then I believe in his own hand, he would write, I certify this is a genuine Andy Warhol. And for a while that worked out fine, but then Fred became overwhelmed with submissions.

And that’s when they decided to form a board. The story that changed the art market and changed art authentication forever was when a gentleman named Joe Simon, who’s British, owned a Warhol red self-portrait, that Fred Hughes had certified. Okay. As years went on, it became very valuable. The story was that Joe was offered $2 million for it.

And he said, I’ll take it. And right before the buyer was going to write him a check, he said, this is a lot of money. I’d really feel better if the Warhol board took a look at it. And Joe’s, be my guest, done deal. So he shows it to the Warhol board and of course, it was not a done deal.

They stamped denied on it, twice, all right, they’re making jokes, they’re calling it double denied, it’s terrible.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS) Oh god.

POLSKY: And I, how do I put it, I was quite familiar with Joe’s painting, I’ll leave it at that. It was real. It was right as rain. It’s a long story as to why I know it’s real. But the point is, suddenly he had a painting worth $2 million, worth nothing.

And he got angry, as you and I would. There’s a whole wonderful account of this, if you want to look it up, in Vanity Fair. A writer named Michael Shnayerson, who’s writing a biography on the dealer Larry Gagosian now, wrote a wonderful encapsulation of that story. And he pretty much agreed this thing was real.

And the point to all this was Joe sued the Warhol estate and the Art Authentication Board, and he lost. What happened was the Warhol people, who were wealthy, they hired one of the most expensive, high powered law firms in New York. Allegedly, they were paying him $1,800 an hour, and they ran up a $7 million bill. I don’t know for sure, but this is what the story was. And they snowed Joe’s attorney under with motion after motion that they kept filing in court. And eventually, they had to give up. They couldn’t compete with these big shot attorneys. And it was a sad story because Joe’s painting was real.

Briefly, the reason they turned it down was they said it was created off premises. It was not physically created in the studio. But, when you get into who Warhol was as an artist, his originality centered around detaching himself from the art making process. He was quoted as saying he wanted to be a machine.

He didn’t want to show brushstrokes. He loved using a commercial process, the photo silkscreen, to make art. And people would say, this isn’t art, it looks like a newspaper photo. But that was the point. He wanted it to do that. He detached himself. He was like an art director. It was a collaborative process.

The long and short of that story was, there was a gentleman who’s still around named Richard Ekstract. He’s in his 90s now. He’s still around. Who during the ’60s came to Warhol’s studio, and Richard owned a movie magazine and the company Norelco had just come out with this newfangled device called a video camera.

And at the time, Andy was making movies. Richard shows up with the video camera. Andy goes wild, he goes, Oh my God, I don’t have to send the film out to be developed. I can instantly see what I’ve shot. You can reuse the film. I have to have this. And Richard says, I don’t own it, but maybe I could arrange a six-month loan.

They make a deal. And in exchange, Richard ends up with a small group of these red self-portraits, right? And Andy being, he was cheap, there’s no other way to put it. People like to say he was frugal. He was cheap. Okay. And he, when he wasn’t getting paid for a painting, what he would do occasionally is job out the painting, meaning he’d send all the materials over to a silkscreen shop where he’d give them the acetate, the image, the canvas, the paint, the ink.

The dimensions, and he’d say, here, run off seven of these.

CHAKRABARTI: I see. So it wasn’t necessarily his hand that made the final image.

POLSKY: No, but that made art.

CHAKRABARTI: But that was the point.

POLSKY: Yeah. That was part of, in other words, authentication is based on intent. What did the artist intend? He intended for these to represent him as paintings of his.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I’m going to just jump in here because.

POLSKY: Okay.

CHAKRABARTI: Wow.

POLSKY: We could go on.

CHAKRABARTI: You said a lot. My first thought is like $7 million in attorney’s fees. I just think of how many school lunches that could buy. But then also when you say you have a close knowledge, and you’ll leave it at that, of this painting.

I suddenly had this image of all those movie scenes where a very rich, dressed person is sitting behind a desk and they turn around and like, all of a sudden, they open a vault and they’re in dim lights in a dark room. There’s this like painting that hasn’t seen the light of day in years.

But I’ll leave it at that. I want to get back to, so this is a really, actually good story about artist’s intent and therefore how that intent serves to, interpretation of that intent serves to authenticate art, which then is an important factor in the art market as a whole, because to me, it is a way to, again, grapple with this, what does it mean?

What does art mean? If people can say it’s not really a Warhol because he didn’t actually pull the ink over the screen. So I’m going to join, I’m going to bring Sebastian Smee into the conversation now. He is a Pulitzer Prize winning art critic at the Washington Post and also author of The Art of Rivalry: Four Friendships, Betrayals, and Breakthroughs in Modern Art.

Sebastian, it’s great to talk to you again. And by the way, Sebastian, in my alternative version of the Thomas Crown Affair, I would’ve cast you in the role that Pierce Brosnan played, but  — (LAUGHS)

SEBASTIAN SMEE: Oh boy. I’m not gonna even begin to [act like] Pierce Brosnan. I’m balding. I’m, yeah. Let’s not go on.

But anyway, thank you.

CHAKRABARTI: Okay. So I wanna start with this. You are one of the most thoughtful and insightful writers about art, that I’ve ever read. And I wanna know what you think about this Sebastian. Does it really even matter if in terms of the value of a piece of art, if a forgery is as good as an original, if it can convince others that it is of the same milieu as a painter’s original work, like, why should we care? Doesn’t it have inherent value in and of itself.

SMEE: You could argue that for sure. And it’s a bit like whenever you get scams or frauds in the other arts as well.

A lot of people have written fake modernist poetry, which has actually been really interesting to read and amazing, but then it’s revealed that it was done as a kind of, as a trick, to expose modern art or modern poetry. And I think it’s often the same here.

I think that there’s so much about art that we value, because we connect it to a story. And there are so many stories around art. And one of the stories, of course, is authenticity. This idea that it was done by an individual hand. And you can, this object here in front of us has that special connection to that individual hand.

And that almost has a sort of talismanic glow about it, which we really value. But I think things got really complicated in the 20th century, didn’t they, when you had a lot of art which was more about mass production, or about ideas, or a whole host of other values that sort of almost seem to unpick or untangle that idea of authenticity or complicate it.

Part III

CHAKRABARTI: Sebastian, I suppose I should have just actually started with asking you a very simple question. Does art have, any piece of art have inherent value?

SMEE: It doesn’t have any inherent value. It’s not, doesn’t even have a use value, right? It’s not like coal or fruit and vegetables. That you can’t eat it.

You can’t burn it. It’s only got value to the extent that there is a consensus around the idea that it matters. And it can matter for a lot of different reasons. It can matter because it’s incredibly beautiful. It can matter because it speaks to something deep down in us that you might call spirit or soul or whatever.

It can matter because it has information in it about previous times in history. You can go on and on. That’s one of the great things about being an art critic that there’s just so many stories around art. But the question of how that consensus emerges is interesting. And I think one of the things that is hard for people to get their head around is that, for some, for an artwork to become incredibly valuable, you really only need two people to really value it.

If it comes up at auction, for instance, if you’ve got people bidding on a work by Jackson Pollock or Andy Warhol, if two people really want it. That’ll do the job of sending the price, into these stratospheric realms.

CHAKRABARTI: Which drives, this drives home the point that Richard was making earlier, that this consensus value really only matters because it’s people with lots of power and money who are driving the consensus.

I remember, Sebastian, years ago, you and I had a difference of opinion on a Corita Kent exhibition. And you were like, eh, it doesn’t really do it for me. But I was like, I liked it. I was surprised, but who actually cared? People care what you think. Sebastian, but people don’t really care what I think.

SMEE: Not sure about that.

CHAKRABARTI: Versus, when it comes to art, I will say that, with confidence. But versus what happens, as you said, when two very wealthy people can drive the value of a single piece of art through the stratosphere. And we’ve got an example of this. This is an auction that took place in Christie’s in New York in 2017, where three works went for more than $50 million in value.

And one sale in particular made headlines around the world.

AUCTIONEER: And ladies and gentlemen, we move to the Leonardo da Vinci, the Salvator Mundi, the masterpiece by Leonardo, of Christ the Savior. Previously in the collections of three kings of England. $400 million is the bid. Here in the sale room at $400 million with Alex Rotter.

The bid is here at $400 million. Leonardo, Salvator Mundi, selling here at Christie’s, 400 million is the bid and the piece is sold. (CHEERS)

CHAKRABARTI: So you heard that right, $400 million for a single Da Vinci. Sebastian, is it even a Da Vinci for sure?

SMEE: I don’t really know. There’s a lot of difference of opinion on that.

Some experts convinced that it is. Others think probably not. It was probably, a bit of Da Vinci but even more of his studio. It was in such a bad state when it was found that it took, I think a year or so of conservation work and a lot of repainting and so on. It’s an incredibly complicated story, but of course, when I said it takes just two people to really value something to drive the price up.

That’s really true. But that doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Leonardo da Vinci, of course, is the most famous artist of all time. And his reputation has been built up over centuries and was very strong, of course, during his lifetime. It’s not that it’s arbitrary, people’s, great artist reputations don’t just come out of nothing.

It does take a lot of discussion and consensus and criticism and there you have it. But I think it gets confusing in the modern era where you have a lot of art that is all about reduction. It’s about simplifying things down to basics. And of course that becomes, that means that the work becomes a lot easier to forge.

So yeah.

CHAAKRABARTI: So this is a good point. Richard Polsky. I appreciate you’re listening along with me to Sebastian here. I want to bring you back in here because he, especially he made this point about there’s a lot of art these days, or in fact, for several decades, that’s been perhaps less about the craft and skill of the artist, and more about the idea that the artist is trying to advance.

Which then makes things like, oh my God, I’m going to make people mad, but Jeff Koontz’s Silver Bunny worth a lot, or, God, this is my favorite punching bag, Tracey Emin’s Unmade Bed gets a central gallery space at the Tate Modern in the UK. When people still ascribe monetary values to those things.

Is that the kind of overtaking that you said that the market is actually overtaking the art itself, Richard?

POLSKY: Oh, there’s no doubt about it. Everyone will agree with that.

CHAKRABARTI: And but what impact then does it have on the world of art or even for we, the great unwashed who can’t afford these pieces.

What is it? Are we led to believe that there’s value in things, that there isn’t, because just some rich person is willing to pay $400 million for it?

POLSKY: Yeah. I think you’re right. It’s I don’t want to sound cynical and say, hey, we’re all doomed or something, but we live in a world, whether it’s art, music, literature, there are always in each decade, there are going to be certain individuals who emerge in each of these fields who are the real deal, who are authentic, who have something to say. But by and large, the world is becoming homogenized. Andy Warhol put his finger on the pulse of that years ago when somebody noticed he used to drink a lot of Cokes and they’d say, Andy, what is it you like so much about Coke? And he’d say, do you realize that the Coke I’m drinking now, and I’m paraphrasing here, I don’t know his exact words, is the same Coke that a wealthy person, in New York City, just down the street from me, could be drinking at the very same moment.

And it levels the playing field, but it also homogenizes things, it whitewashes them. And that’s, Warhol, he was prescient, he was ahead of the curve there. This is where things are going. That’s just an opinion.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. But Sebastian, to bring us back to the question of the forgeries. Richard earlier in the show made a really interesting point, that like the power, the monetary power of this market.

This consensus market that’s emerged, especially as we have just like wildly, fabulously wealthy people who buy up these works, whether or not they’re real. Can that, is that having a corrupting influence in the world of art? Because we started off with the Orlando Museum and the former director there now, basically being part of this scheme to advance forgeries, for his own reputation.

SMEE: Really has a corrupting effect. And it’s something I worry about all the time. I think it even affects the motives of artists in their studios. When you see the amounts of money that some works can go for, it’s hard for them to keep that out of their mind when they’re working away in their studio.

And, if they make a breakthrough and become well known for a certain kind of work, it becomes very tempting for them to churn out the same kinds of pieces, almost signature pieces, rather than explore the full range of their creativity. And you see that again and again. I think Richard is absolutely right.

I think Warhol put his finger on the pulse. Absolutely. It skewed the zeitgeist by just showing us how much, in the post war period, we were living in a society that was all about commerce. It was all about celebrity and it was all about advertising values. I would also make the counter argument that the market can actually have a really great effect.

Dealers are the engine room of the art world. They take risks. They pick out young artists and bet on them. And that can mobilize a lot of stuff. So for instance, in the last 10 years or so, there’s been a concerted effort by a lot of very powerful dealers to bring to people’s attention.

Let’s say, African American artists who were being neglected, artists who had been working for decades, but had been forgotten. People like Sam Gilliam brought them to the attention. And now their works are selling for millions of dollars. They’re in museums all around the country and the world.

And, in many ways, it’s the dealers who’ve created this incredibly booming market now. For work by African Americans and the same with women, I think, all the most important, if it feels to me often, this is an exaggeration, but it feels like most of the important, contemporary painters at the moment are women, incredible artists like, sorry, I’ve got so many rushing to my mind, Charline von Heyl, Nicole Eisenman, Sarah Sze, Nina Chanel Abney, there’s just so many really wonderful artists who are being brought to our attention because the market is generating interest in their work.

CHAKRABARTI: Yeah. You’re trying really hard to deflate my cynicism here, Sebastian, but Richard Polsky, what do you think?

POLSKY: Oh, I don’t know.

CHAKRABARTI: (LAUGHS)

POLSKY: I’ve done this so long and it’s just, back in the day, not to wax too poetic here, but I remember, I only met Jasper Johns once and, you know, it’s debatable, but in my opinion, he is our greatest living artist, alright?

And I met him, and I was like, it meant a lot to me. It made his work come alive for me the next time I look at it. I could feel his personality in the work, his presence in the room with me. I know that sounds corny, but it was all true. Okay, so now we flash forward. And I agree with what was said.

The dealers do perform a service by bringing work to the attention of the audience that they were not familiar with before. Whether it is African American artists or more women being included. And it is a good thing, but to a point, okay? The reality of this is dealers need things to deal. And they’re running out of stuff to sell, or the stuff that they used to sell has become too expensive.

So you have to always feed the pipeline. You have to bring in new art, new individuals, new movements. Let’s look for things that had been overlooked. There’s always, I said this at the beginning of the show, everything is about economics, and that’s what this is about right now. Because a lot of these African American artists certainly deserve their moment, they were overlooked.

Of course there was prejudice out there. But there’s a lot of bad work coming onto the market too. These guys are not all geniuses. Let’s be realistic. I used to show an artist named Bill Traylor. I don’t know if you know who he is. I assume.

SMEE: Yeah, I do.

POLSKY: Some of your listeners certainly do. Okay. Bill Traylor was an ex-slave who made art between 1939 and 1942.

This is a long time ago. He was basically a homeless person on the streets of Montgomery, Alabama, and he made these drawings that were sheer genius. He just drew what he saw. People arguing, people getting drunk on the streets, dogs chasing cats, people walking around with umbrellas. Very ordinary.

This is not, the imagery is just, it’s mundane. But he injected a life force into these works, where you look at it and you go, Oh my God, this guy’s blessed. How did he do this? And it’s, again, a long story, probably worthy of a show in its own right to talk about his rise. But this guy was just a great artist who happened to be African American, not the other way around, not to pat myself on the back either, but I showed his work in the eighties.

I did one of the first shows of his work at a gallery I had called Acme Art in San Francisco. And there were a few hundred dollars at the time. Nobody knew what they were, but the point was, the reason I showed it, it wasn’t because, God, I want to show an African American artist. I showed it because it was great and I think we’re losing sight of that right now in the art world.

All the galleries are scrambling to find minority artists. But I would say I don’t get it.

CHAKRABARTI: Just to jump in here a second. Richard, I don’t know Traylor’s work, I’ll be honest, but in just the little story that you told me, I would say that the fact that he was African American is actually quite central to the greatness of the art that he produced, because it sounds like you’re describing a life experience being a formerly enslaved person and also having experienced homelessness and all that.

All of that went into what you’re describing. How he interpreted the world around him, which is the genius that you see in the drawings. I love your idea about us doing a show about this. I’ve written that down and hopefully we will in the future. But no, but I’ve only got a minute left here and I want to just pull it back to where we started, which is this question of like forgeries.

Okay. And I love all the different directions this conversation has gone, but it’s still, there’s a question that’s been nagging me the whole time and I’m going to let Sebastian answer it. Because great art can move, right? I’ve stood in museums, in various places and been brought to tears by works of art.

I don’t know if they’re real or fake. I presume they’re real. But if a forgery has the same effect and the only loser in regarding this forgery is some millionaire who spent a lot of money, why should I care? Why should I care about that millionaire’s money? Isn’t all that really matters at the end of the day?

Did the art, no matter whose hand made it, move someone, Sebastian?

SMEE: I don’t think it matters at all, the only thing that I guess you’d say is that if part of what has moved you is the idea that this was painted by a particular person. If you find out that it wasn’t painted by that particular person, then that can take away from the experience.

But really, is there any need for that to be part of the effect? I don’t think so. Usually, I think it is exciting to look at a painting and think, wow, Rembrandt’s hand moved this paint around holding a brush. There is something about that, it’s just a story, but it can’t help but affect us, I think, when you’re in front of the work.

But by and large, if it’s a picture then you can look at it and you shouldn’t need to know who it was by.