FT article- Think Like a Faker

Paul Quatrochi is seeking to open a dialogue in the spirit of establishing the rightful role of the Art Loss Register as underscored in this FT article published worldwide, regarding allegations of forgery.


Think Like A Faker
By Anthony Haden-Guest
Published: July 20 2007 14:52 Last updated: July 20 2007 14:52

Paul Quatrochi, a private dealer in Manhattan, only found out that the Art Loss Register (ALR) was now listing fakes when it asked him about a collection with which he was familiar. The ALR, which maintains a list of stolen works, wanted his opinion on whether certain pictures were fakes.
Quatrochi said that he regarded both the collector and his holdings with some scepticism. “He has two Vermeers. Two!” he chortled. An unusual claim that positively demanded scrutiny. “They are hard to date. I’d put them at about 1920.” But Quatrochi, who is trained in art law, noted that this was highly litigious territory and wondered if the ALR knew what it was getting into.
The Art Loss Register was founded in 1991 by Julian Radcliffe, then the director of a Lloyds brokers. “We only really started registering fakes to build up a database in the last two years,” he says. Concerns such as those voiced by Quatrochi don’t bother him unduly.
“We are not the arbiter of whether something is a fake,” he says. “We merely raise the red flag.
“We do sometimes find ourselves in a position where one side says, ‘Put it on the database and I’ll sue you if you don’t.’ And the other guy says, ‘It shouldn’t be on the database and I’ll sue you if it’s on.’”
Has the ALR been taken to court for doubting authenticity? “No. People are often threatening to sue. Very often they withdraw, a little bit shamefaced, when they discover they need us on their side next time round.”
Quatrochi was contacted about the suspect collection by Katja Lubina, a young Dutchwoman who works at the ALR’s offices in London. “I was going through the cases on the database registered as fakes, doing some quality control so that we can immediately act,” she says.
Can’t that be legally a high-risk business?
“Yes,” she says. “Nobody in this office would like to say this painting is a fake. So what we do is we advise them that there are indications that it could not be the real one.”
I observe that this seems a fine distinction.
“We are not saying it is a fake. We are saying, ‘Please be advised that someone might think this is a fake.’ For instance, another identical work has been for years in such and such a museum. So it could be that it is a fake. But we are not saying it.”
The ALR folders resonate with greed, guile and longing. One letter reads: “You mentioned that a South American gentleman had offered this painting to you for sale.” An ALR search established the painting was a copy of a Monet in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.
In such cases, the ALR’s role is simple. Lubina is delighted when she has more complexity to deal with. “People are so creative in covering up fakes,” she says. She cites some supposed Van Gogh drawings, which were not only fake themselves but which had been embellished with fraudulent Nazi stamps on the reverse.
“They point you in the wrong direction. And you immediately think, ‘Well, this might be a case of looting.’ And your attention is on whether the provenance is OK, that is wasn’t confiscated or stolen. Which takes you away from thinking whether it is a genuine work or not.”
Fakers can get more creative than this. “It’s not just about faking the work of art. It’s about faking the whole provenance,” Lubina says. One of the ALR’s most potent fake-busting databases is the Witt Library in the Courtauld Institute at Somerset House in London. “It is an archive where you can look up provenance for works of art. They keep boxes for every artist. They record sales of paintings over a number of years,” she says.
“You can go into archives like the Witt, with your backpack, everything,” Lubina says. “You slip something in one of the files. From then on it will always be picked up by people researching. That happened in the Dr Drewe and John Myatt case.”
Myatt was the artist. Dr John Drewe, armed with an antique typewriter, manufactured the provenance. Between 1986 and 1994, they put 200 bogus pieces into circulation. Many are certainly still hanging or floating around. “There are such great criminal minds out there,” says Lubina. “I think we would all be surprised if we knew the real size of the [problem].”
So Lubina and everyone else at the Art Loss Register has to learn to think like the fakers?
“Yes. Probably after having worked here, I can develop my own techniques,” she says with a merry laugh.
The Art Loss Register, tel: +44 (0)20-7841 5780 (UK); +1 212-297 0941 (US); artloss@artloss.com
anthony.haden-guest@ft.com
ś�际收藏界的赝品清单 - FT中文网 - FTChinese.com曼哈顿私营经销商保罗•夸特罗奇(Paul Quatrochi)出乎意料地发现，国际 ... 那么，ALR有没有因为对艺术品的真实性提出质疑而被告上法庭呢http://s.info.com/clickserver/_iceUrlFlag=1?rawURL=http%3A%2F%2Fapp.ftchinese.com%2Fstory.php%3Fstoryid%3D001013872&0=&1=0&4=74.205.26.218&5=205.188.117.17&9=6e6d127e79764f34b4b8b486f50cca01&10=1&11=us.infoflag&13=search&14=867530&15=main-title&17=16&18=5&19=0&20=3&21=13&22=iZpm%2FQXy6vQ%3D&40=Blj86vtprvmmvVvhLHnKXw%3D%3D&_IceUrl=true