The Art Detective

When the man of means decorates an apartment or home, he may wish to hang a painting or two of some real value. In such a mood, with checkbook in hand, a conservative fellow with both intelligence and taste may find himself suckered into something akin to the purchasing of the Brooklyn Bridge. For he is fair game for the art forgeries offered by crooks so clever they often victimize real art collectors and even the curators of major art museums.

The art forger is no ordinary conman. He is a talented artist who can claim a bond with Michelangelo himself. For the great Italian sculptor was not above creating "antique" statues, burying them among the ruins of Rome, then "discovering" them and selling them for sizeable chunks of pocket money.

The modern art forger can often wield a brush so cleverly, he can produce a Van Gogh that might fool Vincent himself. Chances are it wouldn't fool Sheldon Keck of the Brooklyn Museum, though.

Keck is an art detective. His job is to spot the many phonies that make their way into the respectable company of the bona fide masterpieces. And he would be the first to admit that his adversaries are extraordinarily clever and talented men -- even if they leave something to be desired in the integrity department.

Art forgers have moved with the times, truning out fakes that are becoming more and more flawless. There was a time when a good forger might pull a boner like using Prussian Blue in the copying of a pre-Seventeenth Century painting. Now he would realize Prussian Blue first made its appearance in the Eighteenth Century.

With forgers growing ever more shrewd, Keck's job becomes increasingly difficult. Besides his own knowledge of painting, he has come to rely heavily on scientific aids like the X-ray, ultra-violet light and paint chemistry.

Some forgeries are so clever that X-ray inspection is the only way to tell them from the original paintings. The X-ray reveals initial brush strokes, outlines and tentative sketches that, in a genuine painting, bear the unmistakable stamp of the old master. This preliminary work is the "subconscious" of the painting, and, like the subconscious mind, it often reveals the true personality more accurately than the surface facade. It's almost impossible for the "subconscious" of a forgery to have the same authentic touch.

Ultra-violet light has helped Keck foil many a forger. It tripped up a would-be Picasso recently. The forger had executed a beautiful copy of the Absinthe Drinker, a painting out of Picasso's turn-of-the-century period. When subjected to the ultra-violet rays, however, a strange anachronism came to light. Under the pseudo-Picasso was another painting, a modern abstraction in a style that had not come into being until after the turn-of-the-century.

Chemical analysis also plays an important part in the detection of art frauds. Before the beginning of the Nineteenth Century, paint pigments were considerably denser than those of recent years because they were ground by hand. This difference in density can be detected and is a reasonably sure way of determining a painting's age.

Not all of Keck's methods are so modern, however. One of his most reliable is a little trick art detectives have used for years. While peering through a powerful binocular microscope, Keck gently pricks the paint-layer of a suspected painting with a common pin. Paint less than thirty to fifty years old will leave a smooth, round hole. Older pigment will tend to crack inward.

An art detective must be extremely familiar with the lives of the great painters. Familiar enough to say, "Velasquez was sick in bed that winter and did no painting. This picture must be forged." Or, "Corot was at Cannes on such-and-such a date, hence the canvas signed 'Corot, Paris' is false."

Sometimes the artist himself can be fooled. Keck tells of Parisian art detective André Schoeller, whose friend claimed to own a genuine Monet. Schoeller gently informed him that it was a forgery. Indignant, his friend went to Monet himself, who was still alive. The old man looked at the canvas and assured the owner it was indeed a genuine Monet. But Schoeller was stubborn. "No," he insisted, "Monet is wrong. This picture is not his." Again the great master was consulted. And this time he remembered: many years before, a friend of his had copied a picture of Monet's simply as an exercise. This was the picture. Schoeller was too polite to say, "I told you so."

During and after World War II, Keck was entrusted with the protection of art and monuments in Holland and Germany. Some of his most interesting yarns, therefore, involve those countries. There's the one about the German city of Lübeck which, in 1951 unveiled "the greatest art discovery of the century." It was a series of Thirteenth Century frescoes, uncovered during the course of restoration work on one of Lübeck's wartorn churches. Experts from all over the world made pilgrimages to Lübeck; a scholarly book on the great finding was published; the German government even issued a set of commemorative postage stamps on which a portion of the frescoes was reproduced.

Just last year, another discovery (continued on page 38) art detective (continued from page 17) was made in Lübeck: the frescoes were the work of a couple of local boys, miffed at art dealers who wouldn't buy their paintings.

One of Keck's favorite stories is about Han van Meegeren of Holland --another disgruntled artist who was sick and tired of the emphasis put upon "name" painters. "I'll give them names," he decided, and set about perpetrating a hoax that was to become the most sensational art fraud of our time.

First, he bought an old but worthless picture and took it home. He carefully removed most of the paint from the canvas. The white, a lead paint, wouldn't come off, but this didn't worry van Meegeren for long. To defy X-ray analysis, he hit upon the idea of making his whites coincide exactly with the whites remaining from the original. He saved the ancient frame and nails. Then he began to paint a Vermeer.

And here is where this art fraud differed from most others. For it was not a copy of a Vermeer that van Meegeren painted, but a completely original work in the style of Vermeer.

He used nothing but badger-hair brushes -- because Vermeer used them. Vermeer hand-ground his own blue -- and so did van Meegeren. When the work was completed and signed with the illustrious name of Vermeer, the artful forger doused it in special oils and baked it in an oven to simulate the dryness of an old painting. Then he rolled the canvas until hundreds of tiny cracks appeared in the hardened paint. The cracks he filled with India ink to counterfeit the dust of three centuries.

It took van Meegeren a year to complete one of these ingenious frauds -- and in eight years he produced exactly eight of them which he sold for over two million dollars. The most astute art dealers were completely hoodwinked and accepted them as newly discovered works of Holland's old masters.

Van Meegeren's fantastic hoax might have gone undiscovered for years if fate hadn't played him an even more fantastic trick. When Nazi occupation came to Holland, it brought with it a self-styled art connoisseur named Herman Goering. The fat Field Marshall went into ecstasies over one of van Meegeren's false Vermeers, and acquired it for his personal collection.

After the war, authorities began hunting down those few Dutch who collaborated with the Nazi invaders. On their list was van Meegeren who, their records showed, had sold Goering and other Germans Dutch art treasures. On trial as a collaborator, van Meegeren insisted that the "treasures" were actually fakes, but the frauds were so perfect that the critics called into the case insisted they were authentic, so the court refused to believe him.

In order to prove himself innocent of collaboration, van Meegeren requested that his art materials be brought to his cell and there he proceeded to prove his story by painting another original "Vermeer."

Han van Meegeren was promptly acquitted of the collaboration charge and convicted of art forgery -- a crime imposing a much shorter sentence.

False "masterpieces" are being exposed all the time. Early this year the Winnipeg Art Gallery suffered a shock when it invited a Viennese expert to preside as director. The expert, Dr. Ferdinand Eckhardt, took a good look at Winnipeg's collection and sorrowfully broke the news that the majority of their pictures were fakes.

This sort of occurrence reminds Keck of the old art joke: "Of the seven hundred paintings by Rembrandt, ten thousand are in America."

Art detectives like Sheldon Keck keep busy exposing the phonies.

Above & left: Art expert Keck finds a binocular microscope a great aid during chemical analysis of pigments and when pricking a painting's surface with a pin to determine its age.

Above & left: Art expert Keck finds a binocular microscope a great aid during chemical analysis of pigments and when pricking a painting's surface with a pin to determine its age.

Above & left: Art expert Keck finds a binocular microscope a great aid during chemical analysis of pigments and when pricking a painting's surface with a pin to determine its age.

Above & left: Art expert Keck finds a binocular microscope a great aid during chemical analysis of pigments and when pricking a painting's surface with a pin to determine its age.

Ultra-violet rays revealed this modern abstraction under a copy of a Picasso.

Ultra-violet rays revealed this modern abstraction under a copy of a Picasso.