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THE GEOFF HAVERS COLUMN
Signed with Gauguin’s own biro…
Holidaymakers and historians of art alike will be familiar with the small town of Pont-Aven in Brittany, France. Since the early 1860, French painters have been attracted to this small port, 14 km east of Concarneau and just inland from the tip of the Aven estuary, because of its strong local culture and religious fervour. To the metropolitan elite of the C19th, the village represented qualities of a past that was governed less by French culture than by an amalgam of Celtic, Druidic and medieval Christian folklore. This blend of ancient elements created an environment where artists believed they could encounter a more ‘primitive’ and ‘true’ people.
The artists shared similar subject matter, focusing on pastoral, religious and cultural scenes and largely ignoring the industry growing up around them. Most notable of all was Paul Gauguin, but he, a more dedicated returner-to-the-mud than most, soon shipped out to Tahiti in search of the real thing.
It was not the search for the primitive that led me to Pont-Aven in the summer after I finished my formal education (although I certainly found it – or at least a bit of squalor, which I’ll tell you about later). It was a job working as a ‘courier’ on a campsite for the sort of English punter who wants a foreign holiday with none of the inconvenience of Being Abroad. Most of the day was spent going shopping on behalf of clients who were too scared to look after themselves in a country where the natives had a different word for everything. If I had any time off, I would spend it flopped on the beach like an exhausted fish before preparing for the night’s exertions. These invariably took the form of the fest noz, essentially a Breton barbecue with traditional local music of the sort Gauguin would have recognised and which may well have been the actual impetus for his flight to Tahiti, sounding, as it does, quite a lot like a fire in a pet shop.
I haven’t been back since, but when I was there the village itself contained a café that served a still-to-be-paralleled chocolat chaud, an early form of supermarket whose manager was in permanent competition with the garagiste to be crowned Grumpiest Living Frenchman, and about 400 art galleries that made what seemed to me an astonishing living; astonishing not just for the bravura with which they traded on the town’s past in order to hock their wares, and not even because the works were often signed with such transparently assumed names as Pirosso, Maret and so forth, despite being patently by the same hand, but because as often as not whenever one of my hapless chickens proudly unwrapped their new purchase to show me I would notice that some of the paint had come off on the wrapping paper. I tried to point these things out at first (“Are you sure it’s spelt ‘Von Goff?’”), but they wouldn’t listen, and I soon realised that, just as Gauguin’s chums had been too blinded by the desire to be surrounded by the otherwordly to notice, or want to notice, that the Pont-Avenese were perfectly ordinary fishermen and artichoke farmers, so the gallery-goers of a later age wanted so hard to believe they were buying a connection to art history that they didn’t care if it was coming off on their fingers.
All this, along with a few snatches of that song that goes “When will they ever learn?” came swimming back to me as I read of the latest eBay art forgery scandal.
It appears that the Spanish police and the FBI have dismantled a multimillion-dollar international art forgery ring which duped hundreds of customers into buying counterfeit prints of works purporting to be by artists such as Picasso, Warhol and Dalí. What, another?
Two Italians, one Spaniard and four Americans have been charged in connection with two overlapping conspiracies believed to have netted about £2.5m. With the help of US gallery owners, fraudsters based in Catalonia and Italy used eBay to sell the fakes to victims in the US, Canada, Australia, Europe and Japan. The bogus works were sold for between €1,500 and €20,000 to more than 1,000 clients.
The gang, which was based in Spain and Italy, shipped the counterfeit prints to art dealers in Florida and the north Chicago suburb of Northbrook. They warned dealers to shift the merchandise gradually so as not to flood the market.
At one point, the Northbrook dealer, Michael Zabrin, allegedly offered two supposed Picasso etchings, saying they were 1968 works signed by the artist in pencil and from an edition limited to 50.
A second Northbrook man, James Kennedy, was charged with forging the signatures of Picasso, Chagall, Alexander Calder, Miró and Roy Lichtenstein. Zabrin and Kennedy were also named in a scheme to distribute 2,500 counterfeit Calder prints and 600 Chagall prints. According to the indictment, Kennedy earned nearly £600,000 from the sale of art between 2005 and 2007.
Police were called in after complaints from American customers who realised the ‘masterpieces’ they had been sold were cheap imitations. A joint operation was launched in 2006 between the FBI, the Mossos d’Esquadra (the Catalan regional police) and the Italian carabinieri, and police finally carried out eight raids on addresses in Barcelona, one on a gallery in Granollers near Barcelona and a house in Lliçà de Munt, again near Barcelona, where officers found a thousand fakes.
At a press conference, the head of criminal investigations for the Mossos d’Esquadra said many gallery owners took advantage of the gullibility of buyers to sell on the fakes. I, for one, can see why he’s head of criminal investigations.
I’ve spent a while trying to piece all this together. For a long time, until quite recently in fact, I just refused to believe that anyone ever actually bought a £1,000 Picasso from eBay. I assumed that the vendor would be one of the more hopeless types of optimist, who had decided to scribble a face with both eyes on the same side of the nose, sign it, then list it on the off-chance; after all, the eBay fee isn’t itself a disincentive.
It’s rather like those ladies who write to you from country Russia most friend, because now is not coming visa Peter is not to marry after all; perhaps you would like to make friendship, maybe also more? And please send price for ticket…
Who could possibly be so dim-witted as to fall for that? Then I found out that hundreds of men – American men, frankly – are exactly that dim-witted. So maybe El Picasso Cheapo was worth a forger’s time and effort, after all. Then I thought about it a bit harder, and decided that a crucial component in the scam was that it took place on eBay.
If you’re an eBay scammer, you can be reasonably confident that your victim isn’t going to the effort and expense of having an expert authenticate something they bought for £1,000 and then, when it’s shown to be a fake, the further hassle of getting their money back. One might even say that there’s an element of complicity between the conner and the conned. When the US arrests were announced at a press conference in Chicago, attorney Patrick Fitzgerald said: “Literally thousands of people in different countries and on different continents may come to learn that when they thought they bought an original work signed by Picasso or Dalí or Chagall, they in fact bought a fake.” “May come to learn”, indeed – but “Be absolutely flabbergasted to learn”? I think maybe not.
Just imagine the scenario. You are a genuine art lover after a Picasso. (1) You look for it on eBay. (2) You find, bid for and win it for £1,000. (3) You hang it on your wall for all to see, announcing proudly to family and friends that this is your new Picasso. (4) You tell them you got it for £1,000. (5) On eBay.
At which of the five stages outlined above does the thing start to fall apart? That’s right: any of them. So, come on. If you bid for this stuff, you know you’re going to be lying about it later on; you know in your heart of hearts that it’s probably hooky. It’s a neat variation of the rule that you can’t cheat an honest man. In this case, the fall guy isn’t expecting to fool the vendor but the other consumers of the goods, as it were – the people to whom he is subsequently going to misrepresent his purchase.
But if my analysis is correct then why did American customers complain to the police? Because the forgeries were being released to the public through galleries, and someone who goes to a gallery for their art is expecting to be involved in a different sort of experience. A gallery confers by its very involvement an element of authenticity even on an artwork that is actually being sold online. Provenance is worth money, so galleries are useful to forgers for ramping up prices, but bring with them the increased likelihood of comeback from irate buyers – as would appear to have been the case.
What to do? Well, the obvious answer is, don’t be a doofus. IT’S NOT A PICASSO. The absolute rule of thumb is that if it has a very low price it’s probably a fake. The seller’s description will attempt to persuade you otherwise without actual dishonesty.
“Hand-signed” – by whom? The biggest culprit is the signature. Because a genuine Picasso signature pushes the price of a piece tenfold or more, that becomes the easiest thing to forge – I’m talking to you, James Kennedy of Northbrook, Chicago. Did you buy oversized books of etchings and spend a few days practising the artists’ signatures? Hmmm?
“Print” – taken from a book?
“From a private collection” – mine…
“Comes with a letter of authenticity” – stating that it is an authentic signed print from a private collection etc.
The price is the guide. Think about it. A Claude Monet painting, The Railway Bridge at Argenteuil, just fetched $41.48 million at a New York auction, breaking the record for a work by the French Impressionist painter. The 1873 landscape, depicting a Seine riverbank and two trains sitting on a railway bridge as sailboats pass underneath, was sold by the Nahmad family of art dealers, which has galleries in New York and London. The family bought the painting in 1988 for $12.6 million at a Christie’s auction in London. Before Tuesday, the record price for a Monet painting had been $36.5 million, set last year, for Nymphéas, a painting from the Water Lilies series. None of these was offered on eBay.
For a last word on forgeries, we must return to Pont-Aven. One of my colleagues on the campsite spent his summer in bookshops and brocantes hunting down postcards, books, anything he could find containing illustrations of French naval uniforms, military or marine. His plan was to use these as source material for some ‘original’ oil paintings, portraits of mariners in a naive style, done on board, which he was going to cannibalise from old furniture. The mariner would have a telescope under one arm and be pointing to a map showing some identifiable bit of French dominion. Leave them out in the weather or next to the fire for a while. This was long, long before eBay, of course; in fact, it was only just after the invention of the electric light bulb, but provenance was the thing. He was going to sell them to the brocantes for whatever he could get – next to nothing; it didn’t matter – then have them bought back later. At this point, with provenance of a sort in the form of a picturesquely illegible French receipt, he could legitimately sell them in the UK as ‘original’ portraits – which they would have been. “The historical detail of the uniform”, which would be accurate, “suggests that the work dates from the C19th” – as indeed it would have done. Suggest, that is. And so forth. I don’t know if the dastardly plot ever came to fruition because the company that was employing me went bust, and my wages didn’t arrive, and I had to raid all the dustbins on the campsite for the sort of wine bottles that (unbeknownst to my customers) carried a deposit, and cash them in to buy food until I could raise the money to get home.
I told you there’d be some squalor.
Geoff Havers