From Rembrandt To Picasso: Five Ways To Recognize a Fake Masterpiece

They are everywhere: fake news, dipfakes, identity fraud. People are surrounded by a culture of digitized deception, a phenomenon increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, and it is easy to think that deception itself is a high-tech invention of the cyber age.

But recent revelations - from the discovery of an elaborate, though clearly low-tech, forgers' workshop in Rome to the sensational claim that a Baroque masterpiece in London's National Gallery is a crude simulacrum of a lost original - remind us that duplicity in the art world has a long and rich history, written not in binary ones and zeros but in pigments, clumsy brushstrokes and suspicious signatures.

On February 19, Italy's Carabinieri command for the protection of cultural heritage uncovered a clandestine forgery operation in a northern Rome neighborhood. Authorities confiscated more than 70 fake works of art falsely attributed to famous artists ranging from Pissarro to Picasso, from Rembrandt to Dora Maar, as well as materials used to imitate vintage canvases, artists' signatures, and stamps from galleries that are no longer in business.

The suspect, who has yet to be apprehended, is believed to have used online platforms such as Catawiki and eBay to sell his counterfeit goods, deceiving potential buyers with certificates of authenticity that they made up themselves.

News of the discovery of the clandestine lab was quickly followed by publicity for a new book that claims one of the National Gallery's attractions is not at all what it seems.

According to artist and historian Efrosina Doxiadis, author of "NG6461: The Fake National Gallery Rubens," the painting "Samson and Dalila" is a large oil painting on wood attributed to 17th-century Flemish master Peter Paul Rubens and acquired by the Museum of London in 1980 for ?2.5 million, is three centuries younger than the 1609-1610-dated painting that hangs next to it on the gallery wall, and is far less perfect than the museum believes.

Doxiadis' conclusion confirms the conclusion reached in 2021 by the Swiss company Art Recognition, which has determined with 91% probability that Samson and Dalila is not the work of Rubens but of someone else, using artificial intelligence. Her assertion that the brushwork is rough and completely inconsistent with the Flemish master's fluid hand movement is strongly disputed by the National Gallery, which defends its attribution.

"'Samson and Delilah' has long been recognized by leading Rubens scholars as the masterpiece of Peter Paul Rubens," the statement reads. "Painted in oil on wood panel shortly after his return to Antwerp in 1608 and demonstrating all that the artist had learned in Italy, it is a work of the highest aesthetic quality. A technical examination of the painting was presented in an article in the Technical Bulletin of the National Gallery in 1983. The conclusions remain valid."

The divergence of opinion between museum experts and those who doubt the authenticity of the work opens up a curious space for reflection on intriguing questions of artistic value and merit. Are forgeries ever legitimate? Can fakes be masterpieces?

As increasingly sophisticated analytical tools are applied to paintings and drawings whose legitimacy has long been in doubt (including several works attributed to Leonardo da Vinci, such as the drawing "Female Portrait in Profile"), the debate over the authenticity of cultural heritage is only likely to intensify.

However, there are a few principles to keep in mind to navigate the looming controversy - five simple rules on how to recognize a fake masterpiece.

It takes more than technical skill and a misguided ethical compass to be a successful forger. It's not enough to approximate the dots of Georges Seurat, say, or the dense expressive swirls of Vincent Van Gogh. It takes a knowledge of history and chemistry.

Anachronistic pigments will always give away, and they were the reason for the exposure of German counterfeiter Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Elene, who managed to sell homemade masterpieces of modernism for millions before a careless squeeze of finished paint onto a palette in 2006 sealed their fate.

Beltracchi, whose modus operandi was to create "new" works by everyone from Max Ernst to Andre Deren rather than recreate lost ones, always mixed his paints carefully to make sure they contained only the ingredients available to the person he was trying to portray.

He stumbled only once. While creating a fanciful red landscape with horses, similar to the work of the German Blue Rider Expressionist painters, which Beltracchi attributed to Henrich Campendonck, he pulled out a finished tube of paint that he didn't know contained a pinch of titanium white, a relatively new pigment to which the artist had no access. That was enough for investigators to prove that the work, which sold for 2.8 million euros, was a forgery.

The gap between the appearance of white titanium and its eventual use by Campendonk was only a few years. In some cases, the gap is shockingly large.

An analysis of the painting "St. Jerome," once attributed to the Italian master Parmigianino and sold by the auction house Sotheby's in 2012 for $842,500, has revealed the predominance of phthalocyanine green, a synthetic pigment invented in 1935, four centuries after the 16th-century Renaissance painter's work. Artists may be visionaries, but they are not time travelers.

It is nice to believe that a person's value as an individual is not tied to the past. This is not the case with art. A painting, sculpture or drawing without a heavy history, alas, is no longer inspiring because it lacks baggage. It arouses suspicion. Too often, greed prevents one from judiciously assessing the authenticity of a painting or sculpture.

Such was the case with a succession of fake paintingsby Vermeer that came out of the studio of the Dutch portraitist Han van Meegeren, one of the most prolific and successful forgers of the 20th century. Desperate to believe that the miraculously appeared canvases, including a depiction of Christ and "Dinner at Emmaus", could be lost masterpieces created by the same hand as the "Girl with a Pearl Earring" and "The Milkmaid", collectors did not pay attention to the blatant absence of any trace of the origin of the paintings - their previous owner, exhibition history and proof of sale.

Confirming the authenticity of the painting, one of the experts wrote in "Burlington Magazine": "In no other painting of the great Delft master we will not find such feelings, such a deep understanding of the biblical story - feelings so nobly expressed by means of the highest art".

But it was all a lie. Van Meegeren decided to expose himself as a fraud shortly after the end of World War II, after Dutch authorities accused him of selling Vermeer - and thus a national treasure - to Nazi official Hermann Goring.

To prove his innocence, if it can be called innocence, and to demonstrate that he had only sold a useless forgery of his own work, and not the real Old Master, Van Meegeren performed an extraordinary feat - before the eyes of the astonished experts, a new masterpiece appeared out of thin air. Voila, Vermeer.

Most recently, in a 2017 episode of the popular BBC program "Fake or Fortune?", host Philip Mould's long-held hunch that a painting he once sold for ?35,000 was actually a priceless original by English Romantic painter John Constable - an alternate and previously undocumented view of the landscape painter's 1821 masterpiece "Haymaking" - has received dramatic confirmation.

Mould and his colleague unearthed long-forgotten financial records. After tracing the painting's sale by the artist's son, the team recalculated the true value of the canvas at ?2 million.

The gestures of artists-their simultaneously calibrated and instinctive brushstrokes-are nothing less than fingerprints written large on canvases. The lightness of one artist's touch and the firmness of another's stroke are very difficult to fake, especially when one knows that every brush stroke and pen stroke will be scrutinized by suspicious eyes and state-of-the-art equipment.

Pressure under pressure is hard to withstand, and it's an obstacle that British forger Eric Hebborn (who died in unknown circumstances in Rome in 1996 after forging more than 1,000 works attributed to everyone from Mantegna to Tiepolo, from Poussin to Piranesi) overcame with the help of alcohol.

By all accounts, brandy was Hebborn's favorite drink to calm his frayed nerves. It allowed him to slip into the role of the old master whose work he was portraying. If the forgeries made by the hands of Beltracchi and Van Meegeren turned out to be incoherent gestures on closer inspection, the fluidity of the drawings forged by a tipsy Hebborn during his heyday in the 1970s and 1980s still baffles experts.

To this day, the institutions that own his works refuse to acknowledge that they are all forgeries; for example, the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds a pen and ink drawing, "View of the Temples of Venus and Diana at Bayeux from the South," a work that they still insist belongs in the circle of Jan Brueghel the Elder.

When analyzing pigments, provenance, and brush pressure still stumps you, it may be necessary to dive a little deeper. For 20 years, starting in the 1990s, the authenticity of a still life supposedly painted by Vincent van Gogh has been constantly confirmed and refuted by experts.

To some, the garish reds and blues that echoed eerily off the bouquet of roses, daisies, and wildflowers seemed implausible and at odds with the artist's palette.

But an X-ray taken in 2012 cleared up all questions, revealing that the artist had economized by reusing a canvas on which he had created a very different image - the one he explicitly refers to in a letter dated January 1886.

"This week," Van Gogh wrote to his brother Theo, "I painted a big picture with two naked torsos - two wrestlers .... and I really like doing it." As if anticipating the subsequent scholarly debate about the work's authenticity that the painting would eventually provoke, the struggle of two athletes trapped under paint for more than a century not only saved the work from unjust accusations of illegality, but also created a kind of fresh compositional pattern - a still image of a restless mind, forever struggling with itself, desperate to survive.

As a final precaution when determining the authenticity of a work of art, you should spell it out. It would have helped collector Pierre Lagrange save $17 million - that's how much he paid in 2007 for a convincing forgery of a small 30-by-46-centimeter painting wrongly attributed to American abstract expressionist Jackson Pollock.

Pollock is known for his smeary style, but he has a remarkably legible signature - an unmistakable "s" before the final "k." A missing consonant wouldn't just expose a single forgery - it would shake the reputation of an entire gallery.

The sloppy signature was just one of many overlooked nuances in works falsely attributed to Rothko, De Kooning, Mazervell and others, which the Knoedler & Co. gallery, one of New York's oldest and most respected art organizations, managed to sell for $80 million.

The fake works were provided by a dubious dealer who claimed they came from a mysterious collector, "Mr. X." Shortly before the scandal broke in the press, the gallery closed its doors after 165 years of operation, and the suspect in the forgeries, a self-taught Chinese artist named Pei-Sheng Qian who worked in the forgers' Queens studio, disappeared; he later turned up in China.