This question, which occasionally bothers visitors, makes most institutions uneasy. Is everything we see in museums authentic? On the occasion of our back-to-school series, which addresses all of your art-related inquiries, we provide a brief summary of the situation.
Dirk Hannema, the director of the Boijmans Museum, purchased the painting he thought to be by Vermeer in 1937 for 540,000 guilders and displayed it as a gem in his collection. It was really created by the well-known forger Han Van Meegeren.
Let's be clear: there are fakes in museums. But don't think that heritage collections are full of counterfeits. While the percentages remain difficult to establish and verify, American art historian Noah Charney, author of various articles and fictions on art counterfeiting, proposes the comforting figure of 95% of real paintings on display in major institutions. Fakes can be discovered throughout history. The phenomena has been around since ancient times, when thieves attempted to trick... Cuneiform inscriptions that discuss attempts to pass off colored glass as lapis lazuli provide evidence of this.
Fake archeological relics are extremely valuable to forgers and may mislead even the most seasoned specialists! One of the most striking examples is the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles, which paid $9 million for a superb kouros in 1985, but has now shown to be more than doubtful.
The prevalence of the phenomena varies greatly according to the museum and the sort of work. Not only is authenticity important, but some works, such as antique paintings, might generate attribution concerns. It is not rare for a picture thought to be by a certain master to be credited to another artist or his studio: copying is an age-old creative technique that may often obfuscate the problem. Forgers target famous artists in particular due to the allure of profit. The collection includes autographs by Vincent van Gogh, Auguste Renoir, Salvador Dalí, Pablo Picass, Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Henri Matisse. Guy Ribes, a former forger who claims to have created over a thousand fakes, claims that several of his Degas paintings are now housed in English museums. A difficult-to-verify assertion might cause misunderstanding.
On the opposite end of the spectrum, more private masters make excellent prey, to the disadvantage of museums like the one devoted to the landscape painter Étienne Terrus (1857-1922) in Elne, Occitanie area. In 2018, the Étienne Terrus museum revealed that more than half of their collection consisted of counterfeits. Out of 142 pieces, 82 were discovered to be counterfeits, causing a controversy in the art world because approximately 160,000 euros had been paid to buy these paintings, sketches, and watercolors incorrectly attributed to the artist from Roussillon.
Even renowned museums, such as the Palace of Versailles, are susceptible to deception. The latter fell prey to a fraud involving phony period furniture bought for several million euros between 2008 and 2015. Bill Pallot, dubbed "Father the Chair" and the acknowledged French specialist in 18th-century royal furniture, was at the core of the story, working with his accomplice Bruno Desnoues, a cabinetmaker and Meilleur Ouvrier de France from Paris' Faubourg Saint-Antoine. Museums are now addressing this topic. Museums, which have hitherto been unwilling to openly address the issue of fakes in their collections, are beginning to do so with greater transparency. Some are even tackling the issue head on. In 2022, the Musée National de la Renaissance in Écouen and the Louvre both conducted extensive research on their collections of Venetian enameled glass from the 15th century. Guess what? Following research by the laboratory of the Centre for Research and Restoration of Museums of France (C2RMF), the results found several counterfeits dating back to the nineteenth century! The results of these findings inspired an exhibition stressing the challenge of differentiating genuine artifacts from imitations.
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