Art fraud is an old story and goes back at least 100 years, to the
beginning of big money art sales in Europe and America.
you can go back even further to 1496 when Michaelangelo faked a cupid
sculpture that was sold by an art dealer and later found to be a
fake. Of course, today, that very piece would be a Michaelangelo masterpiece.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_forgery
The most serious violations of art fraud began in the early part of
the last century, however there are startling examples during the
18th & 19th century as well.
in the late 80s, I was staying at a friend's house in Newport Beach
when he said he wanted to show me "something special". No folks, I'm
not talking about the "something special" that we all hope Kerry
Haggard gets to see every day. It was a Lou Fine original for the
cover of Science Comics #1 from 1940. He placed it on a table and
within seconds I said to him "are you sure this is real? have you
checked it against the comic book? It doesn't look right to me."
Later that summer when he, another friend and myself were in Chicago
for the Chicago Comic Con, we discovered the truth and were left with
the duty of explaining it to him. He was very disappointed and was so
angry that he became - on his own and to little thanks - the person
who retrieved and returned many comic books and even cash from the
person who forged what turned out to be a few dozen 1940s comic
covers. I had never been offered any by the forger, but at that
convention, several people brought in forgeries from the guy to show
each other. How did the fraud get uncovered? The forger did multiple
forgeries of the same covers for Planet Comics #15, Science Comics #1
and other classics and he used many of the same techniques that
Haggard used. He got a stack (somehow) of vintage Strathmore art
board, he treated the boards to heat and light, coffee stains and
more. He annotated the backs of them the same way other pieces of
Fiction House and Fox Publishing art were from the original studios
and he made sure to get a rubber stamp made the same as the
publisher's for stamping the margins.
as I said earlier, I was never "gotten" by the forger (who was based
in San Francisco), which is something of a surprise considering I was
one of the top comic art dealers at the time, but surprisingly, some
top collectors and some other dealers were fooled and just like the
Haggard situation - none of them spoke to each other because A) no
one wanted anyone to know there was a great source and B) greed got
to all of them (even if it was just some small level greed). Had any
of them shared the information with me (or a few others who helped to
uncover the fraud), I say the fraud would have been discovered sooner
as I was suspicious of the very first one I had seen and none of the
art was perfect enough to pass the comic comparison test.
the only good news was that later, the actual Lou Fine/Will Eisner
art to the cover of Science Comics #1 did come to the market and my
pal did buy it and it hung in his house for about 15 years. Holding
the forgery next to the original showed the major differences in
skill between the original artist and forger.
One thing that helped cement my rep as an art expert in the field was
the admission by my friend that I had doubted the piece he showed me
immediately and others that I subsequently viewed that I also stated
"didn't look right" which is a nice way of saying "I think this is a
fraud and you got taken".
since then I have seen scores of forgeries of Frazetta drawings and
paintings, Alberto Vargas, Margaret Brundage. someone called me
up and asked if I was going to be at the coming show in NYC so he
could ask my opinion on this Brundage he had. My table was at the
back wall and he called at me from the entrance 200 feet away at the
comic convention in NYC (the show was totally dead and maybe 50
people were in the room, so I had a clear view) and I was cracking up
from 200 feet away because it was so awful. the piece had traded 4
times before anyone showed it to me. The kicker was that the piece
was done in oils and Brundage always worked in Pastels, and yet none
of those dummies could tell it was a fake! My friend Richard Clear
was standing next to me and I told him to turn around to see it and
he was cracking up too (I might also mention that at the time,
between Richard and I we had 3 Brundage pastels on our walls at our
homes in Ohio) so the forger here wasn't even sophisticated.
Art fraud - and Universal poster fraud - has a common enemy: the wish
of the collector or dealer to get the piece and more that are
promised to be in the hands of the "supposed" source. It's nothing
new, and will continue on until mankind is dead.
Rich
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