Provenance
October 18 2016
Picture: BG
For many, the response to the Old Master fake scandal has been to say; 'we must do more scientific testing'. That may be so, and it's true in the case of the Hals it was science that unmasked the fake in the end. But we shouldn't forget that the Louvre, when they tried to buy the picture, also conducted their own tests, and found nothing alarming. Scientific testing is only as reliable as the humans that do it. Likewise connoisseurship.
So while I'm all in favour of scientific testing, it's not going to always be the silver bullet here. The history of faking tells us that forgers soon work out ways to get around the latests tests. Each advance into the technical study of an artist is effectively a forger's charter.
Instead, it seems to me that the elephant in the room is provenance. None of the allegedly fake paintings in this case came with convincing, verifiable provenance going back further than the 1980s or 90s. Mr Ruffini, the collector who has sold these works, has said some have come from the deceased French industrialist, André Borie. But no proof of this has been published, and nor has anyone found any evidence of Borie being a collector. No trace of any of these pictures has been found before Borie's alleged ownership. The Cranach that was sold from Ruffini to Colnaghi, and then to the Liechtenstein collection, was linked to some entirely spurious provenance about an anonymous Belgian family.
And that's the problem here - too often in the art world, provenance is treated far too casually. How often do we see 'private collection', and just accept it? Most of the time we don't even ask for a private assurance of who the private collector was. To me, the suprising lack of any convincing story about previous ownership, even fake provenance, is evidence that the fakers knew that in the art world the question of provenance was not always probed as much as it should be.
Sometimes, masking true provenance is done because owners and dealers don't want to reveal where they bought a picture, or the price they paid for it. Other times it's because sellers want to maintain privacy. Both impulses are understandable.
But I'm not sure we can get away with that anymore. I don't think, really, that the art world has anything to fear from being more transparent about ownership. Provenance can rarely prove authenticity (that is, the difference between say a studio replica and an autograph original), just as science can't. But it can very quickly tell us if we're dealing with a modern forgery or not. It was dodgy provenance that led to the unwinding of the Knoedler fake scandal.
So in future, if someone turns up a new discovery with absolutely no provenance before the late 20th Century, we must proceed with great caution. 'Private collection' will no longer do. It sounds obvious, now, doesn't it?
