Fakes, fakes everywhere (ctd.)
February 20 2017
Picture: via Facebook
In Michigan, a 32 year old art dealer called Eric Spoutz (above) has been sentenced to more than three years in prison for selling forgeries for over ten years. Artists he claimed to be selling included Willem de Kooning. There's some interesting info here on the US Justice department's website - it seems Sproutz wasn't especially diligent:
Despite his efforts to create false histories for the artwork, investigators identified multiple inconsistencies and errors in SPOUTZ’s forged provenance documents. Many of the purported transactions took place before SPOUTZ was born, and the forged letters included non-existent addresses both for the purported sender and various parties referenced as sources of the artworks. SPOUTZ also consistently used a single distinctive typesetting when forging documents purportedly authored by entirely different art galleries in different decades regarding unrelated transactions.
This case is another demonstration of both the ease and problems of faking modern art. The ease is because, let's face it, some of this stuff is easy to replicate or mimic, especially when you're dealing with the proliferation of series and prints. The problems come because buyers assume there must be some quite specific paperwork attached to the artwork, since they were so recently created. It's here that modern forgers usually fall short. Of course, an attraction to forging Old Masters - if you can do it - is that the market is tempted to accept works without any meaningful paper trail.
Katie Zavadski has more background on Spoutz's activities in this piece from the Daily Beast in 2016.
