Books: Art and Authenticity

Over the past few months New York’s arts community has had its collective eye on the US District Court, where Judge Paul G Gardephe has been asked to determine whether three modernist works – supposedly by Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko – are original or fake.

This is not the first time that New York judges have been asked to determine the authenticity of works of art. In 1929 the powerful art dealer and connoisseur Joseph Duveen found himself in court for having publicly declared a version of Leonardo da Vinci’s La Belle Ferronière to be a copy.

The owners sued Duveen – and a court struggled to resolve the question of authenticity, an issue that Duveen firmly believed could only be resolved by connoisseurs.

Duveen failed to convince the jurors, who concluded that the “connoisseurs had given them little but an exotic vocabulary and a distrust for connoisseurs”.

Leonardo also features in Art and Authenticity – this time in relation to the controversial attribution to him of La Bella Principessa, a work that had been purchased at Christie’s in 1998 for $21,850. The long-running and as yet undetermined dispute has split Leonardo specialists.

The first to nail his colours to the Leonardo mast (in 2009) was Martin Kemp, the emeritus research professor of the history of art at Oxford University. Kemp has noted that, despite their initial interest, major museums and galleries around the world have declined to exhibit La Bella Principessa for fear of being compromised.

Ambiguous authenticity

At stake here is not only the reputation of gallery directors, Leonardo connoisseurs and auction houses but also big money. Estimates of the value of a La Bella Principessa, if agreed to be the work of Leonardo, run as high as £100m.

The series of 12 essays, which make up Art and Authenticity, take a broad view of authenticity – material and conceptual. It is, at times, a provocative book, which seeks to answer some complex questions. In so doing it raises others, not least, is the copy or replica any less authentic than the original?

In an era of digital imaging, multiples, the application of forensic science techniques, and high financial stakes, the quest for the genuine has become more intense.

In time, suggests David Bellingham, this may mean a reassessment of “our own valuation systems, and replicated art will begin to regain the higher cultural and market status it had in the 19th century”.

In her contribution Barbara Lasic considers how the early educational mission of the Victoria and Albert Museum resulted in an ambivalent and ambiguous approach to the authenticity of its objects.

This is best reflected in the Cast Courts and a Circulating Department creating a touring exhibitions and loans programme that consisted mostly of reproductions.

In 1860 an official of what was then the South Kensington Museum happily blurred the line between the authentic and the inauthentic: “We cannot send the crystals of the Louvre round, so we send the next best thing.” In this case a photograph was deemed sufficient.

Fresh paint

The dust jacket on this beautifully illustrated book claims that the authors challenge a narrow interpretation of authenticity.

Together, the 12 contributors certainly offer a majestic sweep across objects and ideas, from Frans Hals to John Haberle (an artist specialising in trompe l’oeil paintings of money), from “smoke” furniture to John Soane’s Gothic Library at Stowe.

It’s a bold venture that doesn’t quite come off – perhaps the sweep is just too great. Perhaps the thread of authenticity is stretched just too far.

That said, as Art and Authenticity reminds us, a work does not need to be authentic in terms of its authorship to give “genuine pleasure to its viewers”.

Abraham Bredius, the Dutch scholar of 17th-century art, reacted positively to the perfect condition of a work attributed to Jan Vermeer – “it’s just as if it had left the painter’s studio”.

He was right, but the studio was not Vermeer’s, rather it was that of Han van Meegeren, the notorious forger. The fresh paint was a little too fresh.

Timothy Mason is a museum consultant