Art Forgery and Provenance

I attended the ARCA (Association for Research into Crimes against Art) Art Crime Symposium at the V&A in London today. There were two sessions:

• a. Art Recovery and Reward: Det Sgt Claire Hutcheon (Metropolitan Police), Charlie Hill, Richard Ellis, Jonathan Jones.
• b. Art Forgery and Provenance: Vernon Rapley, Christopher Marsden, Christos Tsirogiannis, Noah Charney.

I tweeted some of the themes here.

I was very struck by Jonathan Jones' point that art can be displayed in its original context (e.g. a church) rather than the sanitised environment of a museum. (It reminded me of the Houghton Hall exhibition --- and interestingly Peter Watson alluded to the exhibition during the discussion.)

During the discussion, Richard Ellis reminded us that due diligence meant that we needed to ensure that we left no stone unturned as we researched past collecting histories.

Vernon Rapley kept coming back to the Amarna Princess as well as other pieces from the same forger. He reminded us of little clues that would send curators down carefully laid false trails. Christopher Marsden (Senior Archivist at the V&A) reminded us of the forging of documentation to support "provenance".

Christos Tsirogiannis (U Cambridge) discussed a range of forged paperwork and collecting histories drawing on examples from the Medici Dossier, as well as the Sarpedon krater that had been acquired by New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art. He explored the background to the Getty kouros.