Art Institute Gaugin: it's a fake

Here's some hot news, spotted via the Cranky Professor. As he notes, some of the most successful forgeries have been those that play the Anastasia card, purporting to be what is lost, and ardently hoped to be found:

The Art Newspaper can reveal that a Gauguin sculpture bought by the Art Institute of Chicago ten years ago and described by the museum as a major rediscovery and one of its most important acquisitions of the last 20 years, is a fake. The work was made recently in the north of England.

Last month three members of the Greenhalgh family based in Bolton, Greater Manchester, were sentenced over charges relating to the forgery of the Egyptian Amarna Princess sculpture, bought by Bolton Museum in 2003.

We posted on the Bolton fake here; you can bet this isn't the last we've heard of the Greenhalgh's work, either.

On 26 November Scotland Yard told The Art Newspaper that a forged Gauguin ceramic of The Faun had also been sold by the Greenhalgh family. The police said that the Gauguin's "current whereabouts are unknown". We then tracked it down to Chicago.

The sculpture has been prominently displayed since its acquisition, and has been the subject of much scholarly attention -- with nary a suspicion being voiced.

So why was it that no one seems to have questioned the Gauguin? The sculpture appeared to be based on a tiny drawing of a faun sculpture in a sketchbook which the artist used in Martinique in 1887. A work entitled "Faun" was also listed in a Gauguin exhibition held at the Nunès and Fiquet gallery in Paris in 1917. These references are noted in Christopher Gray's Gauguin sculpture catalogue (1963) and Merete Bodelsen's authoritative study of Gauguin's ceramics (1964).

It seems that the Greenhalghs set out to recreate this missing sculpture. What is astonishing is that they were able to design and fire such a successful stoneware forgery, which had no obvious features to reveal it as a modern fake.

You don't get that good doing just one.

Had the Greenhalghs not been prosecuted over the Amarna Princess, The Faun could well have remained on display as a Gauguin for decades, unrecognised as a modern forgery.

Full article here. There is a good article on the Greenhalghs (with plenty of further links) at Wikipedia, which notes:

Forty-four forgeries were discussed during the trial, and 120 were known to have been presented to various institutions. However, given the family's bank records only extended back for a third of the period they were operating, and Shaun Greenhalgh's high level of productivity, there are probably many more. On raiding the Greenhalgh home police discovered many raw materials and "scores of sculptures, paintings and artefacts, hidden in wardrobes, under their bed and in the garden shed." In fact, "there can be little doubt that there are a number of forgeries still circulating within the art market."

Posted by David on December 12, 2007 9:57 AM