The Binge
Jessica Zafra

BLINDING sums of money are being made in the Philippine art boom. Art is the “It Bag” of the moment: anyone with the funds can snag a Birkin, but there are only so many masterworks to go around. Of course where there are big bucks, there are shady characters. The gap between supply and demand has been filled by entrepreneurs who miraculously produce works by major artists — pieces that were previously unknown, or presumed missing or destroyed. Surely their powers are supernatural, for they can turn up new work by long-dead painters. (If a forger claims to have been possessed by the spirit of a dead artist at the time he painted the piece, should it be considered authentic?)

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Anyone with the slightest interest in painting, questions of authenticity, and the ins and outs of the art world should watch the BBC series Fake or Fortune? immediately. They may find themselves obsessed. They may start asking what makes a dealer so sure that a work is “real.” They might even start imagining themselves to be experts at finding sleepers — unheralded paintings which are really the work of major artists.

Fake or Fortune? unfolds like a detective series, with a painting in the office instead of a corpse in the solarium. Each episode begins with presenters Philip Mould and Fiona Bruce taking on an art mystery: Is this a genuine Turner (or Vuillard, Gainsborough, etc)? The show derives much of its charm from the pairing of Philip, an art dealer and art historian, and Fiona, a broadcast journalist. Philip is the expert, knowledgeable in the ways of the art business. Fiona is the stand-in for the audience, asking the questions we want to ask and articulating our bewilderment. Philip is generally calm and unflappable, while Fiona is emotional and expressive — she wants the paintings to be genuine, and looks crushed when they aren’t. As viewers, we feel we have a stake in the outcome of the investigation.

The work in question is subjected to a battery of scientific tests including chemical analysis of the paint, high resolution photography, infrared scanning, and X-rays. This sounds like a cure for insomnia, but as the many incarnations of CSI have taught us, watching paint dry can be exciting with the right edit. Meanwhile, the presenters look into the history of the artist who may have painted it, his body of work (so far all the featured artists have been men), and the previous owners of the painting.

The investigations take unexpectedly dramatic turns. In the first episode, Fiona takes a suspected Monet to Paris in order to find the exact view that appears in the painting. All goes well until French authorities seize the painting at the train station, saying it is a national treasure that cannot be allowed to leave the country. That may seem like evidence that the Monet is real, but it won’t stand up in the court of expert opinion. More useful are the many labels at the back of the frame, which Philip and Fiona trace to Monet’s art supplier, his dealer, and the previous owner in Egypt. (Personally I am in awe of the fact that those businesses are still around, and their records from over a century ago have been preserved. On paper!)

The suspected Monet passes the many tests of scholarship (research) and connoisseurship (taste) only to run into the gatekeepers of the art world: the committee that certifies the authenticity of a piece. Only works certified by the committee can be included in the official catalog raisonné, or else they cannot be sold. It’s a heart-rending outcome and deeply frustrating, but not the worst that could happen. That comes in a later episode, when another committee invokes a French law that a painting, having been pronounced fake, must be destroyed.

Sometimes the drama has less to do with the painting than with its current owners. The laws governing “Finders, keepers” are put to the test when a watercolor recovered beside a dumpster turns out to be a genuine Winslow Homer. When the finder’s daughter, a single mother, puts it up for auction at Sotheby’s New York, the former owners emerge to claim their property. At the time of the broadcast, the matter was under litigation.

In another case, the drama springs from the painting’s association with one of the most notorious forgers in history, Han van Meegeren. Van Meegeren had not only forged masters including Vermeer, he had sold them to the art-obsessed Nazi general Hermann Goering. At the end of World War II, Van Meegeren was put on trial for selling art to the Nazis; his revelation that the paintings were forgeries caused the public to rethink his role. Was he a villain, or a hero?

Van Meegeren was such a successful forger that some of his paintings used to hang at the Courtauld Institute in London. Fiona and Philip take it upon themselves to prove that the paintings are indeed by Van Meegeren, a process that involves faking the fake — and then putting it in the oven. Apparently the forger had achieved the craquelure on his fake Old Masters by using phenol formaldehyde, aka Bakelite.

Of course, a successful outcome usually means the addition of a few zeroes to whatever the owner paid for the work in question. Would you love your flea market painting more if it turned out to be a Degas? Is that a trick question?

Contact the author at TVatemyday@gmail.com.

Read her work every week at BusinessWorld, every day at JessicaRulestheUniverse.com.

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