In February 2022, the Orlando Museum of Art opened an exhibit of 25 previously unknown paintings on cardboard by Jean-Michel Basquiat. In June, the FBI seized all the paintings because they had questionable authenticity. When the museum first unveiled the paintings, there were several red flags. Just in broad strokes, twenty-five paintings is a huge number as Basquiat was a great self-promoter who had a studio inside Annina Nosei’s gallery, and the existence of that many unknown works in that environment seems unlikely. Furthermore, losing that many paintings from as recent as the 1980s is much less believable than recovering lost artworks from a bygone century with less reliable record keeping. But more specifically, according to the museum, Basquiat supposedly had painted these works in 1982 and then given them to Thad Mumford, who then auctioned them off thirty years later. Mumford told the FBI in 2018 that he never owned any Basquiat paintings, never mind for thirty years. Additionally, one of the pieces of cardboard used for the paintings has a FedEx logo on it that dates from 1994, which is six years after Basquiat died.
The Orlando Museum of Art had 4,000 visitors in its first two days of the exhibit and an average attendance increase of 500% until the FBI came to shut it down. The director of the museum, Aaron de Groft, was fired after it was revealed he had misrepresented the report of a Basquiat scholar to make it seem like she had authenticated the entire collection when she had, in fact, only said that seven of the twenty-five paintings may be authentic Basquiat works.
In reality, she “rejected nine works outright; 1” the rest she only saw in photographs and was unsure about. De Groft even sent her threatening emails after she told him to remove her report from the exhibit catalogue. This scandal is remarkable because it is becoming clearer that de Groft knew the collection was not completely authentic when he decided to show it, and he went to lengths to try to cover that fact. This is not the only example of fakes in museums, and as museums discover them in their collections they must proceed carefully and intentionally when considering what to do about them.
Prevalence of Fakes in Museums
In the last article, we discussed how museums are looking at the provenance of the pieces in their collection more closely to make sure that everything was acquired ethically. Museums are discovering, at the same time, that many of their artworks are inauthentic. There have been several highly publicized cases in recent years: the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York found out a bust of King David may be fake and the Louvre removed a matching bust from its permanent collection.
The Terrus Museum in Elne, France discovered that 82 of the 140 paintings by Etienne Terrus in their collection were forgeries, all 21 Modigliani paintings on show at the Ducal Palace in Genoa were revealed to be fake, and any Russian avant-garde artwork sold after the creation of the Soviet Union should be investigated as those are popping up in the news as fakes all the time. Some statistics show that 10% of all artwork in museums is fake; the Independent thinks that number is 20% in UK museums.2 Once they’re discovered, what do museums do with fakes?
Most of the time, as in the case of the Louvre and the King David bust, the piece just disappears. Sometimes, however, a museum may decide to show off the forgeries they discover. The Museum Ludwig in Cologne was duped by the craze for Russian avant-garde art that took hold of many museums as opportunists in the Soviet Union took advantage of the breakdown of communication between the USSR and the West by selling inauthentic pieces. The Ludwig Museum evaluated about half of the pieces in their collection after concerns developed about Russian avant-garde paintings, and, of those, half proved to be fake. Instead of simply removing the fakes, they decided to open an exhibit of the forgeries alongside the originals. The museum took an almost offended tone with the exhibit, Deputy Director Rita Kersting writes in the catalogue, “there is no one who does not bemoan the numerous forgeries flooding and muddying the market, befogging the history of art, and above all brutally distorting the oeuvre of the innovative and bold artists of the Russian avant-garde.3” In some ways, it is regrettable that the museum chose to make a larger statement about forgery in the art industry as a whole instead of using this particular moment in the museum’s own history to show how institutions and art collectors can be duped and beguiled. However, it’s a bold thing to do when most museums simply remove all forgeries from their displays and never talk about them ever again.
Copies vs Forgeries
Museums paint themselves as the victims in vast conspiracies, such as the case with the Russian avant-garde paintings or the King David busts in the Met and the Louvre, which were sourced by a notoriously disreputable art dealer named Georges Demotte. They like to show themselves as stalwarts of truth and authenticity, because, as Graham Beal, Former Director of the Detroit Institute of Arts says, “The one thing museums should stand for is authenticity. Museums should be the absolute polar opposite of fake news.4” This explains the tone of the Museum Ludwig’s Russian avant-garde exhibit.
However, there is also a desire to display masterpieces because that is what gets people in the door. That is why Aaron De Groft ignored all of the red flags with the twenty-five supposed Basquiat paintings his museum acquired, and it’s why many museums display copies, prints, and posthumous sculptures with labels that deliberately try to obscure what people are looking at.
For example, the Smithsonian’s African American Museum has a panel from Jacob Lawrence Migration Series and the label next to it read: “Lawrence, Jacob (1917-2000)/The Phillips Collection, Washington, D.C., USA/Acquired 1942/Bridgeman Images. 5” Bridgeman Images produces photographs of artworks, and that inclusion in the label is the only clue that this is not the original painting. Menachem Wecker of the Washington Post pointed this out in a piece he wrote, and the museum said that they would change the label, but he went back about a year later and the label was the same.
Sculpture presents another problem for how to label unoriginal artworks, in this case, posthumous casts. Degas’ Little Dancer of Fourteen Years is a prime example of the practice. Edgar Degas created two versions of this sculpture before his death in 1917 that were made of wax. The surviving original bronze cast is in the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, but there is a version of this sculpture at the MFA, at the Met, and at countless major and minor museums across the globe. Every other version was cast after Degas’ death and without his permission. The MFA’s label for their Little Dancer is “Edgar Degas (1834-1917), French, original model 1878-81, cast after 1921.” On the website, the description is only about the original wax sculpture and not about the fact that Degas had nothing to do with the casting of this piece. Auguste Rodin did give France permission to recast his sculptures after his death, but labels on his pieces are the same. You must look at the artist’s life dates and then dates of casting to figure out if the artist ever touched the piece in front of you. It shouldn’t be that hard. Labels will use words like “conjectural restoration,” “proof test article,” and “engineering test model6” to essentially mean “replica,” and it all feels like an effort to obfuscate the truth.
In the effort to make sure that their collections are of ethical provenance, museums are increasingly discovering that many of the pieces in their collections are fake. It’s hard to reconcile this search for truth when one is faced with the greed of many museums such as the Orlando Museum of Art with their Basquiat exhibit who try to hide the fact that they have copies or forgeries in their collections. It’s easy to see how these museums were duped in the first place when they wanted so badly to have original masterpieces and valuable artworks in their collections that it blinded them to obvious red flags, such as Georges Demotte, who was a known swindler when both the Louvre and the Met bough their King David busts from him. It is necessary, therefore, to be wholly honest. Museums must clean up all their labels and make it very clear that some pieces are posthumously cast or photographs. The only way to truly move forward is to put all the greed in the past.
- “Basquiat Expert Denies She Authenticated Disputed Paintings the FBI Seized from Florida Museum,” The Art Newspaper – International art news and events, July 12, 2022, https://www.theartnewspaper.com/2022/07/12/jordana-moore-saggese-basquiat-expert-orlando-museum-art-scandal.
- Jesus Diaz, “So Many Museums Are Filled With Fake Paintings,” Fast Company, May 1, 2018, https://www.fastcompany.com/90170415/so-many-museums-are-filled-with-fake-paintings.
- onathon Keats, “A Museum Tries To Fight Art Forgery By Showing The Fakes In Its Collection – And Misses The Bigger Picture,” Forbes, accessed July 18, 2022, https://www.forbes.com/sites/jonathonkeats/2020/10/08/a-museum-tries-to-fight-art-forgery-by-showing-the-fakes-in-its-collection–but-misses-the-bigger-picture/.
- “Are Museums Being Clear Enough with the Public about What’s Real and What’s Fake?,” Washington Post, accessed July 18, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/magazine/wp/2019/02/27/feature/are-museums-being-clear-enough-with-the-public-about-whats-real-and-whats-fake/.
- “Are Museums Being Clear Enough with the Public about What’s Real and What’s Fake?”
- “Are Museums Being Clear Enough with the Public about What’s Real and What’s Fake?”