Misadventures in Collecting
August 2008
The Beautiful LieA talented young artist crafts an antique-style sculpture so convincing that his friends suggest selling it as genuine; a wealthy man buys it, later learns it is a fake and returns it for a refund. Most of the time, such transactions are unremarkable, but add names and everything changes—especially if the faker is Michelangelo Buonarroti.
Both Ascanio Condivi’s “The Life of Michelangelo” and Giorgio Vasari’s “Lives of the Artists” recount the story of Michelangelo chiseling a life-size marble figure of a dozing Cupid in Florence in 1495. In Vasari’s version, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de’ Medici tells the artist, “If you were to bury it and treat it to make it seem old and then send it to Rome, I’m sure that it would pass as an antique and you could get far more for it than you would here.” After Michelangelo performs unspecified tweaks to the piece, art dealer Baldassare del Milanese sells it to Raffaele Riario, the Cardinal of San Giorgio. Riario later hears a rumor that his Cupid is bogus, confirms it and returns the sculpture to Milanese, asking for his money back.
Apparently, Riario saw only a matter of false advertising, but Vasari held a different opinion. “Cardinal San Giorgio cannot escape censure for what happened, since he failed to recognize the obviously perfect quality of Michelangelo’s work,” he wrote, adding, “There is no gre-ater vanity than to value things for what they are called rather than for what they are.” The Cardinal soon redeemed himself by inviting Michelangelo to Rome, where he made many valuable connections.
The Cupid passed through the hands of Cesare Borgia, Guidobaldo da Montefeltre (the Duke of Urbino) and Isabella d’Este before entering the collections of King Charles I of England in 1634. Scholars believe that it was among the many Royal Collection artworks destroyed in a 1698 blaze at Whitehall Palace. Since then, the Cupid has become an art-historical counterpart to Bigfoot, in the sense that sightings evaporate under close examination. British connoisseur John Pope-Hennessy made an intriguing contribution to this game in 1956, when he debunked a Cupid that had emerged in Italy a century earlier and found its way to the Victoria & Albert Museum. The sculpture is an odd candidate, considering that it lacks wings and is not sleeping. Pope-Hennessy said that 19th-century experts explained these troublesome details away by agreeing that “Michelangelo’s conception of Cupid . . . would certainly have been original.”
Pope-Hennessy claimed that the sculpture in the V&A, which probably depicts Narcissus, is the work of two artists: The torso is a Roman copy of a Greek statue, and the head, which is attached by what he calls “a narrow collar of makeup reaching a depth of a quarter of an inch in front,” was fashioned by a Renaissance artist, possibly Valerio Cioli. This revelation might not end the search for the lost sculpture, but it is fitting to encounter a purported “Sleeping Cupid”—a false version of a fake—that is mostly antique, partly Renaissance and not at all by Michelangelo. Art Attack
The Florists’ Transworld Delivery company’s hopes of dispersing its corporate art collection discreetly in Paris in November 1974 were dashed by a 43-year-old man wielding a squirt gun loaded with purple paint. That man, British artist Malcolm Morley, transformed FTD’s auction into a Dadaist theater piece and ensured that the painting of his that he chose to attack, “Buckingham Palace With First Prize,” would rise in value, though most of the collectors in the audience were too giddy or gobsmacked to realize it.
It all started when FTD sought to sell 100 flower-themed works that it had commissioned from leading contemporary artists, including Morley, who delivered “Buckingham Palace” in 1970. The British painter depicted the royal residence with tulips and puckishly attached a red winner’s ribbon to the lower left corner of the canvas. The ribbon “annoyed the hell out of people,” Morley says, “especially other artists, because it looked like it was given by an outside source.”
Morley only heard about the Paris auction, which was held at the Palais Galliera, because he happened to be in town that month with an exhibit of his own. Miffed that FTD had chosen a low-profile approach instead of a better-publicized sale in New York or London, he devised a Pythonesque plan that he dubbed “A Night at the Auction” in homage to the Marx Brothers’ 1935 comedy, “A Night at the Opera.” He selected a costume that he describes as a “headwaiter suit with tails” and completed the look with a red sash emblazoned with the words “Ambassador of Art.” He enlisted confederates to create diversions and film the proceedings, and he informed about a dozen collectors at a dinner party on the eve of the sale that he would write the word “faux” on the canvas with purple paint. “I swore them to secrecy, knowing it would get back to the auction house,” he says. “I wanted to see what (the auctioneers) would do. And I am English—we tell people we’re going to bomb them before we do it.”
Auction officials shielded the art with a transparent sheet of plastic, but they were helpless against the absurdist onslaught that Morley’s team unleashed. When the auctioneer ann-ounced Lot 86, the “Buckingham Palace” painting, a violinist began to play, Morley left his seat and strode up the center aisle, and the camera crew, which had been waiting at the back of the room, followed him. (Sadly, an acquaintance Morley hired to edit the footage absconded with it, but photographs of the caper survive.) A Hungarian journalist stood on a chair and narrated the action in French, and a pregnant woman distracted security guards by offering bonbons. Morley proclaimed to the audience, “This place is a laundry, and they’re cleaning dirty money with my art,” a phrase that he says he chose because “It’s a really good thing to say, don’t you think?”
Dissuaded from his original plan by the plastic covering the painting, Morley nailed the water gun to it instead. The spell of bafflement cast by his friends held long enough for Morley to secure the toy to the painting’s upper right corner—an impressive feat, considering that his target was moving (auction staff began carrying the painting offstage before he was done), he was suffering from a cracked rib and he had to deflect several security guards who tried to stop him.
Morley literally eighty-sixed the sale; officials abandoned the 100-lot auction with 14 paintings unplaced. “I did it, it happened and I was very pleased with the end result,” he says, adding, “I knew I was turning the painting into something more valuable. No one saw that except the art dealer.” The dealer Morley references, who he prefers not to name, was the only person in the audience who saw opportunity in the chaos and negotiated to acquire the unsold paintings. (In his 1996 book “True Colors: The Real Life of the Art World,” Anthony Haden-Guest identifies the purchaser as Swedish dealer Bo Alveryd and claims he paid a quarter of a million dollars for the 14 works.) To the chagrin of the bidders who were less quick on the draw, Morley’s prediction proved correct. “Buckingham Palace With First Prize” last sold at Christie’s in London in February 2004—with the water gun still triumphantly nailed in place—for $627,218, which Morley, now 77 and affiliated with Manhattan’s Sperone Westwater gallery, cheerfully deems “confirmation of something or other.” Excess for Success
The 1973 purchase of Jackson Pollock’s 1952 painting “Blue Poles” would have caused less controversy in Australia if Prime Minister Gough Whitlam had honored Australian National Gallery director James Mollison’s request to avoid publicizing its price. Mollison needed Whitlam’s permission to buy the Pollock because it cost AUD$1.3 million, or about a third of the museum’s annual budget. Whitlam approved it but wrote on the memo, “Buy it and disclose the price.”
From the instant the news broke, Whitlam’s opponents figuratively smashed the Abstract Expressionist canvas over the head of the Labor Party leader, and he egged them on. Conservative politicians derided both the painting and the hefty sum it cost. Whitlow skewered a representative who stated in Parliament that he “could not comprehend how the painting was made or the merits of it,” by responding that if “the selection of paintings was based on the comprehension of the Honourable Member, our galleries would be bare and archaic indeed.” Whitlam even featured “Blue Poles” on his official Christmas card for 1973. Not surprisingly, the painting came to symbolize his government. To Whitlam, it stood for modernity, boldness and newness; his critics saw irresponsibility, wasteful spending and bad art.
Lindsay Barrett, a University of Western Sydney media professor who authored “The Prime Minister’s Christmas Card: ‘Blue Poles’ and Cultural Politics in the Whitlam Era” (Power Publications, 2001), says that Whitlam could no more resist “Blue Poles” than a cat could resist catnip. “He identified with cultural elitism on any level,” Barrett says. “Though (‘Blue Poles’) was not to his personal taste, he could see that it was spectacular, that it was confrontational and that it bothered narrow-minded people, so it was for him. Probably his greatest flaw was his smartassness. He wanted to make as big a noise as possible.”
Whitlam’s government imploded in 1975, three years after he assumed power, when the conservatives, outraged by a funding scandal perpetrated by Labor ministers, demanded new elections and blocked passage of the budget to underscore their point. Whitlam refused, and the governor general, an official who could dismiss the Australian government in the event of a crisis, did just that. Some outside observers have suggested that “Blue Poles” brought Whitlam down, but Barrett denies this. “We can only say it’s typical of the excesses of his government,” he says, “and it wasn’t even his worst.”
Thirty-five years later, “Blue Poles” is considered one of Pollock’s finest canvases, and a 2006 estimate placed the painting’s worth between AUD$100 million and AUD$180 million (or $95 million–$184 million). Barrett, who asked Whitlam to help him launch his book, says the former prime minister declines to talk about “Blue Poles” and its aftermath. “When he says anything, he says, ‘I was right,’ but he says that about everything,” Barrett deadpans. “He’s the most unhumble person I’ve ever met.” Romancing the Stones
Even if you are certain that Lord Elgin stole the marbles from the Parthenon at the turn of the 18th century, his doggedness merits at least an iota of admiration. In his quest to remove and bear home to England choice sections from the ancient Greek monument, Thomas Bruce, seventh earl of Elgin and British ambassador to Constantinople (1799–1803), suffered a litany of woes.
He exhausted his fortune to bribe Turkish officials into submission and had to pay sponge divers to retrieve crates of Parthenon friezes and sculptures from the hull of a hired ship that sank. He and his pregnant wife, Mary, were detained in France as prisoners of war during their return trip to Britain, and the son she bore in custody lived for barely a year. The French released her to escort the infant’s body to the ancestral Elgin home in Scotland, but authorities insisted on keeping her diplomat husband detained. During their forced separation, Mary began an affair that would prompt Lord Elgin to sue for divorce. Lord Byron mocked him in verse. And, having requested £74,000 from the British government for his efforts, he was paid less than half the sum—and the money went directly to his creditors. Ultimately he moved to France to avoid them and died there, penniless, in 1841.
William St. Clair, author of “Lord Elgin and the Marbles,” (Oxford University Press, USA, 1998), says, “He ruined himself, he ruined his life and he destroyed the family fortune for several generations as a result of his actions.” Moreover, he fathered a controversy that refuses to die; two centuries onward, the British and the Greeks are still arguing over if and when the antiquities should return to their Athenian home. Andrew Douglas Alexander Thomas Bruce, the current Earl of Elgin, told Smithsonian magazine in 1992 that he was “sorry his great-grandfather (had) ever (seen) the bloody stones.”
Lord Elgin fulfilled his goal, however; artists, poets and scholars flocked to study and learn from the Parthenon marbles. Still, few would accept crippling debt, imprisonment, public mockery, marital breakdown and the death of a child for such an abstract payoff, even if they knew beforehand that poet John Keats would write “Ode on a Grecian Urn” after viewing the hard-won fragments. “He was never in any doubt over whether it was the right thing to do,” says St. Clair, who pinpoints a motive every collector understands. “He genuinely thought it (the Parthenon marbles) was the greatest masterpiece by the hand of man.”‘Mimarizing’ Details
Most people would consider themselves lucky to acquire just one Botticelli or Michelangelo, but Ante Topic Mimara claimed to own works by these artists, among others. The late Croatian’s 3,700-piece collection contains Egyptian antiquities, glass, ivory, silver and tapestries, as well as paintings by Caravaggio, Manet and Degas. In 1973, he agreed to donate his holdings to Yugoslavia in exchange for perks such as housing and an annual stipend of $100,000.
Mimara died before the 1987 debut of his eponymous museum but previewed its reception when he exhibited highlights from his collection in Zagreb in 1983. Italian art historian Federico Zeri told ARTnews that it featured “trash along with some good things. Ninety percent is junk.” Virtually everyone disagreed with the attributions that Mimara supplied, and those who did not dismiss the hoard whispered that it might have been stolen from victims of the Nazis.
Mimara’s biography is difficult to pinpoint. Depending on the source consulted, he was a friend of Tito, a forger, a restorer, a painter, an art dealer, a wealthy businessman or a spy. The plunder rumor sprang from his actions at the Allies’ Central Collecting Point in Munich in 1949, where he accepted on behalf of Yugoslavia treasures that the Nazis supposedly took from the country. Unfortunately, most of the 166 objects Mimara requested actually belonged to other nations. CCP officials learned the truth too late, but American investigators theorized that Wiltrud Mersmann, a junior curator at the Munich location, gave Mimara the information he needed to file believeable claims. Although Mimara and Mersmann later married, she never admitted to assisting in his scheme. (The Americans could not confirm that Yugoslavia received the art that Mimara took, but it appears that almost nothing he donated came from the postwar haul.)
While he was a curator at The Cloisters, Thomas Hoving purchased one of the only genuine and exquisite items that Mimara ever handled: The Bury St. Edmunds cross, a 12th-century work of carved ivory. He completed the $600,000 deal in 1963 after several meetings with Mimara, who tried to interest him in other pieces that Hoving believes he either faked or ruined by “Mimarizing”—his term for the Yugoslav’s heavy restoration. “I got to know his distinct style,” he says, “so for me, it was easy (to spot Mimara’s handiwork).”
Hoving estimates that most items on display resemble what he saw during the 1960s but admits that he has never visited the museum. (He is familiar with some of its holdings, having received an advance museum catalogue in the mid-1980s from Mimara.) “A fake ruins my digestion, so hundreds would give me a problem,” he says. “Besides, I saw too many when I had to deal with this guy.”
Mimara Museum director Tugomir Luksic declines to cite examples of Mimara items that have since been reattributed, but says, “The changes are a work in progress. In a general way, the collection needs to be researched, and that’s what we do. It has to be examined in detail.” His stance might sound reasonable were it not essentially the same thing his colleagues said when the museum opened 21 years ago.Holy Terror
Mark Hofmann was no ordinary forger. His mastery of creating convincing documents and his grasp of the psychology of his targets sets him apart from other criminals, but he stands alone for another reason: The 53-year-old disgruntled Mormon resides in Utah State Prison, not for forgery, but for murder, having received a life sentence for the October 1985 bombing deaths of two people. He attacked the first out of fear that the victim would expose his forgery scheme, and bombed the second to confuse authorities and make them think Hofmann could not be a suspect in the original death.
Hofmann’s dark journey began with the success of the Anthon Transcript, his first major forgery. Mormons believe that in September 1823 in upstate New York, their religion’s founder, Joseph Smith, discovered golden plates containing the text of their holy book, and that the divinely inspired Smith translated the so-called “reformed Egyptian” hieroglyphs carved upon them. In 1828, Martin Harris, a follower of Smith, showed a page of reformed Egyptian symbols to Charles Anthon, a classics scholar at Columbia College in Manhattan, for his opinion. Harris claimed that Anthon wrote and then destroyed a letter of authenticity supporting the odd language, but Anthon stated that he penned no such letter. The paper featuring the curious symbols became known as the Anthon Transcript and was later lost.
Hofmann pretended to rediscover it in April 1980, saying he found it stuck between the pages of a 1668 copy of the King James Bible. Ultimately, he brought the Anthon Transcript to the Mormon church, whose historical department spent four months evaluating it before an official negotiated its purchase from Hofmann. By then, church experts had issued an interim report that generally pointed to its authenticity. Though they confirmed that the paper and ink was correct for the period, they declined to perform more rigorous tests that would require a sample cut from the document.
Simon Worrall, author of “The Poet and the Murderer” (Dutton, 2002), a book on Hofmann’s crimes, says the forger chose his debut subject well. “(Hofmann) presented (the church) with a document that they were in great need of to prove a piece of their story,” he says. “I have said that collecting is irrational, but here we’re dealing with a double irrationality. They were doing it in support of the most irrational, unsupportable human institution: religion.”
In October 1980, the church arranged a trade for the document, giving Hofmann rare 19th-century Mormon currency and a first edition of the Book of Mormon that together was worth about $25,000, the estimated value of the Anthon Transcript. Hofmann received something else much more precious, however—a tool for future forgeries. “What he really gained was access to the Mormon church,” Worrall says, explaining that his connection to the Anthon Transcript convinced officials to admit him to the archives. Hofmann repaid that trust by selling the church dozens more forgeries, including the Salamander Letter, in which Harris says that Smith found the golden plates by crystal-gazing, an occult practice that is a taboo subject among Mormons. Also, Hofmann branched out, faking an Emily Dickinson poem and a copy of “The Oath of a Freeman,” the first document printed in America, before he was arrested in February 1986 on 28 counts, including two for murder and 10 for mail and wire fraud.Bargain Madness
“Corot made 3,000 paintings, 10,000 of which have been sold in America.” That one-liner about the 19th-century French landscape painter Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, was old in 1936 when Louvre curator René Huyghe quoted it in an article for a monthly French art journal. There, he unspooled the tale of an extraordinary sucker: Dr. F. Jousseaume, who, by the time he died in 1923 had amassed 2,414 Corots—not one of which was real.
Jousseaume was an eccentric par excellence. Huyghe cited passages from the man’s 1910 book, “Les Vandales du Louvre,” in which he advocated installing a permanent veterinary station at the Arc d’Triomphe to tend to any animals that might be injured by masonry falling from the arch. Elsewhere in the book, Jousseaume bragged about how he would not pay more than 100 francs for a Corot painting, stating, “If I said how many I have been able to obtain without spending that sum, you would not believe me.” (A first-rate Corot then fetched as much as 100,000 francs.) Also, Jousseaume lacked a connoisseur’s eye. He once praised a J. M. W. Turner painting that later proved bogus as “one of the most beautiful masterworks of this inimitable artist.”
Jousseaume was well aware of how widely faked Corot was, saying, “Corot had during his lifetime so many skillful imitators that of 100 pictures bearing his signature, barely 50 are genuine.” Yet he seems never to have considered that his own collection could be false.
Huyghe claimed that “of the 2,414, with six or seven possible exceptions, they are all from the same hand,” and proceeded to demolish the labors of the unknown faker. Huyghe dwells on a group portrait titled “Memories of Friends,” because the images Huyghe claimed that “of the 2,414, with six or seven possible exceptions, they are all from the same hand,” and proceeded to demolish the labors of the unknown faker. Huyghe dwells on a group portrait titled “Memories of Friends,” because the images of the artists in it were copied from photographs, some of which were taken 20 years apart. He called the Jousseaume affair “one of the most astonishing buffooneries of the era” and likened it to a missing scene from Alfred Jarry’s absurdist play “Ubu Roi.”
Why did Huyghe bother to stomp such an amusing gnat? Unlike most collections of fakes, Jousseaume’s remained intact after his death. It fell into the hands of one Victor Rienaecker, who attempted to sell it in 1928 in New York and London. The catalogue that he produced for the occasion, titled “The Paintings & Drawings of J.B.C. Corot in the Artist’s Own Collection,” includes all 2,414 works. Rienaecker must have made some headway with collectors, because Huyghe felt the need to sound the alarm eight years later. His warning came too late for Samuel Courtauld, who acquired three of Jousseaume’s “Corots” and narrowly averted a posthumous public humiliation in 1948 when they were removed from a Tate Gallery exhibit of French artworks from his collection.Seeing Double
Federal prosecutors allege that New York art dealer Ely Sakhai ran his forgery scheme like so: He would acquire a good-but-not-great work by a name Impressionist or post-Impressionist artist, have a persuasive copy (or two) made of the painting, sell the copy to an Asian client and auction the original in America or Europe. Think it through, and the plan’s flaws snap into focus. Some of those spurious canvases are bound to migrate from Asia to auction houses in New York and London. Besides, every fresh fake released to the market increases the odds that the original and its evil twin will cross paths with results far more awkward than two society ladies wearing the same couture gown to a charity ball. Nevertheless, the strategy worked for a long time and might have kept working if two of his victims had lacked the courage to step forward.
Sakhai almost had a close call in 2000 when officials at the Manhattan branches of Sotheby’s and Christie’s learned that they both had slated Gauguin’s 1885 canvas “Vase de Fleurs (Lilas)” for their May sales. Gauguin expert Sylvie Crussard evaluated the two and concluded that Christie’s had the bogus version; the house withdrew their “Vase” from its auction catalogue, and Sotheby’s sold the genuine painting on May 11, 2000, for $346,750. The word “almost” is necessary here because FBI agent James Wynne says the encounter neither revealed Sakhai’s shenanigans nor provided the proof authorities needed to charge him. (Wynne spent six years investigating the case, receiving the initial complaint against Sakhai in March 1998.) Moreover, Sakhai might never have known of the tale of the dueling Gauguins until he saw the federal indictment that was filed against him in 2004. He learned in 1997 that at least one of his copies had escaped from Asia when Christie’s asked to borrow Marie Laurencin’s undated canvas “Jeune Fille à la Mandoline,” which it had sold to him in 1990. According to an article in the International Foundation for Art Research Journal, the auction house wanted an expert to compare the painting to a second Laurencin of the same name that it had sold for $79,500 in New York in May 1997. It rescinded the sale in part because the auction house stock number markings on the backs of each painting did not match. The genuine painting’s number appeared on a Christie’s label that was affixed for the 1990 auction, while the fakers simply wrote the digits on the stretcher of the copy.
Another forger might have been scared straight by such an incident, but apparently Sakhai felt that he had little to fear; FBI officials suspect that he had been active since 1990 and that he might be responsible for hundreds of fakes. Sakhai seems to have sent his copies overseas on the assumption that his Japanese, Taiwanese and Korean marks would be too ashamed to publicly admit that they had been duped. Fortunately, two of his Japanese victims bravely deviated from the script and began assisting the FBI in 2002. “One guy had made a significant number of transactions, and the other had purchased (the false ‘Vase de Fleurs (Lilas)’),” Wynne says. “That established the motive cleanly.” News emerged later that Sotheby’s withdrew a second iteration of “Vase de Fleurs (Lilas)” from a November 1998 sale that belonged to a Japanese owner. The FBI did not mention this other copy in the federal case, but it seems consistent with Sakhai’s modus operandi.
In June 2004 a grand jury charged him with nine counts of mail fraud, wire fraud and conspiracy to commit those crimes. Sakhai pled guilty to two of the counts and was sentenced in July 2005 to 41 months in prison. Also, he was forced to forfeit 11 genuine artworks in his possession and pay more than $12.5 million in restitution. Though he closed his Manhattan gallery, a second gallery in Great Neck, Long Island, known as The Art Collection, remains open. Sakhai was released from the federal penitentiary in Lewisburg, Penn., earlier this year, and his sentence does not bar him from dealing art. More Sakhai forgeries must be out there, but the two dozen or so in the FBI’s possession have been put to good use: Wynne displays them in presentations on art crime.