From The New Inquiry:
Fake Painting
Noah Charney is the founder of the Association for Research into Crimes against Art and the author of the novel The Art Thief. He spoke with New Inquiry editor about his new book, The Art of Forgery...MUCH MORE
Malcolm Harris: How did you become interested in working around art theft in the first place?
Noah Charney: It started back in 2002 when I was a post-grad at the Courtauld Institute and then at Cambridge. I decided I wanted to write a novel, and I had experience behinds the scenes at the art world. I worked at Christie’s during a summer, I was studying art history, and I had worked at some museums. I thought it would be fun to set a novel in the art world, but as I set about doing the sort of research I was used to as a student, and I realized there was very little from an academic perspective on the subject of art crime. And it sounded more fun than traditional art history.
And then you went on to pursue that professionally as well?
I shifted my research interest from art history to a new field that hadn’t been developed. It was an interdisciplinary study of art crime from the perspective of criminology, art history, archaeology, law, museum studies, security studies, policing and investigating. It’s a whole mixture of things. It had gone really under-studied before. I wasn’t inventing the wheel per se, but I was lucky to be the first person to look at it in a new way.
It is a glamorous field as compared to, say, restoration.
It’s true, it’s one of the things I like about it. Everyone from professors to taxi drivers thinks it’s fascinating. Maybe they’ve just seen Ocean’s 11 or The Thomas Crown Affair, but people find it intriguing. The art trade and art in general is an interesting milieu, and there’s the true crime aspect.
When people think art crime they do think Thomas Crown: rich British aristocrat doing it for thrills. How accurate is that stereotype?
Most of the stereotypes are based on several individual real crimes, but then they’ve been generalized as the norm, which is not the case. If we’re talking about art theft, most of what people know is thanks to the notoriety of the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa by Vincenzo Peruggia, the 1877 theft of the Gainsborough Portrait of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire by Adam Worth, and some other big ones. These were extremely high-profile thefts that made international headlines, but the incorrect suppositions on the part of journalists in particular infested the popular conception of what art crime entails and made it a good deal more romantic than it has been in reality, at least since the Second World War.
Prior to World War II, most of the big art thefts we know of were perpetrated by individuals rather than organized crime. It was generally non-violent; these were people with gentlemanly aspirations. But that really got picked up on by a 1932 article in the Saturday Evening Post by journalist Carl Decker, who was himself a notorious fabricator. He invented the story that the Mona Lisa was stolen on commission by an Argentine count named Eduardo de Valfierno, who allegedly had a forger made six identical copies to sell for $1 million each to six wealthy Americans. This was entirely fictious but was published as a factual account. The story got picked up by the general public and misinformed generations of journalists.
It also colored people’s misperceptions about art forgery. One of the main things I do in my non-fiction and academic work is to try and counteract the romanticized and incorrect ideas about art crime in general. They bring people to the subject, but you also want to make it match with the real story, which I think is more intriguing.
From the stories your book, it seems like successful forgers are closer to these fantastic stereotypes than other kinds of art criminals....
HT: MetaFilter for both the link and the idea that women forgers are just too moral or too clever which I tried to encapsulate in the single word 'good',
