Hiehie blog

DIA show focuses on collection’s frauds and mysteries

Michael H. Hodges, Detroit News Arts Writer

The girl in the Renaissance garb is so beautiful, it feels downright ungentlemanly to call her a fraud.

But that's just what she is. And that's why "Portrait of a Young Woman" is one of the stars in "Fakes, Forgeries and Mysteries," opening Sunday at the Detroit Institute of Arts -- an intriguing show from the DIA's own collection about the serious detective work used to verify artworks.

Divided into four rooms, the first gallery considers works "in the style of" -- pieces that resemble the handiwork of the great and famous, but don't claim to be by the master.

The second contains out-and-out forgeries, often passed off with impressive documentation and fake signatures to seal the deal.

The curtain is pulled back in the next room on the scientific methods DIA researchers use to uncover the truth -- whether X-rays, chemical analysis or, in one surprising case, examination of tree rings. The last gallery looks at ongoing mysteries, and includes works the museum is still trying to authenticate, like an unsigned still-life alleged to be by Vincent van Gogh.

In almost all cases, the counterfeit is paired with a bonafide piece by the artist in question. Explanatory panels guide visitors through the authentication process, equipping them with the observational tools they need to spot clues in the fakes -- from the use of color to seeing whether noses and eyes are rendered with the same delicacy as in the real thing.

Most works the museum acquires come with a paper trail establishing their authenticity beyond question, says DIA director Graham Beal. That's not true, however, with bequests and other gifts that arrive out of the blue.

In those cases, he says, "We don't present anything until we've done due diligence."

But back to that beautiful young woman from Renaissance Italy, whom associate curator of European painting Salvador Salort-Pons calls "the queen of the exhibition."

She entered the DIA's collection in the 1930s, thought to be by Leonardo da Vinci or Andrea del Verrocchio, both working in the late 1400s. But there were always doubts, says Salort-Pons, and try as they might, for years the DIA couldn't quite pinpoint her story.

She had a way of fooling people. At one point, "Young Woman" had been included in a Leonardo exhibition in Milan, Italy. So as Salort-Pons notes with a little satisfaction, even the Italians were fooled.

The X-ray proved her undoing. Pictures revealed that wormholes -- no surprise in wood 500 years old -- had been filled beneath the paint surface with a sort of plaster-of-Paris called gesso.

But gesso didn't exist back then.

"So the forger," says Salort-Pons, "had picked wood to look old," filled the holes and painted over them. This gorgeous fake, which Salort-Pons says he'd be thrilled to have on his wall, was probably created some 300 years after Leonardo or Verrocchio. Chemical analysis of paint pigments showed the presence of zinc -- not used until the 1800s.

All the same, it's hard not to admire the forger's handiwork. It is, as Salort-Pons puts it, "a refined, almost exquisite forgery."

In other cases, sloppiness unmasked fakes, illustrated here by two landscapes said to be by the 19th-century American painter Ralph Blakelock.

The DIA had doubts from the start about "Indian Encampment," says Salort-Pons, not least because of what he calls its "lurid" color palette, quite different from the actual Blakelock with which it's paired.

Again, the X-ray rode to the rescue. "Indian Encampment," it turns out, had been painted atop an earlier work -- a portrait of a woman in a distinctly 20th-century outfit.

One fraud involved the simplest and cheekiest of ploys -- replacing one artist's signature with another, a deception that Salort-Pons lays out in concise detail in a short video.

"Three Figures Resting Under a Tree," bearing the signature of French Impressionist Claude Monet, came to the DIA in 2004 from a bequest.

A label on the back noted that the work had been exhibited in 1910 at Pittsburgh's Carnegie Museum of Art. But no painting in that show bore that name.

The next clue was a sticker reading "A 3707" --љ the identification code for a specific New York City art dealer who sold the work in 1947 as a Monet, but under a different name -- "Tewkesbury Road."

Another call was placed to Pittsburgh: Had they ever shown a work by that name? This time the answer was yes --љ but it wasn't a Monet. It was by a minor British painter named Sir Alfred East. Indeed, zooming in on a photo of the piece taken during that exhibit, researchers could clearly read East's signature.

Case closed.

'Fakes, Forgeries and Mysteries'

Sunday through April 10

Detroit Institute of Arts

5200 Woodward Ave., Detroit

10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Sunday; 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. Wednesday & Thursday; 10 a.m. to 10 p.m. Friday; 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Saturday

General admission: $8, adults, $6, seniors, $4, kids ages 6-17 (313) 833-7900 or