Art history and teaching - recognizing art forgeries
"Art and forgery. Learning the right from the wrong" - Sophisticated forgeries come to light
Exhibition tip: "Art and forgery. Learning the right thing from the wrong" from February 29th to June 30th, 2024 in the Kurpfälzisches Museum in Heidelberg
Heidelberg. The Kurpfälzisches Museum and the Institute for European Art History at the University of Heidelberg are showing confiscated and forged paintings from the police evidence chambers in the exhibition "Art and Forgery. Learning the Right from the Wrong." Opposite them are original paintings on loan from Cologne, Frankfurt, Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg. A prominent artist name and high art market prices were often enough to forge a work or create a new work of art in the artist's style. Big names like Lucas Cranach, Rembrandt, Vincent Van Gogh, Paula Modersohn-Becker, Salvador Dalí and Pablo Picasso are sought out and bought by museums, foundations and private collectors worldwide. The counterfeit works were often given false papers: fictitious provenances and fictitious reports, and sometimes entire artist biographies or collector biographies were added. It is not uncommon for forgers to go down in art history; after serving a sentence, they are even presented in exhibitions and thus promoted by galleries as artists.
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| Loans for the exhibition also come from Munich, photo: Helga Waess - Munich |
The Heidelberg exhibition is currently showing valuable originals and their counterfeits
There is something special about a painting created by AI that appears like a masterpiece when printed in 3D. It imitates a Rembrandt portrait and was created in the project “The Next Rembrandt”.
The comparison between real and fake is not even possible for experts. It often takes extensive technological investigations to track down a counterfeiter. Infrared reflectography to detect underpaintings or the radiocarbon method to determine the age of the painting surface ("wood") as well as pigment analyzes are just a few ways to track down the forger.
Almost deceptively real, fake works of art and archaeological artifacts come onto the market here and there. A discovered work of art or object of cultural history is immediately confiscated and safely stored in the evidence chambers at the state criminal investigation offices.
The exhibits are illustrative teaching pieces for assessing originals and fakes
In spring 2021, the “Heidelberg Counterfeit Studies Collection” (HeFäStuS for short) was founded, where students from the Institute for European Art History at Heidelberg University are trained to recognize delicate forgeries. For this purpose, forgeries from the evidence chambers of the state criminal investigation offices in Berlin, Baden-Württemberg and Bavaria are used.
