In the summer of 2024, I worked at 9I制作厂免费鈥檚 Visual Arts Collection as an Arts Research Internship Award (ARIA) intern. I was tasked with investigating 鈥榓uthenticity鈥� using three paintings in the collection as case studies. The aim of my project was to establish guidelines for researching art authenticity while reviewing the terminology we use to present and explain works of art.
I soon realized that authenticity was more complicated than I thought. Authenticity is not a scientific, aesthetic, or physical absolute, meaning that it can rarely be proven or disproven beyond doubt. Art authentication requires connoisseurship, scholarly documentation, and technical analysis. Connoisseurs consider form, an artist鈥檚 personal and distinct style, facture, the way an artist鈥檚 hand expresses their intention, and iconography, the subject matter of the artwork. Scholarly documentation includes provenance, the ownership history of an artwork, and archival and historical evidence. Technical analysis involves scientific testing and examination of materials. Questions on authenticity do not only pertain to forgeries, an exacting new copy of an original that purports to be the original itself, fakes, a deliberately compiled facsimile that does not imitate any one piece, and fraud, deception intended to result in financial gain. Instead, authenticity is largely concerned with recovering or discovering information about an artist or an artwork. While these problems may seem less exciting, they are by no means less interesting.
The first painting I investigated was Shaman Surrounded by Ancestral Spirit Totems, attributed to Norval Morrisseau (1932鈥�2007). Morrisseau was an Ojibwe painter who was arguably the first Indigenous artist in Canada to achieve national and international renown. A few months prior, a lawyer alleged that 9I制作厂免费鈥檚 painting was a fake. I combed through exhibition catalogues, biographies, and Morrisseau鈥檚 letters to compile a data set of paintings and handwriting samples with unquestioned authenticities from the relevant time period, the 1970s. I soon realized that several elements in our painting and in the signature on the verso were inconsistent with Morrisseau鈥檚 oeuvre. I also looked into the court documents, posted online by an involved party, from three lawsuits against different gallery owners who were accused of selling fake Morrisseaus. When I obtained the agreed statement of facts from the trials of Gary Lamont and David Voss, forgery ring leaders who were recently convicted of producing and distributing fake Morrisseaus, I had a breakthrough. These documents contained photographs of nearly two thousand fakes. Every single inconsistent element in our painting was present in these fakes. For example, though Morrisseau has not depicted a bat in a single unquestioned painting, drawing, or sketch, our painting and several fakes have bats. I concluded that 9I制作厂免费鈥檚 painting was most likely not painted by Morrisseau.
The other two pieces, a copy of Bartolom茅 Esteban Murillo鈥檚 (1617-1682) Children Eating Grapes and a Melon and an undated painting, Penitent Mary Magdalene, are works about which very little was known. I was tasked with uncovering all that I could. I looked through auction sites, blogs, and question forums to date the stamps from canvas makers, the stickers from framers, and an artist鈥檚 signature. I also combed through digitized phone books from the late nineteenth century to date a sticker from Mackenzie & Co., the company that imported the copy. Thanks to the expertise of the Collections Manager Jessica R茅gimbald, I established that the copy鈥檚 frame was repainted, the copy was cut and retacked, and Penitent Mary Magdelene鈥檚 frame was gilded. Because originality is often seen as the artist鈥檚 most essential prerogative, and because copies, like forgeries, imitate another work, copies are put down as a lesser art form. However, the practice of copying can be creative, and copies cannot be forgeries because they do not seek to deceive.
Throughout the internship, insight and opinions from the VAC team provided many important leads. For example, a fellow intern, Hugo Barsacq-Camard, helped me date the canvas of the copy by pointing out that the canvas maker changed their stamp design after their factory was bombed in WWII. Additionally, the Curator, Michelle Macleod, was the first to point out that painting a bat seemed out of character for Morrisseau. When delving into a project alone, it is easy to forget that the impressions and insights of other researchers may be essential.
By the end of the summer, my findings had forced me to reevaluate my own research habits. While I had previously relied almost exclusively on art historical scholarship to conduct art historical research, branching out into other disciplines and searching unexpected places provided me with my most salient clues. I look forward to applying these lessons to my future research projects.
I would like to thank Professor Gwendolyn Owens for her incredible support and guidance, the entire VAC team for their encouragement and ideas, and Michelle Macleod for including my research in the exhibition Bead, Paint, Carve, which was on display in the McLennan Library during the Fall 2024 semester. I would also like to thank the Faculty of Arts Internship Office and the Goodman Fund for making this experience possible.