I just posted on the London National Gallery exhibit on fakes, and that much of the information was devised through scientific means and study. The New Yorker just published an excellent article by David Grann on Peter Paul Biro, the Canadian forensic art expert. The article documents Biro's authentication background and his ability to locate and examine fingerprints in the canvas. The article is long, but is certainly interesting reading material. It also reveals some issues with forensic art examination and inspection.
The article is not all flattery about Biro. It delves into some dark sides of Biro's life including lawsuits, false art sales/authentication claims and unpaid creditors. The article also mentions Terri Franks, who is in a legal battle with Park West Gallery (well documented from both sides on the AW Blog), and calls her a crusader against art fraud. Perhaps most interesting is how the article also explores the possibility of fake fingerprints taken from molds of originals.
Grann writes
For the first time, Hanley was able directly to observe Biro’s fingerprint evidence. He noted several fingerprints on the back of the picture, including two on the wooden stretcher frame, which were black, as if they had been made with ink. Looking through a magnifying glass, Hanley focussed on the most legible fingerprint, which appeared to be covered with a clear finishing coat, like a varnish. Parker said that before giving the painting to Biro he hadn’t noticed a fingerprint on it. “I don’t know where it came from,” he said. He said that Biro had told him he had used some sort of “resin process” to make it more visible. Hanley had never seen a print developed in this fashion. Based on the clarity of the impression, Hanley thought that the fingerprint had to be relatively new—certainly not from half a century ago, when Pollock was alive.
Parker also retained the services of Lawrence Rooney, a retired detective sergeant and latent-print examiner who had worked in the Suffolk County Police’s identification unit, and who had more than two decades of experience as a fingerprint analyst. Rooney agreed that the fingerprint appeared too recent to have come from Pollock. He was also alarmed by the “resin process,” and, as he wrote in a report, the use of a “liquid seal” coating was “beyond all acceptable professional methods of latent print preservation and opens the door to many valid questions relating to the latent prints’ origin of placement and development.”
Hanley kept staring at the way the fingerprints rested on the surface of the wood, without the usual smudging or obliteration. He noticed that they shared an eerily similar shape. And he began to wonder if he was seeing something virtually unheard of: forged fingerprints. In a 1903 Sherlock Holmes story, “The Adventure of the Norwood Builder,” the detective discovers that a criminal has made a wax impression of a solicitor’s fingerprint and then framed him by stamping the forged fingerprint at an apparent murder scene. “It was a masterpiece of villainy,” Holmes says. The scheme became a common trope in detective fiction, but there are almost no documented cases of a criminal forging another person’s fingerprint. In the nineteen-forties, a safe burglar named Nedelkoff set himself up as a fortune-teller in Eastern Europe, and asked clients to press their hands into a soft clay tablet. Later, he poured liquid rubber into the clay impressions, creating soft casts of their fingertips. During his robberies, Nedelkoff pressed his former clients’ fingerprints onto safes. (Eventually, his scheme was unravelled by police.)
Grann continues
Looking at four fingerprints on the back of the stretcher frame and the canvas, Wertheim was struck by their extremely irregular shape—the bulges and curves along their boundaries. Then he noticed something even more peculiar. Each one of a person’s ten fingers leaves a distinct impression, and the elasticity of skin makes it all but impossible to leave precisely the same fingerprint impression twice. Yet the two most visible fingerprints on the Parkers’ painting, Wertheim says, were virtually exact overlays of each other: the same shape, the same pressure, the same ridge patterns. What’s more, the visible parts of the two other fingerprints also lined up perfectly with these prints. In his more than three decades as an examiner, he had never seen a set of fingerprints like this.
When Wertheim examined one of the prints closely, he could make out several bubble-like voids. Although a person’s sweat pores often leave voids in a fingerprint, Wertheim says that these voids were unusually big and elongated.
Wertheim had a hunch about what had caused the voids, and he went with Hanley to Pollock’s old studio. Wertheim examined the fingerprint impression on the paint can. It matched the clearest fingerprints on the Parkers’ painting, Wertheim says. Hanley then made a silicone cast from the impression on the paint can. Incredibly, Wertheim says, all four fingerprints on the Parkers’ painting fit snugly within the boundaries of the cast impression. As Wertheim suspected, the cast also produced similar voids—they were caused from air bubbles that had formed in the rubber.
Altogether, Wertheim says, he tallied eight characteristics that were inconsistent with normal fingerprints. In a final report, he concluded that all of them had been made by a cast from the fingerprint on the paint can. As he told me, the fingerprints “screamed forgery.”
When a forgery is exposed, people in the art world generally have the same reaction: how could anyone have ever been fooled by something so obviously phony, so artless? Few connoisseurs still think that Han van Meegeren’s paintings look at all like Vermeers, or even have any artistic value. Forgers usually succeed not because they are so talented but, rather, because they provide, at a moment in time, exactly what others desperately want to see. Conjurers as much as copyists, they fulfill a wish or a fantasy. And so the inconsistencies—crooked signatures, uncharacteristic brushstrokes—are ignored or explained away.
If a forgery’s success were to depend on fake fingerprints, rather than on the sly imitation of a painter’s style, it would represent a radical departure from the methods employed by art forgers over thousands of years. And yet such a forgery would perfectly reflect the contemporary faith in science to conquer every realm, even one where beauty is supposed to be in the eye of the beholder.
To read the full New Yorker article, click
HERE.
