Accelerated Ion Beams for Art Forensics

Fellow appraiser Robin Gross recently sent me an article from Physics Today about ion beams and fine art forensics. The article looks at two forensic processes which have assisted in determining art forgeries where more than connoisseurship was necessary, in this case on the group of recent German surrealists forgeries.  The two processes include Accelerator mass spectrometry which looked a tree rings in different wood samples of frames on supposedly different artists works and proton-induced x-ray emission or PIXIE which looked at pigment composition.

Physics Today reports

A couple of months ago, in a courthouse in Cologne, Germany, four people were sentenced to a total of 15 years in prison for art forgery. As one art historian exclaimed during the trial, “It is the most exciting scandal in the art world after [World War II].” The four had been on trial for selling about 50 paintings, mostly of German surrealists and expressionists from the early 20th century, from the fictitious Werner Jägers and Wilhelm Knops collections; they admitted to being involved in 14 forgeries. Confessed-to imitations included faked works of such important artists as Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, and Fernand Léger. The total sales of the bogus art have reached about €27 million ($36 million). All the fakes were certified as original by art experts who relied on their knowledge of the artists and their work.

The trial clearly illustrates the folly—particularly in a society in which art can be a major investment—of relying entirely on art historians and others who claim that their expertise makes any scientific investigation pointless. Art experts play an important role in identifying the style, history, and context of a painting, but a solid scientific basis for the proper identification and classification of a piece of art must rely on information from other sources.

For example, investigators working the German forgery case used tree-ring dating to prove that the same tree provided wood for the frames of four paintings supposedly from different artists: Collioure by André Derain, Nature morte by Léger, Else Lasker-Schüler gewidmet by Campendonk, and Seine mit Brücke und Frachtkähnen by Max Pechstein. A second technique, proton-induced x-ray emission (PIXE), enabled investigators to study the composition of paint pigments used in the forgeries.

Source: Physics Today