More Art Authentication Issues

Fellow appraiser and ISA President Christine Guernsey send me this interesting article from the UK's Guardian newspaper on a potential Lucian Freud painting. A British BBC program has attributed the painting to Freud and valued it for at least $300,000 GBPs.

The only problem is Freud who died in 2011 had always denied the painting was his. There is the potential, from a conversation between Freud and his attorney that he started the painting but it was completed by someone else.

The Independent reports

The BBC says it has identified an early Lucian Freud painting worth at least £300,000, despite the artist denying throughout his life that it was his work.

Fake or Fortune, presented by Fiona Bruce and the art historian Philip Mould on BBC One, has attributed the painting, which is of a man in a black cravat, to the acclaimed artist, who died in 2011.

“Freud is a colossus of 20th-century modern art, and challenging his word was something we undertook with some trepidation,” said Bruce.

The London-based designer Jon Turner inherited the work from two artist friends, Denis Wirth-Miller and Richard Chopping, who told him it was an early portrait painted by Freud when he was at art school in 1939.

Wirth-Miller and Freud studied at the East Anglian School of Painting and Drawing together and reportedly had a long-running feud. Turner said Wirth-Miller had given the painting to him with the instruction that he was to sell it as publicly as possible so as to humiliate Freud.

Throughout his life, Freud denied that the painting was his, baffling art experts who believed he had painted the work. Experts at the auction house Christie’s identified it as a painting by Freud in 1985, but took back the claim when Freud said he had not painted it.

For Fake or Fortune, Bruce and Mould spoke to the artist’s former solicitor, who found a note in her files of a phone conversation with Freud in 2006 about the painting.

During the phone call, Freud apparently said he had started the painting, but it had been completed by someone else and so he would not acknowledge it as his own work.

On the BBC programme, experts analysed techniques and materials used in the painting and declared that it was the work of a single artist. A panel of three Freud experts said they believed the painting was by the artist himself, likely from 1939.

On the programme, Mould valued the painting at more than £300,000. Freud has previously set records for the prices fetched by his works. His painting Benefits Supervisor Sleeping sold for $33.6m (£17.2m) at Christie’s in New York in 2008, at the time the highest price paid for a painting by a living artist. Another painting in the same series, Benefits Supervisor Resting, sold for £35.8m in 2015.

“It was a novel and gargantuan task to overturn the reported views of the artist. It was different from anything we’d taken on until now – we had never had to arm-wrestle with the words of an artist beyond the grave,” said Mould.

“It was all the more frustrating as the more I worked on the picture and Fiona was able to add the background with her inquiries, the more I felt confident about it being entirely by Freud.”

Bruce said: “As this investigation progressed we had to investigate Freud the man as much as the painting. He was an extraordinary and controversial character. And only by understanding him could we begin to understand why he would deny that a painting of his was in fact by him.”

Source: The Guardian