Fradulent Donations

Helen Stoilas has an interesting article in the Artnewspaper about an art forger posing as a Jesuit priest. The "priest" is trying to donate the forged works, complete with fabricated auction records to museums and universities.

As the case is investigated and more information is gathered, it appears the fraudulent donations have been ongoing over the past 20 years.  Many of the discovered forgeries were prints that had been skillfully painted.

This article shows that when identifying and authenticating paintings you must be very careful and pick up on all of the warning signals.  This article shows how easily forged items can be passed of as original works of art. The key is proper due diligence and inspection.

The Artnewspaper reports

The director asked museum registrar Joyce Penn to examine the painting. “She said, ‘This doesn’t look right,’ so she went down to the art prep area and took out her blacklight.” The painting glowed suspiciously, so Penn used a microscope to take a closer look and discovered the tell-tale dot matrix pattern of a reproduction, which had been painted over and signed. Tullos admits that the forgery was good enough to fool him. “At first glance, you really could not tell. The hero of this story is our registrar,” he said.

The discovery reminded Penn of a previous incident. She pulled out a file and found a photo of a man who had called himself Mark Landis, who Tullos recognised as Father Scott. This man had also tried to donate a work to the Louisiana State University (LSU) Museum of Art in 2009. As Tullos started to contact museums, more and more cases came to light. His searches led him to Matthew Leininger, who first came across “Landis” in 2007 while working as a registrar at the Oklahoma City Museum of Art and has compiled a dossier of his attempted donations.

Leininger says he became suspicious after the man donated a Louis Valtat watercolour to the museum, which became part of the collection. “He brought five more works to the museum, and we were getting ready to take the new pieces to the museum’s management.” These included a Paul Signac watercolour, a Stanislas Lépine oil on panel, a Marie Laurencin self-portrait, a French academic nude drawing and an Honoré Daumier sketch. As Leininger’s team researched the works, they came across a curiously similar Signac that had been donated to the Savannah College of Art and Design (SCAD) Museum of Art in Georgia around the same time.

To read the complete article in the Artnewspaper, click HERE.