Certificates of Inauthenticity

 

Amirasolo and Other Essays

Part 3. As I See it

Essay 34. CERTIFICATES OF INAUTHENTICITY

One day, I and my cycling buddy Isko Dela Cruz dropped by the house of a painter who was copying an Amorsolo painting. The painter's improvised studio was outside the house, on the narrow front yard separated from the sidewalk by a top to bottom grill fence.

The sidewalk was along Samson Road in Caloocan, just walking distance from Baltazar Bukid Street where Isko lives. The fence being just grill work, we could see from where we stood on the sidewalk the man at work.

The painter, whose name I forgot, told us that he's already based in Canada, an immigrant petitioned by his daughter. He's just here on vacation, he said. On his easel was an unfinished reproduction of an Amorsolo painting. According to him, he used to do several such reproductions when he was younger which he consigned with a gallery in Ermita.

While conversing with him, a friend of his, a fellow painter, came along. This fellow revealed that he was also into painting reproductions not only of Amorsolos, but also of paintings by other famous contemporary painters as well. He added that he had a regular client, an art collector, who commissioned him for those works.

But there's a sinister note to their transaction. This collector resells those reproductions as originals to gullible buyers, presenting as proof of their genuineness the certificates of authenticity (COA) provided by the original artists themselves. This painter-forger boasted  that he was paid 20 thousand pesos by that collector for every fake painting he delivered.

Here's how that sinister art collector operates. He will first buy an original painting from a famous best-selling painter and requests a COA, which the painter will naturally give. The collector will then ask the forger to copy exactly not only  the original painting he just bought but also  the signature of the famous artist who painted the original. The art collector will afterwards find a buyer for the fake painting which he'll claim as an original, showing as proof a certificate of authenticity which could be the genuine thing provided by the famous artist or could also be a forgery.

That was neat. Our talk with those two painters happened many years ago, in 2014 I think. I don't know if that painter-forger is still at it, doing exact copies of paintings by famous artists and signing them with the famous artists' signature, and delivering them to that sinister art collector with a criminal mind. All I know is that art forgery, being notoriously profitable, must still be rampant nowadays, especially of works which are easy to copy but could sell for hundreds of thousands or even millions of pesos.

Wikipedia defines art forgery as the creation of works of art which are falsely attributed to other, usually more famous, artists. Copies, replicas, and reproductions are not considered forgeries if the copying artist puts his own signature on the artwork and not that of the master.

Years ago, I came across an article by Constantino Tejero in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, titled "Devious Manansala Thwarted." Tejero discussed in that article a painting, "The Bird Seller", which was scheduled to be put on the block in a Christie's-Hong kong auction. The painting, dated 1976, was supposedly by Manansala, but alert Manansala collectors immediately notified Christie's of their suspicion that the work was most probably a forgery because there is a similar 1973 Manansala work owned by Judy Araneta Roxas titled "Birdman". 

The owner of the Bird Seller could have passed it off easily as genuine despite a subtle difference in coloration. Only the discerning eyes of the Manansala experts prevented his or her doing so. And indeed, the Bird Seller, when analyzed and compared with the original Manansala, showed hints of being painted by a lesser-skilled artist. The accusation by the Manansala collectors must be true, because the owner of the Bird Seller, when challenged by the Christie's personnel, just quietly withdrew the painting from the auction.

Art forgery is a lucrative racket. One painter, a Dutchman, sold more than a million dollars worth of fake Vermeers before being discovered and jailed. The painter who doubled as an art dealer was Han van Meegeren. He sold several 'Vermeer' paintings to Hitler's air force chief Hermann Goering. When the allies discovered Goering's cache of  supposed Vermeers, and traced its origin to van Meegeren, he was promptly arrested and charged with collaboration with the Nazis---a crime punishable by death. To save his skin, van Meegeren chose to confess to a lesser crime, and claimed that he himself painted the fake Vermeers, a claim he proved when he painted in prison the painting "Jesus Among the Doctors".

And the racketeers are still at it, it would seem, as shown by the case of a painting being eagerly passed off as a lost Michelangelo. The painting was a Pieta, and I, although not formally schooled in art criticism, could easily see that it wasn't a Michelangelo at all. It is but a confused amalgam of the styles of Caravaggio, Giovanni Bellini, and okay, perhaps of Michelangelo himself. But Michelangelo always painted his bambinos chubby, not muscular as they are painted on this pieta. Therefore, the very muscularity of the two boys betrays the try-hard and silly attempt of whoever painted this to approximate Michelangelo's muscular images of adult male and female figures.

Filipino art forgers have already caught on with their foreign counterparts, as witness the appearance in recent years of a fake Malang, a fake Bencab, and perhaps several fake Botongs. Fake Amorsolos seem to be abundant even during the days when the master was still alive. I've read somewhere that when a buyer of a fake Amorsolo brought the painting to him for authentication, Amorsolo, out of pity for the poor buyer, applied by his own hand daubs of paint to the canvas to make it an 'original' work of his.

An assistant curator of a gallery in Manila, told me that he moonlights as a dealer of a Botong watercolor, which is priced at more than a hundred thousand pesos. I have seen an original Botong watercolor, so I told him that I could perhaps tell if the Botong he was selling was a fake. He said that he was sure that the artwork was genuine because it has a certificate of authenticity, signed by Botong's manchador (underpainter or apprentice) himself, to back it up. I cannot say this to his face then , but I'm saying now that some people can be bought. And that documents can lie because they can also be forged. Besides, the apprentice or assistant of the master painter should be the last person whose words we should trust on the question of the genuineness of the painting whose certificate of authenticity he signed. Who knows, that painting could just be the handiwork of the apprentice himself, his copy of the master's original.

Well, my point is authentication papers don't mean a thing if the artworks they certify as originals are so badly done that they are easily seen as clear bastardization of the masters' styles. What art buyers should do is to ask for certificates of authenticity upon purchase of the artwork from the artist himself if he's still alive, or from his heirs if already dead. That was what the buyer of the three oils I exhibited at the Crucible Gallery did.

Another interesting read from the Philippine Daily Inquirer was an article by former Toyota coach and painter Dante Silverio. He lamented in that article the practice of a famous Filipino painter he didn't name, who demands 10 thousand pesos for a certificate of authenticity a previous buyer of his painting would request. Mr. Silverio strongly objected to that. He wrote that it is the duty of the artist to provide free of charge certificates of authenticity to clients who patronized his works, even more so to those who bought from him the works he did when he was not yet famous. Demanding fees for certificates of authenticity is the height of ingratitude, Mr. Silverio pointed out. I agree.

Since certificates of authenticity are not foolproof and can even be used to authenticate fake paintings, perhaps what a buyer of a painting should also demand is a photograph of the painter handing over the painting to the original collector. It would be a good idea therefore for buyers of art to have their photos taken with the artist and the artwork so that when they decide to unload the artwork later on they can provide the new buyer not only with a COA but also with a copy of the turn-over photo.

This, the latest buyer of my painting, Ms. Maricar Celestial, did when I delivered the painting she commissioned me to her condominium. She earlier requested that I provide her with a certificate of authenticity. I replied that I can't give her that for the meantime since computer shops where I'll have the certificate printed are still close due to the community quarantine. Before I left , Maricar, who commissioned me again for another painting, suggested that she be the one who'll provide printed copies of certificates of authenticity which I'll just sign when I come back. I agreed of course. So, I left her condominium that July day extremely grateful and satisfied - and confident too that I'll have cash enough to sustain us through this pandemic for the next few months.

(The image above is a photo-collage of the three oil paintings I exhibited and sold to a single collector during my 2007 solo show at the Crucible Gallery. They were also the first three of my artworks for which a collector asked for certificates of authenticity.)