Hidden Brain - Encore of Episode 11: Forgery

Episode Date: August 16, 2016

This week on Hidden Brain, we explore real and fake, from fine art to fine wine. Shankar speaks with Noah Charney, author of The Art of Forgery, about why art forgers are compelled to spend their lives copying the great masters, and why so many of them want to get caught. Also this week: why we love studies that prove wine connoisseurs wrong.

If I'm allowed to have a favorite forger, which I know sounds a little bit funny, it would be Eric Hebern, who's really the Prince of Art Forgers. He's the only one of over 60 that I look at in my book, who I think is at the same level as the artist he forged. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. On today's podcast, how the brain tells real from fake, when it comes to fine art and fine wine. We start with Noah Charney, author of the Art of Forgery.

We talk about Master Forger, Eric Heber. And his story is one of revenge over monetary gain. That's why he turned to Forgery. He initially had been a failed artist. He couldn't get traction with his own original artworks even though he had some serious talent. And he had been at a flea market and he purchased some drawings that he thought might be of value. He brought them to an art gallery in London and the gallery said, this is pretty good, I'll take it off your hands, not bad. So he sold them and he made a profit so he was quite pleased. But then he came back past the gallery a little bit later and saw that it

was in the window the very object he had sold for much more than he had paid. And he felt that he had been essentially swindled by the gallery and decided to get revenge. And so when you look at Hebron and his reaction to this gallery, he is outraged that the gallery cheated him and that this gallery is part of the artistablishment that has not taken him seriously, has not given him his due. And he makes this life-changing decision. What was the decision? The decision was to try to make his own drawings in the style of old masters and

try to pass them off as originals. And by doing so, he gains a sort of passive-aggressive revenge that is the primary initial motivation for the majority of art foragers in this book. And there are two components to it. On the one hand, if he creates a drawing, and the experts think that it's by a great master, then he can convince himself that he must be as good as the master.

But the second part is that if he's able to fool these so-called experts, he demonstrates how foolish they are, and the implication is that they were foolish not to endorse his own original artworks. When Hepburn decided to forge the great masters, he decided to do it in a way that was quite unique. What was that way? The majority of successful art foragers in the 20th century use variations on what I call a Providence trap, and there are four variations on it.

But the essential component is it uses Providence or the documented history of an object as a trap to lure the researcher to authenticate the work. Let's be honest, every art historian wants to be Indiana Jones and wants to find lost treasures. And you may or may not know that the majority of works that we know of made by old masters are lost. In some cases, as much as two-thirds of the of of these famous artists of the Renaissance, we know of them through documented references to them, but we don't know where they are.

So Providence Trap uses documented history and then creates lost works that match the real documented history. And Eric Hebron is an example of that. He very cleverly created drawings that looked like preparatory sketches for famous paintings. We all know that famous artists throughout history prepared their paintings and sculptures by doing sketches by doing drawings.

But it was not until relatively recently that drawings were considered a collectible art form and worth keeping. It's a little bit like blueprints and a building. You keep the building, but you don't necessarily keep the blueprints. Eric Hebern would create what appeared to be these preparatory drawings for works like the one I'm looking at in the book right now, Anthony Van Dyke's, Crowning with Thorns, which is in the Museo del Prado and Madrid. He created what looked like a drawing in preparation for that, and we know logically that Van Dyke made lots of preparatory drawings, but they simply aren't extant anymore.

I wonder if you could just walk me through these two drawings that I'm looking at in the book here. I'm seeing the original on my left-hand side, and I'm seeing Heberne's preparatory drawing for this work on the right. What am I seeing here in Anthony Van Dyke's crowning with Thorns? In the original painting, which was finished around 1620, is an oil on canvas. It's a substantial size and it shows Christ having the crown of thorns lowered on him as he's bound and he's surrounded by people who would have been his torturers. And he seems resigned to his

fate. And it's very beautiful. It's very glossy. There's brilliant use of oil paints. You can have an almost sculptural quality to Christ's body. I'm seeing his face, Christ's face turned to the right from our perspective. I'm seeing there's a figure in the foreground in the right hand side of the painting who's reaching out and touching Christ on his left arm. And there's a host of figures in the background who are doing various things. Right, there are a number of figures, there's one, two, three, four, five figures in the background, including people peering in through a graded window in the back to spine, what's happening and Christ has seated quite comfortably facing front out to the viewer. Now, when we turn to the preparatory drawing, the positioning of the figures and the number

of the figures is different, but this is entirely normal. Artists, when they're coming up with a concept or invention of the artwork, will do various sketches to try to get a composition that they like. And the composition of this preparatory drawing is actually in the shape of an asset, something called Figura Serpentinata, which was described by Michelangelo as the most beautiful form in nature.

The flickering of a candle flame is supposed to be the positioning of the bodies that is the most elegant, and that's something that we see here in Eric Heberin's forgery of a vandike drawing. And it's normal to have sketches that look somewhat different from the finished product. In fact, it would be suspicious if there was a drawing that looked exactly like the finished product. But here you have this idea that Christ is leaning far to the side, he's being physically supported by one of his executioners, as another one pushes the crown of thorns more violently onto his head. It's more dynamic, and there's more movement to it, more diagonalsals and it essentially looks like

Initial concept that you decided not to follow through with for this drawing It's very clever because it's not hitting you over the head with the fact that this must be preparatory drawing What I find really really clever about this was that Herb and was leaving me to complete his con and Hebern was leaving me to complete his con, and there's two things that I found really intriguing there from a psychological perspective. One, when Hebern is basically presenting a preparatory drawing that looks actually quite different from the finished drawing, he's allowing the expert to connect the dots. That is psychologically very clever, because he's taking advantage of the fact the expert has vanity and wants to make these connections. And the best con game is where the mark essentially executes the con for you. That's one of the things he was doing.

But the second thing was, by so doing, he's also demonstrating to himself that the expert really is not an expert. That he's demonstrating for his own psychological satisfaction that this world of the art expert is a sham world. It's true, it's very clever on his part, and the majority of successful fordras use some variation on the theme that you describe. They set a trap without being too specific and allow the experts to dive headfirst into it and enthusiastically authenticate the work because it feels to them like a great discovery

that they are making personally. It feels like a triumph. And once an expert goes out on a limb and says, this is authentic, it is very hard for them to go back on it. So they wind up tangling themselves in this net that's been laid out by the forger. themselves in this net that's been laid out by the forger. What struck me as I was reading this chapter was the extraordinary attention to detail and the effort that Hebern put in to mastering the techniques needed to pass off his works

as real. Well Hebern was particularly meticulous and of all of the foragers I looked at, he was really the one who was the most passion as an art historian and as a researcher and was focused on getting the materials correct whenever he could. Getting the technique right is something that you can do essentially by practice. You can practice over and over again and you could come up with a signature that looks almost identical to mine and if you practice it enough you can do it with a fluidity that looks authentic. Getting the materials correct is much harder and it's more expensive. It is also not strictly necessary because most forgers that I looked at got the style just about right. They had a very

clever provenance trap that was the confidence trick that passed off the object and they didn't really need to get the materials correct because it's not normal for objects to be friendsically tested unless some red flag is raised stylistically or in terms of the object's history. Nobody does forensic testing. This is part of a residual gentleman's agreement in the art trade that dates back hundreds of years that if an expert says it's good, then it's good. There really has to be something very wrong for them to forensically test it. Or maybe the experts disagree. Or if the experts disagree, if they can't reach a consensus, then the tiebreaker is broken

by scientific testing. These days it doesn't have to be the case. Forensic testing is neither particularly expensive nor is it invasive necessarily into the object. But Hebern took that level of detail because he was a perfectionist because he loved what he was doing. He was very passionate about it. And because I think he wanted to genuinely feel that he was doing exactly what the old

masters were doing. And he is the only one of all the artists I looked at, all the art forders I looked at, who I think was at a similar level to the people he was forging. When you look at the work that he did where he basically broke down the different colors of the masters were using, how did he actually find this out? I mean, he was spending enormous amounts of time being a scholar, not just being a forger, but being a scholar. He couldn't have done the forgeries

if he hadn't done the scholarship. He had a bent as a chemist, and he did analyses of the pigments used by different artists. It is so interesting that he spends so much time thinking about his technique, but also thinking about what he needed to do to himself in order to be able to pull off these forgeries. One of the things you talk about in this book is how he achieved this fluidity of line that he was able to forge these things in a way that looked tossed off. What did he do?

Well, he's a real character, and he volunteered all of his secrets because he was looking for notoriety, and he wrote a book called The Art Forger's Handbook, which incidentally has been found in the studio of many an art forger rested since it came out. And one of his tricks was to get drunk. He would get drunk while he was making the drawings, and it would achieve a certain fluidity of line and body, and the process, he would not overthink things. And when I was giving you the example of if you tried to forge my signature, you wouldn't have the mental or physical capacity if you drink enough to be too painstaking about it. And a painstaking line is a giveaway

to an expert that's something funny is going on. He would do dozens of sketches to prepare the fluidity of line he was after, but then he would start drinking heavily and then do his sketches as well in order to ensure that he wouldn't overthink things. So his forgeries were actually committed while he was on the influence of alcohol? Absolutely, and he volunteers this. He actually has step-by-step recipes for how he made his forgeries of paintings and drawings in his book, and that's one of the ways we can work backwards and see, well, if these were the techniques employed by Hebern,

other forders might have used similar techniques. And future forders literally reproduced the recipes that he put into play in his book. I'm really intrigued by the idea that the motivation for so many of these forgers, Hebern included, is not money. So when you think about forgery and the effort and the time it takes to forge a masterpiece, clearly you would think that the financial value, the forger is deriving, it has to be a big part of it. And I'm really intrigued by the idea

that it's really a psychological motivation that comes first. It's true. The reason that many forgers continue into a career of forgery is eventually they realize this is a source of income, but that initial motivation is this passive-aggressive revenge. However, there's a caveat here because the revenge is a private victory until you're caught.

And a lot of these foragers have either intentionally made a mistake, perhaps subconsciously, in order to get caught, or quite overtly outed themselves, as in the case of Eric Heppard who published a memoir, and a how-to manual for future forgers. The reason is that they have to enjoy this revenge entirely in private until somebody discovers them, but the moment they are discovered, then all of a sudden they're shown as a great artist, and they have publicly shamed the experts who they were out to shame when they set out. So this is the completion, the self-actualization is only when they're caught. A lot of these

foragers actually inserted what one forger by the name of Tom Keating called Time Bombs. And these are intentionally inserted anachronisms that could be used if the forger chooses to announce that the work is a forgery, even if no one would otherwise believe him. What's an example? One of my favorite stories is a German forger named Lothar Malscott, who was a Restorer of medieval frescoes just after the Second World War. And was a restore of medieval frescoes just after the Second World War. And he was commissioned to restore frescoes in a church that had

been damaged by allied bombs. But when he got there, he found that the frescoes were so badly destroyed, there was nothing he could do, and the photographs in the archives didn't show enough to reproduce it. But that didn't stop, and we decided to make his own medieval frescoes. And when they were revealed it was a big national sensation, so much so that the German government

printed 4 million postage stamps with a detail from the frescoes on it. But he didn't want this private victory, he wanted to get credit for what he had done, and nobody believed him. So he took the very unusual step of suing himself, so that he could have the public forum of a courtroom in which to argue his case that he was the artist of these frescoes. He was both a prosecutor and a defendant. He was.

It's a very weird case in legal history and still nobody believed him and he pointed out two time bombs that he had inserted intentionally in case no one believed him. One was a turkey. Turkeys are indigenous to North America and there would have been no turkeys in 13th century Germany and second was Marlene Dietrich, whose portrait was hidden in the background and she definitely wasn't around in the 13th century So this is so interesting because of course when you think about stories about swashbuckling Robinhoods the Leaving behind a motif in your crime that you rob a bank and you leave behind a white glove, or you rob something else and you leave behind the same white glove,

the desire to leave a stamp on what it is that you have done changes to some ways from the world of just straightforward crime, where you really want to cover your tracks completely to something quite different. One of the issues here and the reason that foragers are quite happy to be caught in the end is that forgers tend to get very low sentences. Some of them don't even go to jail at all. From a public perspective, there is no fear of art forgers. If you go to a cocktail party, and I whisper to you that this intriguing looking gentleman in the corner is a Ponzi Schumer. You would say, oh, I don't want anything to do with him. However, if I say he's an art forger, you'd be intrigued.

You'd probably head straight over and start chatting. I would. They're non-threatening. They're not scary. And there's something to admire in them. And they're these wonderful de-kenzian characters who, you have a sense of them more as a prankster than a real criminal. Is it possible, though, that Hebron's desire for revenge and the psychological forces that

were driving him kept him from accomplishing what might have actually been his life's work? It's entirely possible, but on the other hand, I think that he would say that his life's work shifted to being the greatest art forger in history. And I think he could make a good case for that. And he's in good company. There are art forgers in my book who include Michelangelo, Luca Giordano, Mark Antonio Ramondi, very famous Renaissance artists who also dabbled in forgery, and he is up there in terms of his physical ability to reproduce another artist's

style, the care that he put in both the concept of playing with the artist's existing ovga and reproducing the materials in an accurate way. He is a genius but he's a genius at art forgery and I don't think it panned out as a genius of original artistry. No one, Charlie, I want to thank you for talking with me today. This has been a pleasure. Thanks for having me. Noah Charney is the author of the Art of Forgery, the Minds, Motives and Methods of Master Forgers. Coming up, I explore why we find art forgers so compelling and why we like studies that show that wine connoisseurs don't know what they're talking about. Stanford professor Baba Shiv tells us about an interesting experiment.

People always swear that when they taste a high-price wine, the wine actually tastes better, they derive more pleasure from the high-price wine. Stay with us. This is Hidden Brain, I'm Shankar Vedantam. I've asked myself why I find the story of Eric Hepburn so compelling. He was a criminal, but I think of him as a Robin Hood type criminal. Part of it is because, as Noah Charnney said, art crime doesn't disturb us. In fact, as Dennis Leary's detective character in the 1999 movie, the Thomas Crown affair says, the stakes for art crime are pretty low, unless you're a member of the 1%.

The week before I met you, I nailed two crooked real estate agents, and a guy who was beating his kids to death. So if some Houdini wants to snatch a couple of swirls of paint, that are really only important to some very silly rich people, I don't really give it in. But there's another reason Hebern is a compelling figure. Most of us don't understand the world of art, and we have the vague suspicion that people who claim

to know what they're talking about are faking it. So Hepburn wasn't just making a fast buck. He was waging a populist war. I sometimes feel this way about people who talk about a bottle of wine that has a hint of briny oyster shell, writing the lacy mousse. That's a natural quote from a recent wine review. Psychological studies show that when you pour cheap wine from an expensive bottle, wine officionato say, ah, that wine has flavors of likely toasted brioche, spun honey and glazed

apricot. Baba Shiv is a marketing professor at Stanford. He recently invited wine connoisseurs to a blind taste test. They refused to show up. Why did they refuse to come? for its Stanford. He recently invited wine connoisseurs to a blind taste test. They're refused to show up. Why did they refuse to come? You have someone who is in Abinia, then supposed to be an expert in tasting wine, and now if I invite them over here, and we find out that they're no different than the novices, then they go through reputation in a way.

Okay, so that totally confirms my view that these connoisseurs weren't really experts. But here's where the science gets in the way of a nice theory. Something happened in Babaschiv's wine experiment that shook my popular sensibilities. The researchers put volunteers in a brain scanner, gave them different wines. These were occasional wine drinkers, not experts. Some wines from five dollar bottles were set to be from a $45 bottle. Other wines from a $90 bottle were set to be from a $10 bottle. The volunteers said that wine from the more expensive bottles tasted better compared to the same wine poured from a

supposedly cheap bottle. All right, score one for the populace. The wine drinkers were fooled. But here's where it gets complicated. The researchers examined the brain scans of the volunteers. So what we've found essentially is that the area of the brain that codes for pleasure, which is the ventral medial prefrontal cortex, this is the area of the brain that codes for pleasure in real time and has been documented in other studies.

And what we've found essentially was that this area of the brain that codes for pleasure in real time shows greater activation when the brain thinks that is tasting a higher price wine, then when the brain thinks that is tasting a lower price wine. The volunteers in other words weren't merely saying the wine from the expensive bottle tasted better because they thought that's what they were supposed to say. The volunteers actually did experience the wine differently, it tasted better because they thought that's what they were supposed to say. The volunteers actually did experience the wine differently. It tasted better.

If you have expectations about how much pleasure you're going to derive from, let us say, wine, your expectations actually turn into reality. The difference between a $200 bottle of wine and a bottle that costs $8.99 is only partly about the wine. If paying more for a bottle of wine makes you want to save it for a special occasion, share it with good friends over a meal, save for it, then yes, that bottle of wine will taste better. It's exactly the same with art.

Forger show us that experts can be fooled, but they also miss something important. The value of a painting is only partly about the painting itself. When you look at a masterpiece, you are looking at paint on canvas, but that isn't all you're doing. You're thinking about Monet's hand holding the paintbrush.

You're thinking about history, the passage of time. The meaning of the painting isn't just what's on the canvas, it's what you'll bring to it. When Hebron's preparatory drawings were revealed to be forgeries, the drawings didn't change, but something did change in our mind. Instead of making us think about history and time, the drawings were now merely clever. They stopped being masterpieces. at www.hiddenbrainatnpr.org with the word subscribe in the subject line.

You can also listen to my stories on your local public radio station. I'm Shankar Vidantan and this is NPR. you