The Decibel - Celebrated Group of Seven sketches revealed to be fakes

Episode Date: March 7, 2024

In 2015, the Vancouver Art Gallery believed it had made a groundbreaking acquisition. 10 sketches by Group of Seven member J.E.H. MacDonald were unearthed in the mid-1970s and sold off. But experts in the Canadian art world weren’t convinced they were authentic. But it wouldn’t be until late 2023 that the truth was finally revealed to the public.Marsha Lederman is a columnist for the Globe, and has been reporting on this artwork since the Vancouver Art Gallery first announced their acquisition nearly a decade ago. She’s on the show to talk about how the mystery was finally solved, what it means for an art gallery to come clean.Questions? Comments? Ideas? Email us at [e-mail]

It seemed like the discovery of a lifetime. In 2015, the Vancouver Art Gallery announced it had acquired 10 sketches by group of seven member J.E.H. MacDonald. These sketches had never before been displayed. But almost immediately, people had doubts about whether these were authentic. Why would J.E.H. McDonald bury his work in the ground, no matter how carefully he did it? And how could these works be so pristine after spending more than 40 years buried underground? Marsha Lederman is a columnist for The Globe, and she's been reporting on these sketches since 2015. She's here to talk about what we learned back in December, that the McDonald sketches weren't painted by McDonald after all. I'm Manika Raman-Wilms, and this is The Decibel from The Globe and Mail.

Marsha, thank you for being here today. Thanks for inviting me. Let's start by going back to 2015. How does this all begin? Well, I received a news release, but this one seemed particularly exciting. The Vancouver Art Gallery said it had acquired 10 never before publicly displayed oil sketches by J.E.H. MacDonald, who was one of the founders of the Group of Seven. And I should explain that an oil sketch is, it is a painting essentially, but it's small. It's done on a board and generally done in the outdoors because he was sketching outdoor scenes.

This is like a pre-painting or something, basically, before he does the official big painting. Exactly. So he would have taken this sketch, which is not what it sounds like, a drawing with pencil. No, it was an oil painting, but small, taken it into the studio and used it to create a larger painting, as we would call it. So this news release said that these 10 oil sketches, not only had they not been seen, but they had spent more than 40 years buried underground on the property where J.E.H. MacDonald once lived in Thornhill, which is north of Toronto. And there was an amazing story. He had some health problems and he was being sent down to Barbados in 1931. And he had all these unsold sketches in his home. So he and his son, Thoreau, buried them.

They wrapped them up in cellophane and tar paper, and they put them in boxes, and they very carefully buried them around the property for safekeeping. And they stayed there, according to this news release, for more than 40 years. And then what happened after 40 years? They've been there for quite a while. What happens then? So, J.E.H. MacDonald died in 1932. In 1974, Thoreau MacDonald was preparing to vacate the house, and he went about digging up these paintings that had been there ever since the story went. And it just so happened that a family friend happened to drop by that day and saw Thoreau MacDonald digging up these paintings. So he said he would help out.

That man's name was Max Merker. He was a fan of art, Canadian art, and a family friend. And when he was offered these paintings, offered to buy them, he said, yes, he would love to buy those paintings. And he bought them for a fairly low price. Okay, so this is McDonald's son then selling the paintings to this family friend is the story. Exactly. And this is the 1970s. Now we're going to 2012. Max Merker has passed away and now his wife Rita Merker has passed away and their two sons are cleaning out the family home. They come across a treasure trove

of art, all kinds of works. They bring the stuff to a dealer in Hamilton. She has a look and at some point she tells Ian Tom about them. Who was Ian Tom? At the time, he was a senior curator with a specialty in Canadian historical art at the Vancouver Art Gallery. The Merkers said, have a look at these works. If there's anything here that interests you, we'll consider making a donation. He picked these 10 works that he had been told had been buried all these years on Thorold MacDonald's property and that had been made by J.E.H. MacDonald. He picked those 10 works for the Vancouver Art Gallery. Marsha, how big of a deal would this have been in the Canadian art world?

Oh, it was huge. I mean, it is a huge event to uncover 10 new works by a member of the group of seven. And then there was also this amazing story that went along with it, this burial. So it was a very big deal. And it got a lot of attention when the Vancouver Art Gallery made this announcement. OK, so the gallery makes this announcement, gets a lot of attention. What is the reaction that it's getting from the community? Well, the reaction was excitement. But there was also some doubt. I got a phone call from someone who had actually seen the works and said, you know,

there's something not right here. You should look into this. And so I did. I started making calls and I heard from quite a few people that they had some doubts about these works. And Marsha, you were covering this story. I guess, yeah, what was your reaction at that time as all of this was happening? I mean, my first thought was, holy moly, what a great story. You know, I've got to call my editor and say, we've got to get this in the paper now. It never would have occurred to me that the Vancouver Art Gallery would not have done its due diligence in authenticating these paintings.

And, you know, like we do, I rushed to report the story and file it as I did. And then I got this phone call expressing some doubt about the works. And it had also been bothering me. There were a couple of things about the story that didn't sit well with me. The burial story seemed weird. But the one thing that really bugged me was that in an interview with Max Merker's son, Efri, he told me that Max Merker was told by a family friend, A.J. Kasson, who was another member of the Group of Seven, that these paintings were going to be very valuable one day. They were going to be worth a lot of money. And this was 1974. And it was reported that these paintings

were purchased for $35 each. Now, I know 1974 is a long time ago, but I've been around for a while. And at that time, I was a public school student in North York, Toronto, and we had been taken to the McMichael Gallery every year we would go and see these works by the group of seven. It just didn't seem right that if there was already a gallery devoted to these artists that public school students were being taken to on field trips. How were these paintings not already valuable? Interesting. So how did the Vancouver Art Gallery respond to those questions? They initially stuck by their belief that these were authentic paintings. But as more and more questions arose, they agreed that they were going to send them for scientific testing. January 2015 is when they made

the announcement. And in 2015, the Vancouver Art Gallery brought in the person who I would say is the top expert in this field. His name is Charles Hill, and he is a retired curator from the National Gallery of Canada. They had him do a report about these works. Then they brought in a handwriting analyst, someone who was a retired scientist, forensic scientist from the RCMP, because each of these sketches had purportedly been authenticated on the back by Thoreau McDonald and A.J. Kasson. So they had this handwriting analysis done and that was delivered in early 2016. OK, so let's let's break these down because it sounds like this is where some interesting stuff is happening. So this investigation, they brought in Charles Hill, this expert in Group of Seven work. So what did he find? Well, he had doubts. He felt that the burial story was implausible. There would have been rodents, there would have been problems in the ground, freezing and thawing, and yet these

sketches were pristine. That didn't make sense to him. So that was one thing. And he also noted that the sketches looked too much like the finished product. So for instance, there was one painting that he knew was composed of two different scenes that J.E.H. MacDonald had witnessed. And the sketch that was part of these 10 looked just like the finished product of the painting that was created from two different scenes and thus two different sketches. Yeah, this is a sketch you're talking about. Part of it is from like the Laurentians. The other part is from Georgian Bay. So those are two totally different geographies then. Exactly. And so MacDonald had combined them into one amazing work called The Elements. But the elements were made up of different elements in the sketches. And there were other things. There were people, which was unusual for MacDonald to include people figures in his sketches. The color palettes were a little hot.

And then this was also a big red flag. One of the sketches that was supposed to be by MacDonald held an extremely close resemblance to a painting by a different artist altogether, Tom Thompson. And the Vancouver Art Gallery did not disclose this when it told me about all of this. But after we wrote about these sketches and wrote that it had been found that they were not authentic, a Globe reader happened to be at the McMichael the next day and saw that Tom Thompson work at the McMichael that looks like the supposed sketch by J.E.H. McDonald. And he noticed the similarities and he wrote to me, was so excited. He wanted to talk about it.

And Marsha, you also mentioned handwriting analysis, the issues with the signatures on the back. So what did we learn there? spelled four different ways. Now, it's easy to spell McDonald incorrectly, but not when it's your own name. You're going to spell your own name correctly. So that was a real red flag. McDonald spelled four different ways, three of them incorrect. We'll be back in a moment. In 2016, some of these sketches were sent to the Canadian Conservation Institute, CCI, and they were examined there. So, Marsha, what did they find? So there are different steps to the examination process at CCI. First, there's a visual inspection. And right away, there were problems noted. There were inconsistencies in the size and thickness

of the board. It was different than what McDonald was known to have used at that time. Then in the next stage, they used photography, including forensic photography. And one of the things they noted was that there was an underdrawing underneath one of these sketches. And that was very atypical of McDonald. He didn't draw and pencil underneath his sketches. So that was weird. And then finally, this is where the rubber hits the road. They do scientific testing on tiny bits of paint.

And when they did these tests, they found paint in these sketches that was not available during McDonald's lifetime. So that was the nail in the coffin of the dream that these paintings were real. So they found basically there's no way that MacDonald could have painted these sketches. Yeah. So then they initially tested just a few of them, then they sent all of them over. And what they determined was that eight of the 10 sketches contained pigments that were not available in his lifetime. And the other two had pigments that were not available when the finished paintings that the sketches were supposedly for were made. OK, so the Vancouver Art Gallery knew about these results by the end of 2016, then it sounds like. But the broader public didn't learn about this until the end of 2023.

So so what took so long here? Now, that is a great question. I asked many times. I was a bit of a dog with a bone on this. And maybe it was irritating for the Vancouver Art Gallery, but I needed to know what they'd found out with that testing about these sketches. And I was put off and put off and put off. Then there was a change in leadership and it was COVID and all kinds of things were going on. And finally, the Vancouver Art Gallery put together an exhibition about this whole process, about these 10 sketches and trying to determine whether they were real or not. And as they were putting that exhibition on the walls, they invited me in to tell me the story of what actually happened. So this was December 2023. It was nine years after these sketches had been acquired.

And of course, yes, things shut down during COVID. There's all kinds of difficulties for galleries as a result of that. But, you know, we're talking back to 2016. There seemed to be a lot of time there where, you know, this could have been discussed. Did the gallery say anything as to why they didn't discuss this earlier? There are two figures involved here. The previous director of the Vancouver Art Gallery is no longer there. Her name is Kathleen Bartels. I questioned her

numerous times about these sketches, and she did not answer. She would often say, work is being done on these sketches. And that was after 2016, after they had received the reports. Then a new director came in, Anthony Kindle, and that was in 2020, in the midst of COVID. And I did ask him, from the very first time I spoke to him, I asked him about these sketches, and he said he would tell me when he could. And when I asked him in December of 2023, why he wouldn't tell me earlier, he said that he was going through a lot. There was a lot of turnover of staff. There were layoffs. There was COVID. And what he wanted was for the new curator of historical Canadian art to be the person who put together an exhibition

about this. And at that point, they felt they could tell the world about it. And I'm curious, now that this is all out in the open too, the family who made the donation initially, how have they responded to these findings? Well, they sent me a statement saying they welcome the findings. They still think the paintings are really beautiful and that they had been eager themselves to find out about the results of the testing. And so these sketches were eventually found to be fake. I guess I have to ask,

was there any kind of fraud? I don't know, something like that involved here? So the current director of the Vancouver Art Gallery, Anthony Kendall, makes it very clear that the applications for tax receipts for the donations under what's known as the Canadian Cultural Property Export Review Board were halted when questions arose about the authenticity of these sketches. So tax receipts were not issued. So what he said to me, and this is a quote, was there's no financial fraud. He also said it's a bit of an embarrassment, I guess. And he's not wrong about that. And if they had been authentic, these sketches would have been worth quite a lot of money than I would imagine.

They would have been worth millions. And it would have really been sort of the feather in the cap of Ian Tom's long history with the Vancouver Art Gallery. He was really a very well-respected curator. And as he says in a video in this exhibition, when it first started, he thought this was one of the great experiences of his life. And then it just got worse and worse and worse. And then he says it was one of the worst experiences of his life, frankly. Wow. So I guess the big question now is that, you know, if these sketches were not done by J.E.H. McDonald, who did make them? Oh, I'm dying to know that.

It's a great question. That is a mystery. Who made these paintings? And even more of a mystery to me is the question of where did that burial story come from? And what about those signatures authenticating those works on the backs of the sketches? How did that all come to be? So yeah, that we haven't quite figured out yet. You've been reporting on this story since 2015. What was it like for you when you actually finally got to learn the truth about these sketches? very much brought me in ahead of time to tell me about the results when they started installing the exhibition before it went public. They felt that I had worked on it for so long that I had exposed the questions to begin with. And when we were sitting in that room and they told me that the sketches were not authentic.

I was really emotional. I had felt so invested in this story for so many years. It had outlasted many other things in my life. And to finally have an answer was a really big moment for me in my work as a reporter and actually in my life too. Yeah. And I mean, like, this is a question of authenticity too for a gallery that wants to obviously show good work and good Canadian work. So this is something that's important for the gallery that it's now reckoned with as well. This is a public institution. It receives public funding and it also receives the respect and trust of the public. And if something goes awry, the public has a right to know. And we have a right to know when they know, not many years later.

Marsha, thank you so much for following this story and for being here today. Thanks so much. I'll let you know if I find out who made those paintings. That's it for today. I'm Maina Karaman-Wilms. Michal Stein produced this episode. Our intern is Manjot Singh.

Our producers are Madeline White, Cheryl Sutherland, and Rachel Levy-McLaughlin. David Crosby edits the show. Adrienne Chung is our senior producer, and Angela Pachenza is our executive editor. Thanks so much for listening, and I'll talk to you tomorrow.