There’s nothing new about fakes. Spotting them is not an easy task. Here are 4 famous fakes that fooled the experts:
The Brewster Chair
In 1970, the Ford Museum in Dearborn, Michigan, purchased a chair from the Pilgrim era. It was originally owned by William Brewster, a founder of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, and the museum was excited about the great find. The chair was “discovered” in a home by an antiques dealer, authenticated by a specialist, and sold to the Ford Museum for $9,000. But it was a fake. The chair’s maker was a disgruntled artist, who made the chair in 1969 using 17th-century details to show antiques could be faked and that 20th-century furniture makers are as skilled as those of the past. In 1977, he told the museum they had a fake. X-ray analysis as well as modern drill holes and saved pieces of wood cut from the legs that exactly matched the grain patterns, confirmed the chair was a copy and not a 17th-century treasure. The museum still displays the chair, not as an antique, but as an example of a fake to be studied.
Rothko Forgery
In 2004, an art collector couple bought a painting, “Untitled, 1956” by Mark Rothko, from a prominent gallery in New York City. They paid $8.3 million and thought it was beautiful. In 2011, the buyers learned it was a fake. They sued the gallery when it refused to return their money. The forger was a Chinese immigrant who trained at the same school as Rothko. He had a knack for mimicking style, and painted many fakes of modern masters, like Jackson Pollock and Rothko, in his garage. Many experts were fooled and about 40 of the fakes—more than $60 million worth—were sold to the gallery before it closed in 2011. The lawsuit ended with an undisclosed settlement, and the painter has since fled to China.
The Cardiff Giant
In 1869, a buried 10-foot-tall stone figure of a man was discovered behind a barn in Cardiff, New York. Was it a petrified body of a man? An ancient statue? Theories were rampant. Thousands of people came to see the giant and were charged 50 cents each. Then it was sold to a group of businessmen for $37,500. They exhibited it in Syracuse. The farmer made about $50,000 on the Cardiff Giant, lots of money in those days. But it was a fake. The debt-ridden owner of a nearby tobacco farm was in cahoots with the farm owner and a local stone cutter who carved the statue. He eventually confessed, but people kept coming to see it anyway, calling it “Old Hoaxey.” The figure became so famous as a tourist attraction, it is now in the Farmer’s Museum in Cooperstown, New York.
The Mormon Letters
Mark Hofmann was a dealer in rare manuscripts. He made a career in the early 1980s of “finding” important, original documents related to Joseph Smith and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, the Mormons, and selling them to the church and private collectors for many thousands of dollars. But about 1984, they began to be questioned as fakes. Hofmann was also a talented forger and counterfeiter who used authentic paper and developed complicated techniques for making documents appear old. He fooled church leaders and experts. Nobody is sure how many documents Hofmann actually created, but there were many, including a letter from Smith’s mother describing the origin of the Book of Mormon, a contract for the printing of its first edition, and the “Salamander” letter, recounting how the prophet had encountered a white salamander that transformed itself into a spirit, as well as other documents that were not church-related. Talk about provenance problems! He went into debt, became desperate, made bombs, and killed some buyers. Hofmann was charged with murder, fraud, forgery, and other counts in 1986 and has been in prison since 1988.
You can read about other famous fakes—a French églomisé desk that was at the White House; a Greek bronze horse at the Metropolitan Museum of Art; Han van Meegeren, a Dutch painter who had to prove he was a forger from his jail cell; and the Piltdown man, a famous fossil that was exposed as a fraud. And nobody really knows how many more fakes are out there.
