The problem of authenticating fine art objects, and setting their provenance (translated from French as history, origin)

The problems of expert opinions are very prosaic and take into account the whole market of fine arts, and especially the US market.

It would be quite easy to simply ask, as it happens with artists who are currently creating, "Did you create this object?", "Tell me more about it?". Nowadays, finding the contact of the creator of an art object, is quite easy, given the power of social networks and the existence of easy and fast communication using the Internet in general.

In other words, let's ask the deceased artist " Did you paint this picture?" Unfortunately, we can't get an answer from the past. Therefore, we have several ways to come to a conclusion about the authenticity of an object. We can examine the object in person and be guided by the material we have. Beneath my brief formulation of "material" I have hidden a rather specific list of the data we need to help us authenticate, and to determine the history of the piece of art we need.

And today we will touch on painting, as it makes up a large percentage of the other forms of fine art in the percentage ratio with other forms of fine art.

Pardon me for my constant tautology about Fine Art. But what more affectionate and pleasant words can we call all those objects created by painters, graphic artists and sculptors, except "Heritage that will live forever after its creation", because even those objects that disappeared or were lost in difficult periods of world history, left their mark in the records, photographs and memory of people who saw them with their own eyes.



Let's return to the topic of the data we need to authenticate painting objects. And let's divide them into two categories.

So, the first is the family or heirs of the creator, who using archival material left at them, and their personal memories of the artist, how he created his subjects, what brush, what colors, what depicted and what spirit and feelings imbued his paintings.

In most cases, this applies only to painters born in the middle of the 19th century and later, because it is quite difficult, and sometimes almost impossible to find the way to the painters who created earlier, and sometimes almost impossible to establish their genealogical path. And we must not forget that a large number of artists led a rather unorthodox lifestyle and did not have a permanent relationships or at all were alone.

By finding direct contact with the descendants of the author, whether a certified expert, whether a private collector can benefit from the opinion and material of the artist's heirs and draw their own analysis and conclusion. And in the end the heir himself can declare this with the following phrase "This is my father's work!", or "This is my wife's, daughter's, son's work", it doesn't matter, the main thing to realize is that everyone has a tendency to make mistakes and this is what I call the problem of authentication of art objects.

Let's move on to the next category, which I'll burden with the word "expert opinion"

Today, on the world art market, there is a huge number of art critics and art experts who work in different ways and have different reputations.

I myself, as you know, am an art expert and art historian in a particular field. This is the direction of Ukrainian, Russian, Jewish artists who lived in the Russian Empire or the Soviet Union, and who immigrated from there to the United States - the so-called emigrant artists.

These are artists who have found a new home, but they have not forgotten the past. They told little about it, and I am here to remind the world of it, of what has been lost, of what has been forgotten.

And also to make a general conclusion including all stages of the artist's life, and fully discover his biography and pictorial path.

The art expert has his own ways of authenticating a piece of art, such as searching and comparing with the painting, archival materials in museums, archives, literature, exhibition catalogs, and in many other places that somehow concerned and concern the life and work of the artist. This method we will call art history.

Another method of authentication used by experts is chemical-technological analysis of the painting. In this case, microscopic pieces of paint are taken from the studied painting and other paintings with an unambiguous positive reputation, to compare their composition.

The microscopic analysis of the paint itself is also used, which examines the stages of its aging, which is indicated by the presence of craquelure (from the French crack), a thin cracks in the paint that are sometimes not visible without a microscope, the density of the paint itself, its texture and important details and fragments of the canvas. Examination of the painting with the help of X-ray fluoroscopy to determine all the stages of application of paint on the canvas or other material used by the artist to create his work.

As you know in any business in the creation of a contract, any successful transaction or any other agreement between people is a signature, and of course the signature did not pass by the painting. After all, any artist understands in advance that it is necessary to tell people that this is my painting, I am its creator and to do this in the most logical way is to set his signature on the canvas, which sometimes includes other information about the painting, such as the date of its creation, its name and much more. So, what if there is no signature? This is our question to any expert, including myself.

And the task becomes more difficult, if in the presence of a signature, chemical-technological and art analysis, it is clear how to determine its authenticity.

If there is no signature, the task becomes more difficult. The most record-expensive sold painting in history, which amount of sales passed for half a billion dollars, is the work "Savior of the World" created, according to experts, by the great artist of all times Leonardo da Vinci (1452 - 1519). It does not have a signature, and is reliably very difficult to determine its authenticity. The name of this procedure is called attribution, that is, this painting was attributed to the work of Leonardo da Vinci, since the work has no signature and experts to date have not found irrefutable evidence that it was Leonardo da Vinci who painted it. For this reason, many experts refer to this phenomenon as partially attributed.

The provenance (from French, history) of a painting is very important. Let's imagine a certain painting was painted in 1923, the artist sent it to an exhibition in 1924, it was bought by a collector after the exhibition and it remained in his family until today.

If there is documentary and archival information, such as the exhibition tag and the number of this painting in the catalog, old photographs from the exhibition, publications of the painting in the newspaper, the expert will include this in his expert opinion, and this will be called its provenance.

History shows frequent cases as outstanding paintings of great artists are found in completely different and sometimes surprising places. Considering this, the question arises - how?

How many stories of paintings that were in an abandoned garage or in an old uninhabited house, and later were accidentally found. And it turns out that the painting was lying there for half a century, and sometimes a whole century.

To summarize today's story, we all need to understand that the opinion of the artist's heirs, as well as the opinion of experts, including mine, is just an opinion, no matter how sad it sounds, but it is true. It can be erroneous, biased and unfortunately often bought.

But let's not be globalists and ideologues, still the opinion of heirs and experts with a good reputation is important, and almost always decisive. Such is the shape of reality.

I want my readers to draw their own conclusion from my deductions, and each conclusion will be unique, just like the uniqueness of each piece of fine art, which can even sometimes be incorrectly attributed or written by a different artist. After all, someone tried, didn't they?

I want to end the dialog with the reader on a positive note, we all have our own origin just like any piece of art has its own creator.

Author: Yakov Skulskyi