Impressionist? No, just a parrot
Christophe Petyt is a likely customer for Dafen, that art-copying colony in China. He’s been collecting fake paintings for ages and his L’Art du Faux Collection, established in 1992, is in the Guinness records book as the world’s biggest.
He doesn’t seem embarrassed in the least. His new website, complete with enormous photographs of him, suggesting a tendency to narcissim (though he does hold charity auctions), boasts of more than 2,500 paintings “of the most prestigious artists”, though Guinness credits him with 3,500.
The latter number, Christophe’s site seems to say, applies to his L’Art du Faux Foundation, the output of 82 artists around the world – “only the best artists can become members”.
The 35-year-old Petyt breaks his business down into three categories of buyers: rich private collectors needing copies of the originals they own for security purposes; rich private collectors who want fakes while they wait for the originals to come on the market; and average blokes who just want a favourite famous painting in their living room, fake or not.
This latter sector is where Petyt came from. Just out of college, he discovered that the painting he wanted, Van Gogh’s portrait of Adeline Ravoux, was worth more than $10 million, a bit beyond his wallet capacity, so he got a friend at the Ecole des Beaux Arts to do a copy for him. Then he wondered how much people would pay him for it, even knowing it was a fake, because it looked that good.
Plenty, as it turned out. After getting his pal to whip up a stack of fakes, and then selling them all toute suite, he advertised for copyists and got thousands of applications. Perhaps some from China!
As to the legality of all this, he advises that in Europe you have to get the artist’s permission to copy his work if it’s not in the public domain, while in the United States, permission or not, your copy has to be a different size from the original (which, it has to be said, sounds stupidly American). Public domain usually kicks in when the artist has been dead for 70 years.
Even the signature can be copied on a copy – he ran it past the courts, with the estates of Monet and Toulouse-Lautrec hot on his heels.
Petyt munches on the fake Rembrandt phenomenon before pointing out, perhaps unnecessarily, that most artists started out copying other people’s paintings. He also reminds us that Camille Corot used to sign works by his students, saying, “This painting could be mine and deserve my signature on it!”
He is, the Telegraph said in a 2003 article entitled “Fake art meets real money”, “a man whose activities provoke both admiration and exasperation in the higher levels of the art world. Name the painting and for as little as £1,000 he will deliver you a copy so perfect that even the original artist would struggle to tell the difference.”
His maitres fournisseurs – painters steeped in the style of a particular artist or school – churn out commissioned works from scratch, artificially ageing them by baking, then staining with black tea, maybe a little dust rubbed into the back of the canvas. “New frames are buried underground” and “when dug up may be sprayed with acid and bored with tiny drillheads to give the impression of a woodworm attack”.
“Our Dali guy completely lives the part,” Petyt told the newspaper. “He’s got a waxed moustache and long hair, and he dresses in all the crazy gear.”
Christie’s sells the fakes for as much as £20,000, though a Saudi prince once paid $100,000 by for an oversized copy of Renoir’s “Le Dejeuner des Canotiers”.
One of reasons for the furore that Petyt’s business causes is the question mark that hangs over so many supposed masterpieces. Rembrandt wasn’t alone in confounding the market with his signature or the lack thereof and the fact that he was just such a damned good teacher that all his students became clones.
In 2002 the Japanese insurance company Yasuda breathed a massive sigh of relief when a series of elaborate tests verified that the Van Gogh it had bought five years earlier for the a world record price of £25 million was indeed real.
As also reported in the Telegraph, there wasn’t much assurance that the insurance firm’s “Still Life with Sunflowers” was really one of Vinnie’s. It was in fact, critics claimed, one of Emile’s.
Poor old Claude-Emile Schuffenecker, dead six decades by the time this particular controversy arose in his name, was a French schoolchum of Gauguin, with whom he copied the Old Masters at the Louvre, as everybody did back in those days. He was also a theosophist and, almost as if by extension, a symbolist in his painting.
Eventually acknowledged as a dab hand himself with a brush, Schuffenecker was better known in his lifetime for the people he hung out with – Pissarro, Bernard and Redon, as well as Gauguin, but he knew Van Gogh as well, and also the art critic Julien Leclercq, who was one of the first to collect Vincent’s paintings (once Vince was dead, of course).
In 1901, a few years after Schuffenecker painted this symbolist portrait of Leclerq and his wife Fannie, the critic and Theo van Gogh’s widow mounted the first retrospective of Vincent’s work in Paris.
Evidently Schuffenecker got his hands on Van Gogh’s work alright. He “extended” the painting in question, though I haven’t been able to determine what exactly that means. In reassessing “Still Life with Sunflowers”, experts from Amsterdam’s Van Gogh Museum said “it would have been illogical for him to have forged the main part while adding the rest in a different style”.
They also waved off suspicions based on the material used – jute sacking rather than your garden-variety canvas.
But the cloud of suspicion hanging over Schuffenecker wouldn’t dissipate. Also suspected of having completed unfinished works by Cezanne, he still has accusing fingers pointed at him. French art expert Benoit Landais, among others, said the investigators had “failed to come up with incontrovertible evidence”.
Cue Christophe Petyt – he can solve this mess at a stroke.
