A Short History of Fakes and Forgeries
A Short History of Fakes and Forgeries
Lecturer: Dr Tom Flynn
This talk offers a comprehensive overview of the most significant and notorious cases of art forgery over the last 150 years. The lecture focuses on the core motivations of art forgers and explains how the majority of the most prominent art forgers started out as failed artists whose work was ignored by the dealers, auction house ‘experts’ and connoisseurs who function as the market’s ‘gatekeepers’. In many cases, this rejection led to a desire on the part of the overlooked painters to exact a form of revenge against what they perceived as an elitist art world ‘club’ from which they were excluded.
The talk also poses the question of whether we are taking fakes and forgeries sufficiently seriously given their negative impact on broader cultural values. Are we punishing the fakers and forgers severely enough or merely turning them into celebrities and television personalities with lucrative book and film deals?
Is art forgery a serious crime or not? And why do we express admiration and even love for a painting, only for that love to turn into bitter hatred and a sense of betrayal once we are told it is in fact a forgery? After all, the object itself has not changed. Is our aesthetic response to works of art more complicated than we realise?
Dr Tom Flynn is a UK-based art historian, writer and art consultant. He holds a First Class Honours degree in Art History from the University of Sussex, a Masters in Design History from the Royal College of Art and a doctorate from the University of Sussex. His interests include contemporary art; sculpture history; museology and the history of museums; art crime; issues in cultural heritage; and the historical development and professional practice of the European art markets.
Tom is Senior Lecturer at Christie’s Education, Adjunct Professor at Richmond, the American International University in London, visiting Senior Lecturer at Kingston School of Art, and teaches at a number of other UK and European universities. He has taught for many years on the summer Post-Graduate Certificate in Art Crime and Cultural Heritage Protection Studies at the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art (ARCA) in Amelia, Umbria, Italy. A former Henry Moore Foundation post-doctoral research fellow at the University of Sussex, Tom has written for numerous international art publications and is the author of several books on art and the art mark