Do you have to believe everything you don’t know? The saying about Corot’s oeuvre is well known: “Around 3,000 works by Corot’s hand have survived, 6,000 of which are in America.” But how can you recognize an original, and what is actually “original”? Is original only what is “old” or what comes from the “master”? How […]

Do you have to believe everything you don’t know? The saying about Corot’s oeuvre is well known: “Around 3,000 works by Corot’s hand have survived, 6,000 of which are in America.” But how can you recognize an original, and what is actually “original”?

Is only what is “old” or what comes from the “master” original? What about different versions of a successful and therefore often re-created theme by the same painter (fig. 2), what about joint works by different painters, how are workshop copies to be assessed? What is the situation when (old) masters copy other (old) masters? Testimonies of art history, which often concern us more than the verified, “genuine” works, are to receive a brief, illuminating treatment here. It is comforting to know: “Si duo faciunt idem, non est idem!” (“If two do the same thing, it is not the same thing!”), because many doubts can be verified today. This statement also describes the cause of many disputes that have arisen since works of fine art have been so highly prized. Fortunately, especially in the case of paintings, there are many ways of recognizing them. Natural ageing can be checked, wrinkles, craquelure, cracks in the stretcher and stretcher frame, soiling, yellowing, colorless plastering cannot easily be imitated. The amount of restoration work carried out is also often an indication of authenticity, as supposedly valuable paintings have often been treated, i.e. have a real history. “Habent sua fata pinaces” – paintings have their fates. The measures carried out at different times also reflect a history of the restoration methods used at different times.

The signature is the fetish of all art historians and art dealers. Once it is on the painting, it is blindly trusted. This trust is not always appropriate. The signature on a painting does indeed authorize it through the artist’s signature. Since the whole world believes in the authority of the signature, it is often manipulated, usually with dishonest intentions. Healthy doubt can save money in the case of an intended purchase or loss of reputation in the case of an intended attribution. In addition to the originals signed by the artist, later attributions also led to signatures being subsequently painted on. A bizarre way of dealing with one’s own signature is provided by Salvador Dalí, who signed blank canvases and then did not paint them, thus turning the pictures later painted on these canvases by other painters into signed Dalís. He also signed Dalí works by his friend Antoni Pixtot, who had painted them in Dalí’s style in Dalí’s villa when Dalí was no longer able to execute them himself due to physical limitations. Picasso signed one of his paintings with Boldini because the sitter said she would have preferred to have been painted by him. And many a painting that was painted by Picasso and Braque at the same time in the studio and which resembled each other so closely was signed by one or the other as a joke, also because the painters no longer knew which one was painted by whom. But even works definitely painted by the artist, which years after their creation are no longer identified with them and are banned from their catalogs raisonnés, cannot be legally recognized – especially since they were authorized by the artist. The animal painter Norbertine von Bresslern-Roth (1891-1978) was also very critical of her results: She did not want to release all her paintings into the public domain. She cut up paintings that did not meet her standards and disposed of them in her own dustbin. Once word of this practice had spread among her neighbors, who took the paintings she had destroyed out of the garbage and restored them, she preferred to use other people’s garbage cans in the vicinity of her home, where she only put parts of destroyed paintings.

Re-dedications sometimes took place in studios shared by two or more painters, such as the Alsatian Eck brothers, where one brother finished painting the deceased brother’s picture, painted over his signature and then signed it himself. Overpaintings of the names of less highly traded painters with the names of more highly paid painters are known. For example, a painting by Jaques Fouquière was rededicated as a Joos de Momper. However, original signatures were also removed: this was often done unintentionally in the case of works by David Teniers the Younger, where the value-creating signature is usually on the final varnish, which was very often lost when the varnish was removed.

The loss of the signature during restoration is often the reason for “reconstructing” such a signature, which is prohibited under copyright law. In most cases, these repainted signatures look less reliable than the original ones and are the reason why an original painting is disallowed, even though “only” the signature is fake. If such newer signatures lie on a surface that has been craquelured through because it is older, it is possible to recognize with a microscope that it is a later addition.

Forged signatures, on the other hand, are not always deliberate misrepresentations; the copyists often took the view that the signature was a creative device of the painter and that a copy was only complete through the carefully copied signature. The painter Dirk Huisken in Celle, who was close to the “Brücke”, made copies of various painters for his private studio in order to study their technique and deliberately added altered signatures to them. He turned the name Picasso into “Picolino” so as not to gain the reputation of a forger after his death.

It should not be forgotten that in the past it was not considered dishonorable to train oneself on old masters and copy them, on the contrary. It had nothing to do with “forgery” in the modern sense. People imitated the master to show that they were on a par with him. Rubens, for example, also copied diligently, even if not always exactly. Jacob Burckhardt writes about Rubens as a copyist: “When Rubens copied not for the Duke of Mantua, but for himself, in color or drawing, it was done in the most liberal manner, and sometimes as if he had wished to show the past masters how they should actually have begun.” The Rubens copy of Titian’s “Adam and Eve” (Prado, Madrid, fig. 1) also confirms this statement. Either way, these copies are certainly “genuine Rubens”.

Read more about originals, forgeries and copies in RESTAURO 3/2017.