Art: Plagiarism accusations dog prestigious Turner award

An artist who copies has overshadowed the German photographer who won Britain's Turner Prize for art. DAVID LISTER reports.

Photography is art. That is, as they say, official, following the decision to award a photographer the Turner Prize for the first time.

Contemporary art's most prestigious - and studiedly controversial - award last week went to Wolfgang Tillmans, 34, a German photographer who first achieved fame for his fashion shoots in style magazines.

Appropriately enough, the £20,000 ($66,600) award was presented by the fashion designer Paul Smith at a dinner at Tate Britain.

The shortlist for this year's award had been called the most uncontroversial and least eccentric for years, but the choice of a photographer put at least a little novelty back into proceedings, even though Tillmans has moved beyond fashion photography and has been called "the chronicler of his generation."

The Turner Prize fails to live up to its reputation if there is not one controversy surrounding the shortlisted artists. With no Tracey Emin and no Damien Hirst this year, that had looked unlikely right until the 11th hour.

Then The Times newspaper "revealed" on its front page that one of the shortlisted artists, painter Glenn Brown had copied his work from a 70s science fiction book cover. In fact, this was barely a revelation as Brown acknowledged the original artist Tony Roberts on the label accompanying his painting, which has been on display at the Tate for months.

The Tate, though, did not help itself by forgetting to put the acknowledgment in the Turner Prize catalogue.

Brown, the only British-born artist on the shortlist, was clearly stung by the issue. He said, "I'm a fan of all the artists I refer to, including Tony Roberts. I pick artists I like and those I feel aren't given enough credit, such as Watteau, John Martin and Chris Foss.

"I wrote to the publishers of the book featuring the Tony Roberts image but did not receive a response. In The Loves of Shepherds 2000 (after Tony Roberts), I have radically altered Roberts' work in terms of scale and colour. The title of the work and the colour refer to a painting by Fragonard."

While there was no question of subterfuge on Brown's part, the issue did at least open a debate on the legitimacy of the copyist's art, and whether it did come close to plagiarism.

Sir Nicholas Serota, chairman of the Turner Prize jury and director of the Tate, said of Brown's painting: "I would argue that it's not a piece of plagiarism in the first place. But we certainly know that Glenn Brown has frequently used the work of other artists in developing his own work, but that is true of Picasso, who borrowed from Rembrandt ... this is not new.

"The issue really is what the artist does with the material that he has borrowed. Glenn Brown is a rather remarkable painter and artist. He uses other artists' work, but that doesn't mean to say you could possibly mistake his work for theirs ... he takes the image, he transforms it, he gives it a completely different scale."

In awarding Wolfgang Tillmans the prize the jury praised the way in which his work "engages with different aspects of contemporary culture, while challenging conventional aesthetics, taking photography in new directions in both his methods of working and in the presentation of his work." The jury was impressed by his ability to look at often unregarded aspects of the every day and create striking images from them.

Joining the winner Tillmans and Glen Brown on the shortlist were Tomoko Takahashi, originally from Japan, who makes use of everyday "junk" to create various representations, and the painter Michael Raedecker, who was born in Amsterdam, and who uses a range of unusual material, including wool, in his work.