Colin McCahon - the artist whose paintings continue to make headlines. Photo/Supplied
The art market is running hot, but buyer beware. Kim Knight talks to the experts about fakes, forgeries and why it's actually really hard to copy a McCahon.
It took Harcourt Chenoweth Werry exactly 13 minutes and 20 seconds to discover he could not paint like Colin McCahon.
In 1978, the Upper Hutt city councillor's loathing of modern art - and the claim he could knock up a replica in his lunch break - led to a national television event.
The footage of his humiliation is lost. But the quest to copy McCahon is, according to major Auckland art dealers, both ongoing and concerning.
Last year, a painting by New Zealand's foremost modernist broke all previous auction house records, selling for $1.9 million. One art sales database calculates that, in 2021, buyers paid almost $50 for every square centimetre of McCahon that went under the hammer.
And where the market goes, so do the forgers.
The impetus for this story was a phone call from an individual (who spoke on condition of anonymity) questioning the authenticity of a newly marketed McCahon. Further inquiries by the Weekend Herald quashed concerns. Despite the absence of a validating image on a database of the artist's works, it had been authenticated by the Colin McCahon Research and Publication Trust.
Trust chairperson Peter Carr: "The research committee had a look and satisfied itself on the balance of probability that it was likely to be the original piece . . . "
The McCahon digital database, created in the 1990s, is unstable. The trust is currently working to have it rehoused but, in the meantime, it cannot be updated and no new imagery or information can be added.
"It does raise that point," Carr says. "If there's a piece and there is no verified representation of it that people can use as their reference, that clearly opens the door for someone to create doubt. And for a lot of these things, that's all you need at the end of the day . . . "
Art mysteries make great headlines. And, in New Zealand, Colin McCahon-related mysteries are on the rise. Last year, the Weekend Herald reported an Auckland auction house had hit pause on an $87,000 McCahon sale, while it tried to establish ownership history of the painting. The work was from the same series as a different painting that local experts had labelled highly likely to be fake when it came up for sale four years earlier in the UK. Meanwhile, in 2020, a painting created and sold in New Zealand as a McCahon tribute somehow ended up being resold in a London auction house with the original artist's signature sliced off the bottom and a forged McCahon signature and date added.
How many fake McCahon's are in circulation? Does heightened buyer interest in his work increase the possibility that more forgeries might enter the market?
"It may be that we're at the leading edge of this becoming an actual issue," says Carr, one of the artist's grandchildren. "We're entering into a period of time when both buyers and sellers have interests in maintaining uncertainty, perhaps. There may even be value in mystery."
Art begets art. Students work from "artist models" learning how and why paintings are made and emulating technique. Integration, hybridisation and appropriation all contribute to new art - but you can, literally, see where it is coming from.
"There is a lot of work out there that has been influenced by McCahon, stylistically speaking," observes Carr. "Already, that's enough to create some potential confusion."
McCahon died in 1987. Carr says the pooling of knowledge by his contemporaries means "a very significant percentage" of the artist's output is known and documented.
"If someone tried to present work as being a new, previously undiscovered McCahon . . . they'd have to have done a lot of homework, if they had constructed a fake, to be able to locate it within a period that fitted within the existing and known narrative."
The emergence of "lost" McCahon paintings was always a possibility. Carr recalls his older brother renting the artist's home after his death and finding "three or four" works tucked under the house.
"And I know Colin had a habit of giving people paintings, and he'd been over to the United States and Holland, so it's not implausible that works will pop up . . . but it would be strange if there were a very large number of previously undiscovered works turning up. All his residences have been well picked over now."
While the McCahon Trust endeavours to keep track of sales (and asks people to make contact if they have sold or purchased), Carr says some works had now changed hands multiple times. Art sales, meanwhile, are not immune to the general retail trend of "self-facilitated trading" that cuts out middle people and, potentially, ownership paper trails.
"You've got people who now own these because they are commodities . . . it starts to lock in a kind of 'value level'. It also means that if you did happen to acquire something that you genuinely thought was a McCahon for its commodity value, and then doubts were raised, you'd be less inclined to have that tested," says Carr.
That record-smashing $1.9m McCahon - once part of the Adrian Burr and Peter Tatham art collection - was sold in November by Auckland's Art+Object. In an auction described as a "watershed moment" for the local market, total sales across two days hit almost $16m. Three works fetched more than $1m each, 30 individual artist record prices were set and the event went down in history as this country's highest-grossing art sale.
The flipside?
"One of the sad side effects and byproducts of the way the New Zealand art market has increased so significantly in the past 18 months is the proliferation of a market for fakes and forgeries," says Ben Plumbly from Art+Object. "Historically, I think it has been around the Goldies and Lindauers . . . Now we're finding there seems to be a market for the production of potentially fake Gordon Walters and McCahon's . . . "
He points to the "deal of the century" sales of suspect works at regional British auction houses and says "it felt like they were coming from overseas originally and now it feels like they are popping up from within New Zealand".
Outright allegations of forgery are rare.
"When I get offered something, it's not so much a case of saying 'that's a fake' or 'that's not a fake'. It's more 'I don't really like it, I don't want to stand behind it, it's not something I believe in'."
The three auctioneers the Weekend Herald spoke to for this story all cited examples of works they had chosen not to handle that had, subsequently, been shopped around to other auction houses. One expert claimed sellers were often unsurprised by rejection because they already knew their works might be problematic; another said the art world had its own way of dealing with pieces that didn't feel right - they simply failed to sell.
Read the fine print and inherent in any auction catalogue is the principle of "caveat emptor" or buyer beware.
"Yeah," says Plumbly. "But when you offer a particular work by an artist, you're warranting that it is by them. There are all sorts of disclaimers and legalese when you register to bid, but I think at the end of the day, you've got an obligation to stand behind what you sell."
The only New Zealander ever convicted of art forgery was Karl Feoder Sim. The artist (who changed his name by deed poll to Carl Feoder Goldie) is reported to have copied and sold paintings and drawings by Frances Hodgkins, Rita Angus, Colin McCahon, C. F. Goldie and more. He is portrayed as a kind of loveable rogue; a man who never set out to hurt anyone, whose legacy is celebrated in a biennial "fakes and forgeries" competition held in his hometown of Mangaweka.
Plumbly says there's an argument that people like Sim forged to see if they could - to measure themselves against a master.
"Now, I think it's being done for cold, hard cash. If you look at where the fakes and forgeries are turning up, you've got McCahon, Walters, the occasional Frances Hodgkins, Goldie and Lindauer. And between them, they would be five of our top 10 highest value selling artists. I don't think that's coincidental at all."
In 2021, almost $62m worth of art was sold at auction in New Zealand - a 140 per cent increase on the year before. Everything from rising house prices (art is a cheaper investment) to Covid (all that money you saved not holidaying in Europe) has been mooted as a driving factor. In addition, say auctioneers, the way people buy is changing.
"Increasingly, in this time-poor environment, where there is internet bidding, a number of people who buy terribly expensive paintings from us often don't even bother to come in and look. They just buy it on the app with the click of a button," says Plumbly.
"Our business thrives on people making decisions in the heat of the moment. There's something to be said for slowing things down a little bit. Taking your time and really getting to know something."
Do that, he says, "and your chances of making a mistake or buying something that isn't what you thought it was are drastically reduced".
And that idea that modern art is easy to copy?
"I remember a lecture from a prominent international conservator. She said they saw more fakes from the Rembrandt era than they did from the Rothko era. Her argument was that it's easy to fake the hand but it's very difficult to fake the emotion, to imbue a work with emotion . . .
"People have always, on a certain level, ridiculed and used terrible generalisations like 'my kid could do that' around McCahon's work," says Plumbly. "Those who spend time in front of it and give it what it deserves, realise that's clearly not the case."
Sarah Hillary, Auckland Art Gallery's principal conservator, says McCahon paintings "are all about gesture and flow. There can't be any hesitation at all. It's hard to forge that loose, easy flow, when you're copying".
Hillary has never tried to imitate a McCahon, but she does have some experience copying (and authenticating) work by other New Zealand artists. In 2015, her research helped confirm what art expert Roger Blackley had already told the Turnbull Library - the Lindauer portrait it had bought for $75,000 was fake.
"It's a difficult thing to tell someone unless you've got really conclusive proof," says Hillary. "As far as I'm aware, we've only had a couple of examples of that. With Gottfried Lindauer paintings, we've identified a pigment that wasn't available in the artist's lifetime. It wasn't just on the surface where it could have been applied later, it was actually on the ground layer, in between layers of paint."
Hillary says it was "really brave" of the Turnbull to put its purchase up for scrutiny.
"We've found that private owners, if they find out their work is a forgery . . . it's very upsetting for people and they just want to forget about it, and they don't want it on public display."
Auckland Art Gallery does not, as a rule, undertake authentication of works from outside its own collection. Hillary says "it's very hard to have conclusive proof that would stand up in a court of law . . . that's one of the values of an organisation like the McCahon Trust or, say, the committee for Frances Hodgkins, where it's a whole group of experts working together".
According to Hillary (whose art detective skills featured most recently in the book The Back of the Painting) no current technology could guarantee the production of a foolproof forged painting.
"I'm not aware of a machine - yet. People still have to make them. But I suppose they might know more now about how a painting is made up. They won't fall into the same traps of using the wrong pigments or materials. Information is much more easily available."
As part of her gallery work, Hillary has attempted to replicate paintings by both Lindauer and Hodgkins for exhibition touch panels.
"We found it incredibly hard to copy their technique, especially Frances Hodgkins. She would do all sorts of crazy things underneath and then scrape it off and do something on top, but the actual layering made up the work - this unusual layering and scraping back. It's hard to invent something like that and copy it. I don't think we ever got to the end of the Lindauer, but it was a good process, to look at the underdrawing, and then the glazes . . . "
Hillary says although someone might attempt a forgery as a bit of a challenge, it was not a victimless crime: "People are really deeply hurt in the process. People who have spent a lot of money and believed their work was real. I think there are victims. I don't think it's just a fun thing."
Last year, local auction houses sold 37 Colin McCahon works for a combined total of $5.7m. The next highest revenue artist was Goldie - 25 works went for a combined $4m. Heading into the new year, prices remain high. Parnell's International Art Centre recently created a new record for a single Goldie, selling a portrait of Ngāpuhi chief Kamariera Te Hau Takiri Wharepapa for $1.88m (including buyer's premium).
Richard Thomson, IAC director, says he takes a "very cautious" approach to authenticating works.
"Just because you walk in with your Goldie, doesn't mean I'm obliged to deal with you. If I make a decision not to handle your painting, I don't need to give you a reason why.
"I'd only ever offer paintings I'm 100 per cent happy with. I know we had that McCahon question a while back, but as far as I was concerned, I was doing the right thing."
Thomson is referring to "Truth from the King Country: Load Bearing Structures: Series Three" which he offered for sale last July. It reached a bid of $87,000 at auction, but the sale never went through after Thomson decided he needed more information about the painting's provenance (the trail of previous ownership).
Back then, he told the Weekend Herald: "It may very well be a McCahon. But get someone to categorically state in writing that it's not, and then I guess the battle of the owner and them will begin. We don't want that to happen, but there's no certainty either way and when there's no certainty either way, you give someone back their 87 grand."
Thomson says he sees up to a dozen works a year that he declines to handle.
"It's fewer recently, because I think we've got a reputation of being quite hard on authentication . . . Sure, I get shown things that I'm not 100 per cent sure on sometimes, but for the most part, it's not like there is a bunch of fakes on the market. There are artists I guess, like Goldie and McCahon, who are at the top of the food chain that people might give a go.
"You might get an email every now and again saying 'look, I've got a Frances Hodgkins or something' and you just want to know more. It's not just a given that you get shown something and it's right."
But, he warns: "If there's anyone sitting at home who thinks they can just pass off a painting now, they're dreaming really."
Thomson says back in the 1980s, when art dealers and auctioneers were not as knowledgeable, it might have been easier to get a forgery on to the market. That opinion is shared by Charles Ninow, director of art at Webb's.
"They didn't expect fakes and there were a few that got into circulation then - Goldies and Hodgkins. The ones I've seen don't look right, they look very different. It's not just one thing, there's usually 10 things that don't feel right."
According to Ninow, "most sellers of art act with an abundance of caution". He estimates he physically sees between one and three works a year that "are not quite right".
That said: "If I didn't know anything about the art market and I saw a painting that looked easy to do that was selling for huge amounts of money, if I was a less ethical person, I might give it a go.
"But the great thing about fakes, and especially in New Zealand, is they are usually very unsophisticated . . . and the great thing about McCahon is that he is not copyable. It's such a big difference between one that feels awesome when you stand in front of it and one that doesn't. It's almost difficult to describe with words. One has a soul and the other one doesn't."
His ratings have probably improved since the CCO reforms, says the mayor.