Fakes! How, when and why?
Ten-week art history and theory lecture series
8 October 2019 6.30 - 8pm15 October 2019 6.30 - 8pm22 October 2019 6.30 - 8pm29 October 2019 6.30 - 8pm5 November 2019 6.30 - 8pm19 November 2019 6.30 - 8pm26 November 2019 6.30 - 8pm4 December 2019 6.30 - 8pm10 December 2019 6.30 - 8pm17 December 2019 6.30 - 8pm
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre, Burlington Gardens, Royal Academy of Arts
£540 for full course or £320 for five weeks. Includes all materials, light refreshments and a wine reception at the end of the fifth and tenth sessions.
Terms and conditions
Join a distinguished line-up of scholars, artists and art-world professionals as they investigate the rationale behind forgeries and the impact of fake paintings on public institutions and the private market.
Following the success of the course Stolen! How, when and why, this lecture series provides a unique insight into the world of art crime with a focus on fakes and forgeries and their long-lasting impact on the art world, its institutions and markets.
While examples of fakes and forgeries abound from the Renaissance to the present day, in today's art market, recognising fakes and forgeries is an essential skill for collectors, connoisseurs and art world professionals. The significant risk and impact of fakes on public and private collections, museums and institutions is widely recognised and should not be under-estimated. However, the rationale behind forger's actions, is less well understood. And yet, understanding both the motivations and innovative tools and techniques forgers use is critical for preventing false attributions, reducing risk in the market while building confidence and trust in the art world.
Fakes are distinguishable from copies and legitimate reproductions by an underlying criminal intent and motivation of misleading or providing false information including provenance. Paradoxically, some of the greatest forgers, have achieved both fame and fortune, building their artistic reputations through their crimes, gaining popularity as well as notoriety. And yet as in the preceding series about stolen paintings, these lectures explores in detail the wider implications and repercussions of such crimes. The series also considers the role of beauty and artistic value in painting and the reasons why such forgeries have captured the public imagination and affected the art historical canon. Have they gained a degree of respect because of their work's outstanding technical execution, their ability to fool experts, an anti-establishment stance or because of media coverage which transforms crimes into popular myths of rebellion?
This course considers a number of key questions, including:
• What is the motivation and rationale behind the creation of fakes and forgeries?
• Why is understanding this rationale important?
• How can a fake or forgery be spotted?
• How has connoisseurship changed over time including with the development of digital technologies?
• What are the main challenges for art institutions and connoisseurs?
• Should institutions expose fakes or keep them secret?
• What impact does press coverage of fakes have including on the forgers and the artworks?
• How does the general public perceive the forgers themselves and their crimes?
The course will be broadly chronological, with individual sessions taught by leading scholars, academics, art-world practitioners and professionals from both the private and public spheres with opportunity for the insight of both an expert lecture and group discussion and debate.
About the course
A continuation of 2018's lecture series Stolen! How, when and why?, this course provides a unique opportunity to learn about another fascinating area of art crime: fakes and forgeries.
This course will be delivered in part through lectures but will also include an opportunity for questions, discussion and debate from participants.
Please note, participants are encouraged to take notes in each lecture as printed notes are at the discretion of each speaker.
The course is designed to both enable an historical overview for those new to the field, and to be relevant for those with prior art history knowledge who are keen to learn from experts.
This course is suitable for enthusiastic beginners as well as those with previous knowledge who would like to develop their understanding further.
This course is for you if:
• You have a general interest in the history of art and art crime and would like to approach the subject in a new way
• You would like to understand further themes of identity and psychology by exploring how artists have chosen to depict themselves through art history
• You want to learn about the art world in general and/or the connections between the legal and illegal art markets, from both an historical and practical perspective
• You currently work, or aspire to work, in the arts and cultural industry and want to understand art theft and its risks from the perspective of professionals and leading scholars
Minimum age 18
Please let us know if you have any accessibility needs.
£540 for full course
£320 for five weeks
Sessions take place:
Tuesday 8 October
Tuesday 15 October
Tuesday 22 October
Tuesday 29 October
Tuesday 05 November
Tuesday 12 – Break
Tuesday 19 November
Tuesday 26 November
Wednesday 4 December
Tuesday 10 December
Tuesday 17 December
6.30-8pm each session
This course provides:
• 10 expert-led lectures with the opportunity for questions and discussions
• The opportunity to learn and reflect within a peer group, with discussions facilitated by an expert in the field
• The opportunity to socialise and network with peers in a friendly environment
• A drinks reception at the end of the fifth and tenth weeks
• A certificate of participation upon course completion
Bendor Grosvenor
Art historian and dealer
Dr Bendor Grosvenor is an art historian and dealer, best known for discovering a number of lost works of art by artists such as Van Dyck, Rubens and Gainsborough. He worked for ten years in the London art trade, but is now based in Edinburgh, where he focuses on writing and broadcasting. He presents the BBC4 series, Britain’s Lost Masterpieces, did specialist research for and appeared in BBC 1’s Fake or Fortune?, and writes regularly for publications such as the Financial Times and The Art Newspaper. He has for many years been a passionate advocate of both Old Masters and connoisseurship.
Sophie Oosterwijk
Art historian
Dr Sophie Oosterwijk studied English Literature at Leiden University and Medieval Studies at York before obtaining her PhD in Art History at Leicester with a thesis on the representation of the infant in medieval culture, followed by a second PhD at Leiden on the subject of the Dance of Death. Co-editor of the peer-reviewed journal Church Monuments, she is particularly interested in the commemoration of children in tomb monuments as well as in materiality: her latest research focuses on effigial tombs in metal (esp. bronze) in Europe. Sophie previously taught at the universities of Leicester, Manchester and St Andrews, and is a long-standing freelance tutor at the University of Cambridge where she offers courses in her specialist areas of Netherlandish and Dutch art. She has published widely and is an internationally acknowledged expert in her field.
Stephen Farthing RA
Painter and writer
Stephen Farthing is a British painter and writer. He was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1998 and currently serves as the Chairman of its Exhibitions Committee. Farthing has exhibited extensively in solo shows since his first solo exhibition held at the Royal College of Art Gallery, London. His work, representing Britain, was shown at the Sao Paulo Biennale, leading to many further solo shows around the world – including in the UK, the US, Mexico, Argentina, Uruguay, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and France. Farthing has been commissioned to create paintings for the National Portrait Gallery, London, the Cleveland Browns, and the Dorset Hospital Trust, among others. His most recent publication that he wrote with his brother Dr Michael Farthing MD, Leonardo da Vinci: Under the Skin was published by the RA in January 2019. Farthing studied at St Martin’s School of Art, London, completed a Master’s degree in Painting at the Royal College of Art, London, and won a postgraduate painting scholarship at The British School at Rome.
Vernon Rapley
Director of Cultural Heritage Protection and Security, Victoria and Albert Museum, London
Vernon Rapley is the Director of Cultural Heritage Protection and Security at the Victoria and Albert Museum. Vernon is a Special Advisor for the UK Government’s Cultural Heritage Protection Fund, as well as founder and chairman of the National Museum Security Group and chairman of the Security of Major Museums Europe Group (SOMME). He is the UK lead for Tourism on the Cross-sector Security and Safety Communications Team, a board member of the International Council of Museum Security and a member of the National Police Chiefs’ Council's Heritage & Cultural Property Crime Working Group. Before joining the V&A in 2010, Vernon served as a Scotland Yard Detective for 24 years; the last 10 years spent as the head of the Art & Antiques Unit. During that time he overtly and covertly investigated all manner of art and cultural property crime. He was a member of The Interpol Tracking Task Force (Iraq), as well as representing UK Law Enforcement on International initiatives to combat the illicit trade of cultural goods from places such as Afghanistan, South America, Eastern Europe and South East Asia. Towards the end of his police career he organised two exhibitions on fakes and forgeries, the second of which, displayed in 2010, attracted 30,000 visitors in just 3 weeks.
Dr Friederike Gräfin von Brühl
Partner at K&L Gates LLP
Dr Friederike Gräfin von Brühl is a partner at K&L Gates LLP in Berlin with a special focus on dispute resolution in the art market. As a legal advisor to art dealers and collectors as well as museums, foundations and trusts, she has represented relevant parties in major recent art forgery and restitution matters in Germany, including the Beltracchi litigations and the negotiations around the Munich art trove of the Gurlitt collection. She is teaching art law at Freie Universität Berlin and has contributed the German chapter to The Art Collecting Legal Handbook, 2016. She is recommended by Best Lawyers / Handelsblatt as a leading practitioner in the area of art law.
Richard Charlton-Jones
Consultant
Old Master Paintings
Richard Charlton-Jones has worked as an Old Master paintings specialist for over thirty-six years. Educated at Lancing and Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he studied History of Art, he joined Sotheby’s in 1982. From 1982 until 1989 he worked in British Paintings, and in 1990 joined the Old Master Paintings department. As Senior Director and auctioneer he worked there until 2016, specialising in all the principal schools of European painting from the late thirteenth-century to the beginning of the nineteenth, and in particular the British and Early Netherlandish schools. He has been responsible for a number of significant discoveries in the Old Master field, including Orazio Gentileschi’s Holy Family with the infant Saint John the Baptist, found in 2000 and sold for £2.42 million, and Jan Brueghel the Elder’s lost Aeneas and the Sibyl in the underworld, brought to light and sold for £1.92 million in 2007. In 2000 he found Cimabue’s Madonna and Child with two angels in the collections at Benacre Hall in Suffolk. Without doubt the most important discovery in the field of early Italian paintings for a generation, it was subsequently sold by private treaty to the National Gallery in London. Richard has also been closely involved as expert and auctioneer in a number of major sales, most notably that of the Hanoverian Royal Collections at Schloss Marienburg in Germany in 2005. He now works as a picture consultant to auction houses and private collectors, and also lectures widely on the subject of Old Master Paintings, Child portraiture, Forgeries and Connoisseurship. He was co-author of The British Portrait 1660-1960, published in 1991.
Adam Lowe
Director, Factum Arte
Founder, Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation
Adam Lowe is the director of Factum Arte and founder of the Factum Foundation for Digital Technology in Conservation. Adam's workshop builds connections between new technologies and craftsmanship that result in innovative artworks and thought-provoking exhibitions and facsimiles. He has produced artworks for leading contemporary artists including Anish Kapoor, Marc Quinn, Grayson Perry Shirazeh Houshiary and Marina Abramovic. His innovations in the field of conservation include the facsimile of Veronese’s Wedding at Cana, Caravaggio’s paintings of St Matthew and the facsimile of the map Al Idrisi created for King Roger in 1154. He has completed conservation projects in Egypt, Italy, Russia, Spain, UK, the US, Nigeria and Chad, and his work has been exhibited at institutions such as the National Gallery of Art, the Royal Academy, The Museo del Prado in Madrid and many more. In 2009, he received the Microsoft Award for Les Humanités Scientifiques delivered by Sciences Po and in 2014 the Factum Foundation received the Apollo Award for Digital Innovation of the Year.
Lynn Catterson
Art Historian
Columbia University
Lynn Catterson (Columbia Univ., Ph.D., 2002) began with an interest in Italian Renaissance sculpture with a focus on the marketplace and how 15th-century sculptors satisfied consumer demand for antiquities. Lately, she is working on the art market in 19th-centu Florence from the point of view of production and social network via its preeminent dealer, Stefano Bardini, drawing upon material in the state archive of the Bardini family and business. The main goal of the Bardini project is to create a digital research platform to unite the material in Florence with corresponding archival material from individuals and institutions with whom Bardini transacted art.
About the space
The Benjamin West Lecture Theatre
New in 2018, the lecture theatre builds on the RA’s heritage of rigorous and lively debate. This magnificent double-height space, with over 250 seats, allows us to share our artists and scholars with the world. Original clerestory windows provide a spectacular day-lit space, brought to life with a continuous programme of events including lectures, debates, film screenings and concerts.
Our courses and classes programme
Our varied programme of short courses and classes provides an opportunity to explore subjects ranging from life drawing to the history of exhibitions and arts management, led by expert tutors and practising artists. These courses introduce traditional art-making processes, as well as perspectives on art history, theory and business.
Give this course as a gift
All of our courses can be purchased as a gift for a friend or family member – giving the gift of education and a remarkable experience. To arrange a personalised Gift Voucher, please contact Anna Pojer, Academic Programmes Manager, by calling 020 7300 5684 or email anna.pojer@royalacademy.org.uk