Fake or Fortune II
Here’s a curious thing: this evening BBC Television re-showed an epsode of Fake or Fortune in which a fake Chagall was exposed. During the course of the programme and afterwards a post we had published on the programme the first time round (“Good Science, Over-reaching science, Over-promoted Science”, 24 February 2014) received an unexpected spike of visits.
Our post had begun:
“On February 10th the Daily Telegraph published a letter from a professor of chemistry at University College London (Robin J. H. Clark) questioning the relationship between art and science in general terms and with regard to a supposed Chagall painting featured on a recent BBC Fake or Fortune television programme. Prof. Clark expressed particular concern over art world failures to heed the testimony of available scientific techniques.
“In the late 1980s the UCL chemistry department had developed a non-invasive technique – “Raman microscopy” – for identifying both natural and synthetic pigments within paintings. Because the latter have known dates of invention, their presence in a picture can establish the earliest date at which it could have been produced. This technique is said by Prof. Clark to have been known to Sotheby’s by 1992. The Chagall painting, he pointed out, could have been exposed as a fake at any point in the last 20 years. He further reported that the painting was exposed as a forgery in his UCL laboratory in July last year in the presence of its owners and the presenters of Fake or Fortune:
“I am disappointed that neither of the presenters of Fake or Fortune made this clear. The conclusion that the painting is a forgery is based on our spectroscopic results, which showed that at least two of the key pigments had not been synthesized until the late Thirties, putting the earliest date for the painting at 1938, long after the supposed date of 1909-10.”
It is not clear why the BBC chose to re-run this controversial programme.
(For that original post, see: Good Science; Over-Reaching Science; Over-Promoted Science.)
Michael Daley. 9 August 2015