FAKE PAINTINGS GALORE

By Arnel Mirasol

Wikipedia defines art forgery as the creation of works of art which are falsely attributed to other, usually more famous, artists. Copies, replicas, and reproductions are not considered forgeries if the copying artist puts his own signature on the artwork and not that of the master. I wrote this essay after reading an article by Constantino Tejero in the Philippine Daily Inquirer, titled "Devious Manansala Thwarted." Tejero discussed in that article a painting, The Bird Seller (top) which was scheduled to be put on the block in a Christie's-Hong kong auction. The painting, dated 1976, was supposedly by Manansala, but alert Manansala collectors immediately notified Christie's of their suspicion that the work was most probably a forgery. There is a similar 1973 Manansala work owned by Judy Araneta Roxas titled Birdman (above right).  The Bird Seller, could have easily passed itself off as genuine despite a subtle difference in coloration. Only the discerning eyes of the Manansala experts prevented its doing so. And indeed, the Bird Seller, when analyzed and compared with the original Manansala, showed hints of being painted by a lesser-skilled artist. The accusation by the Manansala collectors must be true, because the owner of the Bird Seller, when challenged by the Christie's personnel, just quietly withdrew the painting from the auction.

Art forgery is a lucrative racket. One painter, a Dutchman, sold more than a million dollars worth of fake Vermeers before being discovered and jailed. The painter who doubled as an art dealer was Han van Meegeren. He sold several "Vermeer"  paintings (sample at left) to Hitler's air force chief Hermann Goering. When the allies discovered Goering's cache of  supposed Vermeers, and traced its origin to van Meegeren, he was promptly arrested and charged with collaboration with the Nazis - a crime punishable by death. To save his skin, van Meegeren chose to confess to a lesser crime, and claimed that he himself painted the fake Vermeers - a claim he proved when he painted in prison the painting Jesus Among the Doctors (below).

And the racketeers are still at it, it would seem, as shown by the case of a painting being eagerly passed off as a lost Michelangelo (below). The painting was a Pieta, and I - although not formally schooled in art criticism - could easily see that it wasn't a Michelangelo at all. It is but a confused amalgam of the styles of Caravaggio, Giovanni Bellini, and okay, perhaps Michelangelo himself. But Michelangelo always painted his bambinos chubby, not muscular. Therefore, the very muscularity of the two boys betrays the try-hard and silly attempt of whoever painted this to approximate Michelangelo's images of adult male and female figures who are always muscular.

Filipino art forgers have already caught on with their foreign counterparts, as witness the appearance in recent years of a fake Malang, a fake Bencab, and perhaps several fake Botongs. Fake Amorsolos seem to be abundant even during the days when the master was still alive. I've read somewhere that when a buyer of a fake Amorsolo brought the painting to him for authentication, Amorsolo, out of pity for the poor buyer, applied by his own hand daubs of paint to the canvas to make it an "original" work of his.

An assistant curator of a gallery in Manila, told me that he moonlights as a dealer of a Botong watercolor, which is priced at more than a hundred thousand pesos. I have seen an original Botong watercolor, so I told him that I could perhaps tell if the Botong he was selling was a fake. He said that he was sure that the artwork was genuine because it has a certificate of authenticity, signed by Botong's manchador (underpainter or apprentice) himself, to back it up. I cannot say this to his face then , but I'm saying now that some people can be bought. Well, my point is, authentication papers don't mean a thing if the artworks they certify as originals are so badly done that they are easily seen as clear bastardization of the masters' styles.. What art buyers should do is to ask for certificates of authenticity from the artist himself upon purchase of the artwork, as what the buyer of the three oils I exhibited at the Crucible Gallery (below) did.

Seraglio Fantasy, 2005, oil on canvas, 13 X 24 inches

Snorkeler's Blues, 2006, oil on canvas, 13 X 24 inches

Trekkers' Bliss, 2006. oil on canvas, 13 X 24 inches

But documents can also be forged - more easily.  Therefore, the best thing to do perhaps is for an art buyer to have his picture taken while the artist is turning over to him the painting he bought. Just like what me and my cycling buddy and fellow artist, Isko dela Cruz, did, when Jojo Garcia handed over to us his jeepney paintings in fulfillment of our respective exchange deals. (See turn-over photos below) Now, if Isko and I decide to sell Jojo's paintings in an auction, we can easily belie the claim of alert Garcia collectors that what we are selling are dubious Garcias. The transaction won't be thwarted, and Isko and I would run, or rather, bike laughing all the way to the bank, hahaha....

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ON MULTIPLICITY OF STYLES

By Arnel Mirasol

My painting above, Circo de Amor, clearly show the stylistic and thematic gulf separating my current artworks from those I did in the nineteen-eighties (below).  My high school classmate, Vince Tabirara, remarked that he can't quite figure out my style. He said that my artworks don't have a common look that would readily identify them as mine. I replied that my having a multiplicity of styles was inevitable, considering that the artworks he saw in my portfolio were done over a period of thirty years.

I could cite the names of numerous painters whose bodies of works would reveal several stylistic changes. Pablo Picasso was, of course, the most prominent and extreme example.Picasso was a child prodigy. He can already draw like Raphael when he was twelve years old, and he was just fifteen or sixteen when he came out with the paintings comparable to the mature works of the leader of the French Realist School, Gustave Courbet - The First Communion and Science and Charity. (below)

But Picasso wouldn't rest on his laurels. He chucked off that realist style for good in Paris when he created his poignant series of blue paintings. But before that, on the eve of his departure from Spain, he did a suite of pastel drawings more evocative of Roualt - with their dark outlines and simplified figures - than of Courbet. Picasso's Blue Period paintings, done during his starving years, were pictures of sadness, poverty, and misfortune. In 1907, he came out with the landmark work, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon which was to become the prototype for Cubism. He next did his Neo-classical series, where the figures this time were of massive proportions, strongly reminiscent of Michelangelo, although very much simplified. The painting which many consider his masterpiece, the Guernica, was apparently a fusion or synthesis of his cubist and neo-classic styles. Picasso went on to create more paintings, so innovative and revolutionary in form, that art historians now find hard to label or classify. (selected samples of Picasso's paintings below.)

Another painter who have trekked the style spectrum, so to speak, was the surrealist Salvador Dali, who started out as an impressionist. (selected samples of Dali's paintings below) With the advent of cubism, he promptly did paintings that hewed closely to Picasso's style. He also did mixed-media, minimalist abstracts when abstraction was in vogue. When he became a member of the surrealist movement he focused his efforts on creating dream-inspired paintings rendered in his trademark illusionistic manner. But unlike Picasso who stuck to his deconstructions or distortion of the human figure to the end, Dali's imagery in his later years , especially in his massive religious murals, showed a resurgent concern with correct anatomy.

Other painters who've switched styles in the course of their career were Camille Pissaro, George Braque,Wassily Kandinsky, Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele, Jackson Pollock, Frank Stella, Jasper Johns, Stanley Spencer among the foreign painters, and Vicente Manansala, Hernando Ocampo, Jerry Navarro, Prudencio Lamarrosa, and Bencab, among the Filipinos.

So you see, switching styles doesn't really diminished a painter. The opposite could in fact be true, because that can also be a mark of versatility, or even ingenuity. It might actually be just a revelation of the painter's restless spirit and fondness for experimentation, and urge to elevate his art to a new and higher level.

(below, selected paintings by Bencab)

National Artist Benedicto Cabrera (Bencab)

WORKS ON PAPER

By Arnel Mirasol

Old Rex Bookstore, 1999, acrylic on paper, Rex Printing collection

Celebrated painter Renato Habulan, invited me to join him and other celebrity artists, Fred Liongoren, Benjie Torrado-Cabrera, and Pinggot Zuleta, in an exhibit of paintings on paper. The show, Papelismo, opened at the Crucible Gallery on September 4, 2012 (below).

It was late 2011 when Ato texted me about his plan to curate such a show, because he noticed that works on paper are being ignored nowadays by artists and art collectors alike. Well, there may be truth to what he said, because Atty. Jing David, owner of Galerie Anna, had also observed the same thing. We were at the Altro Mondo, during the opening of an exhibit of our group of Metrobank painting competition winners, when he told me that galleries find it difficult to increase the price of paintings on paper. There seems to be a certain ceiling beyond which the prices of paintings on paper cannot go. Sari Ortiga, President of the Crucible Gallery, also suggested a similar idea, when he advised me to focus on doing oils on canvas, because they are easier to sell. And he was right there, because the three oils I exhibited in my solo show at the Crucible in 2007, were bought wholesale by a single collector - at a good price. I surmised that one reason why collectors seem to be reluctant to buy paintings on paper is the perceived "perishability" of such works. Pish posh!- I say to that.

A Gift of War, 1983, mixed-media on paper, my collection

The painting at right, A Gift of War,  is one of my oldest extant works. It is a 1983 acrylic on Ingres-Fabriano paper. Compared to my old oils done during the same period, this painting aged admirably well. While my old oil paintings have lost their luster because of the accumulated dust and grime, this painting's colors have surprisingly retained their original intensity. And the paper, which is of archival quality, is still very far from crumbling.

The Emperor's New Clothes, 2000, acrylic on paper, May C. Reyes collection

The Sea Gypsy, 2002, acrylic on paper. Bert and Dulce Falsis collection

Submarine Buffet, 2008, acrylic on paper, Vince Tabirara collection

Mermen on Parade, 2008, Acrylic on paper,  Dr. Manolet Delfin collection

In my illustrations (above), I have mostly used acrylic on Canson Montval paper. Sometimes, when I finished a work, the paper buckled or warped because of the many acrylic washes I applied to it. This may surprised you, but what I did to straighten the paper out was immersed it for a second or two in a tub of water, and then hang it on a line to dry. Once dried, the paper regained its flatness with the colors remaining undisturbed and intact. However, I wouldn't recommend that process to watercolorists, because I'm sure that watercolor paintings, even if treated with fixatif would surely be erased if soaked in water. And oil paintings too should be kept away from water because water tends not only to weaken the bond between pigment and the canvas surface, it also makes the dried paint brittle which would result in its cracking and flaking off. One way of protecting paintings on paper is to always keep them framed under glass, or wrapped in plastic, which I should say isn't an inconvenient or expensive thing to do, compared again to what should be done to prevent an oil painting from collecting dust and grime - which is to display them in a dust-free or air-conditioned room.

By the way, A Gift of War, which was my plate for our Composition class at the UE School of  Fine Arts, was one of the two paintings I submitted to the City Gallery in 1985 for approval. Our group, the SETA Movement, intended then to hold our first show at that gallery. We asked Jun Rocha, a fellow UESFA student and one of the gallery's resident artists, to intercede for us. But he, to our disappointment, returned with the word that our exhibit proposal was rejected. Jun said that the reason the gallery owner wasn't sold on our proposal was because she considered this painting an illustration. Today I'm still baffled why she said that, because any competent art practitioner could easily see that A Gift of War is a serious work of art - a pure painting - and not an illustration.

Supremacy of Eve, 2006, acrylic on paper, Elvira Gonzaga collection