Fake art, the greatest painters, the National Gallery Singapore – take your pick of art shows and documentaries on TV
- A New Yorker posing as an art dealer hired one of Ai Weiwei’s classmates to fake paintings, which were passed to a Manhattan art gallery for sale
- The story is told in a Netflix documentary, and Netflix is also where you’ll find a primer on great artists. BBC Earth admires the National Gallery Singapore
Art – like everything else – can’t exist in a vacuum. So it’s hardly surprising to find it filtering into other disciplines, particularly architecture.
From the curly Corinthian column to the capering, cavorting cartouche, fancy designs have found their way into and onto buildings. Some edifices, however, can be said to have inspired works of art themselves – while housing works of art.
Its centrepiece – which presenter Rob Bell calls the epitome of “clever engineering […] that looks beautiful” – doesn’t hang on a wall but props up the building’s extensive glass roof. It is a sculpted, load-bearing steel tree that seems to grow to the top of the gallery’s atrium, branching out wildly as it ascends. Standing sentinel over “one of the most important art spaces in Asia”, it is literally “art for art’s sake” – as 10cc sang.
The sellers were descendants of Holocaust victim Johanna Margarethe Stern-Lippmann, from whom the painting had been stolen by the Nazis in the 1930s.
Kandinsky’s abstract style, we’re told, was influenced by principles of the Bauhaus art school, where he taught – more proof that art and architecture have long been familiar bedfellows.
Predictably, big hubris often accompanies ownership of works by art-market big names, which opens the door to big-time fraud.
Gripping documentary Made You Look: A True Story About Fake Art (Netflix) investigates “the biggest art fraud” perpetrated in the United States, which culminated in a big-news trial in 2016.
Central to a story that “the art world was willing” to believe are previously unknown “masterworks” and Chinese artist Pei-Shen Qian, described here as “artist, maths professor, master forger”.
His works went from easel to showroom thanks to Ann Freedman, then the director of Manhattan’s august Knoedler Gallery, a major player in art-world taste-making founded in 1846.
Freedman is called “gullible and ambitious” by one contributor, and throughout the documentary it is left to the viewer to decide if she was complicit in a fraud that eventually spanned two decades, 60-plus paintings and US$80 million; or, as another interviewee suggests, innocent, yet “one of the stupidest people to have ever worked at an art gallery”.
Either way, paintings supplied by Knoedler trotted off around the world to museums, galleries and various supremely rich and ultimately angry collectors – some of whom, on this evidence, are obnoxious and deserving of little sympathy.
Tantalisingly, a film unit goes in search of Qian, now a fugitive, and coincidentally discovers a Shenzhen factory producing “copies and fakes for international collectors”. Brace yourselves for a cascade of Knoedlers.
