February 2012

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Last week Peter-Ashley Russell was sentenced to three years in prison at Snaresbrook Crown Court in London for faking and forging antique silver. It was, according to the Goldsmiths’ Company, which oversees Britain’s hallmarking system, the biggest case of its kind since the 1890s. Mr Ashley-Russell’s offences included converting spoons into (more valuable) forks and creating false hallmarks using imitation punches. The Goldsmiths’ Company observed that the fakes were of high quality: the punches were well made, producing hallmarks that would have easily fooled most people, and his fake flatware had remarkably convincing false patination and engraving.

Are forgers getting better? It must surely be the case that forgery is affected by market trends. In the late 1990s Sotheby’s in particular was plagued by forged 18th-century and Regency English furniture of high quality. It was only when the forgers got too bold and faked a pair of chairs from a well-known set at St Giles’s House in Dorset that suspicions were aroused. It seems unlikely that anyone would go to quite those lengths today, since although English furniture of this period can fetch very high prices, it needs a secure, documented provenance to get the market salivating; the more anonymous Georgian dining tables and Carlton desks that fetched high prices 15 to 20 years no longer have such wide appeal, and their price has dropped. It is surely not a coincidence that the famous Greenhalgh family of fakers, based in Bolton, Yorkshire, concentrated on antiquities, such as the fake Egyptian statue (pictured above) acquired by Bolton Museum for nearly half a million pounds. As the supply of antiquities that can be legitimately traded declines, the temptation to forge them must get ever more attractive.

There is nothing admirable about faking, which is simply a sophisticated way of stealing, but in some ways it is hard not to respect the extraordinary ingenuity that forgers can demonstrate. I can remember confidently being told by a leading furniture dealer in the early 1990s that there was no point in forging antiques, since it was much easier, and more profitable, to forge luxury-good items, such as Chanel perfumes. It is possible that was then true, but the high prices fetched by works of art over the past decades have clearly encouraged fakers, and the fact that the market now increasingly focuses on the very best and rarest items means that they have to be really good to succeed. The contemporary art market has always been bedevilled by low-grade fakes, but no forger of new art so far as I know has yet scooped millions. The fact that artists such as Damien Hirst or Marc Quinn rely on craftspeople to make works for them suggest that the potential for really profitable fakes of contemporary art exists, although it will probably be after those artists’ lifetime, when authentication becomes more difficult. But will those works – and any forgeries of them – have held their value? Since forgers have been such a useful barometer of the art world’s enthusiasms over the past 20 years, I wonder what they make of the contemporary art boom?

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