About half of all paintings circulating in the world are estimated to be fake—and in the Philippines alone, the number could even be higher. The art market attracts its share of the criminally minded, and forgers go to great lengths to manufacture a plausible trail to fool even the sharpest art authenticator. Sometimes, they don’t have to do very much.
Take, for instance, the case of “The Discovery: A Scene from a Stage Play,” which was offered in 2014 as a Juan Luna painting and appraised at P55 million by a well-known Luna expert. Art historian and professor Santiago Pilar, who authored Juan Luna: The Filipino As Painter—considered the definitive biography on the national hero—authenticated the painting with a long preamble warning the public against “the simplistic, evidently haphazard, thus unreasoned remarks on art authenticity, usually made by people without any systematic training.” In his assessment, he wrote that examination under ultraviolet light revealed that the paint used in the signature—signed “LVNA”—is of the same age as the rest of the paints.
A copy of a 2012 catalogue from Drouot-Richelieu, a French auction house, soon surfaced. It showed the exact same painting, named "La femme trompée," by one P. Ribera, dated 1844. Pilar had dated the “Luna” between 1898 to 1899, the time Luna returned to Paris as a delegate working for the recognition of the Philippine republic.
In an interview with the Manila Bulletin, Pilar firmly stood by his statements, alleging that it was perhaps the Ribera, or the image of the catalog itself, that was a fake. He acknowledged, however, that if he was indeed wrong, it was an “honest mistake.”
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Receipts from the auction house show that a Filipino buyer had won the Ribera painting at a hammer price of 4,000 euros, and had had it shipped to the Philippines. A separate blacklight test on the painting in question indicated that the signature area had in fact been tampered with. The painting went unsold, ostensibly killed by the rumor mill, and Pilar was never heard from again.
“There is no one recognized or designated person or body that can authenticate the work of Juan Luna.”
PHOTO: courtesy of Salcedo Auctions
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Now a boceto of Juan Luna’s seminal Spoliarium will be auctioned off on Sept. 22—incidentally the anniversary of the day he shot, in cold blood, his wife Paz Pardo de Tavera and her mother Juliana Gorricho.
A boceto is a sketch, a study, or a draft of a final artwork, and the painting on offer is a much smaller rendition of the massive work hanging in the National Museum. 3Everyone, it seems, has an opinion about this painting, which suddenly appeared earlier this year. Salcedo Auctions, who was consigned to handle the sale, has a lot riding on this piece, which they have touted to be the art find of the century. Richie Lerma, director of Salcedo Auctions, knows that there is much doubt surrounding the boceto, and for good reason. The painting has not been “authenticated” as such. To which Lerma says, “There is no one recognized or designated person or body that can authenticate the work of Juan Luna.”
The business of art authentication can get quite contentious. Two highly regarded art conservators were asked to look over the boceto—Maita Reyes, the chief chemist-conservator of the Roberto M. Lopez Conservation Center, and Missy Reyes, who has worked with the National Museum and Malacañang. They inspected the painting to give a condition report, and it was found to have been relined, cleaned, and partially restored not too long ago. Missy conducted the UV light test, which showed that the signature—including the marks in Baybayin—was made at the same time as the rest of the painting, “by the original hand that created the artwork.”
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The Lopez Museum, following a misunderstanding over its perceived endorsement of the boceto, released a statement saying that it abides by the International Council of Museums’ Code of Ethics: “As such, it does not engage in authentication services and makes no warranty, representation, statement, or guarantee with respect to any object’s authenticity, attribution, or otherwise.” Lerma, for his part, makes it clear that neither of the conservators are in any position to authenticate the work, and were merely consulted to provide a factual evaluation. “But in so far as Salcedo Auctions is concerned,” he says, “we need to make a call in terms of its attribution and give an opinion regarding its originality and authenticity.”
Determining the authenticity of a painting requires a three-factor authentication process, so to speak.
Determining the authenticity of a painting requires a three-factor authentication process, so to speak. First, there has to be a high level of connoisseurship, or verification from a qualified authority with extensive knowledge of the artist and proven scholarship. Such authorities can also be the relatives, employees, or heirs of the artists, or people who have been legally granted permission to judge work attributed to a particular artist. Whoever this entity is must also be universally recognized in the art community as the ultimate expert on the subject.
For the works of Juan Luna, as Lerma mentioned, such an entity does not exist. So what his team did was gather as much historical evidence as they could find. “After months of research, we happily made the announcement that, yes, we believe it’s a work by Juan Luna,” he says. Salcedo Auctions has been posting short videos (soundtracked by the dramatic strains of Carmina Burana) that lay out just how they arrived at their conclusion. Lerma recounts the process they went through: “The first piece of evidence we looked at is art history. You have to remember where Luna was at this time, even in terms of the creation of the Spoliarium, where he was creatively.”
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In 1878, Luna moved to Rome with the artist Alejo Vera, who was his mentor and professor at the Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Spain. Vera took his best student along to help him with some commissioned work he was doing in Italy. Vera also happened to win first prize at the National Exhibition of Fine Arts in Madrid in 1881 for a painting called "Numancia," which depicted a scene from the siege of Numancia. Compositionally, the "Spoliarium," which also won first prize at the same expo in 1884, is very similar, with the embattled Numancians replaced by dying gladiators. The idea for the gladiators came from a book Luna read by French historical novelist Charles Dezorby, in which he describes the gory spectacle down in the basement of a Roman amphitheater.
“One sure way you would place or do well in the salon competitions would be to create a historical painting and fill it with a lot of people and action scenes,” Lerma explains, “because that shows your consummate skill not just in rendering figures, but in composition, color, lighting, etc.” He points out that the boceto is almost evenly lit, like "Numancia" before it, and there are several unfinished figures as well as details that do not appear in the final version. The artist was putting down his initial thoughts, playing with perspective and the relationships of forms and colors. Lerma continues, “Look how he edits down the 1884 work. The focus is more on the gladiator than the elements around him. It’s very much indicative of the talent of Luna—he actually holds back from the bravura of having so many elements. He already had that confidence as an artist to even challenge the expectations at the time to fill up the painting with figures.”
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Lerma found a reprint of the catalog from the 1893 Natural History and Ethnography Exhibition in Madrid where the boceto was first mentioned. The text cites Luna as the curator of the Philippine pavilion, which featured tribal artifacts and other colonial-gaze objects taken from indigenous people (the Philippine Exposition of 1887 showcased a group of so-called Igorots, which thoroughly outraged Jose Rizal). Amongst these cultural curiosities, Luna exhibited his own works, the boceto of the Spoliarium and "España y Filipinas," as well as a couple of Felix Resurreccion Hidalgo paintings including one called "La Pintura." A newspaper review at the time couldn’t help but notice the incongruity, saying there was no excuse for including these very European paintings next to “Indio” handicrafts.
A photograph of the Philippine booth shows what could very well be "La Pintura," which, a century later, is also owned by the same private collector who is selling the boceto. This brings us to the next important element in art authentication, which is provenance. Provenance refers to the history of ownership of an artwork, and strong documentary evidence is necessary to prove how it has transferred from one person to the next, starting with the original owner, the artist. The boceto and La Pintura were evidently owned by the same family in Spain for several generations, who can be traced back to Jose Vasquez Castiñeira, the one-time mayor of the town of Sarria, where Lerma traveled earlier this year to view the painting in person.
Just a few days before the boceto’s public viewing at the Peninsula, new information further supporting the boceto’s provenance had come in
Just a few days before the boceto’s public viewing at the Peninsula, new information further supporting the boceto’s provenance had come in, upturning what Lerma previously conjectured about how the Castiñeiras got hold of the works. An email from the family that once owned Luna’s "España y Filipinas" reveals that the boceto was part of the same collection inherited from Doña Maria Nuñez Rodriguez, the daughter-in-law of Vasquez Castiñeira. They had sold it at a Barcelona auction in 2012 where it was purchased by a Filipino collector, who in turn sold it at Sotheby’s Hong Kong in 2013, where it was acquired by the National Gallery of Singapore. It’s very likely that the family came to possess these great works through their connection to Pedro Paterno, or specifically his wife, Maria Luisa Piñeira.
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Paterno was the commissioner of the Philippine pavilion in 1893, where the boceto, "La Pintura," and "España y Filipinas" were exhibited together. The paintings must have belonged to Paterno at one point or another—he was a known art patron and a central figure of the Filipino expatriate community in Spain; later on he would become the second prime minister of the First Philippine Republic. In the Sotheby’s catalogue essay, Ambeth Ocampo notes that Luna gifted Paterno with "España y Filipinas," and that it was “soon acquired by a friend of Paterno’s wife, whose family retained the painting until last year.” Doña Maria Nuñez Rodriguez, who didn’t have children of her own, distributed the paintings to different branches of the family.
Two years ago, Salcedo Auctions sold a painting attributed to Luna called "Ado…Va La Nave" for a record-breaking P47 million, the highest a Luna has ever fetched in the Philippines, and the second in the world, after "España y Filipinas". “The provenance for 'Ado…Va La Nave'is even murkier,” Lerma says. The story of the painting was that it came from an owner in Argentina, who claims it was given to him by a Cuban businessman who had fled Cuba for Buenos Aires during the revolution. No records or documents show how the painting left Paris for Havana, then Buenos Aires to Cordoba, but in the end that didn’t really matter.
Part of that same auction lot was a painting titled "Una Damita," which supposedly turned up in Madrid and was attributed to Hidalgo. Valued between P6-8 million, the painting somehow went unsold. A month later, a couple of Internet sleuths discovered that a near-identical painting was auctioned off twice in Brussels, once in 2001 and again in 2014, where it was priced at 2,000 euro. Both times, the painting was called "Portrait d’une fillette au chapeau" by Leon Herbo, a Belgian artist who lived and worked during the same period as Hidalgo. In light of the information, Salcedo Auctions withdrew the painting from its catalogue.
Interestingly, the auction house had sought the opinion of recognized scholars, “among them the leading authority and author of two award-winning books of colonial Philippine art in Spain,” as they said in a statement. Could this be the erstwhile Santiago Pilar? Was he also party to the blacklight examination which did not detect the rather major alteration of the background being stripped? Of course, there may be other semi-plausible explanations, like Hidalgo copied Herbo or vice versa. But absent any other concrete claims to authenticity, the painting was downright dubious.
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PHOTO: Courtesy of Salcedo Auctions
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The final key to unlocking the authenticity of a work of art is through scientific analysis. With paintings, this would entail submitting a sample of the piece, if not the whole painting, to an authentication group that uses advanced techniques like photomicrography and infrared reflectography, or good old detective work like fingerprint matching. Blacklight remains a standard test in detecting irregularities and floating signatures, but it can be bypassed with non-flourescing paints and masking varnishes that emit that greenish glow. Artists, museums, and art collectors should now consider using blockchain technology to safeguard their artworks against forged provenances. With blockchain, a digital ID is assigned to a work of art, and every time the art changes hands, the transaction is recorded using cryptography, making it nearly impossible to tamper with.
The boceto was given only the blacklight treatment; since Lerma believes that with the evidence already on hand there was no need for more invasive procedures. Skeptics—of which there are still several—think that the painting should be subjected to more thorough forensic investigation to put an end to any doubts, especially since it went through recent reconditioning. When it comes to sought-after Filipino masters, the combination of inflated prices and an incomplete catalogue raisonne has made the local art scene a hotbed for unscrupulous authentication practices. And without proper authenticators, there will never be a shortage of talented art forgers in the Philippines.
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