One is an Original...

[Kai Frederik Lorentzen]

Counterfeiting art is so very /last millenium/, no? It was a big theme - 
do also check out PKD's "The Man in the High Castle" - at about the time 
TR was written. Today - remember them Nixon Dollars from "Inherent 
Vice"? - it's all about counterfeiting money. Oh, and I want my fucking 
Deutschmark back ...

No bail out!


On 20.06.2011 17:08, Erik T. Burns wrote:

> One is an original. The other, evidently, a copy. But René Magritte
> was a Surrealist, and the truth behind The Flavour of Tears suggests
> he was enjoying a huge – and probably lucrative – joke.
>
> http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/art/news/its-so-surreal-the-artist-who-forged-himself-2296526.html
>
> It's so Surreal... the artist who forged himself
>
> A new exhibition shows how Margritte could copy. But was it clever
> irony or just desperation?
>
> By Andrew McCorkell
>
> Sunday, 12 June 2011
>
> One is an original. The other, evidently, a copy. But René Magritte
> was a Surrealist, and the truth behind The Flavour of Tears suggests
> he was enjoying a huge – and probably lucrative – joke.
>
> The canvases – both dated 1948 – come together for the first time in
> Britain later this month as part of The Pleasure Principle, Tate
> Liverpool's exhibition of the Belgian artist's work, and the story
> behind them throws light on the artist's early struggles.
>
> When the artist painted the original, he had survived the Second World
> War in German-occupied Belgium, but was unknown and broke. He had just
> come to the end of what is called his Renoir period, which lasted from
> 1943-1947.
>
> Darren Pih, the exhibition's co-curator explained: "He was very
> serious about these works, but he was not a rich man in the 1940s.
> Only in the 1950s did his reputation soar, his work really begin to
> sell, and his quality of life improve."
>
> Experts are now certain that the paintings are both Magritte
> originals, and believe he faked his own work to raise cash.
>
> The question of forgery only arose in 1983 when one of the paintings
> came up for auction in New York. Until then, the art world had been
> unaware of the existence of both pictures because one had been shipped
> to the United States while the other remained in Europe.
>
> The Flavour of Tears was produced around the time Magritte's close
> friend Marcel Mariën claimed Magritte was creating forgeries. In his
> 1983 autobiography, Le Radeau de la Mémoire, Mariën said Magritte was
> making money by selling and producing forgeries of works by Picasso,
> Titian, Max Ernst, Giorgio de Chirico and Meindert Hobbema.
>
> Phi says: "When Marcel Mariën published this text, he was taken to
> court by Magritte's widow. She contested the claim. Marië* was a close
> friend of Magritte: they met in 1937 and he wrote the first biography
> [of Magritte], and he was someone who really understood the artist's
> thinking. But they did fall out in the 1960s. We can't say that there
> were other forgeries, although there is some proof and correspondence
> that Mariën cited."
>
> Phi believes that two collectors saw The Flavour of Tears
> independently in Magritte's studio. "We can only assume Magritte
> painted two identical versions of the same painting. Their similitude
> is such that even the inscriptions on the back of the canvases are the
> same. It's a real mystery as to how this came about."
>
> Mariën says the replica had been faithfully reproduced, "right down to
> the holes made by a caterpillar".
>
> Pih believes that Mariën was describing the way in which Magritte
> created variations of his work. "This was really informed by the art
> market, producing works for collectors, he said. "He is known to have
> produced multiple versions of the same work. In most cases he would
> evolve, improve and refine the image, but this is the only example
> where they are almost identical works."
>
> Pih also points to the fact that forgery and plagiarism are often
> considered as central themes in Surrealism. The original and the
> "forgery" shed light on the painter himself, according to Phi. "He had
> a very anarchic sense of humour. That sense of an anonymous, bourgeois
> man in a grey suit wearing bowler hat. His humour and his work are
> subversive."
>
> When art copies art
>
> The Flavour of Tears is established as a bona fide original, but René
> Magritte and his fellow Surrealists were no strangers to the dark arts
> of forgery. Magritte made a living during the Nazi occupation of
> Belgium by forging Picassos and Renoirs. Fellow artist Marcel Mariën
> would sell them on to private collectors.
>
> The Surrealist movement explores the tension of the real and the
> unreal, and Magritte may well have seen his forgeries as part that
> conflict. Playing a joke on the aficionados, he hung his forgery of
> Max Ernst's The Forest in place of the original in 1943.
>
> Fellow Surrealist Giorgio de Chirico, in his later years, produced
> what he called "self-forgeries" of his earlier, more popular style. He
> would backdate them to fool the critics; ironic revenge for their
> attacks on his later works.
>
>

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