After centuries of neglect by the global art establishment, African art is finally becoming big business. This creates the conditions for a perfect storm locally. While the demand for, and value of, African art is rapidly increasing, the South African art market is notoriously under-regulated and vulnerable to exploitation and the spread of fake art.
“Very simply, there is an enormous number of fakes around,” is how Dr Alastair Meredith, a senior art specialist at Strauss & Co, put it to“We are seeing more fakes now than we ever have before. I’d like to think that we are more knowledgeable than we used to be. You know, I think maybe five or 10 years ago, people weren’t maybe as suspicious as they are now. But the reality is, we have for a long time realised that there are a number of artists who are faked extensively.
“When a fake comes into our office to be valued, we will try our best to convince the owner that the work is indeed a fake. And then we would suggest that they maybe take it back to where they bought it from, or donate it to the University of Pretoria who is building an archive of fake artworks. But if they say ‘no, I’d rather keep it,’ there’s nothing we can do. And often they just take it home with them.
The first leg of the stool, provenance, can be tested with reference to archival evidence of the work’s history. This could consist of old images of an artwork, or a description of the piece in a newspaper or catalogue, or a list of works in a collection. For most really famous Western artists, aOne of the reasons why 20are available, particularly of black artists’ work.
Connoisseurs become familiar, through extensive experience with the work, with things like the artist’s brushstroke, or the proportions that they will use: the kind of awareness that Pippa Skotnes brings to her father’s work. The sole response Bonhams was willing to offer through a spokesperson, without elaboration: “Wherever possible, we check the provenance of works that we offer at auction.”
If Bonhams is selling a Rembrandt which will go for millions of pounds, in other words, the auction house is much more likely to put in the hard work of authenticating it ahead of the sale. Though the Skotnes work may have sold for half a million rand, that is — in crude terms — peanuts compared to what other lots may raise.
But forging a Skotnes, as mentioned earlier, also comes with a major potential challenge: the existence of a dedicated gatekeeper in the form of Pippa Skotnes, and the existence of relatively comprehensive record-keeping about his body of work. “Currently I see new fakes every week. The moment an artist passes away, within a fortnight you see the first fake.”
On occasion, he has had greater success. In June 2017, de Kamper saw that a small British auction house was selling a copy of a painting by South African artist Alexis Preller, which the firm was correctly not attempting to market as a Preller original: it bore the signature and date “GR 1977”, two years after Preller’s death.“Less than a year later, lo and behold, there’s the same painting with a Preller signature. The original signature had been painted out.
One of the elements that makes the behaviour of UK-based auction houses like Bonhams seem inexcusable is that, in the UK, there is a clear legislative framework around fake art and a dedicated police unit. Orford says that a person who buys a piece of art believing it is authentic and subsequently finds out it is fake does have a number of potential legal recourses, but they are generally only used by the “very determined and very rich”.
“The guy faking Lucky Sibiya — if he went out on his own, he might actually get somewhere as an artist,” de Kamper says. Enter a number of unscrupulous individuals – including white art dealers – who promised family members that there was money to be made. But just when it seemed that those responsible for South African art fraud might happily continue their crime without consequences forever, a virtually unprecedented press release was sent out on 3 December 2021 by South African specialised crime unit the Hawks.
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