Fake News! Trivia Quiz

Answer: Johannes Vermeer

Johannes Vermeer of Delft in the Netherlands was famous for his use of light and for the stillness of the scenes that he created. His work was also notable for the use of linear perspective which, although not new, was rare for the time. Vermeer produced a very small body of work, just 34 paintings are attributed to him, so when news that a Vermeer, "Christ with the Adulteress", had been found in an Austrian salt mine as part of Hermann Goering's trove of stolen artwork, the Dutch government took action.

The sale to Goering was traced back to Dutch painter Han Van Meegeren and he was arrested. When the painting was verified by an expert as a genuine by Johannes Vermeer, he was charged with aiding and abetting the enemy. Facing the death penalty he confessed to having painted it himself and to have traded the forgery for 137 genuine paintings that Goering had looted from The Netherlands.

To prove his story, Van Meegeren reproduced another "new" Vermeer painting under armed guard. He also confessed to another 16 paintings attributed to Vermeer and other Dutch artists that he had created. When these were examined and it was discovered that he had used Bakelite, a substance invented in the 20th century, to falsely age the paintings, the charge was changed to forgery and he was sentenced to a year in prison.

Answer: Henri Matisse

Matisse had painted "Odalisque in Red Trousers" in 1925. The subject of an odalisque, a female slave from a harem typically in the Far East, was a recurring one for Matisse in the second half of his career as his inspiration leaned towards orientalism.

The painting was bought by the Venezuelan government in 1981 for display in the Caracas Museum of Contemporary Art. It wasn't until the owner of a gallery in Miami contacted the museum in 2002 to say that he had been offered the chance to buy the Matisse painting that it was discovered that what was displayed on their gallery wall was not the original. That had been stolen at least two years previously and replaced by a copy. That it took so long to discover the theft is surprising, given the poor quality of the copy (look it up on the internet to see for yourself). It was another ten years before the museum would get the painting back after it came up for sale in Miami again and the FBI pounced.

Answer: Alberto Giacometti

Alberto Giacometti was born in Switzerland in 1901 and moved to Paris in his early 20s to study sculpture. Influenced by both the Cubists and Surrealists, a Giacometti sculpture is instantly recognisable. The remarkably slender and elongated forms with rough and heavily textured surfaces were unlike any sculptures that had come before him.

Dutchman Robert Driessen was driven by rejection by the art community. His talent was undoubted but after some early successes his paintings would no longer sell. He was encouraged by a dealer to start replicating other artists and suddenly he had an income again. However, it was once he discovered that, in his words, he "literally had Giacometti in my fingers", that his career reached the next level.

He was happy to make fools of those that had rejected his original works. As he said, "Anyone who believes he can buy a real Giacometti for 20,000 Euros deserves to be duped." He was helped in his subterfuge by the fact that Giacometti's works were never properly catalogued, meaning that there was a huge gap in the market that Driessen could easily fill.

Answer: Max Ernst

Max Ernst was a painter who started as part of the German expressionist movement. He was constantly experimenting with new techniques and rejected the traditional aesthetics of art, preferring instead randomness and the absurd juxtaposition of the grotesque and the more formal. He became a leading figure in both the Dada and Surrealist movements.

As the son of an art restorer, Wolfgang Beltracchi had learned at a young age how to replicate the style of famous artists and he developed those skills into a career of forgery. He specialised in creating "new" or "lost" works by artists who had used materials that were still easy to obtain. He was supported by his wife Helene, who established fake histories for the paintings, which she claimed had been bought by her art collecting grandparents in the 1920s and 1930s. She created photographs that were artificially aged in which she posed as her own grandmother with the artworks visible on the walls in the background.

The Beltracchis' most spectacular success came with a painting called "The Forest" which was created in the style of Max Ernst. It was sold to a Parisian gallery for several million dollars. But their undoing came when Wolfgang created a painting by Heinrich Campendonck that was supposedly from 1914. The white paint that he normally used for such creations was unavailable so he used a replacement, not knowing that the pigment contained titanium, a substance that was not used in white paints until 1916. Though only a small miscalculation it was enough to see the Beltracchis caught and Wolfgang was sentenced to six years in prison for embezzlement.

Answer: Camille Corot

Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot was a prominent landscape painter in 19th century France. He is considered a significant figure in the emergence of the Impressionist movement. One of his innovations was to paint "en plein air" or outdoors, so that he could capture the natural light and weather effectively. The simplicity of Corot's style helped to make him a target for forgers. It is estimated that there are over 100,000 artworks attributed to Corot in the United States even though is believed that he only produced 3,000 pieces in his lifetime.

One such forger was Eric Hebborn. He was a talented artist who, when younger, worked in art conservation and soon became aware of how easily restoration could step over the line into counterfeiting. He began to create new paintings in the style of artists such as Rubens, Van Dyck and Corot.

After more than 20 years of fooling the art world, Hebborn confessed his crimes in 1984. Far from being ashamed of what he had done, Hebborn bragged about the breadth of his deception, claiming that several galleries had his originals on their walls. He even wrote two books detailing some of his forgeries and how he had achieved them, including printing a picture of one of his Corot paintings alongside the original, challenging experts to spot the difference.

Shortly after the publication of the second of these books, he was found dead in a back street in Rome. He had been beaten to death and there was some speculation that this was a revenge killing by or on behalf of someone who had been deceived by him.

Answer: Mark Chagall

One morning in 1967 artist David Stein brewed a cup of tea and used it to give the appearance of age to some paper on which he then painted three watercolours. That afternoon he took the circus scenes he had created to a gallery in New York City and sold them to an art dealer as newly rediscovered Chagall originals along with certificates of authentication that he had forged. By pure coincidence, later that same afternoon Chagall himself visited the same gallery and immediately denounced the freshly bought paintings as fakes. He reported the fraud to the police and Stein was arrested.

Chagall was a popular target for forgers. His distinctive expressionistic style with his dreamlike settings and his use of vibrant colours did not involve highly complex techniques that would be difficult to imitate. He was also a prolific artist, which made it hard for the market to keep track of every piece that he made, especially because his earlier works were not well documented.

Despite the fact that no art dealers would support the case against Stein, for fear of damaging their own reputations, he was found guilty of fraud and sentenced to several years in prison. On his release he used his notoriety to sell his own original paintings, but it was discovered years later that he had never given up on his more illegitimate activities.

Answer: Pieter Bruegel the Elder

There are many complications in the world of Pieter Bruegel the Elder. For a start his name was usually spelled Bruegel, while his son's name was regularly spelled Brueghel. But in the art world, the confusion was more deliberate. Bruegel the Elder was a leading figure in the Dutch and Flemish Renaissance and a key influence in the development of the Dutch Golden Age. He was primarily known for his genre paintings, paintings that depicted everyday peasant life. One such painting was "Netherlandish Proverbs", a grand artistic interpretation of Flemish folk culture and aphorisms.

Pieter the Elder died when his children were still young so they were taught to paint by their grandmother, Mayken, herself an artist of great repute. Pieter the Younger opened his own workshop in the late 1580s and soon started producing copies of his father's works. Numerous versions of the "Proverbs" were produced, some were copies but others swapped the depicted proverbs for new ones. The proliferation of new versions of the Elder's work confused the market and the Younger's reputation dwindled over time, as it was not always clear whether a work was an original piece or a copy of his father's work. However, his reputation was revived in the 20th century when his original pieces became sought after once more.

Answer: Rembrandt van Rijn

Rembrandt van Rijn was a renowned Dutch Master, celebrated as one of the greatest artists in history. His technical mastery of light and shadow in his work was combined with a rare talent for conveying great emotional depth on canvas. He produced a wide range of works including landscapes, genre paintings and portraiture, such as the self-portrait shown here.

His paintings and drawings are on the walls of museums around the world. Sometimes when you visit a museum you might see someone seated in front of a Rembrandt sketching in their little book a copy of the work in front of them. If in the early 1950s you encountered such a scenario then it might have been Tom Keating that you were seeing. Keating claimed to have learned his craft this way. The skills he learned copying the works of many great artists in the museums of London made him the forger with arguably the widest range of counterfeits in the 20th century.

Keating stated that his attempts to destroy the gallery system by flooding it with forgeries were a socialist action. He was incensed by the way many artists had died in poverty while the gallery owners continued to enrich themselves on the back of their work, even after they had died. He was caught when, in the 1970s, a series of faked paintings attributed to landscape artist Samuel Palmer were traced back to him. A series of articles were published in "The Times" newspaper outing him as a forger to which Keating responded "I do not deny these allegations. In fact, I openly confess to having done them."

Keating's skill meant that his forgeries were very difficult to spot and, as he never revealed a list of the paintings he had made, it is likely that many are still part of prestigious art collections around the world.

Answer: Pablo Picasso

Picasso was arguably the most important and impactful artist of the 20th century. His prolific output demonstrated a breathtaking versatility of styles from Cubism, a movement he co-founded with Georges Braque, to more classical forms shown in his blue and rose periods. The expression of the personal, social and political in his work profoundly influenced a variety of artists in his wake.

Elmyr De Hory was born in Hungary in 1906 and after moving to Paris to study art he drifted into the world of forgery after selling a pen-and-ink drawing to a British woman. The woman believed that she was buying an original by Picasso and de Hory chose not to correct her. Realising he had a knack for counterfeiting, and that it would make him more money than his own original works, he made it his career.

David Stein had described his process of creating fake works as "entering the mind and soul" of the artist he was forging. De Hory was having none of that, describing those words as "vulgar and romantic nonsense". What De Hory did was study the artist's work in very great detail and practice repeatedly, until finding the technique that worked. But he was insistent that his works were originals and not fakes. "I never copied. The only fake thing in my paintings was the signature."

Answer: Hans Holbein the Younger

The National Gallery in London set up a laboratory in 1934 to look into (and under) the paintings of dubious provenance within their collection. In 2010 they set up an exhibition to showcase the work of the scientists in this laboratory and put on display some of the most expensive mistakes in the gallery's illustrious history.

Among the mistakes exhibited was the supposed work of Hans Holbein the Younger. Holbein was a 16th century Renaissance-style portrait painter who had moved to England as a young man and built his reputation with portraits of Thomas More and his family. After leaving England for four years he was invited back by Anne Boleyn, who was courting King Henry VIII as he sought a divorce from his first wife. Holbein's work so impressed Henry that he was appointed King's Painter in 1535.

The "Portrait of Alexander Mornauer" by Hans Holbein the Younger was part of the National Gallery collection from its purchase in 1990. It was taken to the laboratory and examination of the paints by x-ray and infra-red photography revealed that the painting had been doctored to allow it to be passed off as a Holbein original. The background colour had been replaced with a pigment not available before 1720 and the shape of the subject's hat had been altered to match the style of Holbein's time. Though the original artist is unknown, the painting is still considered to be of high value because of the scarcity of portraits that exist from the period that it was painted.