These are good times for the widgety breed that gets its joy from new combinations of old standbys. Examples of its accomplishments: America is now engaged in an economic Pearl Harbour; Satyam is India?s Enron. And voil?, here comes art?s Satyam.
Winner of the Padma Bhushan, SH Raza was also a founding member of the influential Progressive Artists Group, which included FN Souza, MF Husain and Tyeb Mehta as well. The New York Met recognises the birth of this group in 1947 as an attempt to define independent India?s reason for being. Today, its members are arguably the brightest luminaries on modern Indian art?s horizon.
Christie?s sold Raza?s 1973 acrylic on canvas La Terre for $2,537,588 last June. Given that art?s fraudsters are as adept as their financial cousins at sniffing out the odour of big money, it?s really not that striking a shocker that he is being counterfeited these days. What?s raising eyebrows is that a) the artist?s own nephew apparently authenticated the fakes and b) the fakes were spotted at a gallery of high repute.
On the first front, we will have to await further inquiries to fully realise Raza?s relationship with his nephew, and the fraud. But on the latter front, the 70 years old Dhoomimal art gallery, absolving itself of all responsibility by saying that it did not seek validation beyond the one provided by the nephew on the artist?s behalf, is actually in august company. Thomas Hoving, who examined about 50,000 art works over 16 years at the New York Met, found 40% of them were not what they were represented to be. And lest you think that non-western art is more vulnerable to forgeries than the western canon, consider an operation that was broken up by FBI and the Spanish police in March 2008. A multimillion-dollar international ring duped around 1,000 customers into thinking they were buying Chagall, Picasso, Warhol and Dal?! And this is just one of the many frauds involving the canonical giants.
From conventional x-ray to infrared analysis, the art scambuster has plenty of artillery in his arsenal these days. Still, it all comes down to so-called internal audit committees, whether these be housed at galleries or with dealers and auction houses. But as Satyam too has shown, such checks can be quite undependable.