Forgery will still serve a purpose

What do you do with a fake?

By that I mean, what do you do with a forged piece of art?

That’s a question I’ve been dealing with for more than 20 years.

And as of this weekend, the question has finally been answered.

This all starts back in the late 1970s and early 1980s. My parents had collected art for years, but they started to get serious about the works of Indiana artists and pieces with a connection to Richmond, where they were living at the time.

And as the collection grew, their willingness to take a risk increased as well.

Sometime about 1980, my father bought a painting that was attributed to the artist William Merritt Chase.

Chase was a Hoosier, and he was a very big name about the time the 19th century became the 20th. One his greatest works, a self-portrait in his studio, hangs at the Richmond Art Museum as part of its collection.

So it was only logical that dad would want to own a Chase as part of the collection.

But there was one little phrase that should make any art collector nervous: “Attributed to.”

The painting, a nice still life with a pitcher and some onions, was signed with the name William Merritt Chase. But there was no clear history on it. It lacked what art collectors call “provenance.”

So instead of selling it as a Chase, the gallery sold it as “attributed to” Chase. They were up front about it, and the gallery owners even offered a buy-back arrangement if my father became convinced it was a phony.

He didn’t make use of the buy-back. He liked the picture. Maybe he even liked the little bit of uncertainty about its provenance. “Attributed to” gave it a little mystery.

When my father died in 1983, my mother held onto the painting. She may have been a little suspicious about its roots, however.

At some point, my brother-in-law, who has forgotten more about Indiana art than most people will ever know, decided to have it checked out.

It was taken to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where it was X-rayed. There was evidence that at one point the canvas had been slashed with a knife.

Someone had wanted to destroy it, and someone had mended the damage and put it on the market.

The Indy experts didn’t think it was a real Chase, but to get a definitive answer Stephen sent photos to the best Chase authority in the country. The answer was the same: It was a fake.

It may have been done in the style of Chase. It may have been done by a student of Chase. But it wasn’t a Chase.

The signature on the painting was a forgery.

So, what do you do with a fake?

That became my problem when my mother died in 1994 and I became executor of her estate.

My siblings and I joked at the time that we could probably pass it off in a country auction somewhere and make some serious money, but that wasn’t in our DNA.

Instead, we passed it around.

It hung in Richmond for years, first at one sister’s house, then at the other’s. It never made it to my brother’s place in Minneapolis, but it ended up in our front hall in Portland.

Fair enough, at least for awhile. It’s a nice painting. The frame is very elaborate and over the top. It’s what the appraisers on Antiques Roadshow would call decorative.

But after several years, we didn’t have room for it.

So this summer I thought I’d come up with the perfect solution. I contacted the Richmond Art Museum and asked if they’d like it as an instructional piece for their collection. I figured they could do a seminar on how to detect a forgery or something.

They thought about it but ultimately said no.

That put me back at square one until I asked the museum director a question: “How would it look in your office?”

As a decorative piece, it couldn’t find a home in the collection. But there was no reason he couldn’t hang it on his office wall, then trot it out when they wanted to talk about forgeries.

He loved the idea. We dropped it off Saturday, happy that it has a new home.

Just so you’ll know, the museum will mark the piece indelibly to make sure it’s not passed off as an original sometime in the future.