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London Exhibition of Shaun Greenhalgh’s Fakes and Forgeries

Amarna Princess by Greenhalgh. Photo courtesy of Metropolitan Police Service.This Saturday the Victoria and Albert Museum in London will open a show that is all about a fake, in partnership with Scotland Yard. The exhibit, Metropolitan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries, will explore the work of counterfeit mastermind Shaun Greenhalgh, and reveal some of the techniques used by the police to spot fakes.

Over a 17 year period Greenhalgh created fake art pieces that fooled museum experts and sold for sums as high as six figures. Sentenced in 2007 he is currently serving a four year prison sentence. His parents Olive and George Greenhalgh, who assisted in his activities, were given suspended sentences they were both in their 80s when tried.

Shaun Greenhalghs fakes encompassed both the ancient and modern worlds. These include Assyrian reliefs, Thomas Moran paintings and a Barbara Hepworth sculpture.

The Greenhalghs melted down genuine Roman coins in order to create a forged Rizley Park Lanx – a Roman serving plate described in detail by William Stuckley. The art world tentatively accepted it as an original, and the lanx was sold at auction in 1992 for 100,000, before being donated to the British Museum.

But perhaps his most remarkable criminal achievement is that of the so-called ‘Amarna Princess‘ that was sold to the Bolton Museum in 2003 for 440,000. Its a headless 52 cm alabaster statue that shows what appears to be an Egyptian princess.

Now, this is no ordinary fake. Amarna art is a very unique artform in Egyptian history. It was only practiced for about 20 years during and shortly after the reign of the pharaoh Akhenaten (ca. 1352-1336 BC).

Statue of an Amarna Princess

As pharaohs go Akhenaten was a total rebel. When he came to power he threw out Egypts polytheistic religion, focusing Egyptian beliefs around the worship of one entity the Aten, a sun-disc. He built an entirely new capital calledAmarna out in the desert and he brought in a new and utterly strange style of Egyptian art.

Unlike the formal prose of earlier pharaohs, art from his reign shows the human body with long spindly fingers,coneshaped headsand intimate scenes such as Akhenaten kissing one of his daughters. Two years after

Akhenatens death Tutankhamun came to the throne and art returned to its traditional formal style which is seen so beautifully in the artifacts from King Tuts tomb. It has been suggested that Akhenaten suffered from a medical condition, such as Marfan’s syndrome, that affected his appearance and caused him to bring in this new art-style.

So the fact that Greenhalgh was able to create such a convincing fake of a royal from such a unique time period of Egyptian art history is quite remarkable.

The Bolton Museum said in a statement that the rarity of the item actually made it more difficult to out as a fake:

There were few comparable objects to compare the statue to, apart from a statue in the Louvre Museum in Paris. For this reason the statues provenance (ownership history) played an important part in the authentication of the statue, they said in a release on their website. Experts at the British Museum also concluded that it was a genuine piece.

To help peddle the fake, Greenhalghs father played the role of front-man. The elder Greenhalgh told the museum a story about how it had been bought by his great-grandfather at an 1892 auction of items from 4th Earl of Egremonts collection.

Shaun Greenhalghs Slip-up

The success of the Amarna Princess appears to have gone to Greenhalghs head. In 2005 his father (again playing front-man) tried to sell three faked Assyrian reliefs to the British Museum. They depicted ancient battle scenes and at first glance appeared to be genuine. But the work that Shaun Greenhalgh had done on the details was sloppy.

The errors were numerous. The artwork showed what appeared to be 20th century harnesses on the horses, and there was a spelling mistake in the cuneiform inscription. To top it off, this time theGreenhalgh’s cover story about how they came about the artefacts didn’t add up.

Museum curator John Curtis told the journal Art and Antiquites that the condition of the reliefs just didn’t fit the story that the piece had been hidden in their garage for decades.” While Iraqi deserts may help preserve Assyrian reliefs, car garages in northern latitudes dont.

Scotland Yard was called and before long the Greenhalghs were exposed.

Their story of fakery was widely reported in the pressand the BBC dramatized it in 2009 with a play called the The Antiques Rogues Show.

A World Full of Fakes

Fake artefacts are a constant problem in the museum world with the Greenhalgh case presenting one extreme example. In Toronto, Canada, a show just opened at the Royal Ontario Museum on this topic. Its called Fakes and Forgeries: Yesterday and Today and examines both fake ancient artefacts and modern day goods.

Heritage Key interviewed exhibit curator Paul Denis a month back and he admitted that his museum had been taken

The artwork showed what appeared to be 20th century harnesses on the horses, and there was a spelling mistake in the cuneiform inscription

inby fakes as well albeit much further back in the past. The museum has a collection of hundreds of Zapotec artefacts (the Zapotec are a culture in Mexico that dates from 500 BC to present). Out of this collection about half are fake. They were bought in the early 20th century by Charles Currelly one of the founders of the museum.

Currelly also obtained a supposed Minoan ivory statuenamed “Our Lady of Sports.”It showed a women in a dress, with her breasts exposed, engaging in what looked like some sort of athletic activity. It was outed as a fake in 2001, after being on displayat the museum for nearly70 years.

Now, speculation of fakery surrounds the Neues Museum‘s showpiece piece, the Bust of Nefertiti, and, less famously, the bust of Hatshepsut. With such high-profile items seemingly impossible to determine as being either genuine or fake, you have to wonder which, if any, of the world’s treasures on display are actually the work of accomplished fakers. Worried curators should head along to the exhibition at the V&A to get tips from the police on how to tell the real from the replica.

The Metropolitan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries runs from 23 January 7 February 2010 at the V&A Museum, rooms 17a & 18a. Admission free.

Looted Iraqi Treasures? Covered up report reads Britain must return Schoyen Incantation Bowls

Incantation BowlAn archaeological mystery may have come to an end, after an enquiry into the origin of 654 Aramaic incantation bowls from the Schyen Collection was finally made public. The report – recently placed in the House of Lords Library – states that bowls currently finding themselves in Britain were likely to have illegally been looted after the Gulf War and should be returned to Iraq.

Commissioned by the University College in London in 2005, the results of the enquiry are that the bowls were stolen from the historical site of Babylon some time after the 1991 Gulf war, and that their provenance is not Jordan, as believed by Norwegian multimillionaire collector Martin Schyen. They should therefore be returned to Iraq or handed over to police. “The bowls are subject to the Iraq United Nations sanctions order 2003,” says the report, “as cultural objects illicitly removed from Iraq after 6 August 1990 and that UCL has therefore a duty to deliver them to a constable.”

The report was finished in 2006, but its findings were suppressed under a legel settlement made between the UCL and the collector when Schyen started legal proceedings over not getting his bowls back. This settlement also led to the payment of an undisclosed compensation sum to the collector. At that time a joint press release was issued by both parties, stating that: “following a searching investigation by an eminent panel of experts, and further inquiries of its own, UCL is pleased to announce that no claims adverse to the Schyen Collections right and title have been made or intimated.”

This statement is quite different from the report which concluded that although Schyen might not have been aware that the bowls were looted when they were purchased, he was guilty of not showing enough interest into their provenance.

A second statement by the Schyen Collection repeated the claim that the bowls were exported from Jordan prior to 1988 and that they were most likely ‘surface finds’. The statement claimed the bowls were part of a private collection built up in Jordan in the 1930s, and that the collection had been granted a valid export license (questions on the validity of this license can be found on the stanford.edu website) by the Jordanian authorities in 1988.

The collection’s website for provenance of the ‘Rihani Collection’ still reads: “Rihani collection, Irbid and Amman, Jordan (before 196588) and London (1988).”

The 5th to 8th century incantation bowls – borrowed from Schyen in 1996 by an UCL Professor Mark Geller – are still in the United Kingdom. Cambridge academic Lord Renfrew of Kaimsthorn, one of the authors of the report, now calls for the Iraqi goverment to demand the return of the bowls and if need be even persue the repatriation of the looted artefacts in court.

The report is now also available on wikileaks: “The file is the report from an expert inquiry into the provenance of 654 Mesopotamian incantation bowls owned by antiquities collector Martin Schoyen and loaned to University College London. The inquiry was begun after allegations were made that the bowls were were looted from Iraq. The report was suppressed as part of the legal settlement in which the bowls were returned to Schoyen.“

This is not the first time the Schyen Collection – which may be the world’s largest collection of ancient manuscripts – has been questioned over the origin of its objects. Shortly after in 2001 Martin Schyen announced he wanted to sell the entire collection for 100 million USD, questions were raised about Buddhist manuscripts smuggled out of Afghanistan that Schyen eventually aquired and the Egyptian ambassador to Norway called for an inquiry into how Schyen came by his Egyptian objects.