Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece

Rembrandt to Picasso: Five ways to spot a fake masterpiece 3 days ago Share Save Kelly Grovier Share Save Alamy (Credit: Alamy) The recent discovery of an art forger's workshop reminds us of the long history of fraudulent artworks – here are the simple rules to work them out. It's everywhere: fake news, deep fakes, identity fraud. So ensnared are we in a culture of digitised deceptions, a phenomenon increasingly augmented by artificial intelligence, it would be easy to think that deceit itself is a high-tech invention of the cyber age. Recent revelations however – from the discovery of an elaborate, if decidedly low-tech, art forger's workshop in Rome to the sensational allegation that a cherished Baroque masterpiece in London's National Gallery is a crude simulacrum of a lost original – remind us that duplicity in the world of art has a long and storied history, one written not in binary ones and zeroes, but in impossible pigments, clumsy brushstrokes and suspicious signatures. Wh ... Read full article.