Bogus bronzes flood market: an estimated 4,000 fake castings have put the market for 19th- and 20th-century bronze sculpture in jeopardy

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 16, 2002 | by Frederick M. Winship

Posting the warning "caveat emptor" (buyer beware) never has seemed more applicable than it does today in regard to the market for 19th and 20th century bronze castings of sculpture that has been flooded with at least 4,000 fakes.

The fakes are the handiwork of Guy Hain, a French collector, dealer and publisher who has been incarcerated in Besancon Prison since last summer, serving a four-year sentence on conviction of a faking scam worth more than $60 million.

Some 2,500 molds, models and bronzes found in Hain's studio were confiscated, but some 4,000 finished pieces are believed to have entered the art market through dealers and auctions, according to French authorities. They say Hain faked the work of 98 artists--including such modern masters as Constantin Brancusi, Jean Arp and Alberto Giacometti--whose sculptures fetch millions of dollars each in today's market.

Nothing is new about fakes, posthumous castings and just plain reproductions in the tricky business of collecting art bronzes. The Rodin Museum in Paris continues to produce legal productions of Auguste Rodin's work long after his death, many of them collected and given to American museums by financier George B. Cantor and his wife, Iris.

Rodin was one of Hain's favorite artists when it came to copying. He also produced many copies of works by Antoine Louis Barye, the foremost French sculptor of animals, who sold the rights to his work to a foundry in order to get out of debt. Others whose work he copied were Jean-Antoine Houdon, Frederic Bartholdi (sculptor of the Statue of Liberty), Honore Daumier, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Emil Antoine Bourdelle, Aristide Maillol and Camille Claudel.

In the case of Rodin, Hain had access to original casts through his association with Georges Rudier, whose family foundry was the official caster of Rodin bronzes for many years. Hain would remove Georges' mark from the sculpture and put on the mark of his father, Alexis Rudier, in order to make the casts seem to be originals made while Rodin still was alive and able to supervise production of his bronzes.

Hain copied other sculptors' work by using original plaster models or by making after-casts from finished bronzes, using flexible silicon molds. He used foundries in remote parts of France, one to do the casting, another the chasing and another the patination. He consigned the fakes to auction houses through third parties, one of them his daughter's father-in-law in Marseilles.

Exposure of the breadth of Hain's fakery has put the entire market for 19th and 20th century bronzes in jeopardy. Gilles Perrault, an art conservator and adviser to the French Supreme Court, now believes Hain may have made 6,000 sculptures over and above those confiscated, only one-third of which have been traced to date through sales at such venues as Drouot, Paris's top auction house, and the famous Maastricht Art Fair in the Netherlands.

Perrault and other art insiders advise collectors of art bronzes to be more wary than ever and to consult experts in the field before making purchases. They point out that under French law, an artist is allowed to make only 12 copies of any bronze sculpture, all to be numbered. If any more copies are made, even in the artist's lifetime, they are considered reproductions and must have "reproduction" marked on them.

Hain never marked any of his fakes as reproductions. Instead he cast into the sculptures the signatures of the artists and the founder's marks to which he had no legal right, making their identification as fakes difficult. Good provenance--especially being able to prove bronzes were in known collections long before Hain's activities began in the 1980s--is important.

"Even so, two out of three pieces of bronze sculpture I see today are problematic," Jerome Le Blay, senior specialist at Christie's auction house, told United Press International. "It makes for huge price differences depending on the piece. If all the reassuring elements are there, then the highest price can be made. If not, the price will be much lower."

As an example, he cited the sale of an authentic Rodin Eve from a long-established French collection for $4.8 million at Christie's in New York in 1999. "Without that provenance, the piece might only have made $500,000," he said.

FREDERICK M. WINSHIP WRITES FOR UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL.