Lesson for library in ‘fake’ purchase

THE Alexander Turnbull Library has been duped: a $75,000 painting it bought two years ago turns out to be a fake.

This is embarrassing for such a guardian of national culture to admit, even if the library has been refreshingly open about the botch-up. The question now is what it will do to make sure it is not bamboozled again.

In the case of the Gottfried Lindauer forgery, ostensibly a portrait of a Hamiora Maioha, the library ignored confident advice from an outside expert.

Victoria University art historian Roger Blackley, who has written extensively about Lindauer, expressed his doubts to the library in the hours before it was purchased at auction.

‘‘It was always very odd-looking,’’ he said this week. The paint was applied unevenly compared with other Lindauers, and the work lacked cracks expected for its age.

The Turnbull’s own experts disagreed, as art experts often do, and the library went with them. Perhaps this is understandable, though public cultural institutions should probably err strongly towards caution when a forgery is in the wind.

What isn’t understandable is the failure to use the following week – a ‘‘cooling-off’’ period after the sale – to do further due diligence. That might have turned up more doubts – or even the conclusive proof that another expert, Auckland Art Gallery conservator Sarah Hillary, has since found: that the paint contains titanium dioxide, a material not available to Lindauer.

A few hundred dollars on a forensic examination, in other words, could have saved the library $75,000 – and plenty of humiliation.

Such forgeries are not, after all, unheard of – a Waikato museum also discovered it had a fake Lindauer on its hands in 2012, for which it had paid $121,000 a decade earlier. Auctioneers, too, report rejecting a stream of fake Lindauers and Goldies, mostly from the Hawke’s Bay region.

Turnbull chief librarian Chris Szekely says the latest fake still has research value, but this is just blackly amusing. It’s true that forgeries, a constant of the art world, can hold a kind of fascination. And perhaps, given enough time, some can add a layer of legend to an artist’s work. But this is really putting lipstick on a pig – ‘‘come to an esteemed national library and see the fake painting we mistakenly bought’’. It’s a stretch.

Which isn’t to say that mistakes won’t happen. Libraries and galleries are working in a space in our history that is, as relatively recent as it is, opaque to us in many ways.

Documentation goes missing, chains of ownership are blurred, details get lost to time – it’s not even clear, for instance, who the man in the latest painting is supposed to be.

It is encouraging that the library allowed its painting to be examined, and that its managers have confessed to their blunder. In this sense, they have shown the transparency and concern for getting things right that curators must.

They need to apply the same rigour, earlier, whenever the next attractive cultural artefact appears at an auction house.