A compelling trust layer adds authenticity, even more valuable when you are telling the truth.
You probably haven’t heard of Wolfgang Beltracchi, or his wife Helene. But they stand out as possibly the most successful forgers of fine art in the world. There may be someone better but they are so good they haven’t been discovered, and remain completely anonymous. But I digress. In terms of technical ability Beltracchi was pretty good, he was relatively untrained but had inherited a natural ability from his father. He was more than capable of knocking out a passable copy of a work in next to no time. And given that there are enough antique paintings out there of next to no value, it was very easy to get his hands on some vintage canvas and an old frame to add that extra touch of authenticity. Where Wolfgang and Helene really excelled, where they were able to completely round off the deception, and ramp up the price, was in the story they wrapped around a painting to give it the provenance.
Nature Morte by Wolfgang Beltracchi, in the style of Fernand Léger. Photograph: © Beltracchi Family/Verlag Scheidegger & Spiess
The picture above is one of Beltracchi’s paintings in the style of Fernand Léger. And here in this photo you can see a very similar painting on the wall to the left behind Helene’s Grandmother, Josefine Jägers, the other works on display including a Max Ernst are all from the “Jägers collection”. The collection had been hurriedly purchased from a Jewish art collector to spare them from Nazi destruction as the party rose to power in Germany in the 1930s.
From Polizei/dapd/ddp images/AP
Except this photo isn’t from the 1930s, the photographic paper may be, but the picture was in fact taken in the mid 1990s. And that’s not Josefine, it’s actually Helene. The Jägers Collection isn’t real either, a story fabricated by Helene, and every one of the aged labels attached to the back of the picture frames confirming their heritage is as fake as the paintings themselves.
A similar scenario was deployed to sell another “Leger”. Wolfgang and Helene’s research had uncovered that the artist had exhibited at a still life exhibition in Berlin in 1924. There were no photos taken of the exhibition, so the Beltrachii’s created one; they coupled this with a forged note from the gallery’s deceased former owner to a collector of the time known to have made a few purchases. The story became complete and the painting was sold for hundreds of thousands of pounds.
What the pair did so successfully was to put their effort into creating the trust layer. An expert may question some slightly uncharacteristic brush work or a minor detour in style, but when presented with the other evidence the picture itself almost becomes secondary when proving the authenticity.
The value of a compelling trust layer isn’t just for peddling fakes. Let’s consider a more legitimate example, the Salvator Mundi, a painting that went from relative obscurity to being one of the most expensive ever sold, fetching a staggering $450million in 2017. For many years it was thought to be a copy, not an original Leonardo da Vinci
It was only when the experts started digging through the historical records that the key breakthroughs came. They found mentions of its acquisition in the 17th-century royal inventories of Charles I of England. And then traced its passage through aristocratic collections over the centuries. These documents built a narrative of continuous ownership, which were powerful enough to counter the arguments being offered that the painting was merely the work of an apprentice in his workshop.
What does all of this mean, what exactly is my point here? Well, it’s that trust in what we present to people goes beyond the image or object itself. Authenticity comes from the story around it, who was there, what was recorded, and whether those details hold up.
Great art isn’t trusted because of how it looks. It’s trusted because its story checks out.
And that trust is not just preserved for the people selling Léger’s and Da Vinci’s, it also applies to the imagery organisations post on websites, print in brochures and publish on the web every day all across the world. Successful well-run organisations don’t leave trust to chance.