10/17/2014

Is Your ‘Priceless’ Painting a Fake? Better Ask a Scientist

15:01 minutes

The painting House in a Village (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 52.33), originally attributed to the impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. Greg Smith, curator Annette Schlagenhauff, and chemistry students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis discovered that the painting is most likely a forgery.
The painting House in a Village (Indianapolis Museum of Art, 52.33), originally attributed to the impressionist painter Alfred Sisley. Greg Smith, curator Annette Schlagenhauff, and chemistry students from Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis discovered that the painting is most likely a forgery.

Art collectors used to rely on the expertise of art historians to decide whether a prized painting was genuine or forged. But in today’s climate of hundred million-dollar art auctions, collectors’ money and museums’ reputations are on the line. Conservation scientist Greg Smith and physics professor Philippe Collon share some of the techniques from chemistry and physics that are helping scientists and art historians sniff out art fraud.

  • Vincent Van Gogh’s Undergrowth With Two Figures (Cincinnati Art Museum, 1967.1430). Greg Smith and conservation scientists at the Indianapolis Museum of Art were called to investigate how Van Gogh’s paints might have faded.

  • Cincinnati Museum of Art conservator Per Knutas created this “digital restoration” of Undergrowth With Two Figures to show what Van Gogh’s flowers most likely looked like when he painted them.

Segment Guests

Greg Smith

Greg Smith is a senior conservation scientist at the Indianapolis Museum of Art in Indianapolis, Indiana.

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Philippe Collon

Philippe Collon is an associate professor of experimental nuclear physics at the University of Notre Dame in South Bend, Indiana.

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