You want a Monet, but can’t afford to pay the price? No problem, says the self-styled queen of fakes. She spoke to Hazel Friedman
DEONA VAN VUUREN is disarmingly honest. She calls a spade a spade. Which is pretty impressive given the fact that, in her line of work, spades often pass for spoons, and sorting the one from the other can give rise to great confusion.
Van Vuuren belongs to a long line of professionals specialising in the fine art of fakery. But she doesn’t regard herself as your average knock-off artist trading products of high culture like zero-coupon bonds or pork- belly futures. Nor does she follow the post-modernist fashion of “borrowing” images from high and low culture. She is the self-appointed queen of fakes. And, as the subtitle of her show — Original Fakes — suggests, she is also a master of the oxymoron.
On show at the Natalie Knight Gallery, the exhibition comprises a selection of works from Van Vuuren’s thriving knock-off shop in Cape Town, where, in addition to copying original works in detail, she produces customised colour and size-co-ordinated fakes as well. If a client desires a Manet in miniature, or a painting from Picasso’s pink period copied in purple, no problem. If a customer wants the Mona Lisa to match the floral hues of her lounge decor, Van Vuuren will provide one that makes Andy Warhol’s Mona Lisas look monochromatic by comparison.
In the show she displays a predilection for Tamara de Lempicka, Gauguin during his Tahiti phase, pre-cubist Picasso, and Monet. Or is it Manet? The image of Olympia undoubtedly belongs to Manet, but the label says otherwise. Yet, whether the original artist was an aspirant dandy with a preference for prostitutes or a half-blind painter with a fetish for hay, is probably irrelevant to Van Vuuren’s clientele. And their buying ardour isn’t going to be dampened by the fact that the works aren’t exact clones of the originals either. What they want, and what she provides, are “cheap” look-a-likes for status-conscious consumers who crave icons of exclusivity but can’t afford to pay the price.
Jacob did it to Isaac, musicologists accuse Brahms of doing it to Beethoven, and some scholars wonder whether Shakespeare didn’t do it to his assistant. The pages of the past have been filled with accounts of fakes and forgeries, and the printouts of the present are pretty much the same. Today’s schemers no longer rob banks. They simply make unauthorised video copies of box office hits, sell bogus designer watches and rip off popular brand names. And they succeed because they’ve tapped into a peculiar brand of consumer pathology — namely, the label.
Once upon a time a name was an emblem of exclusivity, a coat of arms signifying tradition, excellence and authenticity. But nowadays, these qualities play second fiddle to appearance. What matters is that the knock-off more or less looks, feels or smells authentic, and is within financial reach of consumers with wealthy dreams, if not means.
Inevitably, the frontiers of fakedom have penetrated the citadels of fine art. There a demand from security- conscious collectors for substitutes while they keep their authentic masterpieces safe. But there will usually be someone willing to flog the work to a sucker while the original is entombed in a bank vault.
In South Africa, one of the first public exposures of art fraud occurred in 1934 when Cape Town dealer Louis Woolf was found guilty of forging the signature of Tinus de Jongh on thousands of etchings. In 1967 Cape Town again became the centre of scandal when fakes in the names of Maggie Laubser, Pieter Wenning, Wolf Kiebel and Irma Stern were flogged on the market. More disturbing was the emergence in the 1970s of Van Wouw bronzes patched together from original casts with the consent of the artist’s heirs who held copyright.
In the early 1980s, the Pretoria Art Museum discovered that works being punted by a Johannesburg dealer, purportedly by Pierneef, were forgeries. And more recently this critic discovered that a “genuine” Rembrandt was on sale at a Westgate furniture shop for the modest sum of R25 000.
Van Vuuren’s forgeries are all above board because, although she uses the signature of the original artist on the front of the canvas, she signs her own name on the back. And even if she produces cheap replicas of blue-chip art and sometimes gets her names wrong, there’s no real harm done. After all, what’s in a name? These days, just about everything.