collectibles

This page considers fraud and the forgery of collectibles, from 'Chippendale' furniture to militaria, toys and scrawls by serial killers.

It covers -

• introduction - the shape of fraud and forgery in collectibles markets
• antiques - 'genuine Chippendale, circa 2002'?
• cloning contemporary classics - forgeries, lookalikes and ripoffs of post-1900 designs
• crafts
• postage stamps
• militaria - medals, belt-buckles, bayonets and the trade in militaria
• toys
• memorabilia

     introduction

Misrepresentation, complaisance, gullibility and forgery of outside the fine arts mirrors the environment discussed on the preceding page of this profile, although generally not attracting the same attention from the media or from government agencies.

As with Old Master paintings the market for lesser collectibles is driven by greed, enthusiasm and the self-interest of intermediaries, who on occasion turn a blind eye or are actively complicit in misrepresentation of what is being sold.

     antiques

How much forgery is there in the antiques market? Definitive figures are unavailable and much of the literature does not go beyond anecdote or comments such as "the amount of fraud in the antiques business is getting worse".

That is unsurprising, given the shape of the market - much trade does not involve major commercial galleries and auction houses, few vendors and buyers are keen to publicise unwelcome discoveries - and concentration by police on other crimes. As one dealer commented to us, much much misbehaviour is not widely reported and probably is not generally detected. "It is off the radar and is likely to stay that way".

It is rare to see incidents such as the embarrassingly public compensation of Canadian mogul Herbert Black, who paid around £0.5 million for two supposedly Hepplewhite chairs from the St Giles's House collection, or US$4.5 million litigation by a Thomson scion over a pair of allegedly 18th-century urns. It is even harder to find detailed statistics for items sold in the $500 to $50,000 range.

One reason is inherent uncertainty about authenticity, compounded by the absence of accessible benchmarks or published expertise. Another is indifference, with vendors for example adopting a 'caveat emptor' approach that is broadly endorsed by regulators. As with buying a quattrecento masterpiece over eBay (or in your local pub), if it looks too good to be true it almost certainly is.

Furniture and other artefacts that have not been considered to be of museum quality generally do not have a readily identifiable provenance. The genuineness of minor works may be hard to quickly determine: "it is old, but is it old enough ... and is all of it old enough"?

Many antiques have suffered the ravages of time and have been repaired, either recently or in the past. How much reconstitution is permitted before an item ceases to be an authentic antique, given that fakes include new items made out of antique materials, old items modified to make them seem better than they are and old parts put together to simulate a more desirable form? For many buyers the cost of consultation with experts or detailed forensic examination will often be more than the price of an item.

As with the fine arts one reason for forgery is simply the limits of supply. Demand continues to grow but antiques are a nonrenewable resource and, like the Manet or Sisley, the most desirable pieces are increasingly sequestered in museums.

Another reason is pricing: major works when available now go for seven figures (eg £17 million for the Badminton Cabinet in 2004, US$10.9 million for a Jean-Henri Riesenerin commode in 1999, US$8.2 million for the Job Townsend secretary-bookcase in 2000 and US$1.2 million for a weathervane). Thatcher Freund's Objects of Desire: The Lives of Antiques and Those Who Pursue Them (New York: Penguin 1995) notes a tension in collecting.

Shaker chairs and windvanes, for example, have been seen as affordable by consumers and institutions unable to compete for a Louis XVI chair but the interaction of growing popularity and limited supply pushes prices beyond the means of many consumers, who often colonise new fields such as 1860s quilts, rolling pins and fishing lures that in turn experience rapid escalation in prices (and the appearance of items that are not as they seem).

One point of reference is Myrna Kaye's Fake, Fraud or Genuine? Identifying Authentic American Antique Furniture (Boston: Little Brown 1987).

     cloning contemporary classics

Somewhat different challenges are apparent in the market for 'contemporary classics' - from Rietveld and Le Corbusier chairs to Philippe Stark juicers.

Some of those works are going for substantial sums, for example

• a 1948 Carlo Mollino (1905-1973) trestle table auctioned by Christie's for US$3.8 million
• items by Jean Prouvé (1901-1984) - the Kangourou chair for US$136,800, a reading table for the Maison de l'Etudiant for US$556,800 and a pair of perforated metal doors for the Maison Tropicale for US$680,000
• a Marc Newson Lockheed lounge for $200,000
• an Eileen Gray (1878-1976) 1923 lacquered console table for US$534,000 and lacquered screen for US$374,000

That pricing is fostering the forgery of what are claimed to be original items, with vendors falsely asserting an item's authenticity and on occasion providing a phony provenance document or even signature.

Perhaps more insidiously, the interaction of consumer desire (and ignorance) with commercial opportunism is encouraging unauthorised copies and imitations. Those knockoffs often sacrifice quality, by for example omitting particular design features or blurring standards (using glue rather than stitching or dovetailing, paint rather than lacquer, screws rather than brazing).

The problem is exacerbated by inconsistencies in the global patchwork of design protection and enforcement discussed in the Intellectual Property guide elsewhere on this site. In much of continental Europe, for example, furniture designs are classed as works of art, with protection for 75 years after the designer's death. In the UK and Italy they have been classed as commercial designs with protection for a flat 15 years.

That has resulted in a bewildering range of retailers offering designer 'originals'. Knoll for example reportedly produces 1,400 authorised editions of the Mies van der Rohe Barcelona chair each year, competing with an estimated 40,000 rip-offs. The authorised manufacturer of the Arne Jacobsen Egg chair reportedly launches around 100 law suits per year.

     crafts

Media coverage of craft fraud has centred on incidents such as Jeremy Broadway's forgery of ceramics by master potters Lucie Rie and Bernard Leach, each piece being valued by leading auction houses at around £6,000.

There has been less attention to misrepresentation of traditional crafts, with some Australian indigenous communities for example supporting an authenticity mark after discovering egregious abuses such as 'authentic' boomerangs, didjeridus, fishtraps and baskets imported from Indonesia or the Philippines but retailed as the work of that community.

     postage stamps

A preceding page of this profile noted that economies in crisis have sometimes experienced counterfeiting of postage stamps and bank notes, reflecting both the use of stamps as a form of currency, the ease of manufacturing fake stamps and the likelihood that law enforcement agencies would concentrate on other offences.

Such forgery is usually on an industrial scale and concerned with low value items for day to day use, eg making a payment to an government office or sending a letter via a postal network. It is thus distinct from forgery of stamps sought by collectors or misrepresentation of such stamps by dealers and experts in an effort to defraud collectors. That forgery is unsurprising, given the prices paid for particular stamps (eg a 1847 Mauritius Blue stamp sold for US$3.8m in 1993) and demand by collectors for a finite supply of the commodity.

The physical characteristics of stamps, lack of provenance and low forensic expertise of many collectors means that forgery is an issue for dealers and collectors with small collections and those with multi-million dollar collections. It has inspired a large although uneven literature (one pointer is here). Most forgery is anonymous - and arguably undetected - but particular forgers have received media attention and on occasion their work now sells for more than the items that they were copying.

An example is forgeries by Jean de Sperati (1884-1957) of pre-1920 stamps from Australia (the red 1913 £2 stamp) and Hong Kong (olive 1865 96 cent stamp).

In an echo of the van Meegeren case, Sperati was exposed in 1942 when Vichy officials prosecuted him for illegal export of stamps that he claimed had a 60,000 franc value. An expert witness testified that the real value of the collection was over 234,000 francs. Facing a long prison sentence for illegal asset transfers, Sperati responded that the stamps were bogus. In the 1950s he confessed that he had been active as a forger for over 30 years.

His techniques are illustrated in The Work of Jean de Sperati II (London: Royal Philatelic Society 2001) by Robson Lowe & Carl Walske.

     militaria

Much militaria collecting is a forbidden pleasure, like acquisition of pornography, and the lust of collectors for particular items collides with uncertainty about where those items came from. That is unsurprising when many items have an industrial nature and at one stage were loot - souvenired off the battlefield, brought home as spoils of war, even smuggled past military police - or are prohibited in jurisdictions such as Germany.

Fetishism is reflected in the proliferation of published guides such as the Collector's Handbook of WWII German Daggers and the multi-volume Collector's Guide to SS and Political Cuffbands.

It is also reflected in what appears to be a thriving industry (based in Russia, China and South Korea) manufacturing fake uniforms, belt-buckles, badges, medals, weapons, flags, helmets and other items that supposedly originated in Nazi Germany or its allies.

China appears to have the lead in production of swords claimed as coming from Hirohito's armed forces; it has also joined Italy in the production of supposedly mediaeval and early renaissance armour and swords.

The quality of many of the fakes is lamentable, replete with mis-spellings, synthetics purporting to be silk or leather, base metals (or even plastic) masquerading as bronze or silver, documents generated on a laser printer from a blurry JPEG. That apparently does not deter consumers who trust in eBay or its equivalent, lust after a collectible and lack the discernment to ask hard questions about provenance.

Estimates of production and of retail value - much of which takes place through online fora such as eBay or via fansites - are contentious. One Melbourne dealer commented in 2004 that around 60% of 'Nazi' items offered for sale were obvious forgeries.

     toys

Collecting toys - from teddybears to model trains, billycarts and clockwork tin robots - reflects a proustian search for lost time, interest in popular culture, aesthetic values and escalating prices for rare or merely sought-after items. Landmark prices include US$176,000 for a 1905 Steiff teddybear, £12,650 for a single Dinky toy and US$231,000 for an 1875 US tin toy.

As with cars, collectors have encountered a range of problems, including the lack of provenance (a Rembrandt tends to be better documented than something bought 70 years ago to sate a mewling infant) and the physical characteristics of the items.

Some buyers thus discover that a seller has substituted a figure from another set for a damaged or missing piece. Others 'improve' items by repainting them to disguise flaws or lack of authenticity. Some sellers simply use authentic packaging to disguise later items; others gather authentic items and create supposedly original packaging (on the basis that inclusion of the box can add a premium of 25% to 100%).

Some 'remanufacture' but claim authenticity, eg pass off modern reproductions of fin de siecle lead soldiers as the genuine item. Chinese workshops are now making reproductions of 1930s and 1950s Japanese tin toys that are carefully 'distressed' to give the requisite look of authenticity; others are reported to be bashing out 1960s pedal-cars.

     memorabilia

The market for memorabilia - a hair from Napoleon's horse (or from curlers supposedly used by Marilyn Monroe), a quill used by Thomas Jefferson, a baseball signed by Ty Cobb, football shorts worn by Gary Ablett - is driven by enthusiasm rather than experise. Buffs and speculators will pay substantial sums for the detritus of history.

Recent sales of Titanic memorabilia for example include £30,000 for flask, £47,000 for a handwritten account by survivor Mrs Churchill Candee and £22,000 for a letter from first class passenger Stanley May.

Elsewhere on this site we have discussed the market for and legal restrictions on the trade in what has been dubbed 'murderabilia' - artwork, clothing, postcards and even hair of notorious figures such as Ted Kaczynski, Chopper Read, Al Capone, Martin Bryant or John Wayne Gacy.

That trade has not attracted substantial academic attention or protection from consumer advocates and consumption is stigmatised. As with the adult content industry, abuses thus broadly are not policed by trade practices agencies and consumer complaints (if indeed expressed) may not be heard.

The absence of detailed studies means that there is considerable uncertainty about the size of the murderabilia market, the prevalence of forgeries or the extent to which unhappy consumers have detected bogus material and then sought recourse.

The nature of the market, with much contemporary material being illicit or quasi-illicit, without readily verifiable provenance or mechanisms for verification (an Old Master painting is likely to be described or even widely reproduced in scholarly works but the same cannot be said for scribbles by a serial killer or hairs supposedly plucked from the killer's beard), means that the authenticity of much murderabilia must be regarded as deeply suspect.

If you are paying US$800 for a Charles Manson scribble you probably are not getting what you asked for, although as we have commented elsewhere on this site you (and the purchaser of the 'guranteed genuine' Hitler letter) are perhaps getting what you deserve.

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