Chicago’s Faux “Faun” Inspires Faux Journalism

Sotheby’s November 1994 catalogue entry for the purported Gauguin (on right)
Does one good fake deserve another?
I thought this article by Arifa Akbar of the London Independent was the best I’d seen about the Art Institute of Chicago’s Greenhalgh “Gauguin,” until I saw this piece by the highly respected art writer Martin Bailey for the Art Newspaper, which contains much of the same information, in much the same language. Bailey’s piece, however, is much more detailed than Akbar’s. Could the Independent be insufficiently independent?
Here are two sample passages:
Bailey—Writing in Apollo in September 2001, Art Institute sculpture curator Ian Wardropper recorded it as one of the most important acquisitions of the past 20 years. He described The Faun’s features, as “bound up with the artist’s self-image as a ‘savage’.” That same month The Faun was displayed in Chicago’s definitive “Van Gogh and Gauguin” exhibition, which went on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
Akbar—In 2001, the Institute’s sculpture curator, Ian Wardropper, wrote that it was one of the most important acquisitions of the past 20 years and described The Faun’s features, as “bound up with the artist’s self-image as a ‘savage'”. In the same year, it was displayed in Chicago’s definitive Van Gogh and Gauguin exhibition, which later went on to the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.
There’s much more of the same…and I DO mean the same!
In any event, Bailey and his alter ego Akbar tell us many things that the Art Institute hasn’t—that the forgery (concocted by Shaun Greenhalgh of Bolton, England) was purchased by the museum in 1997 for about $125,000 from London dealers Howie and Pillar. They had bought it at Sotheby’s, London, on Nov. 30, 1994 for £20,700.
The Art Institute’s own statement on “The Faun” is here.
Stick with Bailey for many other interesting details about the sculpture’s manufactured provenance and subsequent quotes from publications discussing Chicago’s acclaimed acquisition.
If you want to see more about how the experts were fooled and made fools of themselves, you can peruse this list of publications provided to me by the Art Institute:
—Douglas W. Druick and Peter Kort Zegers, “Van Gogh and Gauguin: The Studio of the South” (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago, 2001), pp. 61-63, 68, 155, 404.
—Ian Wardropper, “Collecting European Sculpture at The Art Institute of Chicago,” Apollo 154, 475 (September 2001), pp. 11-12.
—Bruce Boucher, “The Faun,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies 29, 2 (2002), pp. 64-65.
—Douglas W. Druick, “La Matinée d’un faune les débuts de Gauguin dans la céramique,” Mélanges en hommage à Françoise Cachin (Paris: Gallimard/Réunion des musées nationaux, 2002), pp. 152-59.
—Anne-Birgitte Fonsmark, “A Painter-Sculptor Makes Ceramics,” Gauguin and Impressionism (New Haven: Yale University Press in association with Kimbell Art Museum and Ordrupgaard, 2005), pp. 290-91.
Bailey reports that “Sotheby’s is now expected to reimburse the Art Institute of Chicago.” When contacted by me yesterday, the auction house stated only that it was “currently working with the purchaser to resolve this matter.”