The Art of Authentication: Enriching the Curriculum with Art Research

by Alyssa Mandel, October 2018

I have been the director of library services at Out-of-Door Academy in Sarasota, Florida, since 2008, the sole library professional for grades six through twelve on our upper school campus. I absolutely love what I do during the school year, but every June I return joyfully back to research and writing and the chance to add to the body of what is known about art history (and remove a forgery or two from circulation, one hopes.)

I have spent the last five summers working as an analyst for an art authentication firm. In addition to my library degree, I have a master's in art history, which I spent ten years teaching at the college level, plus professional writing experience. For a discipline that is sometimes lampooned as being the most simultaneously highbrow yet useless, art history can be surprisingly approachable and cross disciplinary. By sharing my process, I aim to offer ways to incorporate some of the tools and tasks of the job into your work to enrich the curriculum and inspire new collaborations among departments, even if you're not uncovering a lost Monet!

Everyone Is a Connoisseur

The end game of the research I conduct is to decide if a work of art is legitimately by the presumed artist. Any art history student can recite the types of approaches researchers take: biographical, formalist, iconographic, psychoanalytic, and so forth, but the one upon which I really depend for this kind of work is what is called connoisseurship, the practice of recognizing an artist's hand in a single work measured against his or her overall artistic oeuvre. Most people do this every day and don't even know it: "Oh, that's a van Gogh—lots of bright yellow, an outdoor scene, visible strokes of paint applied to the canvas thickly with a knife." Confronted with a van Gogh-like painting in a museum, most people react with what they think is gut instinct, but it's not; it's connoisseurship. Writ large and expanded to cover an artist's entire output, this kind of connoisseurship allows a researcher to compare the whole known output of an artist's career against an unknown work and consider points of similarity. Some of the special tools and methods I use, that you or your students may also use, are right there waiting for you.

Tools of the Trade

Sarasota is home to one of the finest art libraries in the southeastern United States and access is free and open to the public. The Ringling Museum of Art, which is a division of Florida State University (FSU), has more than 60,000 noncirculating volumes about art, architecture, and circus history as well as access to all of FSU's databases. The museum library has dozens of discipline-specific print periodicals as well as a vast collection of artists' files and files on all the objects in the museum collection. They also have a friendly professional staff, a very inviting environment with a beautiful view, and the public is welcome to use the library every weekday afternoon. The Ringling is indeed paradise for a researcher, but it has been my experience that most museums of any size generally have associated libraries. Give your local museum library a call. I'll wager they will be happy to hear from you and have treasures of their own to share. They may even be willing to host a visiting class if they have the space and the staff to do so.

Catalogues Raisonnés

The two most useful resources for me that I rely on at the Ringling Museum Art Library are its collection of catalogues raisonnés and its auction catalogs covering nearly an entire century. A catalogue raisonné is a complete list of works by a single artist with photographs; pedigree information such as title, year, medium, size, current collection; and descriptive detail about the artwork such as its subject or formal qualities. A catalogue raisonné is a vital tool for understanding an artist's style. In my case, it is also helpful to see if the work I am being asked to authenticate is already in a collection or is thought or known to be lost. Introducing students at any grade level to an artist's entire output can be fascinating and surprising: older students who think they know his style will be amazed to see what Pablo Picasso's early work looks like, and younger ones will be thrilled to point out or name better-known works of art with which they may be familiar. It's also great fun to look at the collection information about the works of art, as some of them may be in museums your students have visited or even a museum in your own city. Plenty of catalogues raisonnés are available in circulating public library collections too, so check one out and give this a try.

Auction Catalogs

Auction catalogs provide not only photographs of items sold and their asking prices at the time, but generally the works' provenance—their record of origin and ownership—is included also. Often even the hammer price, the price fetched at auction, will be listed on a card slipped into the back of the catalog post-sale. If an important painting has been sold multiple times over a fifty-year period, the previous owners or collections will be recorded in the auction catalogs so long as the sellers do not choose to remain anonymous. Ethically, the auction house bears some burden to ensure authenticity of the pieces they sell, so a work of art's appearance at previous sale is reassuring and the information very useful.

For history students, tracking the whereabouts of a single object, such as a painting, a piece of furniture, or a musical instrument, can be a remarkable window into the past. Really diligent detective work in the auction catalogs or in the digital archives of auction house websites can sometimes yield the whole history of an object—such as a silver dish by Paul Revere—dating back to its creation. It is equally fascinating to explore who owned it in the intervening centuries, to speculate why it was sold, and to consider how its relative monetary value has fluctuated over time.

Signature Dictionaries

Signatures are easily forged, and some artists do not sign their work at all. So, signatures are not an especially valuable clue for me as an authenticator, but they are one piece of the puzzle. Any person's signature can change over time, and a dictionary of artists' signatures from known works is a useful tool for interpreting where a presumed work might fall in an artist's oeuvre. At various stages an artist might use his initials rather than his full name; some women artists changed their surnames upon getting married. Handwriting styles change throughout time as well, and as students are sometimes intrigued by the flourishes of the signatures on the Declaration of Independence, looking at Renaissance signatures versus those from the 1960s can be another window into history, and a very relatable one at that.

Biographical Resources

Oxford Art Online contains a digital version of the Oxford Dictionary of Art, a resource well known to any art researcher. It has entries on individual artists, movements or period styles, types of media and techniques, and offers a limited selection of high-resolution images for download as well. Each entry includes a bibliography of sources, which offers valuable insight into the major publications about an individual art historical topic. Like any other database, it can be a useful tool for teaching search skills. How many different ways can a researcher explore the subject of Mughal architecture, for example, or the life and work of the entire Tiepolo family?

A standout example of a unique biographical perspective, outside of the usual print biography on a single artist, is Giorgio Vasari's Lives of the Artists. Vasari himself was an Italian Renaissance artist, and although not all of his biographies of other Italian Renaissance artists are entirely true, they are fascinating in that they provide one artist's insight into a group of his peers, and were written during a deeply significant period in Western art.

Many artists were prolific diarists throughout their lives. For history students these diaries offer priceless insights into their working lives, records of sales and patronage, and the historical periods in which they lived. They can be a terrific resource for world language scholars, too, such as those of the French 19th-century artist Eugène Delacroix and German Renaissance-era artist Albrecht Dürer. Leonardo da Vinci left at least 50 stunning notebooks filled with notes and sketches, which are fascinating for students of science with their complex anatomical drawings, scientific observations, and hypothetical inventions.

Other Tools and Methods

For art history or even literature students, the "why" of a painting or other work, its meaning and message, is an exhilarating problem—a code to crack or a mystery to solve. There exist dictionaries of symbols to help read the iconography of a work of art, like a sculpture of a seated Buddha or a Byzantine church mosaic. Some of these dictionaries are general, and some are more specific, such as for Asian art or Greco-Roman mythology.

If this seems like the kind of work where math doesn't matter, rest assured that I once used statistical data collated in tables to help prove the likely date of a painting. I tabulated information about the placement of the artist's signature (front, back, left corner, etc.) across his entire oeuvre and correlated it to the different periods of his career to conclude when the painting was probably created. Many artists, particularly in the Italian Renaissance, used the Golden Ratio to compose their works; for example, Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel ceiling panels. Math and art can co-exist in a happy partnership. And so can art and the library! Cull from these examples in any way that suits you, your students, and your program. Who knows? You might even discover a new detail that changes everything we thought we knew about an artist or a painting.