Allegations made in The Australian about dubious practices in the APY collective are disastrous for the National Gallery because its main winter exhibition, meant to open in a couple of months, is devoted to the very artists whose work has been so dramatically called into question.
In response, the NGA has announced almost the only measure it could take, short of cancelling the exhibition: to hold an independent inquiry into the authenticity of works it will be showing.
The announcement is clearly intended to show the gallery is doing something, but also – as with political inquiries in general – to defer the crisis and gain some breathing space.
But how effective will such an inquiry be, and will it be possible to establish the truth in this matter?
The way we authenticate works of art and artefacts varies according to the nature of the object and the period in which it was made. In some cases, modern scientific processes can be used to date materials or determine their chemical composition, but neither of those is relevant in this case.
Otherwise, the main tools of authentication remain the same as they have always been: on the one hand, documentation, including various kinds of recorded testimony, and on the other, connoisseurship or expertise.
Documentation, depending on the period, could mean references in published sources such as books and periodicals, entries in receipt books, mentions in diaries or correspondence, interviews, notes of personal discussions with the artist or relevant witnesses.
Some categories of documents are regularly forged to support fake, misattributed or stolen works. In this case, the documentation we could expect to be examined would include the accounts, stock records and office log books of the APY, together with the testimony of the artists and APY staff.
Unfortunately, this is likely to yield evidence that itself may require questioning.
We can be pretty sure that the APY’s records do not mention whether a proportion of a work was executed by a white assistant.
And while we would like to think people will answer questions truthfully, we have already seen evasion on the part of APY staff and cases of painters mysteriously changing their statements, apparently after advice from these same staff.
Connoisseurship or expertise, the judgment of the eye, is based on an intimate familiarity with the style of an artist so that one can often tell at a glance whether a work is sound or a fake, like the so-called Lost Arles Sketchbook wrongly attributed to Van Gogh in 2016. Two decisive aspects of style are character and skill, the former pastiched and the latter lacking in the Van Gogh case.
Here, too, the problem is double: on the one hand, the character of the APY paintings is generic and easily imitated, as we have seen. Nor can we rely on skill because although some Aboriginal bark painting, like that of John Mawurndjul, is highly skilled and thus recognisable, these acrylic paintings are almost by definition the work of untrained amateurs.
They are not admired for their skill but their assumed spiritual connection to ancient dreamings; but for that reason it is hard to say with any confidence that a given brushstroke is by a recognised artist rather than an anonymous white assistant.
It is hard, for all these reasons, to imagine that an independent review will be able to give the NGA the exhibition clearance it must be hoping for, while at the same time the documentary evidence of the Tjala Arts centre video remains irrefutable.
The gallery may have little option but to cancel an exhibition tainted by scandal.
Christopher Allen is The Australian’s national art critic.
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