There is the news item, on which we will not dwell for the sake of discretion, an investigation is still in progress. Let’s just say that in 2018 the Central Office for the Fight once morest Trafficking in Cultural Property (OCBC) dismantled a network that sold a number of fake paintings on the art market. More than 250 paintings were then seized by this organization within which collaborate regarding fifteen gendarmes and police officers.
And beyond the miscellaneous fact, there is science, as investigators asked a team of French researchers to attempt carbon-14 dating on some of the tables, with the goal of seeing if one might determine accurately the age of the works and whether or not it corresponded to the time when their supposed authors were active. “In our cases of counterfeitingwe explain to the OCBC, we have three levels of analysis: the artistic analysis, carried out by experts who have sometimes drawn up catalogs raisonnés of a painter; technical analysis, carried out by restorers often working for museums, who try to spot anomalies in the technique used to create a painting or a piece of furniture; and, finally, scientific analysis,” which focuses on the physico-chemical characteristics of suspect works.
One of the biggest counterfeiters of recent years, the German Wolfgang Beltracchi, was thus betrayed following one of his productions found titanium white, a pigment which did not exist at the time when the canvas was supposed to have been painted. ” But today, points out the OCBC investigator, you have plenty of forgers good enough to thwart artistic analysis and smart enough to use the right ingredients, like pigments appropriate to the presumed age of the painting. » Hence the idea of using the Carbon 14 Measurement Laboratory (LMC14), a national research platform located on the site of the Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) in Saclay (Essonne).
Open-air trials
Its manager, Lucile Beck, conducted a study whose results are published in the April issue of the journal Forensic Science International. Until now, she acknowledges, carbon-14 dating was little used in the art world because of its lack of precision. “For the periods from the 14the in the 19the century, we will date it to within fifty years, at best. For art historians, this is uninteresting information. » But everything changes when, as was the case for the OCBC investigators, we want to know if paintings supposedly prior to the Second World War were not made by forgers in recent decades. Why ? Because the atomic bombs have been there.
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