Curator fleshes out forgeries

OGDENSBURG — One of the telltale signs for identifying a painting as a Frederic Remington forgery is a smudged signature, which can be seen only under a black light, said Laura M. Foster, curator of the Frederic Remington Art Museum.

Other things such as inconsistencies in technique, form and style are obvious only to a trained eye.

Nearly a decade ago, Ms. Foster helped to found a group of four Remington art experts that meets about once a year at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyo., to separate fake Remingtons from the originals.

Ms. Foster recently attended one of these meetings. The group examined 20 paintings and drawings and determined that 16 were fakes.

"It wasn't a particularly difficult session this time. It was pretty cut and dried. We didn't have to have lengthy discussions," she said. "We've been doing this for, I think, nine years and we have never had a piece of work that we couldn't come to a unanimous decision about."

Ms. Foster estimates that about one-third of the works she reviews turn out to be something other than a Remington.

"There are so many not-Remington items that are sold to people or are misunderstood in some way or forged as Remingtons," she said. "The inquiries about these things are a good section of my work on a daily basis at the museum."

Although the group has access to tools such as X-rays and infrared lights, generally determinations are made based on the experts' thorough knowledge of Remington works.

"In the same way a doctor, after years and years of training, can examine a patient and draw conclusions from that, it's a similar kind of thing," said Emily B. Neff, a committee member who is a curator at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston. "We probably have well over 100 years of experience between the four of us doing exactly this."

Remington works have gone for as much as $5 million at auctions, so authenticating the art keeps the private collectors, museums and auction houses from being taken advantage of. But determining whether the works are real or phony also allows the art establishment to continue to flesh out its knowledge of the artist.

"Having this established procedure to give a conclusive answer with some analysis is a very important feature on the landscape of Remington scholarship because people are desperate to have the right information," she said. "That being said, many times they are disappointed when they get the answer, but that's the way it goes."