Art forgeries alleged

Press, Volume CXIV, Issue 33448, 1 February 1974, Page 3

Art forgeries alleged

(y.Z. Press Association)

AUCKLAND, January 31. The signatures of famous New Zealand painters were being forged by people cashing in on the art boom, an Auckland dealer said. There were a “lot of very wide people on the job at the moment,” he said. Unscrupulous persons were buying virtually worthless old New Zealand oil and water-colour landscapes, and forging the signatures of the sought-after painters, such as Hoyte, Blomfield, and Chevalier. The paintings were then sold, generally at auctions, and fetched thousands of dollars above their real worth. The dealer, who declined to be named, said that some of the paintings had been sold at vastly inflated prices in Melbourne. One had been purchased by a New Zealand art gallery for $3OOO. The Melbourne police

had been informed of the forgeries, and the Victorian Criminal Investigation Division was making inquiries, he said. The dealer said he himself had recently sold a landscape by an unrecognised nineteenth-century artist which later turned up in an Auckland shop, bearing the signature of J. C. Hoyte.

The forging of signatures had become apparent only in the last five or six years, since the price of paintings began to soar. Many of the paintings with false signatures were being sold at auctions, where the principle, “Caveat Emptor (buyer beware)” applied. He believed that a lot of buyers were being duped, some deliberately, and some unintentionally. A spokesman for the Auckland C. 1.8. said today that the police had received no complaints about art forgeries.