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What are your favourite art hoaxes?
Pierre Brassau was the pseudonym of a chimpanzee called "Peter" whose art was exhibited and shown to critics, as an experiment by the Swedish journalist Åke Axelsson to see whether critics could tell the difference between avant-garde modern art and the scrawling of a chimpanzee. He convinced Peter's caretaker to let him play with oil paints and a brush, and included the paintings he considered the most worthy in an exhibition. The reviews were extremely positive - one went so far as to state "Pierre Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer." Here is one of Peter's paintings, and here is a painting from the Bacchus series by Cy Twombly. I have to say, I, too, prefer the chimpanzee.
Then there's Disumbrationism. It was an entire fictionalised art movement created by one man - Paul Jordan Smith. Annoyed with the fact that his wife's realistic still-life paintings were panned by critics as being "of the old style" when she showed them in a local exhibition, he decided to make parody art under the pseudonym Pavel Jerdanowitch, and despite never having any art training or even having picked up a paintbrush in his life he "took up a defective canvas and in a few minutes splashed out the crude outlines of an asymmetrical savage holding up what was intended to be a star fish, but turned out a banana." The painting was initially called Yes We Have No Bananas, but he eventually entered it to an art exhibition under a new name Exaltation.
He ended up receiving a letter from an art journal praising the art and asking him for more information about himself, as well as an interpretation of the painting. So he invented a whole fucking backstory for Pavel Jerdanowitch (which culminated in him inventing the art style he called "Disumbrationism"), stated the painting was about "breaking the shackles of womanhood", and his name slowly became known. He was asked to exhibit the next year, and he painted another masterpiece: Aspiration. This was reproduced in the January 26, 1926 issue of Chicago's Art World, and art critics described it as a "delightful jumble of Gauguin, Pop Hart and negro minstrelsy with a lot of Jerdanowitch individuality." Later he painted Adoration and Illumination, which were also highly praised. He wrote on the latter painting "It is midnight and the drunken man stumbles home, anticipating a storm from his indignant wife; he sees her eyes and the lightning of her wrath. It is conscience at work."
Eventually he broke the hoax to a news source, and the ruse became widely known.
You might enjoy this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ern_Malley_hoax
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My favorite art hoax is mesoamerican art.
Okay it might not be all fake but there is serious suspicion most of it is forgeries.
See e.g.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Br%C3%ADgido_Lara
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