Credit: Ontario Provincial Police
It has been reported in the media that the “principal architect” of the Norval Morrisseau art fraud, one David Voss, has been sentenced to five years in jail for his role in this widespread and long-running criminal enterprise. Co-conspirator Gary Lamont is also serving 5 years. Six others, including some of those involved in producing and distributing the fakes, have also been charged. Hopefully this will bring closure to this high-profile art scandal, but a lot of damage has been done to Morrisseau, his legacy and to Indigenous art in general, as well as to collectors and the art market for Indigenous works.
In the past I have written about the challenges faced by Indigenous peoples and artists in protecting their works and cultural heritage (for example, here, here and here). Copyright provides an inadequate framework to protect works of collective traditional culture, an issue that the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) is working hard to address. This year WIPO reached agreement on a new treaty covering genetic resources and associated traditional knowledge. Once ratified by 15 member states, the treaty will, according to WIPO, “establish in international law a new disclosure requirement for patent applicants whose inventions are based on genetic resources and/or associated traditional knowledge”. It’s a start but, to the disappointment of some, what it does not do is address the issue of “traditional cultural expression”. Earlier drafts of the treaty went beyond genetic resources to include means to protect and control traditional cultural practices and knowledge, such music, dance, art and handicrafts. This would have given Indigenous peoples the ability to preserve cultural integrity as well as rights of attribution. That apparently was a step too far, but if the treaty dealing with genetic resources enters into force, this could give impetus to further diplomatic work to develop a treaty covering traditional cultural expression.
Cultural appropriation and borderline copyright infringement is particularly prevalent when it comes to the visual arts. Indigenous artists, although entitled to copyright protection on their individual works, have nonetheless found lookalikes marketed as native works, although most such knock offs do not normally infringe copyright because they are not reproductions of the work of any individual artist. Rather, they are cheap copies of a genre. What is being infringed is a cultural tradition, and is a pervasive form of cultural appropriation. While knock-offs and lookalikes are one thing, out and out art fraud is even more outrageous. The most high profile example is the art fraud scandal involving the late Anishinaabe (Ojibwe) artist, Norval Morrisseau, who is the ultimate victim.
Morrisseau, who died in 2007, is best known as the founder of the Woodland school of art. A self-taught artist from northern Ontario, he went on to great heights artistically and to some lows personally, including struggles with alcoholism and addiction. Labelled by French modernist artist Marc Chagall as the “Picasso of the North’, Morrisseau was a prolific artist who at times is known to have sold some of his works for a pittance when financial need presented itself. This laid the foundations for an audacious and long-running scheme, dating back to the late 1990s, to produce fakes of Morrisseau’s works, some of which have been displayed in prominent galleries and which have sold for considerable sums. These are not clever forgeries of Morrisseau works, they are outright fakes, works that were never produced by him but which replicate his style and were amazingly “found”, stored in abandoned garages, barns and auction houses. The fraud continued after Morrisseau’s death, reaching an industrial-scale with fakes in the thousands flooding the art market. Writer Luc Rinaldi, writing in The Walrus has an excellent summary of Morrisseau’s background and the complicated and long running fraud investigation and trials.
The case itself is a cautionary tale for art collectors. For years, rumours had been whispered about Morrisseau fakes circulating in the art market. In 2012 a prominent musician but novice art collector, Kevin Hearn, learned he had been ripped off over a supposedly genuine Morrisseau work. It was not until he sued the seller, the Maslak McLeod Gallery in Toronto, for selling him the fake work along with providing a fraudulent certificate of provenance, that things really got serious. Hearn lost the first round when the judge declared he could not determine conclusively if the work in question, Spirit Energy of Mother Earth, was a fake although he accepted that fraudulent works were being produced on a large scale. Hearn appealed and this time was successful, winning a $60,000 judgment against the gallery which, according to press reports, has never been paid. No matter. For Hearn it was vindication.
At the time the trials were being held, filmmaker Jamie Kastner was making “There Are No Fakes”, a two hour documentary about the fraud, featuring some of those who actually painted the fakes, gallery owners (some of whom have lost their reputation; one has been charged as part of the fraud), art experts, lawyers from both sides, friends and associates of Morrisseau-the full panoply. The film also delved into the dark side of the fraud; the drug dealing and sexual abuse engaged in by one of the main organizers of the scheme. There are other backstories in the film as well, defamation suits and harassment. Some owners of what have turned out to be fakes were determined to deny the truth, either because they refused to believe they had been hoodwinked or to protect their investments. All in all, it is a pretty sordid tale.
What the film did, however, was to provide a road map for the police who, until this time, had turned a blind eye to this “white collar crime”. Spurred on by the film, the Thunder Bay Police Service along with the Ontario Provincial Police finally dedicated the resources necessary to go after the perpetrators, who had more or less been hiding in plain sight. For years the excuse in the art world was, “No one has ever proven in court that any of the works are fakes” (thus the name of the film). The end result, so far, is the conviction and jailing of the two main architects of the fraud, lesser penalties for others involved and pending trials for still others.
The eventual bringing to justice of the lead perpetrators involves more than just clamping down on white collar crime and bringing justice, of sorts, to collectors and art museums. It also finally tackles the issue of cultural appropriation. There is no doubt that Morrisseau’s work has been tainted and his legacy damaged. Not only that, the spirituality and personal expression that he incorporated in his work has been denigrated and reduced to lines on canvas devoid of any deeper meaning. As reported in The Art Newspaper, Kevin Hearn in his victim impact statement said of Voss, the convicted perpetrator, “His calculated fraud has not only stolen and utilised Norval’s identity as expressed in his work, Voss has also exploited the art world and Indigenous culture.”
It is difficult for Indigenous artists to protect their work and to earn a respectable living from it. Fighting an influx of fake native art cheaply fabricated in Asia is an ongoing problem, especially when the problem is more one of cultural appropriation than direct copyright infringement. In Canada, unlike the US, there is no legislation to prevent non-Indigenous works from being passed off as Indigenous created. But there is also copyright infringement where the work of native artists is hijacked and reproduced without permission or attribution, often in the form of paintings, artwork and clothing designs sold on the internet. And then there is outright fraud, as practiced in the Morrisseau case, where the integrity of the oeuvre is undermined by the proliferation of fakes.
Hopefully now that the fraud has been proven beyond any doubt, and a technical means established to differentiate the fakes from the real (the fraud became so widespread that the perpetrators resorted to a “paint-by-numbers” process, which can be identified through infrared technology), the genuine works of Morrisseau will speak for themselves even louder. After two decades of skullduggery, it took a high-profile civil trial and an award nominated documentary film for the wheels of justice to finally turn and bring closure to this sordid, complex and unhappy story.
© Hugh Stephens, 2024. All Rights Reserved.
