LONDON — Edgar Peters Bowron was on a pre-opening inspection tour of the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, the Netherlands, one year when, at a new exhibitor’s stand, he spotted a large work attributed to a very well-known 17th-century painter.
“My heart sank,” said Mr. Bowron, who is chairman of the French, Italian, Spanish and English old master paintings vetting committee for the fair, known as Tefaf. “This picture was simply not by the artist. I just knew this wasn’t going to fly.”
The dealer was not a specialist in old masters or in 17th-century art, so the work was taken off the stand. “If we feel the painting is not in the best interest of the fair, we can remove it, and there’s no recourse,” explained Mr. Bowron, formerly the curator of European art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston.
Mr. Bowron is one of close to 190 vetters grouped in 29 Tefaf committees and in charge of checking that all objects pass muster. “You want to make sure that the people who come to your fair have confidence in what they buy,” said Tefaf’s New York-based chairman, Nanne Dekking, who was appointed in July and is co-founder and chief executive of Artory, a company that provides secure data on artworks.
That confidence has wavered a little since March 2017, when four galleries with stands at Tefaf were reported by the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad to be under scrutiny for having sold potentially forged objects elsewhere. All four galleries have stands in this year’s fair, too.
Mr. Dekking said that he was aware of the cases raised in the article, but that it would be inappropriate to comment on them while the cases were still underway. “If in fact we were to find out that a dealer knowingly sells a forgery, they will of course not be invited back,” he said, noting that the continuing cases were “the reason why Tefaf asked me to become their chairman.”
“All of these kinds of things happening in the trade reflect badly on the trade,” he said. So his aim was to drive the number of dealers involved in vetting down to a minimum.
Currently, 8 percent of vetters are dealers, according to Tefaf. The rest are people with “no skin in the game,” as Mr. Bowron put it. The 29 vetting committees specialize in everything from ancient art, old master paintings, and modern and contemporary art to sculpture and design, photography, clocks and watches, ceramics, jewelry, glass, icons, silver, furniture and wallpaper.
Here is how the process works. Two days before the fair opens — with exhibitors strictly barred from entering the premises — the vetters gather. For the next day and a half, they scrutinize everything on sale.
They then issue one of three verdicts: that the object is fine, that the object is unacceptable (in which case it is removed and placed in safe storage), or that the object can stay but needs a label adjustment. That third option is “what happens most often,” said Cecile van Vlissingen, Tefaf’s vetting and special projects coordinator. Dealers can appeal a decision by providing backup documentation.
Since 2014, vetters have been aided by a team of scientific and technical research specialists that includes Robert van Langh, head of the Department of Conservation and Restoration at the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam. “You start from connoisseurship with the eye,” Mr. van Langh said. “When in doubt, you start using the scientific tools.”
Those tools can be highful effective. Mr. van Langh recalled how X-Ray Fluorescence Spectrometry, or XRF, showed that a jewel labeled 17th-century was in fact from the 19th century — it had traces of chromium, which did not exist in the 17th century — and was worth a lot less. “The dealer did not like that,” Mr. van Langh said.
In sculpture restoration, technical analysis shows when a sculpture has had its nose broken and restored, Mr. van Langh noted. If the dealer has not reported that restoration beforehand, the object “is going off.”
Also involved in the screening process is the London-based Art Loss Register, which keeps a computerized record of lost or stolen artworks by pooling information from law enforcement, governments and intergovernmental organizations. The register works with more than a dozen fairs around the world.
All exhibitors at Tefaf are required to send the Art Lost Register their list of objects well in advance. On vetting day, an eight-person team from the register then goes around with laptops to do further checks. “We find things at pretty much every fair” that require further research, said Will Korner, the register’s art fairs manager. “It’s a surprise if we don’t.”
In another incident, a painting attributed to Raoul Dufy turned out to be one in a series of fakes identified by the German police and recorded on the register. The dealer who planned to bring it to the fair had to cross it off the list, Mr. Korner said.
Not all dealers are as compliant. Others react “with anger, with shock and disbelief,” Mr. Bowron said. “Some of them just look at us with complete disdain, and wonder how we have the good sense to find the entrance to the fair and tie our shoes in the morning.”
Yet to most gallerists, vetting is a crucial and necessary process that builds up credibility all around. Ursula Casamonti, director of the Tornabuoni Art London gallery (which has a stand at Tefaf every year), said that at the Frieze Masters fair in London last October, the vetting committee asked that a modern Italian painting bought five years earlier be taken down. “It’s always a bit unnerving when that happens, but they always give you the reason,” Ms. Casamonti said.
It turned out that the British police had not been informed by the Italian police that a lawsuit involving the painting’s previous owner had been resolved. When Italian police documentation was provided, “we were able to hang the painting back up,” Ms. Casamonti said.
Vetting has been known to yield pleasant surprises, too.
“The vetting committee will in some cases supply an attribution to a picture that the dealer didn’t recognize,” Mr. Bowron said. That can be “much more favorable to the dealer than the attribution they thought they had.”
