How to prepare art investments do & don't Part 2

In continuation of last article about what to do and not to do when plan to buy fine art for investment.
Besides the signs of repair to the painting...
- is the artwork dirty? The cleaning of an old master oil painting can be very tricky. "It needs always to be done by a specialist". There is no cheap solution to clean a painting. Experience is needed because an unexperienced technician can destroy the painting itself by erasing all nervosity you can find in the brush strokes , and this is only an example ...some technician erased the signature, because this signature was by example in gouache on an oil painting.
An good cleanup will make discover elements you can only guess : usually the sky, white clouds in an intense blue background where it was faded before.
Also a good clean up can deliver some secrets of the painting. By example I had this client in Los Angeles who bought a painting in Christie's NY with the mention: in the circle of Paul Bril. He bought it for less than $ 50,000.00 premium included.
He asked a famous restorer of the Getty museum to clean the painting. He discovered that at the bottom of a tree someone repainted over the original painting a couple cows.. The restorer erased the repaint and discovered a beautiful naked couple making out at the bottom of the tree.
The cleaning and the discovery of these people changed everything , the painting became an authentic Paul Bril with a tag price close to the 3/4 million $ ..
Here under a Paul Bril painting from a Dutch museum in Rotterdam Boymans -van Beuningen.

- Signs on the frame, on the back of a painting, on a stretcher ....be attentive for:
Labels on the back, of course if you have a label from Sotheby's or Christie's you will know immediately that the painting was in their hands, but old labels from collections, from exhibitions in galleries, from maker of the canvas, they all can be very helpful to establish the authenticity of a painting.
Here an example of a Georges Seurat charcoal drawing with this label on the back:

Galerie Berheim Jeune, the merchants of important impressionist and post impressionist painters , still in activity, mention of Exhibition in December 1909, mentioning an exhibition number 142...these elements are of prime importance and make this drawing highly qualified for an authentication because all these elements are verifiable..
The drawing had a several M $ tag price... unfortunately the Gallery didn't recognize the authenticity of this label.... It looks authentic, I am still convinced it is authentic but the without the agreement of the gallery the authentication could not be obtained based on the lable only..

Signatures and mentions on the back of the painting and on the stretcher.

When a painting is not signed on the front neither on the back of the canvas but a name of an artist is written in pencil on the back of a stretcher, there is 99 % chances that the painting is not authentic. It is an old trick that only beginner collectors will consider as a valid element. A painting signed by the author on the back of the canvas is very usual , especially in modern and contemporary art where the author doesn't want to distract the viewer with a signature on the front.
It's also common that a painter mentions where the painting was made, gives the title of his painting and also dates it.

to be continued

keywords: Fine art expert, Labels on back of paintings, Cleaning of oil paintings.