Source: posted in an online forum by Amir Sidharta

Indonesian art 'finds'
leave critics groaning

John Aglionby
(in Jakarta)

The Guardian, Friday 24 November 2000

An Indonesian art dealer could make millions of pounds tonight when he holds an auction in Jakarta of 115 long-lost masterpieces that he claims to have discovered in unlikely places across the archipelago.

J Syahdam acquired one of two Van Goghs from a remote corner of Sumatra, he found a Renoir on a central Java plantation, one of two Picassos came from a flea market, and a Chagall turned up in a Jakarta satellite town.

He bought a Modigliani from a frame seller, a Monet was lurking on an east Java tobacco farm, a Pissaro was gathering dust in the industrial heartland of central Java, he has forgotten where he got hold of the Goya and so the list goes on.

Or that is what he would like the world to believe. The reality, according to almost every other Jakarta-based art dealer, critic, auctioneer and curator, is that the exhibition, titled The Old Painting Pre-World War II, on display in a five-star hotel, is nothing more than a collection of modern forgeries.

"This should be renamed the festival of all the fakers in Jakarta," said a respected museum curator, Amir Sidharta, as he wandered round pointing out obvious blemishes in practically every painting. "Or rather just the bad fakers because there are much better copies around."

Mr Sidharta admitted that it was conceivable that one or possibly two paintings by such masters could turn up in Indonesia but not such a haul all at once.

"Who in the world is gullible enough to believe that all these paintings would suddenly appear, in very mysterious circumstances, in remote corners of Indonesia?" he asked. "And if you owned one of these masterpieces you wouldn't sell it here, you'd go to somewhere like London or New York."

Pasteur by Goya is the worst, he says. "This is just a quick reproduction done on top of another picture. It's laughable."

The Corn's Farmer [sic] by Van Gogh - which is listed as being worth between £1.8m and £2.8m - rated little better and Scenery, by Monet, did not even merit comment.

Mr Sidharta said he was offered one of the paintings, The Final Court by Indonesia-based painter L Coroot, earlier this year. "Except then it was by a different artist."

Few of the visitors to the exhibition, who surprisingly numbered only a few dozen for such a supposedly prestigious event, were taken in.

"Some of them, like Ballet Dancers by Degas, are quite good but they just don't seem right," said Boy Luna, a Filipino art teacher. "And I've never seen any of them in an art book."

But Mr Syahdam, who refused to reveal his first name "for security reasons", is sticking to his guns.

"They have all been laboratory tested using 15 separate criteria and the results show that they are the correct age," he said, brandishing a sheaf of dodgy-looking certificates.

But one of his assistants, Adelia Rangkuti, admitted that there had been problems persuading experts to come to authenticate the paintings. "We faxed 30 museums around the world two weeks ago inviting people to come and look at them," she said. "But we never heard back from anyone." Ms Rangkuti also confessed that none of the paintings are insured. She struggled to explain why there had not been more publicity for the exhibition.

"We wanted to make this an event for Indonesian art lovers," she said. "We did not want it to be too big."

One of Mr Syahdam's "experts", local artist Sulebar Soekarman, said that the critics were narrow-minded and looking at the exhibition from the wrong perspective. "The question is not whether they're original or fake but whether they're aesthetically beautiful," he said.

Abdul Rachman, the curator of Jakarta's Fine Art and Ceramic Museum, disagreed. "Indonesia's reputation in the world is already bad and this is just going to make it worse," he said. "It reflects the state of what's going on in the country at large. People reckon they can do what they want and get away with it."

Mr Sidharta hoped the consequences would not be too bad. "This is such a bad joke, hopefully we'll just be laughing about it in six months."

See also Renate Kant's article on art fakes:
For art's sake: Detect original and fake works