Digging for Truth

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Sketch after “The Tangled Garden,” no date, oil on paperboard (courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery)

Eight years after their scheduled showing (which was cancelled due to concerns over their provenance), the Vancouver Art Gallery has finally released ten controversial oil sketches attributed to the Group of Seven’s J.E.H. MacDonald.

It's controversial because while Toronto collectors Ephry and Melvin Merkur gifted the sketches to the gallery in 2015, and while the gallery’s senior curator authenticated them at the time, others doubted their authenticity.

Now, after years of testing by the Canadian Conservation Institute, the controversy has finally been put to rest. The sketches are fakes.

A follow-up exhibition J.E.H. MacDonald? A Tangled Garden is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until May 12, 2024.

It’s a bold move to admit the paintings are copies and props to gallery CEO and Executive Director Anthony Kiendl for deciding in 2020 to go public with the results.

“I’m not embarrassed,” he says of the reveal. “The important thing is that we’re transparent and we’re human and we move forward in an authentic way.”

It’s an unsettling exhibition, a mixture of art and forensics. The sketches are accompanied by a detailed show-and-tell from the Canadian Conservation Institute, illustrating the means and measures it used to determine authenticity. Using a baseline it compiled from an earlier analysis of MacDonald works at the request of Ontario’s McMichael Canadian Art Collection in 2013, the CCI applied the same scientific and stylistic methodology to the VAG’s ten disputed works.

The fake The Tangled Garden is the star of the show and the jumping-off point to explain the process. Wall displays introduce us to the tools of the trade, X-rays, infrared photography, fluorescence photography and chemical analysis, while videos show us how the institute scrutinized everything from the thickness of the paperboard backing to brush strokes. Another panel shows us three variations of MacDonald’s signature found at the back of the sketches.

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J.E.H. MacDonald's name is spelled wrong on the back of a work once attributed to him, on view now at Vancouver Art Gallery (photo by John Thomson)

While I appreciate the science behind the expose, I would have liked to have seen the authenticated works supposedly inspired by the ten fakes. That's perhaps impractical as they’re spread out across the country (the real The Tangled Garden sits in the National Gallery of Canada), but I remember the finished canvas as reflecting the Arts and Crafts principles of design, balance and coherence. The garden is framed and balanced on either side by tall foliage, while the eye is drawn to the centre by dollops of green and red running diagonally across the middle. It’s a carefully thought-out composition.

The fake sketch is nowhere near as subtle. It looks rushed and hastily conceived, laden with impasto. An argument could be made for MacDonald quickly testing out his final design — after all that’s what artists did in the field — but chemical analysis has determined that two key pigments, phthalocyanine green and titanium white, were not available in MacDonald’s lifetime and were introduced to the market after his death. The institute team found similar time-sensitive pigment issues in eight of the ten sketches.

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Testing the pigment used in the works once attributed to J.E.H. MacDonald, part of “J.E.H. MacDonald? A Tangled Garden,” Vancouver Art Gallery (photo by John Thomson)

Missing or added elements also undermine their authenticity. The sketch for The Wild River, for instance contains a canoe misrepresented as a log, suggesting the sketch was haphazardly done after MacDonald completed his painting, not before.

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Sketch after “The Wild River,” no date, oil on paperboard (courtesy of the Vancouver Art Gallery)

It’s not all fakery. The exhibition starts with two full rooms of authenticated Group of Seven sketches from Frederick Varley, Arthur Lismer, Lawren Harris and others to introduce visitors to style and content. The gallery also pulled three authenticated MacDonalds from its permanent collection and cleverly hid them among five of the ten fakes. The display, entitled Test Your Eye, asks viewers to guess which MacDonald is real and which is fake and then confirm their choices by activating a QR code on their phone.

Art or forensics? The Gallery’s unorthodox exhibition is indeed a tangled web and audience feedback will determine if unravelling it will pay off. But for me, it already has. I enjoyed seeing the real MacDonalds and the real Group of Sevens.

There are still questions to be asked, of course. Who painted the fakes and why were they buried in MacDonald’s backyard? We’ll probably never know. Solving that part of the puzzle was not part of the investigation. ■

J.E.H. MacDonald? A Tangled Garden is on view at the Vancouver Art Gallery until May 12, 2024.

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