June 30, 2008

Spotting fake paintings

There is one major problem with buying paintings, the fact that it may be fake! This is not a new problem, but artists these days are becoming so sophisticated and they have so many resources available to them, that the potential for buying a fake painting is really high.

But this could be a thing of the past, as the curator of 20th-century art at the Russian Museum from 1978 to 2003; Elena Basner has developed what she is saying could the ultimate fool proof detection system, which can tell if a painting has been produced after the 1940’s.

It is all to do with nuclear testing and more precisely the detection of two isotopes, Caesium-137 and Strontium-90. With over five hundred nuclear tests these isotopes penetrated plant life, in particular Flax and Linseed. These were used to bind paints and so will be clean before the 1940’s. Although when this can be made in a handy testing kit, may be a while yet

Source [CBC]