Inside one of the largest art frauds in history

Jordan: You recognize the artwork we’re going to discuss today, or at least you recognize the broad style. It’s unmistakable. You’ve seen it many times before. What is interesting though is even if you know this art and this artist intimately, even if you love it and appreciate it, even if you own some of it, you might not know what’s authentic and what’s not. Indigenous art fraud is an epidemic, and we’ve reported on that before, but even in that world, the Norval Morrisseau case is a massive one. The sheer scale of the fakes alone is one thing, but it’s the process that led to the creation of these fakes, the crimes committed behind that process and the ongoing attempt to sort this whole mess out that makes this much more than a story about art fraud, though that is where we begin. I am Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Luc Rinaldi is an award-winning writer who’s based in Toronto. He’s written for Maclean’s, Toronto Life, Canadian Business, and many more including this piece for The Walrus. Hey Luc.

Luc Rinaldi: Hey, Jordan. How are you?

Jordan: I’m doing really well. Your story is, as I mentioned, so fascinating. Start by telling us so that we all are starting from the same place. Who was Norval Morrisseau?

Luc Rinaldi: Norval Morrisseau was one of Canada’s greatest artists. He was also, I think one of the most famous Indigenous artists, artists pretty much anywhere in the world. He was born in the 1930s near Thunder Bay, and like a lot of Indigenous kids back then, he was sent to residential school where he was abused physically, verbally, sexually, and art was really respite for him, and he really dove into it as soon as he was out of school. It was around the time he was 30 that he had his first solo show in Toronto, and that really launched his career. And from there he had shows in the US and in Europe, and he helped create a group called the Indigenous Group of Seven, and he became widely known as the Picasso of the North.

Jordan: Describe his art for us, if you can, first, because I know there’s so much of it, but also because the style of it, which I think almost everyone listening has seen is so unique.

Luc Rinaldi: You’re right. It’s called the Woodlands School, and it’s basically based on Morrisseau’s work. There’s a lot of people who paint in his style now, but he was the first one to do it. And like you said, he used a lot of different materials, a lot of different media. In my research, I found that he used not just paint, but crayons and blood apparently as his material, and he painted on fridge doors and pizza boxes, but eventually he got to a point where he was mostly just painting with paints on standard canvases. And the way I would describe his work is you’ve got these very bold black lines, you’ve got very vibrant colors, color blocked out, and you’ve got usually some combination of bears and birds and different beasts. And these are all from sort of Ojibwe legends that his grandfather had told him about, but then he also introduces Catholic iconography or Christian iconography like Jesus. And then on the next canvas he’ll be painting a penis. And so it’s really all over the place. Once you get familiar with his ouvre, you can sense where he is coming from and what he’s doing. But you’re right, it is a whole lot of things that he created, thousands and thousands of works, and they’re quite unique.

Jordan: You told us a little bit about his background. He lived a unique adult life as well. Tell us about that before we get into the mystery kind of at the heart of this thing.

Luc Rinaldi: Yeah, he was an itinerant guy. He moved around a lot. He was in different towns and cities across Canada throughout his life, and he lived with friends, he lived with his agents, he lived with random people in hotels, occasionally lived on the street. And even though he made good money selling his paintings as of his thirties, he really spent his money pretty carelessly after his first show in Toronto, that really successful one I was mentioning, he hired a taxi to bring him home, which was like 14 hours. So I don’t know what taxis went for back then, but that would’ve been expensive. And he also spent a lot of money on booze, and this is sort of not a secret. He struggled with substance abuse and he spent a fair bit of his life trying to get his drinking under control. And at a certain point he did, but he really relied on his friends and his agents and apprentices to sort of help him manage his career and his finances. And some of those people really took advantage of him and his talent and I’m sure we’ll get into that.

Jordan: Yeah. Let’s start with what happened in the summer of 2006, which is maybe a good place to pick it up. And there was supposed to be an auction that kind of serves as one of the hooks of this story. What happened there?

Luc Rinaldi: That’s right. There was an auction. It was a reputable auction house called Heffel in Toronto, and they had a number of Morrisseaus, up for auction, and Morrisseau’s business manager, a guy named Gabe Vadas, he looked at the auction and realized that a number of the Morrisseaus that were upper auction, at least to his mind, were fake. They were not painted by Morrisseau, but forged by someone else and signed off as if they were created by Norval. The fact that there were fakes was not surprising or new to them. There were fakes around and a lot of great artists deal with fakes. That’s just what happens in the art world, and Morrisseau had seen some of them before, but in this case, why this particular auction ends up being a huge moment in the story of Morrisseau and the fakes, it’s that Heffel ended up removing these fakes from the auction, and that set off this very long complex chain of events, which starts with the owner of those paintings suing Vadas, the guy who identified them as fakes. And the owner says, my paintings are real. You said they were fake. Heffel removed them from auction, and therefore you devalued my paintings, so you should give me some money. And Morrisseau wanted to go to Toronto himself and tell the judge, Hey, I didn’t paint these things, but before the trial arrived, he fell ill and he died, and it’s now almost 20 years later, and we’re still talking about these fakes.

Jordan: What do we know about all the Morrisseau fakes out there? How many are there and who makes them and where do they come from?

Luc Rinaldi: Yeah, we know there’s at least about a thousand because the police have seized at least a thousand, but the estate, Morrisseau estate, estimates that there are thousands more. We know from police information that there were three sort of interrelated forgery rings, and we have more details on one than the others. It seems like the folks who were involved all sort of work together or at least overlapped in some ways. Some of these fakes are really easy to spot because they’re signed differently from typical, Morrisseau pieces and the line work is pretty sloppy, but others are quite tricky because they look real, and it’s only once you’re familiar with Morrisseau’s process and its method that you can separate the counterfeits from the real thing. And it often takes an expert to know for sure, and the Morrisseau estate is actually in the process of developing an AI tool that can help separate real paintings from fakes.

Jordan: You mentioned that just before his death, Morrisseau had gone to Toronto and wanted to tell the judge, these are not my paintings. That was later in his life in general. How did he feel about fakes and forgeries and the people making them?

Luc Rinaldi: Well, at first he actually sort of turned a blind eye. He knew that people were making fakes, and these people were sort of friends, relatives, apprentices. These were people who were close to him. And this was the 1980s, the 1990s, and he realized, okay, these people are painting stuff. It’s a similar style to mine. They can sell it off under their own name and make pennies, or they just sign my name and they’ll make a whole lot more money. They can pay their rent, they can buy groceries, they can live a good life. And so a friend of Morrisseau is a guy named Bryant Ross, who helped out with his business affairs, told me that more so sort of looked the other way and let it happen because he was a generous guy and he wanted the people around him to do well.

Jordan: When and how did that really start to change? And I guess where

Luc Rinaldi: This all starts to change in the 1990s, that’s when Morrisseau’s in Thunder Bay, he meets a guy named Gary Lamont. And Gary Lamont is a drug dealer known around Thunder Bay as a bit of a tough guy, and he and Morrisseau work at this deal. Morrisseau provides Gary Lamont with a few paintings. And Lamont says, okay, in exchange you can go paint at this cabin I have on a lake near Thunder Bay. And so Lamont realizes just how much money he can get selling these paintings, and it seems like he hatches a plan around this time to unbeknownst to Morrisseau, at least as far as I know, Lamont wants to create and sell a bunch of counterfeits. And the really ugly thing about this plan was that Lamont didn’t make the fakes himself and just sell them off. He actually got other Indigenous artists, including some of Morrisseau’s relatives and his friends and former apprentices, and he paid them in cash. He paid them in drugs, he paid them in booze. He used their status cards to buy art materials without paying tax, and then they would sell off those paintings to gallerists and auctioneers. And the truly awful part was that Lamont was also billeting some of these young men in his house, and a number of these young men would later tell the courts that Lamont raped them. And I can say all of this with some certainty because Lamont has pleaded guilty to both sexual assault and to running this forgery ring.

Jordan: How did Lamont end up in court to plead guilty to that forgery ring and the sex assault? And I know this sounds like a very strange adjacent question, but how did the Barenaked Ladies find their way into this story?

Luc Rinaldi: Yeah, the story takes a lot of twists and turns, but I don’t think anyone saw the Barenaked Ladies factoring in. It really goes back to 2010, the Art Gallery of Ontario asked Kevin Hearn, a member of the Barenaked Ladies to show some of his private art collection at the gallery. And so he’s a fan of Morrisseau, and I talked to him and he told me he included a supposed Morrisseau, a piece called Spirit Energy of Mother Earth, in this show. But what happened was within a few days, the gallery took it down and they called him and they said, I think this painting might be fake. And so Hearn was surprised, and he tried to figure out what was going on, but he went to the gallerists that he bought it from, and that guy was not cooperating. He refused to believe it was a fake. And so Hearn decided to hire a lawyer, a guy named Jonathan Sommer, who had been involved with Morrisseau fakes and trying to bring them to light before. And so they started working together and investigating where these paintings came from. It’s a long, fascinating and heartbreaking saga, and if anyone wants the full story, I highly recommend they watch Jamie Kastner’s excellent documentary called There Are No Fakes, which really gets into it. And ultimately, it was the creation of that film that caught the attention of police, and then they began investigating the forgery of Morrisseau’s works, and that’s what led to the arrest of eight people last year.

Jordan: How did they go from that investigation to the arrest, and what did they learn sort of along that way about the scale of the forgeries that Lamont was creating out of that cabin in that workspace?

Luc Rinaldi: It certainly took them a while to figure it all out because it was such a complex operation. They discovered some of the details that I told you about this cabin. They spoke to some of the young men who worked there in addition to Indigenous artists that Lamont had hired and told, Hey, I’ll pay you if you make these kinds of paintings, but just don’t sign them. Ultimately, there were more than a thousand fakes Lamont and some of the people he was working with would drive out to Alberta and British Columbia and sell these, buy the dozens, and then come back home and make some more. And so it was huge. When the police announced the arrests, they called it the biggest art fraud in world history.

Jordan: What kind of effects did it have on the Indigenous art community in Canada or just Canada’s art community in general? How big a deal was this?

Luc Rinaldi: This was huge, in part because it had been such a long time coming. People knew there were fake Morrisseaus going around, but because no one had proven it in a legal sense, you couldn’t really even say that there were fake Morrisseaus or else you ran the risk of getting sued for devaluing someone’s paintings. And so when Lamont pleaded guilty, and in fact when Kevin Hearn won an appeal that said that the providence of one of his pieces was fabricated, it sort of lent some closure to this. It didn’t solve the problem because there are still so many fakes out there, but it did make certain that there are fakes, and we know there are, and now the estate and police are sort of on board and working on it and trying to legitimize this market again. But as I learned the art world in general, and particularly the Indigenous art world, this story is not an exception. This is symbolic of a problem that runs much deeper.

Jordan: Why does that problem run so deep in the Indigenous community in the first place? And how widespread is it in this country?

Luc Rinaldi: So Indigenous art artwork is being counterfeited and faked en masse. The reality is that Canada prizes, or at least likes to say that it prizes, its Indigenous art, it celebrates the artists. But the unfortunate reality is that when people go out to actually buy these pieces of art, they’re often looking at counterfeits. So if you go online and you think you’re buying a piece from an artist from BC, it’s a beautiful carving. It may be a 3D printed counterfeit that produced in Eastern Europe. And so I talked to a number of Indigenous artists who just told me straight up, we deal with this stuff every day. They go online, they see their designs printed on mugs and t-shirts and Crocs, and they report the sellers. They try to shut down these websites and it works for 24 hours, and then a new site pops up and suddenly their wares are available again. And it’s such a deep seated and hard to tackle problem that a lot of these artists have sort of just given up on fighting them because they can’t spend millions of dollars to hire lawyers to investigate what’s happening, to go across the ocean to where many of these things are being manufactured. And the ultimate effect is that it takes a real toll on their livelihood because buyers can get art that they want cheaper, albeit of lower quality. And so it’s hard for a real Indigenous artist to make a living as an artist, and that discourages young people from becoming artists themselves. And so in my Walrus piece, I talk about some of the legislative changes, some of the policing changes that could really help address this problem, but so far nothing’s really happening. And so Indigenous artists are just being left high and dry.

Jordan: Give us a quick sense of what could help in terms of legislative or policing changes.

Luc Rinaldi: Yeah, I talked to a senator, or I should say a retired senator now named Patricia Bovey, who has sort of led the charge on these legislative changes. And a few things include better controls at the border, so training customs guards to identify fakes, to know where they’re coming from to better intercept them. Another thing that would help is for real artists who are selling authentic works, finding a way to recompense them after the fact. So say they sell an artwork to a buyer, they make whatever money they make. If that buyer then puts it up for auction or they sell it to someone else, the original artist doesn’t get any new money, even though their artwork is earning someone else possibly more than they sold it for. And so Bovey recommended doing what some other countries have done, which is introducing resale rights, which would give something like 5% of the sale price or the resale price of an artwork back to the original artist. And there are some complicated factors of how you achieve these kinds of things, but other countries have done them. They’re doable. They work, they’re very helpful, and in fact, I believe the Canadian government has said, we will do this, and they’ve already passed their timeline for I think when they plan to do it. So in my opinion, it can’t happen too soon.

Jordan: You mentioned they’ve already found a thousand plus Morrisseau fakes, they suspect there are more out there, but also, as you also mentioned, his own volume of original work was so huge. How does somebody interested in perhaps acquiring a Morrisseau or even somebody who thinks and hopes they have a Morrisseau authenticate it? I know you mentioned an AI program. Is that available now? What do we do with his artwork today?

Luc Rinaldi: Yeah, this is a very complicated question because it gets to the heart of the problem. There are so many people involved with this story who claimed to be the good guys, and so it can be hard to know who to trust, who can actually authenticate paintings and who’s just sort of trying to make a buck. The short answer is that there are some credible people. The lawyer who worked with Kevin Hearn, Jonathan Sommer, is involved in some authentication work. There are other folks out there. I think if you read my piece in The Walrus or you watch There Are No Fakes, you’ll get a sense of what can give away a fake. There are these black dry brush signatures on the back of some pieces, and that’s sort of a giveaway. There are certain types of lines and certain types of forms that are not really Morrisseau’s thing, but show up a lot in the fakes. Ultimately, it’s not easy. It takes an expert opinion, and even the courts didn’t agree with some of the experts who came and said, these are fakes. So my unfortunate answer for a lot of those people is, you’ve got to do your research. You’ve got to figure out who you can trust, and you might have to pay a little bit of money just to figure out whether the Morrisseau that you have or would like to buy is the genuine article.

Jordan: Luc, thanks for this. As I said, such a fascinating story and sums up the problems so many Canadian artists, including Indigenous artists are grappling with.

Luc Rinaldi: You’re right, thanks Jordan.

Jordan: Luc Rinaldi writing for the Walrus. That was The Big Story, and for more from us, including the previous episode I mentioned off the top about Indigenous art fraud, you can head to TheBigStorypodcast.ca. You can as always give us some feedback by emailing us at hello@TheBigStorypodcast.ca or by calling us and leaving a voicemail at 416-935-5935. The Big Story is available wherever you get your podcasts, and of course, it’s in every single smart speaker. Just ask them to play The Big Story podcast. Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. We’ll talk tomorrow.