Yesterday Andy MacDougall, longtime professional screen printer and Print Workshop Central‘s correspondent/sleuth in Royston, Vancouver Island, B.C., in Canada sent us a link to an article published a couple of weeks ago in the Vancouver Sun on one of our favorite subjects: giclee fraud. The author, David Baines, says, “I think I have found the perfect fraud. Perfect because, even though there is a mound of circumstantial evidence suggesting it is a fraud, I can’t prove it.”

Baines is referring to giclee (inkjet) copies being passed off as original paintings in the Vancouver area. “It involves a form of digital imaging called giclee,” he says,  “which is basically a sophisticated ink-jet printing process. If you take a high-resolution digital photograph of a bowl of fruit, for example, then download it to a giclee machine, it will produce an exact replica…”

It turns out this giclee fraud is not limited to Vancouver. In a follow-up article published in the same newspaper on November 26, Baines recounts the case of Ottowa artist, Sheryl Luxenburg, who last April was awarded a gold medal and a $4,000 cash prize for one of her paintings by the American Watercolor Society. Now, after more careful scrutiny, there is some question as to whether the winning “watercolor” was an inkjet print of a mashup of two photographs she acquired from a stock photo agency. Baines concludes his article, “The American Watercolor Society, meanwhile, has withdrawn Luxenburg’s painting from its travelling exhibit and from its website. It has also commenced an investigation.”

These false Canadian paintings, if the allegations prove correct, represent clear-cut cases of what we shall refer to as “hard” giclee fraud: passing off inkjet reproductions of photographs as paintings. But what about the softer versions of this same fraud, those which affect the printmaking community? I’m referring to zig-zag businessmen offering for sale, “signed and numbered giclee prints” or “fine-art giclee prints.” This co-opting of the terminology of the fine-art print tradition to sell glorified photocopies is dishonest and damaging to the interests of authentic printmakers.

Digital Metastasis

And the trend is metastasizing into printmaking’s vital organs. Let me give you a couple of examples from our experience in recent months. The first one is a commentary which surfaced right here in a comment on Print Workshop Central. It’s from the deputy editor of Britain’s printmaking magazine of record. In the midst of a formidable display of smoke and mirrors, he makes a couple of points clearly:

There are indeed many dealers and publishers marketing expensive, limited edition digital reproductions – in other capacity, I run a magazine through which these are promoted. In some sense these prints are competing for the same pounds that might otherwise be spent on fine art prints; in many ways, they do not. They are often cheerfully undemanding in terms of imagery and often produced to co-ordinate with current decor trends. Few fine art printmakers would wish to work under such constraints so you have to ask yourselves: is this a market you would wish to be in?

Such prints do aspire or ape aspects of fine art prints. They purport to be the artist’s inspiration and to be made with care. Many are indeed limited editions. In the UK edition sizes for reproduction giclees have come down dramatically in recent years (95 and 195 are now the norm; several years ago editions sizes were 495). So there is a market and, I’m told, it is doing okay.

So, the deputy editor of one of world printmaking’s prime specialist information sources comes down clearly in favor of mixing “expensive, limited-edition digital reproductions” with authentic fine-art prints in the pages of the magazine.  I am prompted to ask, “How did that happen? What logic does it correspond to?  What possible place do reproductions of paintings have in a fine-art-print advocacy magazine?”

Shall We Sign and Number It?

“Many are indeed limited editions.” Indeed. Doesn’t our printmaking-specialist editor notice that the operative question here is: limited editions of what?  He knows, as we know, that they’re inkjet copies of photographs of paintings. Isn’t this detail relevant to the discussion? I’m reminded of the story (possibly apocryphal) of the Mexican village which got rich making ceramic reproductions of piles of dog excrement and selling them to American tourists. Mercifully, they had the good taste not to number them.

So much for standards at the top of the printmaking food chain in the U.K. Earlier this month we attended the Estampa International Print and Contemporary Art Editions Fair in Madrid. Who do you suppose was the principal sponsor of the fair, with their stickers stuck all over the hall? The world’s pre-eminent inkjet print manufacturer, Epson. And very proud foxes they were in one of international printmaking’s premier henhouses. After looking at the work exhibited on the stands of their collaborators, their mission seemed clear: to blur once and for all the difference between fine-art prints and digital reproductions.

Framed works on the walls of the stands bore monikers like:

• “Digital art on canvas. Print run of 5 copies.”
• “Giclée print.”
• “Digital print, Dibond. Print run of 5 copies + 1 AP” (These guys are really sophisticated!)
• “Digital print on Kodak Duraclear paper”
• “Infinity Endura metallic paper with methacrylate and Dibond” (Um, OK…)
• “Inkjet paper”

In all of these images hung on the walls at Estampa, there was no distinguishing between the copies and the original work. The emphasis was rather on “methacrylate and Dibond…” I’ve been in the fine-art printmaking communications business for more than eight years now, and I’ve done my homework.  I had trouble understanding what was what on the Epson-associate stands. Imagine the plight of your average casual visitor to the fair. What’s she supposed to make of it? She doesnt’ know a mezzotint from a mezzosoprano. She’s confused, and a prime victim for these bigtime purveyors of “limited-editon giclée prints.” (Please don’t forget the accent ague.)

Some Questions

Some questions inevitably arise:

• Should something be done to combat this “soft” print fraud which is doing so much damage to legitimate printmakers, both traditional and digital?
• Can anything be done?
• If so, what?
• Who should do it?
• What media should they use?
• When should they start?

Though I have some ideas, I don’t have the answers to these questions. I was hoping you might. You could start by clicking on the “Comments” link and sharing your thoughts on the subject with all of us.

Thanks to Andy MacDougall
(www.squeegeeville.com) for
opening up this rich vein.