Photograph: Alamy
Revolutionary technology invented to identify counterfeit spare parts in the car and aerospace industries has now been adapted to detect counterfeit works of art.
The developers of the “optical recognition system” claim they have created “tamper-proof digital fingerprints” of paintings and sculptures that could, for example, enable museums to spot – within seconds – whether an original work has been swapped with a fake.
A German museum recently fell victim to such crime. An employee replaced three paintings with fakes, selling the originals to treat himself to a Rolls-Royce and other luxuries.
The technology, called Origify, was developed by Bosch in 2017 to stop the trade in fake spare parts for cars and planes. The German manufacturing company is the biggest supplier for the car industry. Until developing Origify, it had struggled to combat counterfeiting and other fraud in manufacturing and the replacement parts market where, with unregulated networks of dealers and repair shops, it is easier for counterfeiters to bring in illegal products.
Such counterfeit parts include exhaust sensors that are too small to carry identifying labels or markings. A special camera system captures selected unique details that are not normally visible to the human eye, storing data in a “tamper-proof cloud” and enabling authentication with a smartphone app. “It’s really like looking at the fingerprint of someone, a unique fingerprint that cannot be copied,” said Origify’s inventor, Oliver Steinbis.
“Due to the statistical thresholds of our algorithm, it is impossible to identify a not-registered image as an original one. Even with art prints from the same production, the images are uniquely recognised.”
As an art lover, he suddenly realised that he could extend its use to paintings, prints and sculptures. Even if a work has undergone restoration, untouched areas will still offer crucial data. Steinbis is due to meet security heads of European museums next month.
Michael Daley, director of ArtWatch UK, an independent watchdog for art conservation, said: “The Bosch scheme sounds eminently feasible technically. Every work of art – from drawings and prints to paintings and sculptures – is a manufactured object and no matter how skilfully an intended facsimile might perfectly mimic the optical appearance of a given work of art, it cannot replicate the means by which that work had originally been constructed. Inevitably, at some level of scrutiny, the tell-tale differences of genesis would become apparent.”
The German case in September 2023 involved the Deutsches Museum in Munich, where an employee who worked in the archives took the art nouveau artist Franz von Stuck’s Es war einmal (Once upon a time), 1891, a painting based on the fairytale The Frog Prince.
He replaced it with a forgery and sold the original through German auction-house Keterrer Kunst for €70,000 (£60,000). He stole three further paintings by 19th-century German artists, two of which he managed to sell at auction.
A museum spokesman said that the Stuck was part of a collection whose provenance was being researched when another member of staff noticed its unusual back: “This quickly led to the realisation that the painting … was not the original, but a fake.” The thief received a 21-month suspended prison sentence and was ordered to pay back more than €60,000.
