Where Art Forgeries Meet Their Match

Featured on nytimes.com

Jamie Martin has some advice for criminals: “Never wear synthetic fibers while making a forgery.” They’ll show up in the lab.

And everybody knows that Vermeer didn’t wear polyester.

Mr. Martin shared that wisdom while showing a guest around his fifth-floor laboratory-office at Sotheby’s New York on the Upper East Side of Manhattan. It’s a large, windowless white room filled with technology, some of the equipment owned by only a handful of institutions worldwide.

Just past the locked door, with its laser-radiation danger warning, cameras were aimed at the vibrant oils of a Flemish old master. Mr. Martin described another painting in his office, seen only from the back, as “probably from the 16th century.” (The owners had not given him permission to show it.)

Mr. Martin, one of those lucky men who still look boyish in their late 50s, knows some forgers are careless, like the man whose supposed Jackson Pollock was sold to the Knoedler Gallery in Manhattan with the signature “Jackson Pollok.” That was part of a major 2016 art-world scandal, which Mr. Martin discussed on “60 Minutes.”

But some forgers are clever. They are the ones who fear Mr. Martin, who was called “the rock star of his field” with “no equal” in a recent Art New England article. After decades of consulting for the F.B.I., museums, auction houses and other clients, Mr. Martin is now head of Sotheby’s scientific research department. In its first year, 2017, his department examined works valued at more than $100 million, Darrell Rocha, a Sotheby’s spokesman, said.

Museums may have this kind of setup, but until now major auction houses didn’t. Sotheby’s acquired Orion Analytical, Mr. Martin’s Williamstown, Mass., company, in December 2016 and now claims 80 percent of his time, half of which he spends in New York and half either at Sotheby’s London or traveling, sometimes to examine artworks on site.

Click here to read the full article.