The Art World's Wild North

My favorite app on my phone is the DailyArt app. The Polish-run app delivers a single work each day to your phone, along with a story about the piece, the artist, the era, or most often, some combination of the three. It has kept the fires of my art-lust going for a few years now.

It was through the app that I found a painting that has since become one of my favorites (a work I even mentioned before), Afterglow, by Norwegian-born American artist Jonas Lie, a painting of New York from the harbor (or one of the rivers):

But the connection of the north got me feeling the connection between that painting and the works of Norval Morrisseau, an artist I just learned about. Not that they're stylistically similar, because they are decidedly not. Mainly because I can't stop looking at them or thinking about them.

Or about the bizarre story of fame, fakes, fraud, first-nations people, and gangsters that inhabit the world of Norval Morrisseau.

"Artist and Shaman Between Two Worlds" 1980

Morrisseau was born on March 14th, 1932 on the Sand Point Ojibwe reserve in Ontario. He, like so many natives of the era in both Canada and America, was taked from his reserves and placed in boarding schools, forced to learn English/French, assimilate religions, and ignore his heritage.

Working later in life

Instead of forgetting everything, he merged his Anishinaabe beliefs with the western artistic vocabulary he was forced into at a young age and synthesized something new, something powerful.

If that was the end of this story, it would be compelling enough for me. I enjoy getting lost in amazing works of art. But it gets crazy.

Today, Morrisseau is widely recognized as the grandfather of indigenous art in Canada, and has been called the "Picasso of the north" when his works were exhibited in France and Italy. His rise to fame in the 1960s led to the trappings you may expect: parties, drugs, excess, et al.

Times were fun, followed by times that were hard, and sometimes decisions were made that could benefit people close to Norval. Maybe it was the occasional signing of a painting that wasn't his to help a cash strapped loved one; maybe it was helping out a crew of gangsters out of Thunder Bay on Lake Superior with some forgeries or fakes.

Eventually things got out of hand. The whole story is available in documentary form, and in book form, and I saw it all in an article in the Smithsonian but: in the end there were THREE separate rings of fake Morrisseau production companies---three separate entities producing high-level fakes of Morrisseau works, none of which he knew about or sanctioned.

It looks like, before they were all broken up, these groups possible produced over $100 million for themselves (of which Norval got exactly zero dollars), and over 200 paintings were sold and shipped worldwide. This whole enterprise turned into the biggest art fraud ring(s) in history, which is saying something. Disputed Morrisseau works have been found everywhere from private collections (natch) to the Smithsonian itself and the Canadian Parliament building in Ottawa.

In another bizarre twist of this story, Kevin Hearn, keyboardist for the Barenaked Ladies (composers of the theme song for The Big Bang Theory, among other things), upon learning that his Morrisseau painting was a fake, set about an odyssey with his lawyers to investigate and bring down the rings that were profiting off of these forgeries.

That's not a misprint: the keyboardist from the Barenaked Ladies and his lawyers performed the work of a police procedural---doing the legwork---that brought down three separate, unaffiliated, international forgery rings.

This seems ripe for a dramatization, or true crime miniseries on HBO, doesn't it?

In any case, I can't stop looking at these paintings, and this whole saga has set up shop in my brain. It reminds me a little of what the opening chapter of Gould's Book of Fish emphasizes: the story is more important than the artifact. That may be true with junky trinkets being sold as fake objects, but with these paintings, the story is just as compelling, which isn't always the case with amazing art.