MUSEUM curator help identify artist’s works as real, fake

BY BRIAN KIDWELL

JOHNSON NEWSPAPERS

OGDENSBURG - Laura A. Foster’s job description doesn’t include being a detective.

Well, not exactly. As curator of the Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ms. Foster oversees the collections of bronze sculptures, paintings and illustrations that grace the 303 Washington St. museum named for the late north country artist (1861-1909).

But in oversight exists protection of legacy and reputation. And so it was that Ms. Foster was in Wyoming last week to ensure that Mr. Remington was safe on both counts.

At the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody Jan. 24, Ms. Foster joined three other museum curators and Remington experts to examine several privately owned paintings and illustrations. Their owners wanted to know if they were real or reproductions.

It turned out that of the 16 pieces put before Ms. Foster and her three colleagues, five of them turned out to be the real article. In her 10 years of taking part in this ritual, there has emerged an average.

“It has often been about 20 percent,” Ms. Fosters said Thursday of the positive findings. “It can also be none.”

Ms. Foster and the other judges use their visual acuity, familiarity with the Remington style and other means to decide what is and what isn’t authentic. They look at colors. They look at the front and back sides. The canvas is also a telling giveaway. Mr. Remington preferred Devoe brand canvasses.

The judges also have a formidable scholarly reference, the 1996, two-volume Catalogue Raisonne of Mr. Remington’s sketches and paintings. It is a heavy, dog-eared, exhaustive reference that contains no less than 3,000 of them.

But exhaustive is hardly final, according to Ms. Foster.

Mr. Remington was prolific. No one believes he stopped at 3,000.

“It’s growing,” Ms. Foster said, adding that two of the five positive discoveries from last week were not listed in the Catalogue Raisonne.

“That’s the most exciting,” she said. “It’s a very exciting process.”

Ms. Foster said the owners aren’t out to get a dollar value - the panel doesn’t do that - and they sincerely believe what they have is the real thing,

“Most people wouldn’t bother to take the trouble,” she said.