Black Mark

There is the seen, and there is the unseen; likewise, there is history, and there is un-history. Just because something is unseen doesn’t mean it doesn’t exist, as do the unmentioned, the under-acknowledged and underrepresented parts of history. Un-history is what is untold, not discussed, the blind spots in the narratives. In art history, money, copying, and art crimes are not discussed.

In her new book, Unseen – Art Crime in Australia, Dr Penelope Jackson argues that art crimes are part of art’s un-history. The theft of Picasso’s Weeping Woman is not mentioned on the didactic card beside it in the gallery. Nor is the unauthorised removal of Picasso’s La Belle Hollandaise for the Queensland Art Gallery, as the man who broke into the gallery to take it has told me several times. (I’m not a random reviewer but a long-time observer of the intersection of art and crime in Australia.)

Art crimes need to be exposed more, as do the other unseen elements of the art world. Raising awareness that art crime is not a victimless crime, and that its victims are not only wealthy art collectors. Indigenous people are now common victims of both art theft and art forgery. And the most common of victims are artists who stereotypically are living in poverty, and actually living in relative poverty.

From criminals avoiding detection to victims reluctant to publicise thefts and forgeries, art crime is often intentionally unseen. There is a chapter on the normally unseen backs of six forged or faked paintings. And although the subtitle of the book is“Art and Crime in Australia”, Jackson keeps the main title, the unseen, as a constant theme in the book, even when it isn’t about art crime. There is a chapter on copies, which, although fake and forgery-related, is a separate subject. However, given the current status of copies in the art world, where the NGV’s copies are consigned to storage, they are part of the unseen un-history of art, along with women artists, Australian artists who practice offshore, and data and statistics.

In general, data and statistics about the art world are limited to non-existent. Data and statistics on art crimes are not available; the police classify miscellaneous things as “art”. But there is no data on vandalised or damaged works in public collections.

In one chapter, Jackson examines whether being the repeated victim of art theft affects an artist’s work’s value; the answer is no. She presents 20 cases of theft involving paintings by William Dobell. It wasn’t that the thieves were targeting Dobell, who was a popular and prolific artist whose work was in many collections. Measures of popularity are relatively easy, but what does “prolific” mean? Jackson turns to the data when it comes to this overused description of an artist.

The theme of the unseen serves Jackson well. From her imaginary exhibition of stolen art, because so much is missing and probably will never be recovered, the missing provenance of forgeries, and finally, the missing specialist law enforcement in Australia, the missing evidence, and prosecutions. So much about art crimes is missing, not here, untold, unmentioned, the under-acknowledged and underrepresented; in contrast, Jackson’s book has the details of the art involved in many art crimes, great and small.

Jackson focuses on the art rather than the details of the crimes, tracing their sometimes surprising origins and destinies. As a former public art gallery director and curator, she is keen to locate the art and is interested in the physical object. However, this background doesn’t serve her well in examining vandalism, where she spends five pages complaining about the unmentioned but negligible cost of damage caused by climate activists, compared to the three pages she devotes to $4.2 million in damage by climate change when the Lismore Regional Art Gallery was flooded. In this case, the damage to institutions’ reputations appears to be a greater concern than the damage to art.

A final detail about Unseen: the book launch was at Lauraine Diggins Fine Art, a commercial gallery in a quiet Caulfield North street. The location has resonance in the history of exposing art forgery in Australia, and one of the forgeries that motivated this was on hand as a visible example of the detail a forger will add, even to the back of a painting. Lauraine Diggins Fine Art does not consider itself an art crime victim, more of an avenging angel. She funded the Grimwade Centre for Cultural Materials Conservation to establish authentication services, which, in turn, have exposed more forgeries.

Penelope Jackson, Unseen – Art and Crime in Australia (Monash University Publishing, 2025)