On March 3, the Ontario Provincial Police said they had found "the biggest art fraud in world history" while looking into a ring that faked works by the well-known Ojibwe artist Norval Morrisseau. Eight people, including a member of the late painter's family, were charged in the case, and more than 1,000 paintings were taken away. The forgery ring used child slave labor in sweatshops and took advantage of talented young Indigenous artists. This shows that Canada has bigger problems with how it treats First Nations people. Morrisseau was a groundbreaking artist who lived through Canada's notorious residential school system and a near-fatal illness as a teenager. He went on to become famous around the world after being "discovered" by Jack Pollock, a Canadian gallery owner who worked with Morrisseau for many years. In the years before he died in 2007, Morrisseau learned that fakes of his work were being sold. There Are No Fakes, a 2019 documentary by Canadian filmmaker Jamie Kastner, brought the issue to the attention of a wider audience.
The idea for the movie came from a lawsuit that Canadian musician Kevin Hearn of the band Barenaked Ladies filed against the Toronto-based Maslak McLeod Gallery for selling him a painting that he said was a fake by Morrisseau. It then reveals the art-fraud ring based in Thunder Bay, where the artist lived and worked for decades, and suggests that there may be up to ten times as many fake Morrisseau works on the market as real ones. People say that the movie helped Hearn's lawsuit, which had been thrown out at first because he couldn't prove for sure that his painting was a fake. After the first decision was made public, the Ontario Court of Appeal overturned it and gave Hearn C$60,000 (about $44,000). Ontario police also said that the movie was a big reason why they started the investigation.
Kastner says that since the 3rd of March, the number of people watching the film online has been "spiking." However, he says that he is currently in a legal battle with the Ontario police, who want to use parts of his film as evidence in their case. Kastner says that there are "at least 3,000 more forgeries out there," but that "a huge portion of these disputed works," especially those in the style of his black dry brush series, "are easy to identify—they have a signature on the back in English." On the front of his works, the artist always wrote "Copper Thunderbird" as his name in Ojibwe. The person in charge of Morrisseau's estate, Cory Dingle, says that the damage to Morrisseau's art legacy affects the whole Canadian art market. Others think that the forgery ring scandal might make people more aware of the artist's work and raise its market value.
Morrisseau is thought to have started the Woodlands School of Art, which was based on traditional Native cosmology. Marc Chagall called him "the Picasso of the North," and his work reflected the cultural and political tensions between Indigenous and settler traditions. But it also celebrated the way cultures and sexualities can change over time. (Morrisseau was bisexual and painted a lot of sexually suggestive pictures.) Artists like Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun, who combined Indigenous cosmology with Surrealism, were influenced by the artist's later work, which used modern phrases. The 1974 National Film Board documentary The Paradox of Norval Morrisseau brought a lot of attention to Morrisseau's work Indian Jesus Christ, which mixed Indigenous religious symbols with stained-glass images.
Selena Mattei