Max Pechstein: “Seine Bridge with Freight Barges”

The brilliant forger. In 2010 Wolfgang Beltracchi was arrested by the German police. He was accused of having forged at least 30 paintings and having sold them for $45 million. Confessing to forging paintings by Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, and Max Pechstein as well as other artists, Beltracchi was sentenced to six years in prison. As it turned out, he and his wife managed to deceive the art world for more than 40 years.
What did the experts say? In the advent of the affair, experts found out that when manufacturing the artwork ‘Seine Bridge with Freight Barges’, the forger used an image projector to cast images of Pechstein watercolors and ink drawings onto larger canvases, then traced slightly altered copies using oil paint. By this method he shoud have been able to reproduce Pechstein’s brushstroke very accurately. Nevertheless, our AI System detected the imitation, and classified the piece as ‘not-authentic’ with a probability of 94.75%!

The brushstroke and a provocative thought. In general, brushstrokes appear as texture areas in paintings distinguishing themselves from other significant contours. Moreover, the stroke-like line segments often display a clear directionality
The AI system developed at Art Recognition is capable of analyzing and learning the orientation, shape, width, and length of brushstrokes. Along with other elements such as objects, shapes, and chromatic features, this data is fed into the system, allowing the AI to learn and recognize the unique characteristics and style of Max Pechstein.
In “Seine Bridge with Freight Barges”, the individual brushstrokes are clearly visible and pronounced. The AI classified the image as a forgery, revealing a strong mismatch between the brushstrokes learned from the original Pechstein training images and those identified on this artwork. This discrepancy raises the question: why did the art experts who initially deemed the piece authentic fail to notice this difference?