“I had an art professor at the university in Havana — my friend the curator Osvaldo Sánchez once recalled— who used to say [referring to artistic achievement]: ‘Either you are the first, or you are the best’” ( “O eres el primero, o eres el mejor”).
This phrase by a colorful Cuban professor (whose name was Teresa Crego) might as well summarize, in its crudest terms, the litmus test for artistic relevance: we celebrate those artists who either introduce a new practice or transform a paradigm, but we also recognize those who brought that new form into its highest expression, whatever that might mean for the critical standards of the moment.
Once a particular artistic generation in art is historicized it doesn’t take long for the debate of who were the key players of that period. While an artist can’t control the critical reception of their work, the question of “who was first” at doing something seems more clear-cut: Who made the first abstract work? Who made the first Pop Art painting? Who made the first minimalist sculpture? And so forth. It is an issue of simple math and record-keeping. Or is it?
Enter the secretive practice of backdating artworks.
First, a few points about art works and dates: signing and dating an art work is the way an artist certifies not just authorship, but, as a notarial process, the time when the work was finished. The completion date point thus becomes a definitive marker of the birth, as it were, of the work.
Some artists, like Gerhard Richter, are fastidious in that practice. According to various reports, Richter documents every single step of the process of the making of every single one of his paintings, and keeps a perfect record of every work.
Other artists are not so concerned with the potential historical significance that a date might carry—at least at the time of making the work. This was the case of many Fluxus artists who —due to youth, the incredible amount of works that poured out of them in the early 60s and the way in which they didn’t place too much importance on authorship or art sales during that intense present— in later decades there have been differing accounts among them about who was the true author of what, as well as the exact date of some works and their multiple variations and reinterpretations. These conflicts escalated to the point that Fluxus artist Ben Vautier created a work titled “Is La Monte Young in the house?” Consisting in, at the beginning of a Fluxus concert, yelling that question to the audience to ensure that the aforementioned artist was not present, so that he could proceed to perform his versions of those works that La Monte Young would consider proprietary.
It can be argued that dating art work in the 20th century gradually became an even more important practice due to the rise of the international art market and its related demands— such as a dealer asking the artist to sign and date a work so that the buyer could have the assurance that what they are acquiring is something current — and also because a signature (which is generally attached to the date) generally raises the value of the work.
We know from historic documentation that several major modern artists backdated their works for a range of reasons. At times they were commercial, as was the case of Giorgio de Chirico, who is known that produced many backdated paintings from his Metaphysical period as they were in higher demand than his later works.
Then there are the instances of those artists who used backdating as a way to position themselves as precursors. In the case of Ernest Ludwig Kirchner, he famously backdated his works so that they would help cement the narrative of him as an artistic pioneer. His famous work Street, Dresden, which he originally dated 1908 and wrote “1907” on the work, was most likely painted in 1919.
But I tend to be particularly fascinated by a few cases in Mexico.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Madre campesina, c. 1931 (dated 1924)
In Mexican modern art perhaps the most prominent repeat offender in the backdating category was David Alfaro Siqueiros. “Siqueiros’s case is egregious, conscious, and malicious”, says art historian and scholar James Oles, who has authored several books and curated exhibitions of art of this period. “Siqueiros had a constant feeling of inferiority compared to Diego [Rivera], and needed to prove that he was ahead of the game.” The examples of backdated art works by Siqueiros are many, including Madre Campesina, a large 1931 painting that Siqueiros backdated to 1924 — an important distinction because he wanted to show that he was making large works during that period. While Oles and other scholars have conclusively proved (with contemporaneous catalogues and other materials) that the work is from the early 1930s, in Mexico “bureaucratically they can’t change the date because the work is legally considered ‘national patrimony’ and would involve too much paperwork.”
Art historian Esther Acevedo has also shown ( through historical documentation and X-Ray analysis ) that in the case of a famous painting by Siqueiros, Explosión en la Ciudad ostensibly from 1935 that shows a city under a mushroom cloud —hailed by some critics as a premonition of the nuclear bomb— never appeared on any publication or was mentioned by any author prior to 1945— the year that she establishes as the true date of that painting. Acevedo’s research proved that Siqueiros actually superimposed the 1935 date “with the goal of appearing more avant-garde”.
David Alfaro Siqueiros, Explosión en la ciudad, 1945 (dated 1935)
Another case of mis-dating involves the major Mexican photographer Manuel Alvarez Bravo. “Photography is very hard to date because the negative film material remains standard” for long periods of time, says Oles. However, color film offers a firm time reference because it was not commercially available until 1936. This fact allows one to identify mis-dating issues in some of Alvarez Bravo’s photographs, who the artist dated to the early 30s. Oles showed that the artist as a common practice would often take the same shot in both black and white and in color. This is the case of La hija de los danzantes, (The Daughter of the Dancers), a famous photograph in MoMA’s collection. In his book Manuel Alvarez Bravo in Color, Oles reveals that while the gelatin silver print in MoMA’s collection “is dated there as being from 1933, in reality it could not have been taken until after 1936, and was far more likely taken in the early 40s.”
Left: Manuel Alvarez Bravo, La Hija de los danzantes (dated 1933); right: Untitled (variant of La Hija de los danzantes, c. 1940-41)
Alvarez Bravo’s misrepresentations of the dates might not have been a case of hubris like Siqueiros, but most likely of simply misremembering in his later years.
As one goes further into the rabbit hole of backdating, things get curioser and curioser, including some of the most iconic works of the 20th Century. Take for example Jasper Johns’ Flag, dated 1954-55: some of the collage elements of the work (newspapers and such) visibly date from 1956, but the artist insisted on the original date stating that the work was damaged and later repaired in the studio in 1956. Yet, the fact that this 1956 paper is deep underneath the paint means that the piece would have required such substantial repainting that the intervention could no longer have constituted minor conservation work. Given that Johns is still alive and due to his prominence, it seems understandable that no one would dare question his own determination of the date. The question, nonetheless, is the extent to which this kind of “repair”, if not, alteration, should be accounted for in the historical record. In the case of Kirchner’s Street, Dresden, the work’s date has now been modified to “1908 (reworked 1919, dated on painting 1907)”, giving the benefit of the doubt to the artist on whether the work was initiated at the earlier date but noting that, at the very least, the painting was still being worked on years later.
But backdating does not have to be necessarily a practice of dishonest intention, earnest insistence in a particular genesis story, or mere amnesia. There are those artists who have taken on backdating in it of itself as an art form. One of them is Peter McGough, who along with his former partner and still artistic collaborator David McDermott took it to the level of a performative, lived practice: in the 1980s they backdated themselves to live as if they were in the Victorian era— dressing in period attire and only using appliances from that time— and would date their works to the 19th century. If time as duration is a state of mind as Henri Bergson more or less argued, and if something is art because the artist states it so, this also brings up an interesting question: if one buys a Peter McGough piece of 1889 made in 1989, what is the date of the piece? Is there an “artistic date” versus a “chronological date”? And should McGough be entered into art history as a contemporary of John Singer Sargent, a Postmodern artist like Jeff Koons, or maybe a post-Victorian artist in the same way that the Pre-Raphaelites saw themselves as post-Quattrocento?
Whatever the answer, the beauty of that time puzzle is that in the long scope of time the obsession with progressive narrativity of art history perhaps overlooks more atemporal, everlasting values in the work of a several artists who might rebel to the tyranny of the calendar or be subjected to anyone else’s stories or timelines.
This means that, according to the wise teachings of Professor Crego, they might not be the first, but they could still be the best.
Or, someone could simply be the best at backdating.
(with thanks to Anny Aviram for her input during the research of this column)