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• Dr. Carolyn Butler-Palmer, University of Victoria
• Dr. Dawn Cunningham, Queen’s University

Art crime is fodder for sensational movies, novels, and games avidly consumed by the public. However, this entertainment aspect of crime disguises its impact on art history, shaping the contours of our knowledge of objects and the past. Forgeries, for example, call into question the primary evidence art historians rely on and theft complicates our understanding of an artist’s oeuvre. Similarly, theft reduces our archive of primary evidence about artists and their work while forgeries falsify that record. Despite the effects of art crimes on art historical research and teaching, the subject has only a tenuous relationship with academic inquiries in our discipline and we wonder why that is the case. We solicit papers exploring crime and its relationship to the discipline of art history in terms for research, teaching, and the challenges we experience in so doing.

keywords: crime, theft, forgery, art, history

session type: panel

All Art, No History: Archaeological Looting and the Destruction of Context

• El Tennant, Queen’s University

Archaeological looting, understood as the clandestine removal of artifacts from an archaeological site, is an old and persistent problem. While this looting has been discussed extensively by archaeologists and criminologists, it also presents unique problems for art historians. The inclusion of looted antiquities in our museums and curriculums allows for appreciation, but not for education. Once removed from its original context, the object becomes frozen as an object of pure aesthetics, unable to fully contribute to our understanding of the past. It leads to a stagnation in the classroom: we can add images to our textbooks, but not information. These gaps in our knowledge are only growing larger as the scale and severity of archaeological looting increase, and the current system of remedies is widely regarded as inadequate. Whether we ignore or include looted materials in our teaching and research, they represent a troubling doubt in the historical record. The inability or unwillingness to identify looted materials means we don't know what we don't know, and cannot trust what we have. This paper asks: how do we compensate for the doubt introduced by archaeological looting in attempting to understand and teach about the past?

keywords: archaeology, looting, art history, crime

Photographic Crimes: Research in the Aftermath of the ‘Affaire Duclos’

• Zoë Tousignant, McCord Stewart Museum

This paper proposes to discuss the ramifications of a different kind of art crime: those cases where, in a particular set of circumstances, an image is officially declared to be illegal. On April 9, 1998, the Supreme Court of Canada decided that the publication of a photograph by Gilbert Duclos of a young woman sitting on a Montreal sidewalk had violated the subject’s image rights. Taken in the street photography style for which Duclos was known, the offending picture had been published in the 1988 edition of the cultural magazine Vice Versa without the plaintiff’s consent. The Supreme Court’s decision, the result of a ten-year legal battle between the subject and the photographer commonly known as the “Affaire Duclos,” would have a dramatic and lasting impact on the way photography is both practised and disseminated in Quebec. Among the members of the photographic community, the outcome of the highly publicized case was experienced as a collective trauma that effectively paralyzed the making of images in the public sphere. For publishers and institutions that disseminate photography, the precedent set by the decision rendered the publication of people-centered images produced after the earliest decades of the twentieth century fraught with potential legal and financial risk. But what of the broader methodological repercussions of the affair? How does it continue to affect researching and writing the history of photography in Quebec today? This paper argues that this particular “crime” marked a turning point in the conception of the human photographic subject, henceforth seen as a source of mistrust and even fear. To go beyond this understanding, the subject must be embraced as a key component of research.

keywords: photography, street photography, image rights, public sphere, print culture

Racial Politics and Aesthetic Neglect: Labyrinthian Predicaments and the Art of Norval Morrisseau

• Carmen Robertson, Carleton University

When a recent headline in the Art Newspaper announced: “Canadian police uncover ‘biggest art fraud in world history’” (8 March 2023), with a sensational but factually incorrect story about the arrests of fraudsters and the seizing more than 1,000 works in a forgery investigation, Carmen Robertson was unsurprised and probably less hopeful than most who read the story. As an art historian who has researched the art of Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau since 2005 and is currently the lead investigator for The Morrisseau Project: 1955-1985, an exhaustive study of the art and life of Copper Thunderbird’s first thirty years of his career, Robertson has encountered first-hand the difficulties involved in carrying out an art historical study of an artist targeted by an insidious criminal campaign.

Employing experiential and autoethnographic methods of analysis, this paper frames key issues surrounding the ways crime has complicated art historical research into Morrisseau’s art and other Indigenous artists. Situating racial discourse in the art world as a central issue that impacts the untangling of aesthetic considerations, and a lack of legal infrastructure and appetite in Canada to combat such crimes, Robertson considers the complexities that impact Indigenous art histories and the reproduction of mythologies art history aims to counter.

keywords: Indigenous art, forgery, crime, aesthetics