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Authenticity is Everything
Marilyn Monroe Signature Authentic?
I would love members opinions as to
the authenticity of these signed Marilyn
Monroe picture?
- Attachments: No photo uploads here
Replies to This Discussion
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Permalink Reply by Pauline Berry on
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That would be good. It's not a good "fin" i.e. "lyn" and yet, other than the not so pointy loops, most else is all good.
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Having slept on this, my eyes are fresher. I initially made too quick an assessment on this, peering at it via FB messaging, I thought it looked good in the context of the photo. I did, however, tell him, as I do anybody, to keep researching, 100s of signatures, to get more familiar.
This item has a good back story, and I tend to be quite trusting, it's a Kiwi thing I guess. A German seller who has sold him real authenticated items before. The story is it came from an MGM employee prior to that with a signed note. Apparently also, the s on kisses is there i.e. the pressure mark, but the ink isn't.
I think the signer put quite an effort in, and it was a fair try at the dedication, a very correct J etc, but it doesn't match the signature, which on it's own is ok-ish (bar the "lyn" and unpointy Ms). Two too many things wrong.
This signing is like a patchwork of other signings, but they don't belong together all in one. So that is the third thing - three too many.
This is the strangest "lyn" - it appears the last part was added from the tail, i.e. the opposite direction, rather than a continuation of the ly combo. A very bad sign and the very worst aspect. I should have paid more attention to this at the very beginning. The close up reveals all and I don't think I saw it large and separately before. It's also too slowly written when viewed up close.
I have been in contact with Beatlenut and he is able to return it.
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I wipe my sweaty brow - I jumped too fast on this. Skepticism and slower assessing is good.
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Permalink Reply by Steve Cyrkin, Admin on
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I can relate, Pauline. When I'm fast, don't check exemplars when I should or wake up in the middle of the night and comment, my accuracy can suffer considerably.
Then there the ones I look back on and say, "Cyrkin, what in the world were you thinking?"
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Permalink Reply by Woody2Shoes on
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Steve, IMO, the problem IS having to check exemplars for MM. MM can be erratically eccentric with her signature (mostly later years) and though I haven't checked any exemplars since first opining on this horrendous mish mosh, I'm sure if I went through all of my MM files, I can find a sample that matches small parts of this very closely.
So if you start referencing exemplars to compare against this smorgasbord signature, you will quickly note, "OK, well one of the Ms looks spot on to this one here, and the other M matches this exemplar there, and here's one with a matching "on" and the same degree of separation here and there as this one, etc., etc., and so on.
You do this, and you may see enough in the way of matches here and there to known authentic exemplars and you can be convinced that even a blatant forgery may be good.
But then, at some point, you stand back and look at the whole; the architecture and composition of the whole thing and it's a different story. It's like painting a mural on a wall and never walking across the street to see the macro detail. Up close, each character taken individually looks great at arm's length, and then when you're done, you walk across the street to look at the finished product, gasp, and then run to home depot for 5 gallons of white paint!
That's what the forger should have done with this. He's chugging along with his library of exemplars, pausing after each entry, and thinking, "Oh boy, did I nail that", and he did. Here and there. But once he stood back and viewed the whole, he should have ran for the paint. lol
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I am slightly impressed with the effort this forger put in. Most seem to not study her signature at all . . .
8/10 for the dedication 3/10 for the signature. Most are 1/10
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The inscription was quite good.
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It would have been better if Kisses had that last 's'! lol
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Yes, feeling rather sheepish about this. I think I have gotten used to seeing an item as fake really quickly, because it is usually really obvious when I open up an image.
I would be interested to see if anyone has an image of what they would call a "good" Monroe fake? Most are truly awful - like this on Ebay currently.
I guess all fakes are "bad" but has anyone had one they know is now fraudulent, but it had them going in the other direction a while?
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Pauline, I once painted a 20 foot wildlife mural on the side of my school's library. Took the whole summer. 49% of it for the initial rendering, 2% of it to whitewash the whole thing to start over, and 49% of it to redo it, this time stopping often to walk way down the block to view it from afar!
I was a kid, I was on a roll, and I was nailing it, as far as I was concerned. After a month, once the whole thing was finished, I took pictures from every conceivable angle and I was horrified. From close up, to me, it rocked, Woody2Shoes, SUPER-genius. From afar, each element still looked good... on its own; but the perspectives and angles from afar made it look like the lions were half the size of the elephants, instead of 1/4 the size and 1/10th the volume! Same with the monkeys. Too damned big from afar. The whole scale was off, so much so, the perspective and angles skewing it on the macro level that I painted over the whole thing and started all over again.
That's the best analogy I can think of with this MM. You knew what you were looking at, you really know your stuff when it comes to MM, in fact, I've learned a lot from you about proxies from studying your output, but this was just a case where the trees blocked the forest for you. The whole temporarily escaped you because the individual elements looked proper, in and of themselves.
That fate didn't befall me because my first reaction was "no way" and I didn't review exemplars, which may have been misleading with this, because it looks like the forger used a dozen different exemplars to compose this.
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