Hands of clay: the Nelson Mandela art print fraud
by Sue Williamson
One of the saddest stories of the year is the one about the nation's beloved hero Nelson Mandela and the fraudulent issue of (un)limited edition prints allegedly drawn and signed by Madiba himself.
It is certainly not the first large scale art print fraud in history - the respected Spanish artist Salvador Dali was notorious for signing large piles of blank paper for future use by his printers. Fake Andy Warhols come up all the time. But the fact that Mandela, revered worldwide for his impeccable morals has been sucked into this mess, badly advised, set up, duped into participating, or allowed himself to be used as a front of a commercial enterprise for the sake of his charities, depending on how you read the situation, fills one with deep disappointment. At some point, he apparently called a halt to the process, but the ferocious marketing of fake prints continued for months after that.
Right from the start, the project looked highly questionable. First, there were the prints themselves. All of the prints looked as if they were made exactly the way they later turned out to be - a facile sketch made by an illustrator was traced over by Mandela, and presented as an original drawing.
Anyone with an art training could see that. There was none of the awkwardness and skewed perspective that would have been apparent in a drawing made on the spot by an older, untrained person like Mandela which would have given the drawings a real interest and sense of authenticity. You know how you can always see when an ad agency has done a child's drawing instead of a real child? It was like that. The drawings looked wrong. You can't fake the drawn line.
Someone should have told Mandela right then that the tracing of someone else's drawing is not an original, however eminent the tracer.
Looking at those first prints, one wondered if Mandela knew what was being marketed in his name. But there, undeniably was the Mandela signature beneath each print, in pencil, as it should be on a print. Surely, one thought, no one would be foolish or brazen enough to fake that.
And at the beginning, back in 2000 when the prints first appeared, while one regretted that these crude prints were being sold, one assumed that the buyers also understood some of the background to the print, and that the money was going to the Nelson Mandela Children's Trust. In addition, one assumed that the limited edition prints were being issued in a strictly limited edition.
The purpose of this opinion piece is not to try to establish where all the enormous amounts of money - many millions - have gone. That will presumably come out in the courts. The prints are still available online through outlets like the snootily named Belgravia Gallery in London. A full set of six lithographs from the Robben Island series costs R680 860,00. Oprah Winfrey, on a visit to South Africa, bid R2 million for her set. In the three series, an astonishing total of 26,919 prints have been manufactured.
Our concern here is simply to lay out the facts of the matter as they have been presented in a recent Noseweek story, and to consider the effects of the fallout.
The first series, the hand series, was drawn by graphic designer Tish Roux based on concept sketches by Hugh McCallum in 2000. In July 2001, Nelson Mandela traced over the pictures and hand-wrote a statement to accompany them: 'I draw hands because they are powerful instruments, hands can hurt or heal, punish or uplift.'
Apparently 546 prints in this series were contracted for, but 5046 copies of the prints were, in fact, produced. Reports Noseweek, 'There appears to have been chaos at all stages of the numbering process of the various limited editions.' Mandela did sign a few of the first prints, but Ross Calder, mastermind behind the project, imported a Ghostwriter machine to electronically sign all the others.
The second series, drawn by young artist Varenka Paschke, a granddaughter of PW Botha, was the 'Robben Island' series. Here, says the Touch of Mandela website, Paschke 'assisted Mr Mandela with both the composition and the application of colour.'
For the third series, known as the Davos series, more than 20 international artists, of whom the brightest luminary is art star Marlene Dumas, including Willie Bester and Beezy Bailey, were invited to superimpose their own images over the original hand prints.
Somewhere along the line, Mandela withdrew permission for the prints project to continue, but the bandwagon rolled merrily along, churning out thousands more prints.
Even if it turns out that every cent of the vast amounts of money generated by this sorry enterprise has gone into the charitable foundations it was alleged to support - and don't hold your breath on that one - the venal attitude which allowed these ersatz prints to flood the market in unrestricted editions with no regard for the credibility of Madiba or art, is stomach turning and disgusting. All those who spent their money supporting a good cause, but at the same time obtaining, as they thought, a limited edition print by Mandela, must feel sick at heart and angry at the way they have been deceived.
So do the prints have any value at all, considering that Mandela did give his approval originally, and must have condoned the electronic signing? (Noseweek reports that he told a Robben Islander that he signed only a very few himself.) The strict numbering and signing of limited edition prints is critical in the process for maintaining their value as art. The minute this goes awry, this value has completely gone.
If any worth remains, it is only as the unhappy evidence of the triumph of greedy manipulators over a hero's reputation.
