Anne,
Thanks for bringing this up. It's an important issue but one which has a
lot of tricky aspects...
For one thing, if collectors start doing less restoration and backing
that means hard times for the wizards and hard working honest people at
the restoration and backing studios who provide a valuable service.
But since there has always been a buyer preference for unrestored and
unbacked material whenever you can get it, the supply of good quality
unrestored vintage posters -- particularly the highly desirable titles
-- simply could not meet the demand as more and more buyers entered the
field.
There's the rub... far too many truly vintage posters... truly beautiful
posters... are in bad shape. The ones in really good shape are already
in collections and rarely make it back out onto the market. A lot of
wonderful posters (not necessarily super-expensive ones either) exist
today because of the restorer's art, and that's a good thing. But for
the super-expensive, highly desirable posters, just about the only
option left became to find one in very bad condition and restore into a
presentable state.
And that's where things really got wonky. Everyone has a different idea
of what's presentable and how far a restoration should go. In the huge
price run-up of the last 15 years, the big money buyers only wanted to
pay their big money for "practically perfect posters in every way".
Restorers obliged them. Nothing wrong with that (well, theoretically,
anyway...) but it started a trend towards a whole lot of other people
wanting their posters to look "mint" like the day they came off the
press. Some people started backing posters that were already in mint or
near-mint shape "to preserve them". Madness. You can de-acidify a
poster, stick it in an archival frame and "preserve it" every bit as
well. Better, from a purist standpoint.
But that wasn't the real danger in all this restoration fervor. It was,
as you point out, that restoration techniques got so good and at the
same time it became more acceptable for a valuable poster to only be,
say, 50% original paper... or 42% original paper... or 30% original
paper... even 25% or less original paper and STILL be considered a
genuine "restored original movie poster" worth tens of thousands of
dollars -- instead of what it actually is, which is a skilled
reproduction (or, as we say in polite poster society, a "recreation" --
and what they call in the rest of the world a "painting").
The next phase was inevitable. Someone saying "Well, hey, if people are
willing to pay $23,000 and more for something that is less than 25%
original paper, why bother with the original paper at all? What's the
difference, so long as it looks right?" And so extreme restoration leads
to outright fakery because it is not only possible from a technical
standpoint, but becomes more likely from a psychological and
sociological standpoint.
Which is where we are today. I would love to see a formal hobby-wide
standard where if a poster is less than 40% genuine original paper it
cannot be called a "restoration" but must be called a "recreation".
Yeah, like that will happen. We can't even agree on a standard grading
language...
-- JR
Anne Coco wrote:
I have been reading the discussion surrounding the recent revelations
about forgeries have been discussed and there is one point I would
like to make before this topic is sidelined as old news. The
over-restoration of movie posters has contributed greatly to forgers'
ability to fake old paper. Too much paint makes it difficult to
determine not only how much (if any) original paper actually exists
but it also plays into the hands of those with nefarious plans. As I
understand it, the forgers not only distressed the paper that they
used but they also applied over-painting because this is a common
practice within the field of collectible movie paper. I would
advocate for movie paper collectibles to instead be evaluated based on
their original condition not some ideal that can be created via the
application of over-painting.
If anything good comes out of this, it would be (in my opinion) that
collectors would look at posters with fold creases and paper losses
and learn to love them just the way they are without paint to brighten
the colors and obscure the signs of use. If the practice of
over-painting could magically disappear, it would be much easier to
determine what is and is not real. Visible fold creases should be
viewed as a clue that the paper is truly what it claims to be while a
lack of fold creases should be a cause of concern for collectors. If
the fold creases, background and borders have been over-painted, how
can you be certain that what you are buying is more paper than paint?
And I haven't even touched on the problems of what happens to paint
and paper when they age. It's not pretty, especially if the piece was
exhibited under less than ideal light conditions in a frame on a wall
in your house for a long period of time.
That said I completely understand that paper losses particularly in
the image area can detract greatly from the enjoyment of a poster. In
these cases, those in the field of paper conservation would tell you
that whatever you do should be completely reversible serving only to
trick the eye at a distance but completely revealing itself upon close
inspection.
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