Art and Fingerprints

[pleasant music]

[David] My name is David Grann,

I'm a staff writer at the New Yorker Magazine,

and I just finished a piece on the process

of authenticating artworks using fingerprints.

Peter Paul Biro, who works out of Montreal,

has a business that authenticates and evaluates artworks

using methods of forensic science

that evoke CSI and Sherlock Holmes.

He looks for an artist's fingerprint in an artwork

and he tries to match that fingerprint

to another fingerprint in an undisputed work

by the artist.

His father, Geza Vero, was a very talented

and very skilled painter.

He had a gallery and also a restoration business,

and the two sons, Lazlo and Peter Paul Biro,

grew up in that and they started

when they were very young as teenagers,

working in conservation and restoration with their father.

And then as time went on, Peter Paul Biro

began the process of authenticating artworks.

[paper rustles]

The Bella Principessa is a drawing

that has been attributed to the hand of Leonardo da Vinci.

There is this great debate about this mysterious drawing.

Where it came from, what is its history?

And what's important to know is that

there's a lot at stake in this, both in terms of money,

we're talking about unbelievable amounts,

but also in terms of our understanding

of art and art history.

'Cause in the case of La Bella Principessa,

there was a fingerprint found impressed into it.

And you can see it, it looks almost like a smudge.

Using various digital techniques of enhancements,

he says he was able to eventually develop this print

and find enough detail for a comparison.

He then used an undisputed Leonardo,

the Saint Jerome, which is in the Vatican,

and in that print, there is a clear fingerprint.

And so he takes these images

and he tries to present scientific evidence

that this painting, yes,

was touched by the same hand of the artist.

And so if he is able to do this,

it's extraordinarily powerful evidence.

But during the course of my investigation,

I began to uncover questions from people

who had had dealings with him during the 1980s

and into the early 1990s.

There were several civil lawsuits filed

against Peter Paul Biro and his family business.

And several of those cases involve allegations

of the business selling artworks

of questionable authenticity.

During my investigation, several people raised questions

about the reliability

and the scrupulousness of Biro's methodology.

There's actually two of them down here.

[David] Pat Wertheim, who is one of the few experts

in the world in forged and fabricated fingerprints,

examined a painting that Biro

had claimed was a Pollack painting.

He determined that the way the fingerprints

were impressed or put onto the back of this canvas,

they had various irregularities.

This is a reproduction of this.

[David] The thing about fingerprints is you

almost never leave the exact same fingerprint twice

because of the way you press your finger down

and the elasticity of skin.

And when Wertheim looked at these prints,

they were so similar.

Two of them were almost, he said,

virtual overlays of each other.

And Wertheim told me

that these fingerprints screamed forgeries.

Now, it's very important

to say that Peter Paul Biro vehemently denies this.

He says that he never forged a fingerprint

and that Wertheim is wrong in his conclusions.

He did at one point say, it is possible

that they are forged, but even if they are,

why is everybody after me?

[somber music]