0:05

In nineteen ninety five, a man named

0:07

Anthony Ayers was traveling around England

0:09

with his girlfriend. They're bouncing

0:11

around the English countryside. Tony

0:14

was an artist and furniture

0:16

designer, and so he always liked rummaging

0:18

around antique shops.

0:20

That's our colleague, Kelly Crow. So

0:23

they find themselves in this little antique shop

0:25

he's sort of looking behind things and looking around

0:27

things. In any way, he finds

0:29

this arm wore, but he actually was more

0:32

curious about what was behind it.

0:34

And there was this this dusty, you

0:36

know, wood paneled painting

0:39

that looked like it was a madonna

0:41

picture a picture of Marion, the

0:43

baby Christ, and

0:45

he just was struck by the quality

0:48

of it.

0:49

Ayers had a hunch that this painting was special.

0:52

They look like something from the renaissance. He

0:54

thought it might be a long lost da

0:55

Vinci. He didn't have enough money

0:57

to buy it though. The shopkeeper wanted

1:00

thirty thousand dollars for

1:01

it. So errors went back home to

1:03

Chicago and convinced a small group

1:05

of people to pool their money and buy

1:07

it together.

1:08

These were not art dealers. These

1:11

were not curators. These

1:13

were not trained people who had a

1:15

hunch and then followed that scholarly hunch

1:17

to its

1:18

conclusion. These are everyday guys.

1:21

They thought they might have found a hidden gem

1:23

that they could sell for hundreds of thousands or

1:25

maybe even millions of dollars. But

1:32

proving the painting was actually worth something

1:35

would end up being a massive undertaking.

1:37

And consume their lives for decades.

1:40

I think what their story shows

1:42

is just how many loops

1:44

they have to go through how many people

1:46

they have to appeal

1:47

to, ultimately how subjective

1:50

it is, right, to try to get something authenticated.

1:55

Welcome to the Journal. Our show about

1:57

Money, Business, and Power. I'm Ryan

2:00

Knutson. It's Wednesday, February

2:02

twenty second. Coming

2:09

up on the go. Did Anthony

2:11

Ayers find a masterpiece?

2:23

Business Finance politics.

2:25

There's a lot going on out there and the Wall Street

2:28

Journal's what's news podcast covers

2:30

at all. Twice a day in less than

2:32

fifteen minutes. Navigate your

2:34

world with what's news wherever

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2:45

After Anthony Ayers found that painting, He

2:47

spent the rest of his life trying to prove it was

2:49

a masterpiece,

2:51

but he died last year

2:53

leaving his investors to carry on his quest.

2:56

You know,

2:56

this whole thing is bittersweet without him

2:58

here. He should be doing this phone call today,

3:00

not me.

3:01

That's Ari Cohen. One of the first people

3:04

that Aries got to invest in his painting back

3:06

in the nineties. Well,

3:08

let's go back to the beginning before this

3:10

whole thing started. How would you

3:12

describe your relationship with art?

3:15

I had no relationship with art. I

3:17

was a twenty two year old kid who knew nothing

3:20

about art. I couldn't tell you the difference between

3:22

Nickel and

3:23

Van Gogh and knew absolutely nothing.

3:26

When did you first meet, Tony? We have

3:28

a little industrial complex, and he

3:30

was one of our tenants. And

3:33

one day, I'm sitting there looking

3:35

through his window, and I see he's

3:37

got this picture sitting on like an easel.

3:40

And I go in there and I go, what's going on?

3:42

He's like, I think I found

3:44

a da Vinci.

3:46

Ares didn't have the painting yet.

3:48

Ari was just looking at picture of it.

3:53

The painting is of four people. There's

3:56

Mary and baby Jesus along

3:58

with Mary's cousin Elizabeth and

4:00

her baby son John the Baptist. They're

4:02

dressed in rich blues and reds reminiscent

4:05

of other renaissance art.

4:07

In the corner, almost in a shadow,

4:09

is an oak tree with a gold finch sitting

4:11

on its branches. Something about

4:13

it looks special to me. And I

4:16

was a young kid just starting my life, I wanted

4:18

to make a lot of

4:19

money. So I thought, hey, let's

4:21

dive into this. Ari borrowed

4:24

some money and told Ayers he could contribute

4:26

thousand dollars to help him buy the painting.

4:29

And he wasn't the only one. Ayers

4:31

managed to convince a group of people to pitch in

4:33

and buy the painting with him. I

4:35

think it just started off is kind of a fun parlor

4:37

game among friends. Hey, let's just see if we can do

4:39

this and maybe maybe we've hit the

4:41

lottery. Right? Like, maybe there's a payoff. So

4:44

economic arrangement here, the deal is sort is

4:46

that, like, they're putting money in and they were

4:48

sort of, like, buying a stake in

4:51

the painting so that when it

4:53

else one day for, you

4:55

know, however many millions of dollars they'll

4:57

get that percentage?

4:59

They will. Yeah. That's how they've arranged

5:01

it. And can solutions are not let

5:03

me be clear, consortiums are not unusual

5:06

in the art world. Dealers will often team

5:08

up two or three to in together on a

5:10

picture.

5:15

After cobbling together enough money, heirs

5:17

flew back to England and bought the painting. Now

5:21

he just needed to figure out who created

5:23

it. He had one solid

5:25

lead. The antique shop

5:27

owner had told him that he had gotten the pick

5:29

sure by way of a convent

5:31

in Kentucky. It was run by

5:33

the Sisters of Charity of Nazareth. And

5:36

so, Tony went there. He, like, flew to Kentucky,

5:38

you know, the summer after he got the work, and he

5:41

met with the sisters

5:42

there. And he said, what can you tell me about this picture?

5:44

And they confirmed a huge great

5:46

tail. The nuns in Kentucky

5:49

told Ayers that they got the painting in the

5:51

1800s from a Catholic Bishop,

5:53

who was donating European art to new

5:56

American churches. In the nineteen

5:58

eighties, the nuns sold it to an art

6:00

dealer when they were trying to raise some money.

6:03

For

6:03

Tony, this felt like a big breakthrough.

6:05

It showed the painting in history. I

6:08

think for Tony, it was just this great

6:10

early eureka moment that made him

6:12

feel like all the pieces were gonna clip

6:14

together, you know, really quickly. But

6:17

that story wasn't quite enough.

6:19

He still didn't know who actually painted

6:21

it. Originally, heirs

6:23

thought it was a da Vinci, but he began

6:25

to change his mind after showing the painting to

6:27

an art his door and named Larry Silver.

6:30

He invites Larry Silver over to his house,

6:33

sets it up on an easel, and Larry

6:35

took a look and Larry said he was impressed.

6:37

Impressed by the delicate warm nature

6:40

of Mary's face, and he

6:43

was impressed with the

6:45

fact that it was painted on wood, that the wood

6:47

looked old. And so when

6:49

Larry came in and said, wow, you know, I

6:51

don't know exactly what you've got,

6:53

but these are Rafael faces. That

6:56

went a long way with a guy like Tony who hadn't

6:58

been trained in

6:59

that, you know, to sort of have a lead to

7:01

run from.

7:03

Why would it be significant if this

7:06

was a Rafael painting?

7:08

Oh, man. Any sort of a Raphael finding

7:10

would be seismic, right, within the art

7:12

world.

7:13

Rafael was an Italian Renaissance painter

7:15

who died in fifteen twenty. Rafael

7:19

is one of those handful of names. Right?

7:21

Who we know only by one name. Right? You've

7:23

got the Ninja Turtles there. You've got michelangelo,

7:26

Lisa, Artko, tonnage, So Rafael,

7:29

I mean, he's just he's one of these amazing

7:31

painters. He typifies the the

7:33

high renaissance. So

7:36

he also only created, I think, fewer than

7:38

two hundred works. And most of them are in

7:40

places like the Vatican, or they're in

7:42

museums, they're just so rare

7:44

to find another one would be a game

7:47

changer. I mean, look, the last time we founded da

7:49

Vinci, it sold for four fifty million

7:51

dollars. So the hope is is

7:53

huge when you think maybe you found a

7:55

Rafael. It's

7:56

like finding a lottery ticket.

7:57

Yeah. Yeah. A

7:58

winning lottery ticket. I just If you can

8:00

prove it if you can prove it. Than it

8:02

is. Yeah. In

8:04

two thousand nine, one of Rafael's sketches,

8:07

not a full painting, just a sketch, sold

8:09

at auction for almost fifty million

8:11

dollars. But

8:16

proving you found a Renaissance masterpiece isn't

8:19

easy. There's no one person

8:21

or organization who makes a final decision.

8:24

What heirs needed was a consensus

8:26

from the art world. And to

8:28

get

8:29

that, he'd have to hire people to

8:31

do some forensics. You

8:33

have to not only look

8:35

at the picture, you have to look at the details

8:38

concerning the age of the pigment, right, the

8:40

age of the canvas or in this case a panel

8:42

of wood, you have to look at other

8:44

comparable pictures that the artist did

8:46

and see where you can find similarities.

8:49

You're gonna be looking at you know, how

8:51

did Rafael paint other

8:53

pictures of Christ? Like, did the

8:55

ringlets on the hair look the same or did

8:57

they look different? Right? Like, you have you sort

8:59

of you you launch yourself into this

9:02

matching

9:02

game, and then you put it before people

9:04

who are considered to be Rafael experts.

9:08

So that's exactly what Ayers did for

9:10

years. Here's Ari Cohen again.

9:13

It meant trips to England, trips

9:15

to the Vatican, he had to

9:18

read, you

9:18

know, there was no Internet back then. So

9:20

you he had to go to libraries and look

9:22

things up and do things the old fashioned

9:24

way. It was quite the tremendous

9:27

undertaking, and Tony was the

9:29

perfect person to do it because he was very

9:31

detailed oriented he

9:33

bought every book on Rafael and

9:36

the run of science, and he

9:38

really took it on with a tremendous

9:40

amount of gusto. He would find

9:43

all sorts of little tidbits and get

9:45

excited and call us and

9:47

and I was gonna have to go back to my job.

9:50

How would you respond? That's

9:53

great. Very exciting. Great

9:55

news, and

9:58

let me know what the next step

10:00

is. Ayers took his

10:02

painting to scholars, conservators, and

10:04

pigment analysts. And a lot of the

10:06

evidence seemed to suggest that it was in fact

10:08

painted by

10:09

Rafael, but they still hadn't

10:11

convinced everyone in the art world. So

10:13

some scholars thought the face of Mary

10:15

and Jesus were particularly compelling,

10:18

but then they thought that the way

10:20

the Elizabeth character was painted was off

10:22

and like Rafael would would not have

10:24

painted the the

10:27

curls on Jesus' head to be

10:29

so wispy that there's, you know, he typically

10:31

did ringlets and these are a little bit more

10:33

blown out and then other people had problems

10:35

with the oak tree, the way the leaves

10:37

were painted, and some people thought the goldfinch

10:40

was like a little bit more crudely painted than

10:42

he would have done. Other people countered

10:44

well. The oak tree was the symbol of

10:46

the family that was Rafael's

10:48

biggest patron. So maybe an assistant went

10:50

in there and, you know, added an oak

10:53

tree as like an homage to his patron after

10:55

the fact. The scholars were

10:57

willing to get really close and they

11:00

weren't, you

11:00

know, saying one hundred percent sure Rafael

11:02

and no one else. Right? They were saying pretty

11:04

darn close.

11:08

What kind of an impact does this have

11:11

on Anthony Ayers? So

11:13

it really consumed him. I think it went

11:15

from being kind of a fun past time to

11:17

being a quest of epic proportions.

11:19

I mean, he He fell

11:21

for this picture, and he fell for the hunch,

11:24

and he could never let it go. Unfortunately,

11:27

around twenty ten, he got diagnosed with early

11:29

onset Alzheimer's. And

11:31

so even he started to worry at some

11:33

point that his memory was going to

11:35

betray him. And so

11:37

he sort of conceded the point

11:40

and really let the group, you know, he and

11:42

his wife retained their roughly thirty

11:44

percent

11:44

share, but ultimately he

11:46

had to he had to let it go. Today,

11:50

there are around forty investors who have

11:52

a stake in the painting. Together,

11:54

they've invested more than half a million dollars

11:57

trying to prove it's a Rafael. And

12:00

then last year, heirs

12:02

died.

12:05

When Tony passed away, how did that

12:07

affect the quests that you were all

12:09

on? Well, it

12:11

didn't change our determination at all because

12:13

we had known you know, Tony

12:15

was suffering from dementia many

12:18

years before he passed away. So we had taken

12:20

on the reins of proving this

12:23

way before he passed. After

12:29

Ayers died, Arie and the other investors

12:32

refused to give up.

12:34

We knew it was Rafael. We

12:36

knew it. We knew it. Coming

12:40

up, a break in the case.

12:55

What then will the future reveal?

12:57

There's one thing we know about the future.

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It's being built

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13:31

After Ayers died, Ari and the investors

13:34

kept looking for ways to prove their painting

13:36

was a Rafael. And then

13:38

they came across a relatively new company

13:40

called art recognition that uses

13:42

artificial intelligence to examine paintings.

13:47

So our recognition is a firm

13:49

in Zurich and it was

13:51

created by a woman named Corina

13:54

Popovich who has

13:56

the doctorate in theoretical physics So

13:59

she's used to sort of creating algorithms

14:02

and datasets to sort of analyze

14:04

a whole lot of things. She has

14:07

her her bona fides within the financial realm

14:09

in terms of using data to tell a machine

14:12

how to learn and come up with

14:14

different conclusions. And so what she's decided

14:16

to do is apply the headspace

14:19

in the AI software to art

14:21

attribution.

14:23

Art recognition built algorithms that

14:26

can identify patterns and artists brushstrokes

14:29

in order to assess whether painting is real

14:31

or fake.

14:36

Has art recognition had any proven

14:39

successes with other art? I

14:41

mean, what's funny is it's had more luck sort

14:43

of dismissing pictures. Right? So

14:45

it it very recently sort of

14:47

completed out possible painting by Peter Paul

14:49

Rubens in London's National Gallery wasn't

14:51

by him. Museum

14:53

sort of took some note of that. And

14:56

the firm has had good luck with a handful

14:58

of other

14:58

pictures, but it's still it's still a newcomer

15:00

in the game. Right? So they've still got to got

15:02

to prove their metal.

15:04

Arie and the investors thought the AI

15:06

might be able to help them. We wanted

15:08

to subject the painting to any technology

15:10

out there that could help our case. So

15:13

we have nothing to lose. We submitted

15:16

it to the AI. And at first, the

15:18

AI talked about how the

15:20

tree, the bird, the

15:22

cloth on the madonna were not painted

15:24

by Rafael. We said, you know what? Let's just focus

15:27

in on the faces. And then

15:29

we had a ninety seven percent identification

15:31

that it was

15:32

Rafael. How

15:32

did you feel in that moment when you saw ninety seven

15:35

percent? I got chills. Right?

15:37

We'll be honest with you. Definitely chills ran

15:39

down my body. Very excited.

15:42

Finally have the proof that we

15:44

have always been looking for. And

15:46

it's you can't argue against

15:48

it. But our colleague, Kelly, says

15:50

there's a good chance that humans in the art

15:52

world will argue against it. Ninety

15:55

seven

15:55

percent, I mean, that's That sounds like it.

15:58

That sounds like the smoking gun. It's it's a

16:00

Rafael. Ninety seven. It

16:03

kinda does. I mean, at least it sounds

16:05

like don't know how much more sure they need to

16:07

be. I guess now you have to see how much do you trust

16:09

a machine. Right?

16:11

What

16:11

do people in the art world think of this

16:13

technology and of this company? Yeah.

16:16

I mean, so the art world is still still

16:18

a little bit of a busty, clubby

16:21

realm. Right? Where people adjust

16:23

to change more slowly. So I

16:25

think within the art world, there

16:27

is some cautious optimism

16:29

about the role that AI could play. So

16:32

long as it doesn't sort of replace or supplant

16:34

the standard gatekeepers. You

16:37

know, they don't want people to think that the computer

16:39

is flawless. They don't want it

16:41

to see it as a smoking gun. They they do

16:43

want it to be used potentially as another tool.

16:46

But, you know, there's some things like, you know,

16:48

conservators wanna know. What do they do when paint

16:50

has been worn down or maybe when it's

16:52

flaking. I mean, to what extent does condition

16:54

play a role in the quality of those

16:57

digital images, you know, a smaller

16:59

conservative, you know, figure that out. Can

17:01

a machine do that? They have real questions

17:03

that I think the firm will have to speak

17:05

to as time goes

17:06

by. So

17:08

what does this story tell us about the art world.

17:11

Oh, man. That is as Byzantine as

17:13

ever. Right? And that it is a rabbit

17:16

hole that you should sort of

17:18

know is gonna be difficult to navigate

17:21

when you plunge in. I don't think any of these

17:23

guys thought initially that it would

17:26

be so consuming or expensive?

17:32

Ari, says the group doesn't have plans

17:35

to sell a painting at the moment. For

17:37

now, they're just hoping the AI report

17:39

will finally persuade the art world.

17:41

And potential buyers that their

17:43

painting is a real Rafael. What

17:46

would your advice be to someone else who

17:50

discovers an old painting in the back of an

17:52

old shop that they think might be painted

17:54

by an old master. Good

17:56

luck to you. You're gonna need a

17:58

lot. It's gonna

18:00

be quite the journey. So you said earlier

18:03

that you weren't into art

18:05

when this whole journey started How

18:07

do you feel about it now?

18:09

Oh, I love art. Now I'm way more into

18:11

art as, you know, I go to a

18:14

museum now and I'm way more appreciative

18:16

and have much more understanding

18:19

of the skills and techniques that these

18:21

artists have to create these pieces of

18:23

work, and it's lot

18:25

of fun.

18:26

Is it true that you named your son Rafael?

18:29

I did. I named a maiden Rafael. Rafael

18:32

is his middle name.

18:33

After the painting?

18:35

After the painting. After

18:37

the artist. So

18:39

this has meant a lot to you. Oh,

18:41

yeah. Yes. It's been more

18:43

than half my life. I'm fifty years old. It's been

18:45

twenty eight years. How

18:49

much do you think it would mean for Tony for

18:52

it to be confirmed as a Rafael? A

18:56

lot. I mean, this was his whole entire

18:58

life. It consumed him

19:00

every single day. And

19:02

it just it's a shame that he worked

19:04

his whole entire life proving

19:07

this thing and never really got

19:09

to see

19:11

the fruits of his labor.

19:26

That's all for today, Wednesday, February

19:28

twenty second. The journal is a co

19:30

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