Art Fraud Forensics An engineer helps curators foil forgers How
many engineering jobs let you take a van Gogh off the wall and
hold it in your hands? The kind C. Richard Johnson Jr. landed.
He’s both an electrical engineering professor at Cornell
University, in Ithaca, N.Y., and an adjunct research fellow at
the Van Gogh Museum, in Amsterdam. As such, Johnson says, he can
”speak the language of people on both sides.” And when the two
sides talk, they mainly talk about fraud and how to detect it.
Two years ago, Johnson organized a conference at the museum that
brought together researchers from Pennsylvania State University
and Princeton, in the United States and Maastricht University in
the Netherlands. Together, they processed high-resolution images
with specially designed signal-processing algorithms to help
sort fake van Goghs from real ones at the brushstroke level. It
was the first time that image-processing teams at different
universities could compare authentication approaches on the same
paintings. Ano