to us as a culture. this is our historical record. and if we allow this to happen, we re destroying our own past. the minneapolis institute of art owns two paintings from the zaks collection. one is said to be a work by the ukrainian artist alexandra exter. the other is a mysterious work called the clockmaker by the russian artist ivan kliun. for a few months, we have been exchanging emails with the minneapolis institute. they told us they would conduct their own investigation into kliun s painting. they didn t share the result with the bbc. ..but the painting has now been removed from display. and on the institute s website, the painting is now only attributed to ivan kliun.
the description now includes information from the bbc that this painting comes from the zaks collection. and where previously the website said the institute had reviewed the paintings documentation, now it stresses that the data may not have been reviewed and may be inaccurate or incomplete. this is the painting that appeared in the background of two recent hollywood films. we asked the creators of both oppenheimer and the wonderful story of henry sugar if they would like to comment. they haven t responded. another painting from the zaks collection, attributed to the ukrainian artist alexandra exter, is in the cleveland museum of art. its curators expressed interest in the results of our investigation, but declined to comment. we have found out that one more zaks collection painting is in the possession of the albertina museum in vienna.
get misattributed. so what we re going to do is use a high resolution image of the subject s painting, run it through the machine, through the various algorithms that we have that allow it to be compared to a body of 20 original, bona fide lissitskys that we know are real. if that painting fits inside that cloud, inside that contour, we can say with 99% confidence that the painting is authentic. if it s outside of that cloud, we can be fairly confident that the painting is a forgery. so, when looking at this painting, one thing we re going to want to look at is the signature because signatures are always important in both real and inauthentic works. so, here, it looks very much like the signature was put on at the same time
when you re working with material, there s always environmental things that interact with the paint. it s, you know, people. people clean their brushes or people s jumpers have fuzzy fibres. yeah. if it s just on the surface, fine. but it actually. where you don t see it here, it s going under the paint. so these particular fibres that we found in the painting were treated with substances that were developed in the early part of the 20th century but were really first commercialised and brought onto the market only after the world wars. being able to identify them was, right there, a very hard indicator that would even stand up were we needed to take this to court. it s like looking at something that should have been 18th century and there s a flatscreen tv in the background. it s not possible. you can t have it. it doesn t work.
called genoa, it was also attributed to exter. the museum has told us that they conducted their own analysis. the painting is not on display. this brings us to the last step in proving if a painting is real expert opinion. the bbc has obtained records showing that both museum curators and art experts helped mr zaks promote his collection. we tried to track some of them down.