NORVAL MORRISSEAU'S ELEGANT LINE WORK AND FORENSIC SCIENCE
- John Zemanovich
- Feb 5
- 4 min read
Excerpt, Conquest of the Thunderbird (Unpublished)
Copyright © 2025, John Zemanovich
In the life of a story, and in the life of the mind, you learn quickly that gathering facts is not the same as gathering wisdom. I had learned early on to model my own walking path after the teachings of Charlie Munger, the elder from Berkshire Hathaway. He spoke of a "latticework of mental models," a way of braiding together strands of knowledge from many disciplines (history, science, the arts) to create a strong basket. It was a framework for wisdom that reached back to his own hero, Benjamin Franklin.
The teaching is this: if you collect core concepts from everywhere, you build a filter. You learn to sift the river of information until only the gold of insight remains. It is not how much water you swallow, but how clearly you see the bottom.
So, I became a tracker. I followed the trails of varied books and biographies, looking for the insights others had carried in their bundles. I read scientific papers like some men read maps.
In 2008, the wind blew a story my way. It was about computers being taught to see the spirit in the paint. They were using machines to study the brushstrokes of Van Gogh to separate the true from the false. As the news wire reported:
"The 23 authentic van Gogh paintings were used by a computer system as a training
database for van Gogh's brushstroke styles. Statistical models were created to capture the unique style, or 'handwriting' that became the artist's signature in those scans. Detailed images could be blown up in size, allowing researchers to analyze intricacies of brushstrokes. The other 78 paintings, which were composed of works of van Gogh or van Gogh's peers, or paintings at one time attributed to him but later deemed inauthentic - were compared with the statistical models generated by the 23 authentic paintings."
I saw immediately that this was a path to try.
There was a great fog surrounding the work of Norval Morrisseau; a debate filled with noise and pretenders. But we had the map to clear it. We knew where the darkness lay: Don Robinson had donated a group of paintings to the Norval Morrisseau Heritage Society. These were paintings Norval himself had looked upon in 2005 and rejected, telling us plainly they were not of his hand. And we knew where the light lay: we had the authentic works held by Gabe Vadas and Richard Baker, acquired directly from the artist.
But an idea is only a ghost until it is given a body. I understood that to fight a war for the truth, you need more than just good eyes; you need action. I made the logistics happen, helping to turn a quiet theory into a loud reality.
I contacted Professor James Z. Wang. We spoke, and he saw the value in what I offered. He agreed to the work, not for coin, but for the discovery. It was a perfect circle. I offered the art; he offered the science.
On August 15, 2009, the truth was sung. Dr. Wang published his findings in a paper titled "Characterizing Elegance of Curves Computationally For Distinguishing Morrisseau paintings and the Imitations." The machine had seen what we felt in our hearts. He wrote:
"We have developed an approach to characterize steadiness and coherence of contour lines in paintings. Existing techniques on painting authentication have been primarily based on brushstroke characteristics and cannot be applied to certain styles of paintings when individual brushstrokes are not clearly visible. We argue that the steadiness of the contour lines reflects the draftsmanship of a painter in line work. And the coherence measures we defined can be used to distinguish the authentic works from the forgeries. Paintings by Morrisseau and forgeries are analyzed. It is found that Morrisseau’s paintings consistently demonstrate higher level of steadiness and coherence in curves."
The computer saw the trembling hand of the liar. It saw that the spirit of Morrisseau flowed with a steadiness the fakes could not mimic. However, Dr. Wang was a careful scientist, and he added this caution:
"Whereas the techniques demonstrate their power on this dataset, they may be insufficient in identifying skillfully forged paintings. A study involving forgeries from additional sources will be desired. Finally, it is clear that the presented techniques may not be suitable for analyzing some styles of paintings. We plan to further study the applicability of these techniques for other painting styles."
The publication of this truth was like striking a hornet’s nest. Those who were feeding off the sale of these false spirits became enraged.
Professor Wang and I spoke later, and the tone had changed. He told me of the threats, the shadow of litigation, and the harassment that had come to his door. The noise was too much. He ceased his cooperation. Like many good people, he had become lost in the confusion, told by others that we were the ones lying, that the sky was ground and the ground was sky.
It left him in a bad spot as a scholar, and it left us without his shield in our ongoing battle.
If there is a lesson to be carried from the Morrisseau fraud, it is a hard one. It is that the truth requires courage. We learned that people with the ability to do something about it are often too afraid to stand when the storm comes. It is not that they doubt their own knowledge. It is that they do not trust their institutions to stand behind them when the threats turn vile.
After the storm passes, their fears disappear and then they assert all manner of authority where none now exists because authority is given to those who earn it.
And that dissonance, in the end, is a truly sad state of affairs.
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