Article content

One day in 2005, Bryant Ross, the owner of an art gallery in Aldergrove, B.C., invited his friend, the famed Ojibwe artist Norval Morrisseau, to look at two paintings he had acquired from a Winnipeg dealer.

Because Morrisseau was suffering from Parkinson’s disease and confined to a wheelchair, Ross said, he brought the paintings out to the parking lot to show him. It took seconds, Ross recalled, for Morrisseau to render judgment on them. “I didn’t paint those f—ing things,” Morrisseau reportedly said.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Picture-perfect forgery? Art world awaits court decision on alleged fake Norval Morrisseau painting Back to video

A few years later, before a crowd assembled at a Vancouver gallery, a defiant Ross painted a bright red “X” over one of the paintings in an attempt to draw attention to the concern that forged Morrisseau paintings were in wide circulation.

“He’s a great man and he doesn’t deserve this,” Ross said to applause.

Photo by Postmedia archive

Since the early 2000s, persistent allegations of a fraud ring peddling fake Morrisseaus have cast suspicion on countless paintings hanging in public galleries and in private collections and put a stain on the legacy of an artist widely considered to be the “grandfather” of contemporary Indigenous art in Canada.