TIME: Almanac 1993/TIME Almanac 1993.iso/time/050790/0507400.000

Text File | 1992-08-28 | 8.6 KB | 164 lines

                                                                                ART, Page 118

Brilliant, But Not For Real


A show surveys old and new masters of forgery

By ROBERT HUGHES


    The history of faking is nearly as old as the history of
art, and for as long as there have been documents, there have
been forgeries. "This is not a lie, it is indeed the truth,"
runs an inscription of the earliest forgery we know, a
Babylonian cuneiform inscription from the 2nd millennium B.C.
pretending to be one from the 3rd millennium. "He who will
damage this document, let Enki fill up his canals with slime."

    In the thousands of years since, there have been fake epics
and poems, fake royal seals and family trees, fake historical
relics (from chastity belts to spurs of warriors killed on the
field of Agincourt), fake newspapers, propaganda photos, films
and books. Some of these, like the so-called Protocols of the
Elders of Zion, forged by a 19th century Russian anti-Semite,
have had appalling political consequences. Others, like the work
of the fictional bard Ossian and the skull of Piltdown man, have
had deep cultural ones. Others still, like the phony mermaids
that turned up in the cabinets of Renaissance collectors and
the fraudulent photographs of fairies that deceived Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, may not have
mattered greatly but retain a certain fascination as souvenirs
of human credulity.

    In art, of course, the field widens immensely -- as does the
spectrum of motives and responses. An honest copy becomes a fake
when the context of desire is switched. There are Egyptian
statues from the 7th century B.C. that deliberately copy the
archaic style of Old Kingdom figures done nearly two millenniums
before. Chinese craftsmen in the Sung dynasty made ritual bronze
vessels almost indistinguishable from those of the Shang period,
2,100 years earlier. Roman sculptors in the 2nd century A.D.
made versions of 5th century B.C. Greek prototypes, and from
then on, there would be an immense industry in the copying,
overrestoration and outright forgery of everything antique --
marbles, bronzes, pots, cameo gems, goldwork.

    There is no kind of artwork that has not been forged, from
Cycladic idols to Watteaus, from medieval manuscripts to rococo
porcelain elephants, from Michelangelo drawings to paintings by
Constable, Picasso or (a great favorite) Renoir. It used to be
said that Camille Corot painted 800 pictures in his lifetime,
of which 4,000 ended up in American collections.

    This is a subject that makes museums nervous, and perhaps
it is not so strange that no museum show in recent memory has
focused on forgery and its ramifications. Hence the interest of
"Fake? The Art of Deception," a sprawling and overcrowded array
of more than 600 objects, on view at the British Museum. "We are
all emotionally involved with fakes; nobody wishes to be
associated with them," the museum's director, Sir David Wilson,
sagaciously remarks in the catalog. "Fortunately, most of the
worst errors are our own, the result of nearly 2 1/2 centuries
of collecting." The reluctance to fess up may account for the
absence from this show of some of the real lulus of American
public collections, such as the fake Etruscan warriors that
until some 30 years ago were star exhibits at the Metropolitan
Museum of Art in New York City.

    The rewards of artistic success are money and fame, but the
perfectly successful faker is by definition unknown -- and
probably not very well paid even for an unknown. There is no
fame in forging, only the notoriety of failure, and there can
be very few forgers whose personalities excite real curiosity
(Thomas Chatterton and Hans van Meegeren are two obvious
exceptions). To deceive today's ignorant, art-hungry mass
audience with a mechanical reproduction is no big trick. It does
not approach the achievement of the 19th century German
goldsmith Reinhold Vasters, who produced large numbers of
"Renaissance" cups, bowls and jewels that are, in their own way
(if you look at them as obsessive tributes to a style), as
remarkable as any of the Gothic architectural restorations that
were being done in Europe at the time.

    To complicate matters, there was even in the 19th century
such a thing as "subversive" forgery. Louis Marcy, a.k.a. Luigi
Parmeggiani, a brilliant faker of medieval and Renaissance
caskets, jewelry and reliquaries whose works entered the major
museums of Europe, was an anarchist who wrote magazine articles
that reviled the capitalist art market -- and other forgers.

    The Italian Renaissance was a tremendously fertile ground
for 19th century fakers. Two in particular, Giovanni Bastianini
(1830-68) and Alceo Dossena (1878-1937), filled English and
American museums with fakes of Donatello, Antonio Rosselino and
Desiderio da Settignano. Bastianini's "portrait" of Lucrezia
Donati, mistress of Lorenzo the Magnificent, made art historians
swoon with rapture; even after it was found to be a fake, the
Victoria and Albert bought it, and for the same price as a real
quattrocento bust. There are almost certainly quite a few
unidentified Dossenas and Bastianinis gazing serenely at
museumgoers today.

    Presumably, there are not many competent Renaissance fakers
left: the common heritage of training, which changed so little
between the 15th and 19th centuries, is a thing of the past. Its
survival -- along with poor records and primitive techniques of
scientific scrutiny -- had made the 19th century a golden age
of forgery. Today, with exhaustive documentation of works of art
and better analytic tools -- carbon dating, fluoroscopy,
ultraviolet and X rays and chemical spectroscopy for pigments
-- it is harder for an "old" fake to pass muster but certainly
not impossible. The forger's greatest ally is always the
cupidity of the collector: people want to believe.

    Yet the fake does tend to become a little more obvious with
the passage of time because forgers, consciously or not, are apt
to work in the style of their own day, and that style in the end
becomes historical. One "Botticelli," The Madonna of the Veil,
was made by a still unidentified Italian forger in the 1920s.
No less a connoisseur than Roger Fry enthused over it. The only
thing that gave the game away was the precocious eye of young
Kenneth Clark, who thought the Madonna looked like a
silent-movie actress -- as indeed she does. Then tests were
made, and down it went.

    Nevertheless, to a quick glance, this Madonna still looks
at least somewhat like a Botticelli. Whereas the most famous
forgeries in modern times, Van Meegeren's "Vermeers," look
hopelessly unconvincing. Van Meegeren (1889-1947) was a
talentless and paranoid academic hack who felt the Dutch art
world had joined in a conspiracy of silence against him. For
this, he wanted revenge. He found a real 17th century canvas
with its stretcher intact, scraped the image off (leaving the
ground and its authentic craquelure) and went to work. He
ground his pigments with oil of lilies and thinned them with a
medium of phenol-formaldehyde resin. Then he baked the picture
in a low oven.

    The result was an almost perfect replication of Vermeer's
enamel-like paint surface, even though everything else was
hideously wrong. Van Meegeren's bodies were boneless; his faces
coarse and thick-lipped, their expressions stereotyped. Yet
Dutch experts, led by the art historian Abraham Bredius, rushed
like lemmings toward a collective suspension of disbelief. "What
a picture!" Bredius rhapsodized in an art magazine. "What we
have here is a -- I am inclined to say -- the masterpiece of
Johannes Vermeer of Delft." Not only did the experts fail to
expose Van Meegeren, but they closed ranks to protect their
attributions when he tried to tell the truth about them. He
produced a stream of "Vermeers" over the next few years, into
the German occupation of the Netherlands, and one of them,
Christ and the Adulteress, was bought by Hermann Goring. At the
end of the war, Van Meegeren was charged with treason for
selling a national treasure to the Nazis. Penalty: death.

    At the trial, Bredius and all his colleagues testified that
the Vermeer was genuine. Van Meegeren convinced the court that
he had made it and was sentenced to a year in prison for fraud.
To everyone's intense relief, he died before the sentence was
up. If the general and ancient moral of the forger's trade is
caveat emptor (let the buyer beware), Van Meegeren illustrated
another: peritis nec crede (put not thy trust in experts).