Brilliant, But Not For Real

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).