Table Of ContentArt Forgery
The History of a Modern Obsession
Thierry Lenain
reaktion books
art forgery
Art Forgery
The History of a Modern Obsession
Thierry Lenain
For my mother
Published by
33 Great Sutton Street
London ,
www.reaktionbooks.co.uk
First published
Copyright © Thierry Lenain
This book has been published with the financial support of
Free University of Brussels (ULB)
Fonds de la Recherche Scientifique (FRS-FNRS)
Fondation universitaire
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No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system,
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photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission
of the publishers.
Printed and bound in Great Britain
by /Antony Rowe, Chippenham, Wiltshire
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Lenain, Thierry.
Art forgery : the history of a modern obsession.
. Art –Forgeries –History.
. Pictures –Copying –History.
. Art –Expertising.
I. Title
.-dc
Contents
Foreword
one
The Symptoms of an Obsession
two
Before the Age of Art Forgery
three
Before the Age of the Obsession
with Art Forgery
four
Art Forgery as the
Connoisseur’s Nightmare
Conclusion: Fakes and the
End of the World
Foreword
In his classic book on art forgery, published in , the art historian Otto
Kurz complained that most literature on the topic turns out to be of little
interest. While it should focus on archaeological hard facts, historical data
and the improvement of detection methods, he argued, this literature is con-
gested with anecdotes. Kurz was also suspicious of any attempt toapproach
the subject in a comprehensive way and, as a consequence, presented his
readers with a number of isolated cases classed in categories pertaining
to types of objects (paintings, drawings, stone sculpture, ivory carvings
and so on), as is the rule in the numerous ‘collectors’ handbooks’ issued
since the nineteenth century.
Should Otto Kurz rise from the dead and hold the present book in
his hands, he would probably feel terribly disappointed. Obviously the
‘facts’ that this book is dealing with are not of the ‘hard’ but typically of
the ‘soft’ kind – meaning facts of discursive nature. The material that I have
chosen to study is mostly composed of literary representations, among
which age-old anecdotes receive particular attention, and there is indeed
an effort to bring these discursive facts into some sort of comprehensive
‘narrative’. Then again, a resurrected Kurz would perhaps be surprised to
see that this material is not meant merely to entertain the reader, although
a good part of it actually is by itself entertaining, but is taken as an object
of historical and theoretical study. A systematic enquiry into discourses
revealing a cultural perception of art forgery, conducted from the view-
point of what might be called ‘deep historiography’: this is what the present
book is about.
In a similar manner as a number of recent scholarly works, the per-
spective adopted here takes a different course from a literature that, after
Kurz, has been chiefly interested in positive discoveries. Until recently the
problem was not so much to discover truths about art forgery as to spot
fakes. Outside the ring of the philosophers who, after Nelson Goodman,
used the topic as a launching pad for conceptual analysis and theoretical
7
Art Forgery
experimentation,only so-called hard facts were deemed worthy of inter-
est – the implicit message being that forgery mustand canbe reduced to a
number of discoverable data. This can be explained by the fact that, regard-
ing this specific issue, the agenda of the specialists in connoisseurship and
art history was ultimately pragmatic (and this is something Kurz and the
authors he criticizes have in common). Generally speaking, the aim was less
to discover than to uncover– to neutralize the object by unveiling it – and
discoveries were demanded chiefly as a means to that end.
The factual reduction of any issue is a prerequisite to its trans forma-
tion into a practical, supposedly solvable problem. It can also be a conven ient
way of getting rid of the complexities and deeper implications of the issue
in question. As such, it may even easily degenerate into an instrument of
denial. This is very much the case with art forgery. Sandor Radnoti has
stressed the neurotic character and the hermeneutic blindness of fake-
hunting literature, and I could not agree more.This brings us right to the
core of our topic. How could a practice that between the fifteenth century
and the mid-eighteenth was considered without particular nervousness,
and often with much enthusiasm, come to be perceived as an immediate
danger and an object of virulent detestation? Seen from our postmodern
horizon, in which we have to deal mainly with the after-effects of the trauma,
there is reason to be baffled at that virulence and at the neurotic conducts
of denial it inspired. But it is even more confounding to consider it against
the background of the early modern history of art.
To understand how the practice of deceitful stylistic imitation became
such an obsession in the late-modern context, the only evidence we may
rely on is made of discourses. These come in many shapes and sizes. Some
are typically discursive: scholarly books, essays, newspaper or magazine
articles, novels, films and so forth. Other expressions do not present them-
selves as discourses but can certainly be treated as hermeneutic objects in
their own right. The way fakes are exhibited in a museum, for example, or
the attitude of a convicted forger before a courtroom, can reveal a lot – as can
the embarrassed silence of collectors or officials fallen victim to stylistic
simulacra. Between the revealing silences and the full-fledged dissertations,
one could also mention ‘quasi-discourses’ like decisions of justice or official
reports issued by laboratory scientists acting as consultants in the context
of a trial. Such documents may not saymuch in themselves but they are
all the more so easily converted into rhetorical weapons by those who want
to make a statement.
These are all potentially relevant sources, but a hermeneutical recon-
struction of the issue should first concentrate on the most-often mentioned
texts pertaining to the nature of art forgery. The first to appear are semi-
legendary anecdotes that enliven the classical art literature of modern times.
Next come arguments sustaining the development of connoisseurship since
8
