 | Despite it's dark side, the art of fakes and forgeries has always been a major part of the art world and a continued source of fascination and legends. It is a subject that is more than important and vivid on today's art market, as every day dozens of impressive fakes are discovered all around the world. Who knows how many there are ? This dark side of the art is explored at the Bruce Museum of Arts and Science in Greenwich, USA, in a beautiful exhibition called "Fakes and Forgeries : The Art of Deception", opened until the 9th of September 2007. |
For this show, the curators have chosed 60 examples of Western fakes, ranging from works on paper to fascinating paintings and sculptures or examples of decorative arts, most of these so carefully made that they could pass by as the real thing. Some of the works selected are considered by all means artistic, yet they are still forgeries. But beautiful made. Aside the simple presentation of the works, the specialist of the museum are talking about subjects such as connoisseurship, authentication, and conservation.
What the organisers have tried - and succeeded - is to present the strategies and techniques used by the most important forgers in history, as well as the amount of work that they put into it, often going to amazing lenghts which would otherwise qualify them as brilliant artists. Also, the means used to expose fakes are presented in detail, from the use of X-rays to the pigment analysis, spectrography, dendrochronology, carbon dating. The works selected are from Western painting and sculpture, from the antiquity to modern times, from the Renaissance to Vermeer.
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The main question is what exactly could be qualified as a fake or forgery ? How cuold one recognize an authentic works amidst the large world of the copied, faked, attributed and replicated compositions ? The simple answer is that a fake is a work that actually replicated an existing - generally well known - work of art, more often as a deliberate deception that a mistake or tribute payed to the original artist. A forgery, on the other hand, tries to mimic the particular style of a certain artist or at least copy his or her signature, trying to deceive collectors and experts.
 | The range, diversity and quality of the works featured in the exhibition is amazing. From compositions bearing the forged signatures of Manet, Juan Gris or Giorgio de Chiricio to an etching falsesly attributed by Picasso or to the legendary forgery by Han van Meegeren, Christ and His Disciples at Emmaus. This might be the most famous forgery in the art world, as van Meegeren managed to imitate to such degree the style of Johannes Vermeer, that the result is simply astounding.
In short, a seductive and fascinating voyage into the world of art fakes and forgeries, not to be missed. |
Photo : brucemuseum.org
2007-07-27
