The Oxford English Dictionary (O.E.D.) defines “forgery” as “1. the action or craft of forging metals… 2. invention, excogitation; fictitious invention, fiction… 3. the making of a thing in fraudulent imitation of something.” As the first definition is labeled “obsolete” and the second, “now only poetical,” the third definition prevails in respect to relevance. Application of the adjective “fraudulent” is made necessary by the absence of culpability in the O.E.D. definition of “imitation” as “a copy, an artificial likeness; a thing made to look like something else, which it is not; a counterfeit.” A sense of fraudulence is only found in the attributive definition of imitation as a thing “made (of less costly material) in imitation of a real or genuine article or substance.” Though the use of parentheses implies an externality to the inserted conception of quality, imitation is still marked as inferior in being made of less costly material while the assumed original is purportedly superior in being made of more costly material. Forgeries are culpable exactly because they do not appear inferior or cheaply made; they are passed off as and pretend to be the original. They pose the practical problem of identification and the theoretical dilemma of differentiation, affecting how works of art are looked at, troubling critics and art historians with the possibility of wrongful attributions, connoisseurs with the prospect of loosing money, and philosophers with the question of aesthetic value.
In the Grove Dictionary of Art, the fraud enacted by art forgeries is defined as “a departure from transiently agreed canons of authenticity.”1 Anxieties over authenticity [link] have affected the categorization of media according to the potential of forgery. Nelson Goodman offers the split between “autographic” arts, in which the distinction between original and forgery is relevant, and the “allographic” arts, in regards to which the distinction is redundant.2 While painting and sculpture have been plagued by forgery, the concept of fraudulent imitation is foreign to music and the verbal arts. The inability to forge literary works and musical scores is reliant upon their “definite notation,” or their “consisting of a certain number of signs or characters that are to be combined by concatenation.”3 These particular signs, such as the word order, punctuation, and spelling of a poem, function as the required features of the work. As long as spelling is correct, a copy of a literary work acts as a legitimate original since the identity of the text is not bound to any copy or physical form. “In painting,” Goodman points out, “with no such alphabet of characters none of the pictorial properties …is distinguished as constitutive.”4 Following this assertion, identity in painting and sculpture remained reliant upon the establishment of the work’s historical fact and the identification of the product of the artist’s hand. Expert forgeries enact this substantive connection between artist and artwork by imitating an artist’s style in exactly copying their work.
The transience of authenticity stipulated by the Grove definition becomes evident in respect to differing conceptions regarding the duplication of objects. In the sixteenth century, Italian painter, architect, and artist biographer Giorgio Vasari praised the forging of an antiquity as a triumph of artistry.5 In his stories about Michelangelo, Vasari praised the artist’s reproductions of antiquities as original creations. But even in this positive conception of forgery it is possible to identify hints of fraud, since according to Vasari Michelangelo was in the habit of returning forged antiquates in place of the originals to their owners.6 In the restoration of ancient churches and cathedrals during the Victorian era the concept of forgery is placed in opposition to the act of restoration. This tension originates in the Victorian’s custom to replace early features with modern ones believing they were lending them a higher truth. While at the time these gestures did not appear to be problematic or questionable, such restorations were later denounced as forgeries.
Despite its transience, the concept of authenticity foregrounded by the Grove definition, underwrites the socio-cultural relation of power and value realized through collections and their exhibition.7 If the possession of a collection of original art works is a demonstration of power, following the anthropology scholar Richard Leventhal, art forgeries violate such a conception by pretending originality. Behind assertions of authenticity emerges the traditional connoisseur who also became the first art historian with the self-ascribed agency of “assessing quality” and differentiating between “authentic objects and imitations.”8 The connoisseur arrives at the moment culture is commodified, when art works and objects of antiquity are transformed into market commodities.9 In this transformation the value of the original objects is augmented as rarity and uniqueness enhance value.
During the golden age of forgery, roughly delineated from 1850 to 1940, connoisseurs asserted varying methods of authentication in an insistent drive to perfect the detection of forgeries masquerading as the genuine thing. Between 1874 and 1876 one such connoisseur, Giovanni Morelli of Italy, argued that paintings should be properly attributed through the identification of minor stylistic details, “especially those least significant in the style typical of the painter’s school.”10 Claiming that museums are full of forgeries and wrongly attributed works, Morelli sought to attribute works and establish authenticity by noting peculiar details in a painter’s works, such as earlobes, fingernails, and the shapes of fingers, that could only be found in originals and not in the forgery. Though Morelli made dozens of new attributions in galleries throughout Europe, his method was called “mechanical” and “crudely positivistic,” and was quickly ostracized. Despite its fate, “the Morelli method” points toward “an appreciation of the detail of the whole,” leading to suggestions that it exemplifies a more modern approach to artworks.11 As art historian Edgar Wind notes, this method suggests, in tune with modern psychology, “that our inadvertent little gestures reveal character far more authentically than any formal posture.”12 In this light, “the Morelli method” locates the authenticity of the work within the artist’s idiosyncrasies. In contrast to Goodman, Morelli appears to claim that forgeries could not access this facet of the artwork located outside of its medium.
By concentrating on content Morelli departed from the connoisseur obsession with establishing the historical fact of an artwork, best exemplified in the advent of the Provenance, or the history of the ownership and display of the object.13 Morelli’s method necessarily bypasses the early authenticating device of the artist’s signature, which had become unreliable already by the fifteenth century. At this time the forging of Albrecht Dürer’s name and monogram necessitated an order from the Nuremberg City Council that read, “prints containing Dürer’s signature would be confiscated unless his cipher was removed.”14 More recently, the forger’s ability to imitate almost every possible aspect of artwork leads art historians and connoisseurs to use x-ray, infrared, and laser microanalyses in authenticating artworks. In revealing what is behind the surface of a work, scientific methods have the potential to devalue art as “mere surface representation of chemical media and optical structures.”15
The paintings of Han van Megreen are often cited in discussions of artistic values of forgeries. In 1945, van Megreen confessed to painting eight paintings, six that were sold as the legitimate works of Johannes Vermeer and two as that of Pieter de Hooghe’s works. His Disciples at Emmaus hung in Rotterdam’s Boymans Museum for seven year and received the highest praise. Noted scholar and critic Abraham Bredius exalted its artistic value, calling Disciples at Emmaus the “masterpiece of Vermeer.”16 In identifying the fraud of van Megreen’s painting Alfred Lessing asserts, “The fact that the Disciples is a forgery is just that, a fact. It is a fact about the painting which stands entirely apart from it as an object of aesthetic contemplation.”17 For Lessing this fact can only be meaningful in reference to the concept of originality, by which he means the novelty and innovation attributed to every good work of art. Lessing draws the conclusion that the fault of van Megreen’s most notorious work is its lack of original artistry, since “it presents nothing new or creative (in terms of style or technique) to the history of art even though …it may well be as beautiful as the genuine Vermeer pictures.”18 But as van Megreen’s paintings show despite their lack of originality, forgery can easily pretend authenticity.
The transience of the agreed canons of authenticity reflects the “shifting interests and the shifting history of artistic, technological, economic, political, and moral experience.”19 These shifting interests and experiences are necessarily attributed to shifts and developments in the varying media of artistic production. Evincing this notion, Walter Benjamin states, “Confronted with its manual reproduction, which was usually branded as a forgery, the original preserved all its authority; not so vis á vis technical reproduction.”20 For Benjamin the question of authenticity is displaced in the age of mechanical reproduction, no longer relatable to artistic production that stands more independent of the original work of art than manual reproduction. Richard Prince’s ‘rephotographs’, such as his Untitled (Cowboy) (1989) series in which he closely cropped images from cigarette advertisements, confront the displacement of the authentic that begins with the coming of the photograph. As Prince’s ‘rephotographs’ take on the appearance of paintings they prompt the questioning of their identity. Are these works forgeries? David Lowenthal offers the assertion, “Every relic displayed in a museum is a fake in that it has been wretched out of its original context.” 16 Is there a difference in the refashioning of the past and the refraction of the present culture?
Though the question of authenticity and artistic value of forgery continues to be debated within the lengthy discourse on fraudulent imitation, forgery for profit has moved away from fraudulent imitations of ‘high’ works of art into mass production of brand-named goods. Mark Jones notes that people purchasing these ‘forgeries,’ better know as “counterfeits” though the definitions are relatively the same, are fully aware that are not purchasing the original at the price they are paying.21 This move is in large part due to the sophisticated methods of material analysis and the rigor of modern attribution. Within contemporary ‘high’ artistic practice, forgery is utilized to test the power and mode of operation of the artistic effect.22 As Sándor Radnóti asserts, in the age of reproduction “the referential character of the original was abolished, along with the imitational character of both the copy and forgery.”23 As reproduction is inscribed into the media of new art, forgery becomes an artistic tool for the interrogation of tradition and the banal. Through this gesture culpability inherent in the O.E.D. definition of “forgery” is stripped of its agency, as forgery is not kept secret but laid bare and its implications mobilized.
1. Grove Art Online, “Forgery.”
2. Nelson Goodman, “Art and Authenticity?” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, 103.
3. Ibid, 105.
5. Sándor Radnóti, The Fake: Forgery and Its Place in Art, 5.
7. “Geopolitics of Archaeology: Global Market for Stolen Antiquities.” Worldview. Chicago Public Radio. WBEZ 91.5 FM, Chicago. 8 Feb. 2008.
8. Grove Art Online, “Forgery.”
9. David Lowenthal, “Forging the past,” in Fake? The Art of Deception, 19.
10. Carlo Ginzburg, “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Modeling,” in The Sign of Three, 82.
12. Ibid, 84.
13. Grove Art Online, “Forgery.”
14. Lowenthal, “Faking In Europe from the Renaissance to the 18th century” in Fake? The Art of Deception, 120.
15. Lowenthal, “Forging the past,” 19.
16. Alfred Lessing, “What Is Wrong With Forgery?” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, 59.
17. Ibid, 64.
18. Ibid, 72.
19. Joseph Margolis, “Art, Forgery, and Authenticity” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art, 167.
20. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction” in Illuminations, 220.
21. Mark Jones, “Why Fakes?” Fake? The Art of Deception, 13.
22. Radnóti, The Fake, 207.
Benjamin, Walter. Illuminations. New York: Schocken Books, 1968.
“Forgery”. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 22 Jan. 2008.
“Forgery”. The Grover Dictionary of Art, 2008. The Grover Dictionary of Art. Oxford University Press. 22 Jan. 2008.
“Geopolitics of Archaeology: Global Market for Stolen Antiquities.” Worldview. Chicago Public Radio. WBEZ 91.5 FM, Chicago. 8 Feb. 2008.
Ginzburg, Carlo. “Morelli, Freud, and Sherlock Holmes: Clues and Scientific Modeling,” in The Sign of Three: Duping, Holmes, Pierce. Ed. Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1983.
Goodman, Nelson. “Art and Authenticity?” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1983.
“Imitation”. The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed. 1989. OED Online. Oxford University Press. 22 Jan. 2008. http://dictionary.oed.com.proxy.uchicago.edu/.
Jones, Mark. “Why Fakes?” in Fake? The Art of Deception. Ed. Mark Jones. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1990.
Lessing, Alfred. “What Is Wrong With Forgery?” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1983.
Lowenthal, David. “Forging the past,” in Fake? The Art of Deception. Ed. Mark Jones. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1990.
Margolis, Joseph. “Art, Forgery, and Authenticity” in The Forger’s Art: Forgery and the Philosophy of Art. Ed. Denis Dutton. Berkley, California: University of California Press, 1983.
Radnóti, Sándor. The fake: forgery and its place in art. Translated by Ervin Dunai. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999.