Art forgery

“ Speaking of such imitations, we may note that fakers contemporary with the artist are perhaps the most dangerous to the neophyte, and as imitations have always existed more or less, and are by no means only the product of the greed of modern fakers and dealers, a collector is often taken in by a false Corot or a false Rousseau, in which the only legitimate thing is perhaps the date, the forgery having been perpetrated during the master’s lifetime. ”

“ In the first place, this method works only in certain cases of suspected forgery. Over the last 50 or 100 years, a number of paintings have turned up that seemed, even to the best art experts, to be several hundred years old. Some of these were genuine, and some were painted by forgers who could not resist the high prices paid for works of art. The National Gallery of Art, in Washington, D. C., thinking that there might be a way of detecting these forgeries, gave its support to a group of scientists who developed a method for this purpose. ”

“ And what is most tragic of all is that these people, who for the sake of art are spoilt for life, not only do not render service to this art, but, on the contrary, inflict the greatest harm on it. They are taught in academies, schools, and conservatoires how to counterfeit art, and by learning this they so pervert themselves that they quite lose the capacity to produce works of real art, and become purveyors of that counterfeit, or trivial, or depraved art which floods our society. This is the first obvious consequence of the perversion of the organ of art. ”

“ One of the brightest signs for American painting to-day is the fact that it is now found profitable to make and sell forgeries of the works of our most distinguished modern artists—even living ones. This is a new and encouraging situation. A few years ago it was hardly worth a forger's time to make, say, a false Hassam, when he might just as well be making a Corot—which reminds me of an amusing thing a painter said to me the other day.
We were passing through an art gallery, when I happened to see at the end of one room three canvases in the familiar manner of Corot. ”

“ Later, the growth of scientific knowledge and religious skepticism spoiled this market; while recognition of the artist as an individual and the development of art collections stimulated production of forgeries imitating the work of particular artists or of particular epochs. ”

“ Ah, my boy, I too once thought such things, ere I was drastically disillusioned. You seem not to understand that our countrymen know nothing of art, that they can rob artists with impunity and drive them, crushed, broken up and penniless, abroad or into the grave. ”

“ The forger is a picturesque figure until he, too, is discovered and publicly condemned. This class of men—I know of no women forgers—is responsible for the literary detective. There is real sport in tracking these fabrications. An ability to tell the original from the false, the genuine from the spurious, sometimes under the most trying circumstances, has developed almost into a fine art.
There are men who make literary detecting their profession. Their eyes are so well trained that they are seldom wrong when pronouncing judgment. ”

“ Paint to the statuary is what all this motion is to the flute-player. Whoever mutilates what is great and good in art, and would persist in so doing, after reproof, ought to pay the penalty of his folly. We would not be too severe in the punishment of offenders in taste, but should rejoice to see one of a congenial kind put in practice, one very mild for such an offence as this of statue painting—the tarring and feathering the perpetrators, plasterers and bedaubers, principals and coadjutors. ”

“ The same element of price rules the decency or the indecency of pictures. A picture painted in oils, life size, of the naked human figure, such as Venus disrobed for the bath, or Phryne before her judges, or Perseus and Andromeda, exhibited to the upper classes, in a gallery, with a shilling admission charge, is a perfectly decent and respectable work of art. Photographs of those pictures, uncoloured, and reduced in size, are obscene publications, and are seized as such by the police. Cheapness is, therefore, an essential part of obscenity. ”

“ They have not the relation which we sometimes find even in a random collocation, as in the accidental pictures of a discolored wall; for the careful hand of the contriver is traced through all this disorder; nay, the very execution, the conventional dash of pencil, betrays what a lawyer would call the malice prepense of the Artist in their strange disfigurement. To many this may appear like hypercriticism; but we sincerely believe that no one, even among his admirers, has ever been deceived into a real sympathy with such technical flourishes: they are felt as factitious ”

“ Till the corruption of literary taste, there was no appearance of this moral degradation, made up of meanness towards superiors, of insolence towards equals, and of utter forgetfulness of all respect towards the public; vices unfortunately sufficiently contagious, and which defame and destroy the nobleness of an art, that from the nature of its object, and the means it uses, has in it something superhuman. ”

“ In the detection of two particular types of forgery they are especially useful. Imitations of contemporary work can be very baffling, since the forger works with materials which were or might have been used in genuine work, does not have to give an appearance of age, and works against the same general background as does the artist he imitates. ”

“ It never occurs to us to permit the criminal by organic disposition to ‘expand’ his individuality in crime, and just as little can it be expected of us to permit the degenerate artist to expand his individuality in immoral works of art. The artist who complacently represents what is reprehensible, vicious, criminal, approves of it, perhaps glorifies it, differs not in kind, but only in degree, from the criminal who actually commits it. ”

“ But the harm is still greater, in so far as the possibility of attaining fortune of this kind tempts people continually to become painters who have no real gift for the work; and on whom these motives of mere worldly interest have exclusive influence;—men who torment and abuse the patient workers, eclipse or thrust aside all delicate and good pictures by their own gaudy and coarse ones, corrupt the taste of the public, and do the greatest amount of mischief to the schools of art in their day which it is possible for their capacities to effect ”

“ I can easily teach you, as any other moderately good draughtsman could, how to hold your pencils, and how to lay your colours; but it is little use my doing that, while the nation is spending millions of money in the destruction of all that pencil or colour has to represent, and in the promotion of false forms of art, which are only the costliest and the least enjoyable of follies. ”

“ Or is the same control to be extended to other artists, and are they also to be prohibited from exhibiting the opposite forms of vice and intemperance and meanness and indecency in sculpture and building and the other creative arts; and is he who cannot conform to this rule of ours to be prevented from practising his art in our State, lest the taste of our citizens be corrupted by him? ”

“ Indeed, I fear that the inartistic temperaments of the day busied themselves also in matters of literature and art, for the accusations of plagiarism were endless, and such accusations proceed either from the thin colourless lips of impotence, or from the grotesque mouths of those who, possessing nothing of their own, fancy that they can gain a reputation for wealth by crying out that they have been robbed. ”

“ He felt the power in his hands to lash evil, and so at times he went from art, to reveal the untold horrors of false society, and he made coarse engravings of such scenes, only using the artist's cunning in the epitomizing and contrasting of facts. ”

“ Illegal operations very often do. The punishment was one which might follow the crime, not only in that case, but in many cases. Here, I think, the whole argument might be sufficiently cleared up by saying that the objection to such things on the stage is a purely artistic objection. There is nothing wrong in talking about an illegal operation; there are plenty of occasions when it would be very wrong not to talk about it. But it may easily be just a shade too ugly for the shape of any work of art. ”

“ And while we see simultaneously set up a foolish and dangerous principle to govern our national collections in painting, and probably sculpture, assumed with too much apparent authority, we fear the introduction of monstrosity in preference to beauty, and the consequence in oblivion of what is good in art, and the encouragement of a practice of all that is bad. ”

“ To speak of over-restoration is in such cases to use a euphemism. We can offer an example showing how this over-restoration of objects is nothing but a form of faking highly flavoured with different varieties of deception. A rich American bought a marble statue some years ago representing a famous Roman empress. It was bought not only because the Roman art appealed to him but as the portrait of that particular Roman empress. As a matter of fact, the whole statue had been faked by the addition of new portions to a headless, limbless torso, which was the only genuinely antique part. ”

“ These are drawn from the multiform and numerous guilds of the restorer, and from the questionable side of the trade, namely, fakers, assumed owners, noblemen or pseudo-noblemen160 willing to lend paternity and pedigree to works of art, smugglers and other degenerate forms of criminal and semi-criminal activity.
Speaking of the friends and enemies of the collector whose co-operation is more or less openly apparent and of a less mysterious character, it may be said that the art critic and expert once represented two entirely distinct forms of interest in art. ”

“ False art will make us cruel and remorseless—that is, the personating and choosing of monstrosities; and the more artfully they are designed, the more degraded and callous we must become, and the more deeply we must sink in our moral perception of what is good and noble in humanity. ”

“ Many literary forgeries have been pious frauds, perpetrated in the interests of a church, a priesthood, or a dogma. Then we have frauds of greed, as if, for example, a forger should offer his wares for a million of money to the British Museum ”

“ In fact, however, many things made for quite innocent and even laudable purposes have been used to deceive and to defraud, by means of misrepresentation or subsequent manipulation. So the essential element in forgery lies in the way an object is presented, rather than in the purpose that inspired its making.
Still, it is objects made to deceive which have always held the center of the stage. Without doubt, the main motive for their manufacture is to make money. But often there is an element of drama, even of romance, in the way they come into existence. ”

“ The corrupting action should also be carefully considered, which experience proves to have been exerted on the public by certain so-called works of art, or artistic exhibitions, as for example certain cafés chantants, etc. ”

“ Naturally, then, when I observed this connexion of a criminal with a wax-work artist, I asked myself whether the motive of the murder was not to be sought in that artist’s unique powers. Could it be that an attempt had been made to employ the deceased on some work designed for a fraudulent purpose? If such an attempt had been made, whether it had or had not been successful, the deceased would be in possession of knowledge which would be highly dangerous to the criminal; but especially if a work had actually been executed and used as an instrument of fraud. ”

“ As for felonies and misdemeanours, we do not know exactly why, but it is an obvious fact that with the spread of the cult of art they have disappeared as by enchantment, while formerly the progress of industrial life had tripled their numbers in half a century. ”

“ The artist who fails to realize for his world the character-creating elements in the life which he essays to paint or write, fails, to just that degree, in being an artist; or is self-branded by his work as criminally careless, a charlatan or a liar. That one who, for a price, presents a picture or a story without regard for the influence of his production upon the characters of those who receive it, commits a crime for which human law provides no adequate punishment. Being the famous Conrad Lagrange, you understand, I have the right to say this. ”

“ If we are to suppose that offences against society disgrace the offender, and that public dishonor argues the fact of some such offence, then apparently plagiarism is not such an offence; for in even very flagrant cases it does not disgrace. The dictionary, indeed, defines it as “the crime of literary theft”; but as no penalty attaches to it, and no lasting shame, it is hard to believe it either a crime or a theft; and the offence, if it is an offence (one has to call it something, and I hope the word is not harsh) , is some such harmless infraction of the moral law as white-lying. ”

“ The commands for destroying sacred paintings and sculpture prevented the artist from suffering his mind to rise to the contemplation or execution of any sublime effort, as he dreaded a prison or a stake, and reduced him to the lowest drudgery in his profession. ”