Blink_ The Power of Thinking Without Thinking - Malcolm Gladwell [2]
Hoving turned to Houghton. “Have you paid for this?”
Houghton, Hoving remembers, looked stunned.
“If you have, try to get your money back,” Hoving said. “If you haven’t, don’t.”
The Getty was getting worried, so they convened a special symposium on the kouros in Greece. They wrapped the statue up, shipped it to Athens, and invited the country’s most senior sculpture experts. This time the chorus of dismay was even louder.
Harrison, at one point, was standing next to a man named George Despinis, the head of the Acropolis Museum in Athens. He took one look at the kouros and blanched. “Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture coming out of the ground,” he said to her, “could tell that that thing has never been in the ground.” Georgios Dontas, head of the Archeological Society in Athens, saw the statue and immediately felt cold. “When I saw the kouros for the first time,” he said, “I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.” Dontas was followed in the symposium by Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. He spoke at length on the contradiction between the style of the sculpture and the fact that the marble from which it was carved came from Thasos. Then he got to the point. Why did he think it was a fake? Because when he first laid eyes on it, he said, he felt a wave of “intuitive repulsion.” By the time the symposium was over, the consensus among many of the attendees appeared to be that the kouros was not at all what it was supposed to be. The Getty, with its lawyers and scientists and months of painstaking investigation, had come to one conclusion, and some of the world’s foremost experts in Greek sculpture — just by looking at the statue and sensing their own “intuitive repulsion” — had come to another. Who was right?
For a time it wasn’t clear. The kouros was the kind of thing that art experts argued about at conferences. But then, bit by bit, the Getty’s case began to fall apart. The letters the Getty’s lawyers used to carefully trace the kouros back to the Swiss physician Lauffenberger, for instance, turned out to be fakes. One of the letters dated 1952 had a postal code on it that didn’t exist until twenty years later. Another letter dated 1955 referred to a bank account that wasn’t opened until 1963. Originally the conclusion of long months of research was that the Getty kouros was in the style of the Anavyssos kouros. But that, too, fell into doubt: the closer experts in Greek sculpture looked at it, the more they began to see it as a puzzling pastiche of several different styles from several different places and time periods. The young man’s slender proportions looked a lot like those of the Tenea kouros, which is in a museum in Munich, and his stylized, beaded hair was a lot like that of the kouros in the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His feet, meanwhile, were, if anything, modern. The kouros it most resembled, it turned out, was a smaller, fragmentary statue that was found by a British art historian in Switzerland in 1990. The two statues were cut from similar marble and sculpted in quite similar ways. But the Swiss kouros didn’t come from ancient Greece. It came from a forger’s workshop in Rome in the early 1980s. And what of the scientific analysis that said that the surface of the Getty kouros could only have aged over many hundreds or thousands of years? Well, it turns out things weren’t that cut and dried. Upon further analysis,