Provenance_ How a Con Man and a Forger Rewrote the History of Modern Art - Laney Salisbury [101]
In his revealing opening remarks, the museum director spoke of the thrill of discovery. “Who can evoke the collector’s trembling excitement as he stands before a secondhand dealer’s shop and sees a rare piece of ancient glass offered at a trifling price?” he said. “Or when, beneath the superficial grime of a picture bought at auction as a mere copy, the autograph of some classic ancient painting begins to emerge beneath the restorer’s hand?”
Nearly the entire collection turned out to be bogus.31
Some forgers work on a grand scale. Eric Hebborn, an art restorer and another failed painter, confessed in 1984 that he had produced a thousand forgeries in the style of the old masters, among them Tiepolo and Rubens, and boasted that many of his paintings had landed in esteemed collections, including those of the National Gallery in Washington, the British Museum, and the Morgan Library and Museum in New York.
To Hebborn, whose works have been described as stylistically brilliant, the production of fakes was an intellectual exercise as well as an attempt to confound a market that had rejected him. He refused—or failed—to see the criminality “in making a drawing in any style one wishes . . . [and] asking an expert what he thinks of it.” He claimed to be a “fair player” in this game of wits because he was leveling the playing field. He established his own moral guideline of sorts: One of his rules was that he would never sell a work to someone who was not a recognized expert or was not acting on expert advice. “No drawing can lie of itself; it is only the opinion of the expert that can deceive,” he wrote in The Art Forger’s Handbook.32
Skullduggery aside, Hebborn and his colleagues raise basic questions about what makes certain art valuable. If a drawing is a good one, does it have an intrinsic worth even if it is not by the artist it purports to be by? “It is the most tantalizing question of all,” said connoisseur Aline Saarinen, quoted by the Met’s Hoving. “If a fake is so expert that even after the most thorough and trustworthy examination its authenticity is still open to doubt, is it or is it not as satisfactory a work of art as if it were unequivocally genuine?”
If Saarinen had asked Picasso, the answer would have been yes. “If the counterfeit is a good one, I should be delighted,” he once said. “I’d sit down straight away and sign it.” In the 1940s, a dealer asked Picasso whether he would put his signature on an unsigned painting of his that a client owned. Picasso agreed, but when he saw the work he realized it was not actually his.
“How good a client is the owner?” he asked the dealer.
“One of my best,” the dealer replied.
“In that case, the painting is mine,” said Picasso, and signed it.33 The public is of two minds about history’s great forgers. It has celebrated them as beloved outlaws and vilified them as philistine rogues. After Han van Meegeren was released from prison, most of the Dutch public saw him as a clever crook who had succeeded in fooling both the art experts and the hated Göring. Several years ago one of his works sold at auction for $88,000.
The flamboyant Hungarian Elmyr de Hory was caught in 1968 after a twenty-year career of forging nearly a thousand works, in the style of such artists as Matisse, Modigliani, and Picasso. De Hory used a number of aliases to sell his works, and at one time had two accomplices who not only sold on his behalf—and cheated him—but also searched antiquarian bookshops for out-of-print art books of the 1920s and 1930s, and got de Hory to produce forgeries that matched the descriptions accompanying the plates in these books. Then photographs of the forgeries were slipped