The Forger's Spell - Edward Dolnick [8]
Despite their sour outlooks, forgers can be good company, like many rogues. Even their cheating is easy to forgive. No one winks at the con man who takes an old couple’s life savings in exchange for a phony insurance policy. But who would fight down a grin if he heard that an investment banking hotshot had blown his million-dollar bonus on a fake painting cranked out in a basement?
Not that forgers are as good-hearted as Robin Hood. On the contrary. They have about the degree of sympathy for their victims that lions have for antelopes. The dupe’s role in the universe, his reason for being, is to be a dupe. In the words of one con man, “If you gave one of them an even break, it would spoil his evening.”
FORGERY IS A craft as much as an art, a battle of wits between the con man on one side and connoisseurs and scientists on the other. Technique is crucial, but it is only part of the story—in every successful forgery, psychology plays a role every bit as important as art.
That is why forgers continue to thrive today, even though science has grown so sophisticated that no one should be able to pass off a new work as an old one. “With old master paintings, it’s just about over,” says Marco Grassi, a well-known specialist in art conservation. “Forgery is much more difficult because we have so many tools to discover them.”
But Grassi is too optimistic. The problem is that, even in the case of paintings that cost millions or tens of millions, science seldom comes into play. The best tools don’t help if no one uses them. “Nobody bothers to take the time or spend the money to go to the scientists,” says Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and an expert on fakes. Crazy as that sounds, Hoving insists that it makes perfect sense. The deeper problem with scientific tests, beyond their expense, is that they can seldom deliver the clear-cut answers they seem to promise. We turn to science to free ourselves from the fallible judgments of human experts, and we find that the scientific tests themselves require human interpretation.
Consider the experience of the team of scholars known collectively as the Rembrandt Research Project. For years they have labored to separate Rembrandtian wheat from school-of-Rembrandt chaff. They have taken countless pains. Art historians by training, they have enlisted the help of experts in half a dozen arcane specialties. With the aid of specialists in dendrochronology, for instance, the Rembrandt team can look at a painting on a wooden panel and tell the exact year that someone felled the tree that became the panel.
But tree experts know about trees and not about Rembrandt. On one occasion the Rembrandt committee examined two paintings, both of them attributed to Rembrandt and both on wooden panels. The scientific tests proved not only that both panels were the same age, but that both came from the same tree. But in the end even that information proved irrelevant. On the basis of stylistic differences between the two works, the committee concluded that one painting was by Rembrandt and the other was not.
“Unless you find something egregiously stupid,” says Hoving, “science can’t resolve anything on its own. Not unless you have a sculpture that’s supposed to be paleolithic but it’s really made out of Silly Putty.”
When it comes to art, scientific tests have another shortcoming. In theory, a single failed test—a Silly Putty sculpture or a “Rembrandt” painted on a panel from a tree chopped down in 1950—can unmask a painting. But a questionable painting could pass a dozen scientific tests—paint from the right era, panel and frame of the appropriate wood,* X-ray and ultraviolet and infrared and autoradiography findings as they should be—and still it might stay stuck in limbo. Scientists