Art forgers: great artists?

Do forgers qualify as "real" artists? Jonathan Keats, author of Forged, contends that art forgeries go original art one better: They blatantly succeed at "what legitimate art accomplishes when most effective, provoking us to ask agitating questions about ourselves and our world." His provocative book asks us to take art forgers seriously as artists and acknowledge their work as significant in the overall context of art.

The idea is both interesting and rather tedious, but the book itself is thoughtful and well written, and Keats provides an abundance of anecdotal evidence to make his case. Whether or not you agree with his premise, it's fascinating to follow Keats through the history of prominent forgeries, examining motives, cultural frames, and the curious, often supremely gifted individuals who can pass off work that deceives art lovers and experts alike.

Copying Raphael

Keats introduces his subject with a famous example: Raphael's 1519 portrait of Pope Leo X. The Duke of Mantua took a liking to it, pulled a few strings and suddenly a second "original" materialized, produced by no less a copyist than Andrea del Sarto, a master in his own right. Giorgio Vasari is our eyewitness for the story: He was in del Sarto's studio while the copy was being painted; when he later saw it at the palace in Mantua, he spilled the beans to the Duke.

Instead of outrage, the Duke expressed praise for genius twice displayed. But as Keats points out, "Values shifted over the ensuing centuries"; copies became forgeries, and the idea took on nefarious meaning.

In 1735 the British Parliament passed an act— named for the painter William Hogarth— giving artists legal protection for intellectual property, just as the Industrial Revolution began making reproduction easy and cheap, thus raising further the value of works that were original and unique.

Fake Vermeers

Keats names not only the makers of faux masterpieces but also the dupes, a distinguished list that includes the Frick Collection, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and the Metropolitan Museum.

The "modern masters," as Keats characterizes them, include an impoverished Italian sculptor whose fumbling transaction in a Vatican bar led to a career spent churning out Renaissance beauties; Hans van Meegeren, the celebrated Dutch forger who wowed the art world with his Bakelite "Vermeers"; and Elmer de Hory, whose strange life and prodigious outpouring of Matisses and Picassos was chronicled by Clifford Irving in his biography, Fake. One of the book's most intriguing stories is that of a vengeful dark spirit whose talent allowed him to wreak gleeful havoc among British connoisseurs of Samuel Palmer and John Constable.

Works from "masters" such as these inevitably turn up in museums and collections; we just don't know it when we see them. The men— so far as is known, all men— who made these fakes were too good at the technical aspects of art not to fool a great many people.

Their skill is apparently sufficient to merit Keats's approval, and that's where I part company with him.

Missing ingredient

Keats is himself a conceptual artist, so by definition he's comfortable with the "non-object"— the notion that an idea (which requires no visible skill) matters more than what you actually see. But the best conceptual art requires the very qualities that forgers lack: heart, passion and significant connection to individual human experience.

When Raphael, despite his superstar status at the time, painted the portrait of the Pope, his efforts came out of the sweaty, fraught plight of facing down an enormously powerful man cloaked in the physical and psychological regalia of his mighty office. Raphael used all of his prodigious skill to wrangle all this tension into a work of imposing beauty and significance.

Andrea del Sarto knew similar challenges in his own art, but when he made his copy, he simply followed the dots: color for color, tone for tone, texture for texture.