Forgeries

The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York announced on December 7, 1967, that it had removed from display a bronze horse supposed to have been sculptured about 475 B.C. this “quintessence of the ancient Greek spirit” was suddenly declared a modem fraud, made in 1920.

The museum’s Handbook at the time described the horse as summing up “in eloquent way the achievements of the Greek sculptor in this period,” and added that “the artist’s conception has embodied it with an additional quality which is essentially Greek - a quiet beauty which removes it from the individual to the typical.”

Why was this exquisite sculpture, admired for decades by millions, placed in storage? How did it change? Similarly, the fake Vermeers painted during the 1930’s by Van Meegeren are so good that some art experts continued to maintain that the paintings were authentic even after Van Meegeren announced his hoax. Why were the paintings removed from the galleries? They had delighted many observers.

In 1762, James MacPherson published some “translations” from the third century Gaelic bard Ossian; they were greatly admired by such notable literary figures as Blake, Herder and Chateaubriand; Goethe wrote, “Homer has been superseded in my heart by the divine Ossian.” But when it was revealed that MacPherson himself had written the poems, no one took any further interest in them.

On August 2, 1961, some prankish B.B.C. announcers in London broadcast an “avant garde composition by Piotr Zak” entitled “Mobile for Tape and Percussion”. The “music” was a random collection of whatever sounds could be made, by banging on whatever objects happened to be in the studio.

The problem presented by forgeries in the arts is not that intelligent and responsible critics may be deceived, but rather that whatever interest may be retained by paintings, sculptures, poems, and so on, that they are exposed to forgeries, they are no longer accepted as works of art.



Reuben Abel