Forgery

Forgery, in art, a work of literature, painting, sculpture, or objet d’art that purports to be the work of someone other than its true maker. The range of forgeries extends from misrepresentation of a genuine work of art to the outright counterfeiting of a work or style of an artist. Forgery must be distinguished from copies produced with no intent to deceive.

The most common type of fraudulence in art is forgery—making a work or offering one for sale with the intent to defraud, usually by falsely attributing it to an artist whose works command high prices. Other fraudulent practices include plagiarism, the false presentation of another’s work as one’s own, and piracy, the unauthorized use of someone else’s work, such as the publication of a book without permission of the author; both practices are generally in violation of copyright laws.

Forgery most often occurs with works of painting, sculpture, decorative art, and literature; less often with music. Plagiarism is more difficult to prove as fraud, since the possibility of coincidence must be weighed against evidence of stealing. Piracy is more often a business than an artistic fraud; it frequently occurs in the publication of editions of foreign books in countries that have no copyright agreement with the nation in which the work was copyrighted. A stage production, the reproduction of a painting, the performance of a musical composition, and analogous practices of other kinds of works without authorization and royalty payments also fall into this category.

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The fundamental consideration in determining forgery is “intent to deceive.” The act of copying a painting or other work of art is in itself not forgery, nor is the creation of a work “in the style” of a recognized painter, composer, or writer or of a particular historical period. Forgery may be the act not of the creator himself but of the dealer who adds a fraudulent signature or in some way alters the appearance of a painting or manuscript. Restoration of a damaged painting or manuscript, however, is not considered forgery even if the restorer in his work creates a significant part of the total work. Misattributions may result either from honest errors in scholarship—as in the attribution of a work to a well-known artist when the work was in fact done by a painter in his workshop, a pupil, or a later follower—or from a deliberate fraud.

Excluded from the category of literary forgeries is the copy made in good faith for purposes of study. In the matter of autographs, manuscripts in the handwriting of their authors, forgeries must be distinguished from facsimiles, copies made by lithography or other reproductive processes. Some early editions of Lord Byron’s work, for example, contained a facsimile of an autograph letter of the poet. If such facsimiles are detached from the volumes that they were intended to illustrate, they may deceive the unwary.

The commonest motivation for fraudulence is monetary gain. Fraudulence is most likely to occur when the demand for a certain kind of work coincides with scarcity and thus raises the market prices. Unprincipled dealers have encouraged technically skilled artists to create forgeries, occasionally guiding them to supply the precise demands of collectors or museums. This is by no means a modern phenomenon: in the 1st and 2nd centuries ad, sculptors working in Rome made replicas of Grecian works to satisfy the demands for the greatly admired Grecian sculpture of the preceding five centuries. These copies or adaptations apparently were not offered as contemporary work but as booty from Greece at the extraordinarily high prices paid for such works in imperial Rome. Similar circumstances may account for the “discovery” of a manuscript or autograph by a dead author or composer, although many such finds are quite legitimate and have been authenticated.

The history of the arts reveals instances of persons who have used forgery either to gain recognition of their own craftsmanship or to enjoy deceiving the critics who had rejected their genuine work. A legend told about Michelangelo illustrates this point. At the age of 21, he carved in marble a small sleeping Eros, or Cupid, based on ancient Roman works that he admired. Some time later this carving was sold as an antique to the well-known collector Cardinal Riario, who prized it highly. When Michelangelo stepped forward and claimed the work as his own he won immediate fame as a young man who could rival the work of the greatly venerated ancient sculptors.

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Two further motivations behind forgery must be noted: forged documents have been produced from time to time to exalt or malign some religion, political party, or race; and forgeries are sometimes created as a hoax. Some hoaxes are intended to confound or ridicule the experts; others are intended to parody or burlesque an artist or genre.

There are basically three methods of producing a forgery: by an exact copy, by a composite of parts, and by a work done in the style of an artist or period and given a deliberately false attribution. These methods apply most directly to the visual arts but can be discerned in literature and music as well.