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The Shock of the Past

Time-function and Image-function in Art Forgery

In Walter Benjamin’s Passagen-Werk, there is a short pas- sage about the shape of time, organised along two vec- tors, one temporal and one aspectual, which has kept in- triguing me with regard to the question what art really does. Benjamin writes that history can not only be un- derstood by science, but has a metaphysical or theolog- ical aspect as well. This latter aspect of history is activated through remembrance [das Eingedenken]:

[image 2: Benjamin]

”What research has established can be modified by remem- brance. Remembrance can make the incomplete (happiness) complete, and the complete (pain) incomplete. This is theology – but the experience of remembrance forbids us to conceive of history in a fundamentally atheological manner, even as we are not allowed to write history di- rectly in theological concepts”.1

The first thing to notice here, is that the concepts of happiness or pleasure (das Glück) and pain (das Leid) is very similar to the concepts that formed the modern

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aesthetics from Burke and Kant. The second feature is the concept remembrance (das Eingedenken), which can be understood as an aesthetic representational device, an aesthetic likeness, or an aesthetic ’aboutness’ (Hel- mut Thielen describes this Eingedenken as an ästhetis- che Bildhaftigkeit).2 And the third feature I want you to take ad notam, is this orthogonal analysis of time.

In Benjamin’s term with a chronological and theologi- cal vector, which I believe with some benefit could be equalised with the grammatical concepts of temporality and aspectuality respectively.

Independently and perhaps even unknowingly of Benjamin, Lyotard wrote something remarkably similar in his sparsely distributed text Gestus from 1991:

[image 3: Lyotard]

”From this follows that the determinations of periods or epochs only concerns the cultural object, which is part of the art work, but not part of the promise of happi- ness its beauty provokes. This promise is ongoing – not because it has remained unchanged from the time of the Lascaux-paintings until today, but on the contrary, be- cause it is transmitted incessantly imperfect through

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the limitations of the different epochs. The transmis- sion of the promise does not belong to chronology – it opens up for a time of anticipation and redemption, which is not calculable”.3

[image 4: schema 1]

Now, with the backup of two authorities of this dignity, I will try to exemplify and clarify my issue with help of a little art historical empiricism, which I believe could cast some light on what effects images, specifi- cally art images, actually have on the reality we live in, or, to put it more dramatically: a reality we wouldn’t be able to conceive without images. As this is a ques- tion from my part, trying to get a grip on Benjamin’s thesis, I think it could be productive immediately to disclose the rather simple diagrammatical schemata I am

applying in the following. I will return to the same schemata in a more elaborate form later.

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1 Scandal and Embarrasment

1.1 Scandal of success or futurum exactum

Lyotard’s short, but extremely dense, text describes the artistic modus operandi as a sort of halted movement, a torsion or inversion of the time-space-matter of the world, configuring a substantivated event made up of this time-space-matter, but now separated from it. Like a lo- cal time-space-matter emphasis in the timespace-matter continuum.

For Lyotard, the aesthetic quality of the (artistic) im- age is inherent and immanent within its time-space-matter.

Its cultural context is irrelevant and the machinations of the art world and the diagrams of art history are a mere sad commercial side-effect, having nothing to do with the artistic promise hidden in the ”cultural ob- ject”. All that matters are these aesthetic qualities and they would do fine without any art world, art market or art history.

I believe Benjamin would agree with Lyotard on this is- sue, as most philosophers of aesthetics tend to do. In the following I will suggest the opposite: that it is precisely the machinations of the art world, the epiphe-

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art forgery, etc) which, combined with the ’ordinary’

image production of humans of all cultures and epochs which enables this transcendental, but secular, promise of images.

[image 6: Les Demoiselles]

The difference between the aesthetic quality of an im- age and the artistic value of the same image is clearly demonstrated by one of the icons of twentienth century art, namely Pablo Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon.

Painted already in 1907, Picasso had some serious doubts about the quality of the picture, nor were his friend, who saw the painting at his studio, especially happy about it. Picasso probably knew that the painting could dam- age his career if he exhibited it, and thus it remained rolled up and left unfinished in his studio in spite of many offers to exhibit or sell it. When it finally was

exhibited, for the first time, in 1937, cubism was of course an already well established style, and the aesthetic qualities—

—or lack of qualities——it might have had, was now irrel- evant due to the historical value it since had acquired as the central document in the development of cubism.

If Picasso would agree with the aesthetic view just men- tioned, the logical thing to do, would be to repaint it, thus improving its aesthetic deficiencies. It would then

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be finished when Cubism was already a well established movement. He would undoubtedly have improved its aes- thetic quality, but at the same time he would have de- stroyed its artistic value.4

This logic of artistic value commenced——as is well known—

—with Courbet’s Realist Salon and Manet’s Olympia at the Salon des Réfusées, when art made its final transition into a matter of interest for an anonymous public. In this sense the logic of the image and the logic of mod- ern art share the common property of not existing with- out an observator and that the image as well as the art work can only be observed with the help of an observing apparatus.

[image 7: Nude + Fountain]

Every avant-garde movement knew——consciously or not——

that the artistic value now was created in a dialectical movement between rejection and acceptance in an acceler- ated stylistical differentiation, but no artist seem to have been able to use this logic as effectively as Mar- cel Duchamp. When Duchamp’s Nude in 1912 first was re- fused by the very institution that was created for the réfusées, for the year after to be hailed as the apoteo-

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aware that he had cracked the code of fame. And this code was then even more succesfully repeated with the staged rejection of the Fountain at the newly founded Society of Independent Artists’ first exhibition in New York, and the successive Salon des Réfusées in the form of the jour- nal The Blind Man.

I will not dwell upon this algebraic logic, as it is thouroghly discussed by Thierry De Duve,5 but just note, that the

very concept of the readymade, could be seen, not so much as something concerning the art object, as something per- taining to this very logic of artistic value, and that this logic of artistic value is intimately connected with the shape of time.

[image 8: early avantgardes]

”A Ready-made”, Duchamp once said, ”is a work of art with- out an artist to make it, if I may simplify the defini- tion. A tube of paint that an artist uses is not made by the artist; it is made by the manufacturer that makes paints. So the painter really is making a Ready-made when he paints with a manufactured object that is called paints.

So that is the explanation, but when I did it, it was not at all intended to have an explanation. The icon- oclastic part of it was much more important. Well, the

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Impressionists were iconoclasts for the Romantics and the Fauves were the same and again Cubism against Fau- vism. So when I came along, my little idea, my icono- clastic gesture, was ready-made”.6

Thus, the readymade, the single most important artis- tic modus operandi in the twentieth century, could in this sense be regarded as an anticipation of time. At another occassion Duchamp speaks of the readymade as ”a kind of rendez-vous”,7 of an anticipated time in the fu- ture, which is to be inscribed on the readymade. As the logic of artistic value, the shape of time produced by the readymade, thus understood, is not only in future tense, but also in an already perfected aspect, there- fore the typical duchampian ”with all kinds of delay”.

”A rendez-vous, with all kind of delays, already-made”

is the poetical formula for what a grammarian would call

”futurum exactum”, or the already perfected future. This is the grammatical form of the avantgardist logic of artis- tic value: the anticipation of a fame already inscribed, therefore with all kinds of delay.

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In this avantgardistic logic, the historical judgment trumps the aesthetic quality. The form of art histori- cal time beats the metaphysics of the beauty of the im- age. It is thus not surprising, that the predominant re- lationship to the image during the art of the twentieth century have been iconoclasm. This is of course not a coincidence, as iconoclasm is the dialectical antithe- sis to the readymade. The only definition Duchamp ever gave the readymade was a negative, or antithetical defi- nition. A ”reciprcoal readymade”, Duchamp wrote, ”to use a Rembrandt as ironing board”8

”It is rather hard on the Rembrandt”, Hamilton asks, ”It is,” Duchamp confirms, ”but we have to be iconoclastic”.9 This is because the inversion of the readymade, ”to pro- claim any object an art work”, into ”use an art work to something” will always be an act of vandalism. To use a book for reading is thus confirming its usage value but correspondingly reduce its sign value.10 Iconoclasm is thus not a crime against art, but a crime against im- ages.

1.2 Fiasco of embarrassment

A curious counter-example of Duchamp’s and Picasso’s suc- cesses with art historical judgements in the operations with the time aspect of futurum exactum, is presented to

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us when Francis Picabia in 1935 was invited by Gertrude Stein to exhibit in Chicago, with the anticipation from the organisers that they would see some machine paint- ings or some other crazy dadaistic idea. To their dis- belief Picabia came with a bunch of neo-classicist alle- gories. There were no scandal. Only embarrassment. Even Picabia himself seemed to be embarrassed as he immedi- ately after destroyed the majority of these paintings.

Picabia was never again invited to exhibit in the United States and the exhibition in Chicago was soon forgotten in an atmosphere of mutual embarrassment.

I would like to follow this embarrassment. If there is any feeling so intimatelly linked with art forgery, it is precisely embarrassment. When forgers are exposed it is usually not a headline story in the press. When the famous English art forger Eric Hebborn was exposed in 1978, only few insiders were informed, no legal action was taken, as it would be too embarrassing for the cred- ibility of the museums and the art market if it was made public. It took a British journalist more than additional ten years to be able to publish the name of the forger, who in the meantime claims to have made some further 500 Old Master Drawings.

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When the famous expert on Chinese art, James Cahill was on the track of one of the most prolific and expert forg- ers in modern times, the Chinese artist in the tradi- tional style, Chang Dai-chien. When Cahill intended to present his findings for the Chinese Art Treasures Ex- hibition, at Asia House Gallery in New York in 1962, he was discouraged to do so, as it would embarrass an al- ready weak confidence in the market of Chinese art. Cahill obliged, and his result was first delivered with 30 years of delay in 1991.

[image 9: Bredius]

This is an embarrassment on behalf of the expertise, which in itself wouldn’t explain the relative reluctance of

dealing with art forgery, as this exposing of the expert always have had a strong star in popular culture, and indeed, almost every book on art forgery deals with the commonplace of the simpleton fooling the expert and the well-known topos of the Emperor’s New Clothes. This was the story Han Van Meegeren succeeded in selling when he was exposed after the Second World War. Instead of being a Nazi collaborator and a degenerate nouveau riche while his compatriots starved on the streets of Amsterdam, he succeeded in branding himself as ”The Man Who Swindled Goering” to became a modern Dutch folk hero.

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[image 10-11: Van Meegeren x 2]

No, I believe this embarrassment sticks deeper. I be- lieve it is linked with the artistic mediocrity of the legitimate works of the forger, which inevitably pops up from nowhere when the illegitimate works are exposed.

And the legitimate works have had a sad tendency to pro- duce a grotesque travesty of art in the most repulsing manner. As almost every forger, out of a certain prac- tical necessity, are artists themselves; and as almost every forger, out of a similar pragmatical necessity, are failed artists, what we perceive is this ostentative lack of originality, this blatant lack of authenticity and thus this embarrassing lack of identity.

[image 12: Dossena:Dossena]

Of Alceo Dossenas legitimate works Martin Price disdain- fully writes: ”Briefly famous after his exposure, Dossena saw his work, exhibited under his own name in Naples and Berlin, savaged by the critics. This example, acquired from the exhibition in Berlin, shows why. Removed from dependence on the dealers who set him his subjects and exercised strict quality control, his work had markedly

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deteriorated. Of interest though is the deliberately in- fliced damage, a hallmark of the faker’s trade, which Dossena must absentmindedly (or drunkenly) have inflicted on his work before remembering that this example was to reach the world as his own.”11

[image 13: Dossena:Pisano]

Apart from probably being correct, this is nevertheless one of the innumerable examples of perfect hindsight, considering the number and quality of the many pieces of Dossena which were sold to the most famous museums of the world.

[image 14: Hebborn]

There was never any great interest in exhibiting Eric Hebborn’s legitimate works, which are made in a vaguely indeterminate modernist style, but after his confessions a couple of galleries exhibited some of his own works together with a strange type of artistic genre, labelled

”decorative fakes”. The critics weren’t excited. Geral- dine Normans wrote an review with the telling title ”Old Master faker fails to show a style of his own”, conclud- ing that the ”show of drawings, most of them not made as fakes, underlines the fact that a picture faker does

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not have the time to develop his own style. Hebborn is a very good draughtsman but this group of his work looks miscellaneous and gives no clue to what makes him tick.”12

It is this embarrassment, which is not an embarrassment toward the negative identities of the forgers, toward their criminality, homosexuality, piracy, deceitfulness, fraudulence or excessive consumption which usually ac- company the lives of the most excellent forgers, it is rather, as Alfred Lessing once phrased it, their crime

”against the spirit of art”, or rather: the embarrass- ment of art itself.

1.3 Plagiarism

[image 15: Elmyr / Picasso]

On of the feats Elmyr de Hory, the forger of Orson Welles’s fame, was most proud of, was when he, in 1951, dared to present five Picasso drawings to Paul Rosenberg, one of the leading art dealers in New York and Picasso’s offi- cial representative in the United States. Elmyr moti- vated this move with an urge to know if he was as good as Picasso or not. ”I knew of course that Picasso had invented something new, and I was merely following in his footsteps,” Elmyr continues, but, ”if Rosenberg, who

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who was Picasso’s dealer, who for the last forty years was handling Picasso exclusively——if my drawings were good enough for such a man, then it meant that in their quality they were certainly as valuable as Picasso’s.

It’s a sort of recognition by the highest authority”.13 According to Elmyr, Rosenberg bought all five drawings, but more importantly, his motivation demonstrates clearly that if he knew ”that Picasso had invented something new”, he was totally at loss when connecting this with any con- cept of artistic value.

Elmyr became aware of his abilities in 1946, when a fe- male friend of his saw a drawing in his studio and asked,

“Elmyr … that’s a Picasso, isn’t it?”14 This could be a hurting remark to hear for a young artist convinced of his own genius. But no so for Elmyr, instead he asked how she knew it was a Picasso, she answered with an air of nonchalant authority that she happened to know some- thing about Picasso and that he didn’t sign many of his drawings from his Greek Period. The Lady bought the draw- ing, as a Picasso, and Elmyr was grinding his brain. Could it be so simple? Instead of being humiliated by produc- ing work as of oneself, when they in reality was of another—

—which is the definition of plagiarism——why not make this relation reciprocal, by producing works as of others,

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when they in reality was by oneself? Which of course is the very definition of a fake.

Plagiarism, and the practice of copying, was otherwise,

before the mid of the 19th century, the ability that artists, connoisseurs, and collectors all alike appreciated the

most. The ability of the aspiring artist to follow and imitate the great masters. All education was centered at pracitizing this ability, the museums and collections was filled with copying artist, and works were compared to each other with the masterpiece as standard. It is this logic, which is turned around 180 degrees during the second third of the 19th century and which finally, around the First World War had completed its reversion of values.

[image 16: Bastianini 1]

This did apparently cause some major confusion in the Parisian art world in particular, being the center of the artistic developments of the time. Parallel with the scandal-successes of Courbet and Manet, a more embar- rassing event took place when it became clear that a cou- ple of highly prized and lofty celebrated Renaissance

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figures in reality was modern productions by an else to- tally unknown Italian sculptor with the name of Giovanni Bastianini.

[image 17: Bastianini 2]

In the aftermath of the passionate debates between Ital- ian and French art historians, it turned up that Bas- tianini had produced a large number of portrait busts in a late Gothic and early Renaissance style. Bastian- ini is today known as one of the prominent forgers in the annals of art forgery, but a recent debate evokes the question, if not the Bastianini-affair rather is a consequence of the confusion, produced by the turning around of artistic qualities, which happened during this time.15 For Bastianini, as for the majority of Italian sculptors during this time——and it can be argued, that Dossena, working in the 1920s, belongs to this very same tradition——never became aware of what was going on at the Parisian art scene, but stayed loyal to the old tra- dition of artistic emulation, copying, and … plagia- rism.

And so did, it seems, all our minor artists, including, most notably, every forger I know of. The forgers, in general, were all caught, not only behind the logic of

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the perfected future of the avantgardes, but, more im- portantly, behind the logic of artistic value. In their ambition of producing good works in an established style or canon, they put all their investements in practicing their handiwork for to revive, emulate, and variate a certain timeless experience of a never perfected past.

From this perspective, the past exists in an imperfect aspect and not really dateable. ”It is,” as Lyotard once wrote, ”transmitted incessantly imperfect through the limitations of the different epochs. The transmission of the promise does not belong to chronology——it opens up for a time of anticipation and redemption, which is not calculable”.16

[image 18: Sturtevant]

As a large number of recent artist is working with copy- ing, appropriations and re-enactments, such as Eleanor Antin, Walid Raad or Elaine Sturtevant, it is neverthe- less clear that these practices unambigiously stem from the logic established by the avantgardes, that is that the artistic value they may possess, is related to ques- tions of originality, authenticity, and identity, judged from a focal point in the future.

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[image 19: Elenor Antin——Helene Beltracchi]

This is not the case with art forgeries. The legitimate works of the forgers are embarrassing, because they are hopelessly out of joint with the artistic logic, why the reciprocal turning of plagiarism (issuing another’s work as one’s own) to forgery (issuing one’s own work as by another) is just a logical conclusion. And if so, the artistic value of art forgeries could now——with the logic established by the avantgardes——be judged with the same parameter as authentic art. The scandal of the new just turned 180 degress on the time axis as an embarrassment, or shock of the past.

2 The Shock of the Past

Sometimes during the 1960’s, Graham Smith, the long time lover of Eric Hebborn, bought a drawing from a minor auc- tion house in England. The drawing depicted a landscape with Roman ruins. The drawing did not only bear the sig- nature of Jan Brueghel, but had earlier been sold by Col- naghi’s, who had attributed it to Brueghel, as stated on the firm’s label on the back of the frame. When Eric

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Hebborn took a closer look on the drawing, he neverthe- less came to the conclusion, that the drawing was not by Brueghel, but a copy of a lost original, probably exe- cuted by an engraver.

Having satisfied himself with this fact, Hebborn decided to recreate the original Bruegel drawing from the en- graver’s copy, ”to make a copy of the copy in which the lines were speeded up, i.e. draw the lines at the same speed that Breughel had originally drawn them, rather than that of the plodding reproductive engraver. Thus in a sense recreate the original”.17

Hebborn gives a lengthy discourse of his considerations and preparations with regard to materials, pigments, frames and drawing techniques. When he had extracted the en-

graver’s copy of this presumably lost Jan Brueghel from its mount, he examined it carefully through a powerful magnifying glass and spent an hour or so making a metic- ulous examination of every stroke of the pen. Doing so, he asked himself question such as ”in the original from which this copy was taken, in what order were these lines executed? For the copyist had not, I suspected, copied the lines in the same sequence that Breughel had origi- nally drawn them”.

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[image 21: Bruegel]

Heborn continues the report from his recreation with the following beautiful discourse, which I quote at length:

”The reader who is not a skilled draughtsman may not think that such a change of order could be of the slightest

importance, but in fact the sequence in which the lines of a drawing are put down is vital. This is because of the rhythmical nature of good drawing where one movement leads naturally to another. If one changes the order in which the lines are made, one changes the rhythm. Again the reader may better understand what I am speaking of by making a comparison with handwriting.”

”If you were to copy a specimen of writing by imitat- ing the letters in a random order you would later have difficulty in linking them up with a convincing flow to the writing. Let us imagine, for instance, that you are copying Breughel’s signature. Naturally you will copy

the letters of his name in the same sequence as the artist wrote them. You would not I imagine begin by copying the r, the u, the h, and the l, and try to fit in the remain- ing letters.”

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”This is because you know how to write, and should you also know how to draw (by which I mean considerably more than most people mean by the phrase), and you were to set about copying a Breughel drawing, you would also know the proper sequence of his lines. You would know which are construction lines, which the correcting lines, and which the final strokes used to strengthen or stress the essential movements. Having satisfied myself that I had understood the order in which Breughel had created the lines in the lost drawing from which the engraver’s copy hade been made, I rehearsed the drawing time and time again, both in my mind and lightly with a dry pen over the old copy. But I was too tired to start the recre- ation of the lost Breughel that day. So I rested my eyes and brain and waited for the following morning, when fresh and bright, with the drawing I was about to make deeply etched upon my subconscious, I picked up my pen and set to work. To make the first marks of a new Old Master, knowing that one tiny slip could cost you a small for- tune in wasted materials, is a nerve-wracking experi- ence and it was not until I had sipped a tot of brandy and drawn a few lines in Breughel’s manner on a scrap of note paper that the stage fright vanished and the con- nection between the conscious and the subconscious was unblocked. Oblivious of my actual surroundings, I found

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so-called temples of Venus and Diana at Baia on a bright clear morning over 300 years ago. Time was halted. Hours must have passed but it was as if I had breathed the draw- ing into existence in a moment”.18

The drawing eventually ended up in the Metropolitan Mu- seum of Art, again through Colnaghi’s to whom Hebborn sold it. Hebborn published his report of the recreation of the drawing in 1991, thus exposing this drawing as a modern forgery for the first time. Five years later, in 1996, Thomas Hoving published a monograph on art forgery, False Impressions. In this book Hoving gives a fascinat- ing account of a very early identification of the hand

that later turned out to be Eric Hebborn’s. In this exposure—

—admittedly late and characterized by a certain hindsight—

—Hoving invests all his credibility as a connoisseur. He goes ”all in”, as a poker player would say.

In 1968 Thomas Hoving worked at the Metropolitan under Jacob Bean, then the curator of drawings. ”When it came to assessing real and fake”, Hoving writes, ”Bean was about as good as anyone I’d ever seen. He was also coura- geous and forthright in admitting when he had been had, which was not very often”.19

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Now, in 1968, many years before anyone had any idea of Eric Hebborns activites, Jacob Bean turned Hoving’s at- tention to this Brueghel drawing, which he himself had bought from Colnaghi’s five years earlier, but just re- cently had started to study. During these studies it had become clear for Bean that it was a modern forgery. Bean’s argument is truly convincing. The fundamental problem, according to Bean, is that the drawing doesn’t display any interest in antiquity; there are no interest in reg- ister or record antiquity, a desire that would have caught Jan Brueghel as well as every Nordic artist on his grand tour. The shattered stones and the architecture signals a draughtsman completely uninterested in the construc- tions of antiquity, something any artist would have reg- istered, because in the 16th century it would have been the very reason for choosing this motive. Instead we see piles of stones and a chaotic clairobscuro, a romantic accumulation of objects, which wouldn’t be conceivable before Goethe. Explaining these anomalies for Hoving,

Bean plays his trump: ”The measurments of the sheet: doesn’t it remind you of the size of a book?” Hoving was con-

vinced.

If Hoving is telling the truth here——which we have no reason to doubt——then we have to admit: we are convinced

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as well. And if Bean did this observation already in 1968, then it is fake-busting at its very best.

During the next five years Bean showed Hoving a number of works produced by the same ”lazy faker”, the auxil- iary name given the hand later identified as Eric Heb- born. During this time Bean had pointed at some Tiepo- los, a Rembrandt or two, half a dozen Stefano della Bella, Van Dyck, Luca Cambiaso and Jacopo da Pontormo.20

But, as often is the case when dealing with fakes and

fake-busting, if Bean already in 1968 had identified Metropoli- tan’s Brueghel as a modern fake, why was it still, with-

out reservations in the catalogue entry written by Ja- cob Bean, attributed to Jan Brueghel at the exhibition of Netherlandish drawings at the Metropolitan in 1970?21 This attribution was still intact two years later, then at an exhibition in Rome,22 where Eric Hebborn, by the way, to his surprise, saw it for the first time since he sold it to Colnaghi’s.23

Now, providing Hoving is telling the truth——which I, in spite of the above-mentioned anomaly, have no reason to doubt——his judgement on the authenticity of the drawing is irreversible, not negotiable. Remember, the judgment about the physical drawing was made long before neither

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Bean nor Hoving had the slightest idea about any Eric Hebborn and therefore created the auxiliary name ”the lazy faker”. ”Lazy”, because he was lax——presumable com- pared to other, more difficult fakers——in adapting to the styles of the time. Either had Bean and Hoving observed this hand or they are both totally incompetent. There are no third alternative. This is what I mean with ”all in”. Bean and Hoving have the right to make a mistake concerning individual drawings, but they are not allowed to make a misstake in defining a corpus of a hand con- sisting of some fifty drawings, and definitely not with regard to the very drawing constituting the core work in defining this hand as ”the lazy faker”. This identifica- tion can not be withdrawn, as it was continuously sup- ported by a number of other works. Either is this lazy faker identifiable in his style, technique and methods, or it doesn’t exist at all; either you can observe one and the same hand across styles and epochs, or else is every identification of a work essentially arbitrary. Hov- ing, of course, insists on the identity of this hand, and that he got his confirmation of his and Bean’s hy- pothesis when Hebborns autobiography appeared. You could of course object that Hoving safely could publish their early judgement as Hebborn already had published his facit.

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Nothing of this is shocking or embarrassing. It repeats a very predictable stalemate in every discussion in this battle of titans between the forger and the connoisseur.

But it gets a twist when Graham Smith, Hebborn’s partner and lover, published his autobiography three years af- ter Hebborn’s and two years before Thomas Hovings False Impressions. On that occassion Smith was interviewed by Geraldine Norman, and to her Graham said that the his- tory that Hebborn should have forged the Brueghel draw- ing was an outright lie, as was most of the stories Heb- born had told in his autobiography. Smith had seen the drawing himself and would have noticed if Hebborn had changed it. When Hebborn describes how he used home-made ink from old receipts, Smith dismisses this as well, ar- guing that Hebborn at that time used ordinary Pelican ink, which glossy surface he usually was set to rub away and subsequently pour with boiling water, but nothing of this happened with the Brueghel drawing.24

Geraldine Norman considered Graham Smiths testimony as credible, Hebborn managed to dismiss it before he died, and personally I am sceptical to the motives of Smith.

However it may be, suddenly the mood about the drawing is changing. The new curator of drawings at the Metropoli- tan, George R. Golder, states in 1995, already a year

before the publishing of Hoving’s False Impression, that

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”we believe that the story told by Mr. Hebborn in this book is not true.25 These doubts reaches Hoving’s ear be- fore his book was published, as he ends his story about Hebborn’s aesthetically deficient forgeries and Bean’s extraordinary capacity as fake buster with the far too laconical conclusion that the Brueghel recently ”has been defended by the current Met drawings curator and by Heb- born’s former lover who lives in California. The latter has charged that his late friend has exaggerated wildly the number and the character of the drawings he forged.

He claims that the Brueghel was never faked.”26 Since then, Metropolitan has considered the drawing authentic, even

if the attribution now has been geared down from Jan Brueghel the Elder to Jan Brueghel the Younger.

Now, this is what I call a shock of the past. If I would have had the chance to study the drawing, I know I wouldn’t be able to judge if it was a modern forgery or an au-

thentic drawing, but that is just simple ignorance. The antinomy is this: either does the hand ”the lazy faker”

exists or it does not. [image] If it exists, Hebborn is its author and Hoving and Bean its interpretative ex-

posers. If it, on the other hand, does not exist, as Smith and the current curators at the Met state, then, either are Bean and Hoving unforgivably incompetent: [image]

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are no room for changing of opinion, as Hoving as well as Bean saw this hand’s very characteristics across draw- ings executed in the style of artists as different as Stefano della Bella, Luca Cambiaso, Jan Brueghel, Rem-

brandt and Van Dyck, or there are no such thing as ”stylis- tic identity”, [image] only a question of who do you trust and who do you not. The stylistic identity being exactly the logic behind Bean’s and Hoving’s reasoning. [image] And not only Bean and Hoving, but virtually every art

historian has to subscribe to this idea of stylistic iden- tity. This is why they repeatedly assure us that all fakes eventually, and with necessity, will be exposed,[image] because the difference of the forger’s own time, and the time represented, will be more and more obvious, as the larger the distance in time the observer comes from the time-space of the forger. This is the comforting message of art history. The paradoxical antinomy, lies in the last consequence. Even if Hebborn lied about his recre- ation of the Brueghel, he would then, ironically, be right in his refuting that fakes are always detectable. ”The unpalatable truth is,” Hebborn continues, ”that although it is true that fakes often, even mostly, reveal them- selves by the stamp of the time in which they were made […], this is by no means always the case and it is pos- sible for the master forger to escape the hallmark of his age.27

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If we opt for the last option——which I, paranthetically speaking, not necessarily do——art history is a fictional or imaginary science. What makes art forgery artisti- cally shocking——in its avantgardistic sense——is exactly this antinomy of ambivalence. However we choose to turn the problem around, the possibility of a superimposi- tion of two states, ”being an X” and ”not being an X”

could be true at the same time. This shock of the past was once poignantly phrased by the philosopher Michael Wreen:

[image 28: Wreen]

”But why hold to that? Kenny himself provides no argu-

ment for thinking that the Mona Lisa necessarily was painted by Leonardo, and the claim, moreover, seems counterin-

tuitive; surely we might discover, might have discov- ered, or might be in the process of discovering that the Mona Lisa——the very object which everyone now agree is the Mona Lisa——was painted by Michelangelo, or by any of Leonardo’s compatriots. There is no insuperable con- ceptual barrier to such a discovery, so they property in question, having been painted by Leonardo, is one which the Mona Lisa has in the actual world but not in every

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is not an essential property of the Mona Lisa. […] Nor do works of art seem to have essential properties of a historically-indexed sort. No logical or metaphysical

red lights are run in saying that the Mona Lisa […] might have been painted by van Eyck, or by van Dyck, or by van Gogh, or even by van Meegeren”.28

In the quote from Benjamin, together with the experi- ences from art forgery, two central variables poses them- selves: a time-function (the completness and the incom- pletness of temporal tenses respectively) and an image- function (artistic value and aesthetic value, respec- tively; or: readymade and iconoclasm versus plagiarism and forgery). I will therefore discuss these two func- tions one after the other. First the time-function, there- after the image-function.

3 Time-function

[image 30: sedimentary]

There are basically two modes of understanding history.

The first is the stratigraphic method, where time is un- derstood as a certain horizontal layering of matter and

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traces. This is the method usually applied when geolo- gists speak about geological epochs as Silur, Jura, and Holocen, when archaeologists speak about Younger Bronze Age or when art historians speak about renaissance, neo- classicism or Flemish 16th century. This time could be described as horizontal and virtual.

[image 31: stemma]

The second is the narrative method when a certain itinerary is constructed from a later viewing point. This is the method philologists uses when designing stemmas, histo- rians when narrating and interpreting events. This method has to rest on a strong reliance on causality and the relative importance of different events. It could thus be described as vertical and actual.

3.1 Stratigraphy

[image 32: Thompson pyramid]

The first method, the stratigraphic, carries history through recollections, remembrances and customs. The events of

the past are remembered through repetition, ceremonies, and similar oral and physical transmissions. The prob- lem with this method is what anthropologists have called

”the curtain of anamnesia”, which we all are familiar

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at loss, as the curtain of anamnesia enters after three generations of oral communication.

This anthropological model present us with some inter- esting historical-theological problems Benjamin worthy that I won’t be following here. For the time being I will only note, that Thompson here designes the time as per- fected or fixed in the vantage point and the focal point respectively, whereas it is imperfect or flexible in be-

tween. However it may be, the very virtuality of the strati- graphic projection of history is comparable to the rep-

resentation of space as presented in Jorge Luis Borges’

On Exactitude in Science, about making a map in scale one to one.

[image 33: Elkins]

More recently, James Elkins has humorously demonstrated an art history based on this stratigraphic method. In his Stories of Art he muses over some ”perfect” stories of art. One of them being a strictly chronological one- to-one representation of the history of art, where each page represents a fixed span of time. Elkins provides us with some reproductions of this impossible book, here

page 268, representating the time-span between year 12,000

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to 11,985 B.C., and another, representating the time- span between 1650 to 1665 on page 983 (which must be a misprint, as the correct page would be 1,110). ”It would be wonderful to have such a book and to leaf through chap- ter after chapter of nearly empty pages, here and there passing the odd notched bone or cave painting. The whole first half of the book would be nearly blank”.29 Whereas the other page would have to be set in a nanosized font to be fitted on one page.

[image 34: Tanaka Atsuko]

Its impossibility nonewithstanding, the stratigraphic time has its own poetry. I was personally struck by this poetry, when, at the Documenta in 2007, I was confronted with three empty linen canvases of different dimensions.

Because the information sign was placed on a different wall, I was left standing helpless before these three empty canvases. Starting to look closer I could see they were of linen. They were not new, but had some discreet foxings, occasional stains from humidity and/or grease.

The foldings where like a tablecloth that had been for- gotten in a drawer and now folded out for the first time.

It was a support for no image, only traces. Traces of what? In my opinion, what we saw was the traces of mate-

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but still very present. Finally localizing the sign, it read: ”Tanaka Atsuko. Work. 1955,” the dimensions of

the linen pieces, and with the note ”Estate of the Artist”, confirming this impression of a tablecloth left in a drawer for decades.

[image 35: Rauschenberg]

After reading the information sign, my first thought was the fascinating contemporaneity with Robert Rauschen- berg’s Erased De Kooning drawing from 1953. But the more I have been thinking about it, I believe it points in a rather different direction. Rauschenberg’s work is about de-creation and artistic value, Tanaka Atsuko’s is about the very materiality of time, the indexical signs, a cer- tain exposure of this stratigraphic time with no closing of the aperture.

[image 36: blank paper]

It thus rather corresponds to the blank sheet from the time, so eagerly sought after by art forgers, potentially containing any type of image, attributable to virtually every identity of the stratigraphic timespace of the sup- port.

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3.2 Narratives

The other method, the narrative, isn’t at all impossi- ble to describe. On the contrary, it is necessary for any developed historical sense. Art history, as a sci- ence and a discipline, is dependent on the activation of both time-functions, the narrative together with the stratigraphic, at the same time. And the art historical hypothesis——if one could speak of a such in the singular—

—would be that these two time-functions have to be aligned to each other; that the stratigraphy gives the matter- trace foundation for the causal spacetime narrative. It is this spacetime narrative that makes art history pos- sible in the first place from Vasari to Gombrich.

Parallel with the birth of the avant-garde between the 1860s and 1910s, with their anticipating the history of art as an aspectual feature of time, as a readymade, art history establishes itself as a discipline of a perfected past with no future, hence the documentary focus in its workings and the notion of an ’end of art’ in its con- temporaneity.

For the avant-garde artist, the only possibility of im- age production is the production of a work existing in

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work functions as an image of this very closure. For the art historian, the art works are produced, or rather:

re-discovered in ”a rendez-vous at such or such time”, aligned in a causal chain in an closed past, with its focal point at an unsurpassable end-of-art paradigm. For the avant-garde artist, new works have to be of ’a ret- rospective tomorrow’, as a work à la mode would be out- dated already. For art history, on the other hand, new works are either inconceivable or degenerate.

Image production before art or outside art functions to- tally different. I will call this image production be- fore or outside art ”traditional” image production, and understand therewith of course the vast majority of im- ages produced today: commercial, scientific, popular and all other types of images. They are all produced and con- sumed à la mode, discarded or replaced when outdated, ignored when incomprehensible. But there are no sharp threshold of modern or non-modern, just a slow decoher- ence which suddenly makes an image, not confining to the standards of today, impossibly outdated.

This is in sharp contrast with the art historical nar- rative, which, since the emergence of Western art from the Renaissance until today, is constructed over a list of names, together with the works linked to these names

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that functions as the argument of the name. The name is not a proper name, but what Foucault called an ”author function”. The art system, in contrast to the image pro- duction of humanity in general, is irreversible depen- dent on this author function, that is, art would not be feasible without it.

[image 37: S. Lucas]

This author function can be tested with the help of a painting, brought home to Cambrai from Rome by a Flemish prelat in 1440. This was a Madonna and Child attributed to S. Lucas. Not necessarily because it was believed that S. Lucas himself had conducted the brush, but because it was believed that it was a true and authentic copy, that is an original image of Our Lady and the Christ Child.

When it was painted was irrelevant: the image was au- thentic. Today we know that the image was painted in the mid-14th century, probably in Siena, in a byzantine style, and even a copy of this type, Virgo Eleousa, was regarded as an original image by S. Lucas as well. The Cambrai- Madonna, in its turn, was copied at least 15 times, among others, by Petrus Christus, Hayne from Brussels, and Ro- gier van der Weyden. The image was of course never signed, as it authority was self-evident, S. Lucas being the only

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as authentic images as original because——as we now know from digital images——there were no such thing as ”an orig- inal” and ”a copy”; the copyability being an intrinsic property of the image, which the legend of the Mandylion clearly illustrates.30 On the other hand, it is not at all improbable that no one could see the——for us——obvious stylistical differences between the copies, as there were no observation apparatus to detect any such differences.

The question of attribution, the author function, con- cerned the image not the style, that is, the indexical traces in matter.

During the Early Modern and the Classical Period, copy- ing the great masters and the noble prototypes of images retained their edifying connotations; the new and con- temporary image was introduced slowly, like the devel- opment of the horse driven chariot was transformed into the automobile. It thus made sense comparing Ingres to Raphael, and Antonio Canova to antique marbles.

With the emergence of modernism and art history, as two complementary discoursive shifts, the fine arts, or the art of images, the concept of the image was radically devaluated to index and iconoclasm respectively.

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4 Image-function

In colloquial speech, we often speak of images as ob- jects. I suspect many of you would consider an image in- separable from its support, and I would understand what you would be aiming at with such a statement, for in- stance, that a drawing is not identical with its photo- graph, and that an image cannot be distilled out of its matter. And no, it cannot. Nevertheless this conflation of image and support, of the imaginary with the real, present us with a similar alignment as the alignment of the stratigraphic with the narrative time of art his- tory: two, not orthogonal, but rather incongruous axes conflating into one matrix (and thus indissoluble). It is not implausible that it was something like this Plato was aiming at in this famous quote from The Sophist, when the Stranger concludes with the aporia that, ”what we call a likeness, though not really existing, really does exist?”

Nevertheless, in my argument here, I believe it could be productive to consider the concepts of the image (or the imaginary) as well as the matter (or the real) sepa- rately, with this matrix of an incongruent conflation of

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[image 39: Der Standard]

A physicist would say that an image is not a realistic object, but a conceptual. This means that the image does not exist, if it is not observed. What exists, intrin- sically, is matter, the reflective support of the image.

This does not mean that we have to look upon the image with our eyes, before it exists. The absent matter, the empty space of the museum wall, carrying the image of Edward Munch’s The Scream, attracted significantly more observers of the image than when its matter actually hung upon the wall before the theft of the painting. The car- toonist of Der Standard seems even to suggest a certain inverse function, which dramatically changes the rela- tionship between visibility and invisibility. When the pictorial matter was visible at the museum wall with the actual image, the image became manifold potentialized (as synapses on neurons) when its matter (as oil on can- vas) was removed. If the observation of an image always is made through an apparatus, then this apparatus can be of various kinds, but always constitute the exposure or visibility of the observed.

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This apparatus, not identical with the image, and con- necting the observer with the observed, is the inter- preter of the indexically marked matter, synapses on neu- rons, oil on canvas, bodies in space and so forth which develops the image in matter.

4.1 Indexicality and iconoclasm

For the artist it became more and more evident, that the image had become increasingly irrelevant (e.g. Cézanne’s apples), and that which really matterd in art was the style, or rather: the author function. The author func- tion, opposed to the direct link between the proper name and the person’s action and inner identity, does not present any such direct link, but is rather something that make up the whole image, delineates it, follows it’s borders, and manifests it’s way of being. The author function is that which replicates, redraws or superimposes the im- age. ”The author’s name,” Foucault continues in his es- say on the subject, ”is not a function of a man’s civil status, nor is it fictional; it is situated in the breach, among the discontinuities, which gives rise to new groups of discourse and their singular mode of existence”.31 The author function is such an observation apparatus.

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This stylistic indexicality replacing the aesthetic im- age as a kind of superimposed signature, delineating the work, was already conceptualized by Alfred Barr Jr, when he devised the first modern museum under the dictum of

”one-of-each”. Which means that every artist essentially just made one ’picture’, consisting of the same stylis- tic features, the indexical signature convering the pic- ture plane, each having the same degree of authenticity and originality as the other.

[image 41: Lichtenstein]

This stylistical identity of course carries with itself it’s own iconoclasm. We thus don’t have to recurse to all the innumerable examples of modernist iconoclasm, but only note, that this stylistical hegenomy of the au- thor function, or signature fuction (because it is the time during which the physical signatures in the lower right corner started to disappear from the painted sur- face), in itself produces the most efficient iconoclasm ever seen.

[image 42: Berenson]

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Parallel to the artistic developments during the 20th century, art history has developed what Thierry Lenain recently has called a ”paradigm of the trace”. First in the form of the fine art of connoisseurship, where the seismographic body——from the eye to the gut——of the con- noisseur records the almost invisible or infra-thin dif- ference between ”right” and ”wrong”.

[image 43: technical transillumination]

After the Van Meegeren-affair, it become clear that the scientific examination of the physical matter was the way to go. Today this scientific observation of the matter has by far passed the purpose of detecting fakes. It is well on its way of replacing our perception of the phys- ical art image. In any scholarly old master exhibition or publication of today, the most important arguments are in the form of x-ray photostats, chemical diagrams, and other type of transilluminations of the image, reg- istering the physical traces on the matter. This techni- cal examination of pictures, however, contains an aberd- abei. Not only does it ignores the image, it is further- more incapable of registering the image. The technical observation is not in itself visual, but a logical argu- ment, projected on a screen. All these photostats, dia-

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observation that is beyond our perceptual horizon. But the incapability of observing the image is not a conse- quence of the technical examination, the technical ob- servation is a consequence of the paradigm of the trace, of our own iconoclasm. I would thus not consider it un- likely that the image for us is as invisible, as the style was for a late gothic observer of an image of Our Lady.

4.2 Incompletess of images

[image 44: van Gogh-Leonardo]

The traditional method of image production, when copy- ing or plagiarising the great masters was the virtue of art, suddenly became a crime against art. This shift was never grasped by our lesser known artists, among whom

the forgers belong. All forgers, without exception, couldn’t get the logic of artistic value right, but instead in-

sisted on aesthetic quality.

In his autobiography, the British art forger Eric Heb- born on several occasions mentions what he calls his ”the- sis” or ”theory”, which in essence is that every good

drawing is tapping from a common source, beyond time and space and with no individual stylistic features, that is, essentially unfixed or floating in time. The germi- nal notion of this his theory came when he as a student

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at the Royal Academy wrote a thesis called The Science of Drawing some years before he had started to forge Old Master Drawings. ”It was basically,” Hebborn writes, ”an unlearned lope through the history of European draughts- manship from Leonardo to Van Gogh, with many a slip be- tween, but it did contain an idea that was later to be developed as a full dress theory. This germinal notion was not, however, contained in the text, which was of unrelieved banality, but in the illustrations. These were copies after the various masters discussed, and at the top of one double-page spread, I made a drawing after a Leonardo landscape on the left-hand page, the movement of which seemed to be continuous with a landscape after Van Gogh on the right hand page. Since the originals are separated in time by several centuries, and were made by an Italian and a Dutchman of totally different tempera- ment, according to present artistic theory, they should have no stylistic affinity whatsoever. And yet as I drew from them, I became more and more aware that both Leonardo and Van Gogh were tapping from a common source. Defy-

ing time and space, they were working in some shared di- mension, exploring a world of universals common to all great art”.32

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4.3 Images of a second order, or: the completion of the image

One can argue, that the Western system of an institu- tionalized art world begins when magnates, instead of the time-consuming and tedious undertaking of commis- sioning artist to produce works for their palaces, be- gins to buy paintings and sculptures already made from the artists directly or through the——for that very reason—

—newly established art market. This had the consequence that what became sought after, not so much was the image—

—of, say Madonna and the Child——as the signature of a specific artist. Thus a painting by Raphael, any paint- ing of Raphael, became the highest of desiderata, re- gardless of which motif it happened to depict.

The image depicted on a support did, however, continue to play a significant role in the value and price of the art object throughout the following centuries, but it was this tendency——towards iconoclasm and indexicality——

which reached its final fulfilment with modernism.

During the twentieth century it had become clear for most successful artist that the focus was irreversably shifted from a focus on the quality of an aesthetic image to the artistic value of the signature.

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Now, when images become signatures, or ”author functions”, as Foucault termed it, they become images of a second

order while still retaining a first order quality, which, however, would be invisible if there weren’t images of a second order.

[image 45: Niele Toroni]

To exemplify; in the image——any image, it precisely doesn’t matter which we pick——of ”a Niele Toroni” we perceive

some regularly placed monochromatic colored dots. But if we didn’t knew, that these dots were art, they would be as invisible as images as any pavement or facade, which we perceive on a daily basis. What we perceive, as an image, is ”a Niele Toroni”, with the attributes of ”punc- tual brushstrokes, painted with an arbritrary monochromic colour, each brushstroke placed in 30 cm distance from the next”. This is the image of a second order. This is a indexical, stylistical and often algorithmic concep- tual image, which symbolical meaning is its causal in- corporation in the narrative of art history.

The disappointment which arose of Picabia’s 1935 Chicago exhibition is due to the fact that the image of the first order (the mythological allegories) precisely didn’t match

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of ”a Francis Picabia” because it lacked the attributes of ”a Francis Picabia”. They were so to speak fake ”Fran- cis Picabias”, made by Francis Picabia or not did not make then any more authentic.

Again, Picasso was perfectly aware of this difference, as two famous anecdotes confirm. When a collector showed Picasso a confirmed forged ”Picasso”, Picasso asked the collector how much he had paid for it. The collector di- vulged the very high sum he had paid, and Picasso an- swered, ”Then it must be a Picasso” and consequently au- thenticated it, effectively making it ”a Picasso”. In another anecdote, Picasso is again authenticating a bunch of works, when he declares a drawing a fake, the collec- tor, a friend of Picasso, bursts out:

——But I saw you doing this drawing, and you gave it to me immediately after it was done!

To which Picasso answered:

——Even Picasso can make fake Picasso’s.

Art history operates, per definition, in hindsight, and hindsight has, as we all know, perfect vision. This per- fection in the observation is the complex aggregate of time-space-matter with the image or the imaginary. In traditional image-making, the time-space-matter remains—

—as Lyotard noted——continuously imperfect, transferred

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in time, where the time-space-matter of the image so to speak follows the stratigraphic time-space in a joint disjunction. In art history, where the image of second order is the indexical traces of time-space-matter, re- ferring to an identity with the likeness of a signature, it allows this signature to be freely incorporated in any time-space-matter.

Incidentally, this is what traditional image production does with the depicted. An image of Christ moves the iden- tity, ”Christ”, to the time-space-matter of the observer.

Christ is imperfectly present. This is what Benjamin meant with ”incompletness” and ”happiness”.

One could say that the traditional image-production ma- terializes, or incorporates the image (for instance of Christ) in a time-space (for instance Bruges 15th cen- tury) and is continuously left imperfect in the moving time-space. When this image is attributed, not to Christ or S. Lucas, but to Petrus Christus, an author function is added, which makes the image-matter perfect in time- space. This is not a physical fact——because time-space is not of the same fabric and texture as the image-matter—

—but a measurement by an observer.

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The author function ”Jackson Pollock” belongs to a strati- graphical time. It has the properties of the sum of ”Pol- locks”, which, however, not necessarily exists in the same stratigraphical time as the author function ”Jack- son Pollock”. As Michael Wreen wrote, ”no logical or meta- physical red lights are run” in conceiving a ”Pollock”

from Den Haag in 1665 or from Australia in 2031 or from Altamira fourteen thousand years ago. The attribution of

”Jackson Pollock” to ”a Pollock” is arbitrary, but fol- lows a gravitational distribution of individual obser- vations and, which is the important point, changes the identity of the signature as it now has other proper- ties. This is exactly how Van Meegeren tried to change the identity of ”Vermeer” but also how the invention of photography actually have changed the identity of ”Ver- meer”.

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5 Final Remarks

5.1 Exposed and Unexposed Fakes [image 47: schema 2]

If the exposed fake uses the difference between image and trace to release an embarrassment, to instigate a rendez-vous of the present in the past——with all kind of reimbursements——it is to procure a specific artistic sentiment of shock, comparable with the shock of the new of the different avantgardes. And if the shock of the new of the avantgardes uses anti-art on art, iconoclasm on images; the shock of the past of the exposed fake, uses art history as an art and artistically manufactured traces as images. Thus, exposing fakes is the same as undressing art history in a shocking strip-tease; em- barrassing it, making it blush. Demonstrating that art history, while perfecting the past with its alignment of the narrative with the stratigraphy is making the image invisible behind the transillumination of the trace and index.

Similarly, as the avantgarde tests the reciprocity of art by inverting the artistry and skill to readymade and iconoclasm, the exposed fake is testing art history by

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the narrative from the stratigraphic and thus exposing the image in the indiscernability of trace and style,

and thus, as opposed to the avantgardes, again, re-inverting art to a question of artistry and skill.

[image 48: Piranesi]

The undetected fake, although its relation in quantity to the exposed fake probably equals the relation between the whole iceberg and the tip of the iceberg, is, by all means, identical to what it purports to be. It is triv- ial. This ”Piranesi”, which recently surfaced on the art marked——which, by the way, surprisingly many Piranesi’s have done since the 1980s——with no provenance whatso- ever, ought to make the red lights run. I am perfectly aware of the fact that I am partial, but for me it was impossible not to observe the very hebbornesque char- acter of this piece of drawing especially in the design of the sheet. If I am correct or not, if the drawing is

”right” or ”wrong” is trivial. When it is observed, it behaves as that it is observed as, and acquires the prop- erties given to it by the gravitational distributions of its observations. Before the observation it is smeared out, lingering outside of time and space, tapping the source of which every time-space-matter is part, and——as

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Lyotard phrased it——”opening up for a time of anticipa- tion and redemption which is not calculable”.

So the forgers where right all the time?

By no means. Art forgery wouldn’t be possible without art history. They are the two sides of the same coin.

If there were no narrative, no causal time in art im- ages, Eric Hebborn’s drawings would——without any problem whatsoever——be regarded as the image they purported to be. But nor would it make any sense producing a forgery in the first place, as a modern copy painted in a modern style would be much higher valued than any worned-out original, which the case with the S. Lucas Madonna il- lustrates. Remnants of this paradigm is left in the fa- mous recent case of the restauration of an insignificant Ecce Homo from 1910 to the web-hit Ecce Mono of Cecilia Gimenez last year.

In the same vein, that is, in a culture with no narra- tive of a causal historical development, no one could ever get the idea that van Meegeren’s Christ at Emmaus had anything to do with Vermeer. I would just be an old worn religious painting. An antiquarian would maybe be able to link it to the group of paintings now known as

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incomplete anything completed as it would already be op- erating in the imperfect aspect of time.

Art forgery and art history, being the two reciprocal modes of the same function, produces observations of a second order, making images out of indices and visualiz- ing traces as representations. This is possible, because of the incongruent congruence of a stratigraphic time

(traces in matter) with a narrative time (time-space events) in an observation matrix.

5.2 Future simple

Now, until now we have discussed the futurm exactum of the avantgarde, the already made future rendez-vous an- ticipated by the shape of the narrative time. We have discussed its parallel in art history, the perfect hind- sight of art history, closing the past with the help of the same narrative time and we have discussed art forgery, reciprocally embarrassing this art history by imperfect- ing or opening up this perfected time-space, thus es- tablishing itself as art history’s other or the inverse function of art history. What about the last slot, the imperfect future or futur simple? Can it make the avant- garde incomplete, re-establish utopia as a place beyond time and space?

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A recent re-discovery suggest so indeed. The Swedish painter, Hilma af Klint was a habile painter in the style of late

19th century realistic style. Parallel with her not very successful artistic career, she entertained conversa- tions with spirits. As she is gonna to be well know in the future, there are no reason for me to go into de- tails of her life. My point is just this: In 1904, whilst having received the spirit ”Ananda” in a state of trance, Hilma af Klint, agrees to drop her ’exoteric’ work and only paint after the instructions of this spirit. Which she does, accumulating a corpus of some thousand abstract and figurative esoteric paintings until her death in 1944.

These paintings were never exhibited, because the spir- its, who had complete knowledge of the past and the fu- ture, explained to Hilma af Klint that the paintings could not be understood until some 20 years after her death.

It took some additional years as it was first in 1986, at the exhibition of The Spiritual in Art in Los Angeles that her images was seen as a significant contribution to the history of art. Hilma af Klint had no contact to the international art movements of her time and probably didn’t regard her own visual spiritual praxis as an art praxis, but precisely as a imaginary, revelatory praxis as a medium of something else. What this praxis demon- strates, is that Hilma af Klint are working in a mode

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in the future simple tense as there are no art histor- ical aspects of a historical readymade fixing them in an causal relation to the art historical narrative. What I believe is happening with the reception of Hilma af Klint in our days is an making incomplete the complete art history of the avantgardistic narrative, thus un- ending the end of art.

6 Discussion

”This is the earliest signed and dated painting by Bruegel known so far. Max J. Friedländer was the first to recog- nize it as an authentic work of the master. It was first published by Charles de Tolnay in Burl. Mag. XCVII, Au- gust 1955. The scene is based on the Gospel of St. John, Ch. XXI, but the narrative is overshadowed by the land- scape. The very small figures are completely subordinated it and relatively even smaller than in the engravings of the Large Landscape Series (Van Bastelaer, Nos. 3–17), most of which were produced only after Bruegel’s return from Italy. The pictures is closely connected with the Landscape with Sailing Boats (Plate 1). In both pictures the composition is much more dependent on Patenier than in any other extant landscape painting by Bruegel”.33

(58)

Until 1989, Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s Landscape with the Calling of St Peter was a 1553-event involving the identity ”Pieter Bruegel”, and connected in a causal re- lationship with the Netherlandish Weltlanschaft-tradition as an effect of the identities ”Joachim Patinir” and ”Herri met de Bles” and in turn the cause of the further de-

velopment of Bruegel’s depictions of alpine landscapes.

In all its attributed, it behaved like a Bruegel, looked like a Bruegel as is was observed by a Bruegel by an in- creasing number of observations following the first ob- servation by Friedländer. No it doesn’t behave like a Bruegel, it stands in no causal relationship to anything and is, by the way, invisible and never reproduced since.

Apart from the technical side of it, the evil genius of Han van Meegeren lies in this anticipating the art his- torical reasoning, and from this discourse, produce an image which, on it’s turn, is anticipated by the art his- torical community. Art historians had for a long time searched for some examples of early Vermeer’s, and ex- pected that these early Vermeers ought to show some in- fluence from Caravaggio. So, instead of producing a Ver- meer as we know him——which he probably already had tried—

—van Meegeren set out to produce an image, which not only

References

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