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Compliments of the Season to all of AHT’s readers.
In the new year I intend to keep publishing posts.
Plans include- to remind me as much as you……
Happy Christmas!
“A landscape picture is an image of the outside world adorning the walls of our indoor world. The Getty turns its vistas into posthistorical landscape pictures framed by the windows. The galleries for the permanent collection forms three-quarters of a circle, so you complete the collection by looking at the city below. Meier thus actively encourages the visitor to look outward and think of the landscape as an additional work of art.”
David Carrier, Museum Skepticism.
In his essay on the Getty, David Carrier observes that unlike most museums where one moves inwards and away from the city, seldom reminded of its existence, the Getty constantly makes you aware of the outside world, thanks to the intentions of its architect Richard Meier.[1] Due to windows and apertures embedded in the Getty structure, a number of vistas are created through which Los Angeles and the external environment is visible, even inside the galleries.
“The spatial experience should allow for contemplation of works of art from close up, and from a distance, but there has to be a periodic interval allowing the viewer to see nature, to see natural light, and to have a syncopated rhythm of experiences as one moves through. Otherwise museum fatigue takes over.” [2]
Richard Meier, architect of the Getty.
Is Meier right that movement through the gallery should be refreshed by views of nature? Isn’t simply looking at landscapes of Claude, Poussin, and Ruisdael sufficient to remind us of the beauties of the countryside, even though they are painted representations of the natural world? Some historical perspective is needed here. Claude and Poussin were lucky to discover a market that would pay for landscapes inspired by classical poetry and erudition; poor Ruisdael starved as landscapes met no social need.[3] Later there was more demand for landscapes in the age of the Grand Tour as patrons used art to familiarize themselves with local landmarks. This is clearly of interest to the Getty since one of its curators noted how travellers on the Grand Tour who looked at landscape paintings and Italian art “tried to see the relationship between art and the place it depicted.”[4] In our times we seldom observe how the dynamic between landscapes in galleries and topography may affect the museum experience since galleries deal with “museum fatigue” by building cafes, shops, providing seats and temporary exists from the museum, not by opening the walls to the outside world which the gallery-goer has abjured for a short time. Recovery, or the process by which the malaise of “museum fatigue” is relieved, is dealt with by these amenities inside the museum, not by recourse to the outside. However, in addition to these conventional amenities, the Getty weaves nature into its design in order to soothe the visitor’s body as well as ameliorating the onslaught on their senses. Thus, “intervals for visual relief” to combat “visual competition “are programmed into the visitor’s experience. The museum is no longer sheltered, but open to nature. Wether this soothes the exhaustion, both physical and mental, that assails the museum visitor on their journeys through the modern museum, is debatable. There is also the equally important question of wether it neutralizes reverie in front of paintings in the museum.
“…I could think of no simpler or surer way of carrying out my plan than to keep a faithful record of my solitary walks and the reveries that occupy them, when I give free rein to my thoughts and let my ideas follow their natural course, unrestricted and unconfined. These hours of solitude and meditation are the only ones in the day when I am completely myself and my own master, with nothing to distract or hinder me, the only ones when I can truly say that I am what nature intended me to be.”
Jean Jacques Rousseau.
Debates about the restorative qualities of nature can be traced back to the philosopher Jean- Jacques Rousseau who advocated nature as an antidote to the turbulence of civil society which he saw as corrupt. According to Rousseau, if there was such a thing as happiness, it could only be experienced in a natural state free from any agitation. In the 1770s Rousseau wrote a series of philosophical meditations inspired by his walks around the environs of Paris, which are wonderful a mélange of anecdotes, recollections of people and places, and philosophical reasoning brought to bear on assorted topics. His Réveries du promenades de solitaire attempts to recreate walks through nature while thinking which provides an analogue for the flexible intelligence of a mind on the move. Rousseau is useful when considering how nature can be merged into the act of moving through the galleries although his ideas have yet to be absorbed into the literature on visual processing, thought and museums.
“Reverie is a mode of introducing personal material into a picture or a building: it brings an abundance of thoughts and feelings into play. It also frees us from merely following routine assumptions. The word itself derives from the Old French ‘revel’. Etymology here helps draw our attention to the vagabond quality of associations: they don’t follow the expected or standard line, so more interesting moods and ideas can enter this way into our relationship with a work of art.”
John Armstrong, The Intimate Philosophy of Art.
In his meditation on aesthetics and visual and cognitive processing of art in museums the philosopher John Armstrong describes “reverie” as “the state of giving ourselves up to the flow of associations…a passivity of the mind which allows the activity of associations to go unimpeded.”[5] Armstrong recounts how Autumn Sunshine, a painting by Edward Arthur Walton helps him to recollect a long, afternoon walk taken in childhood during which he saw trees such as are depicted in Walton’s painting. This might be seen as a Rousseau-like promenade where paintings serve to trigger the memory and generate impressions along the way, but this experience with its overlay of pictorial and material landscapes is closer to Rousseau’s contemporary Denis Diderot who wrote on the landscape painter Horace Vernet by debating nature and art as he “walks” through four “sites”, each of which are based on landscapes by Vernet, but which recall places known to the philosopher.
Diderot’s “walk” should be distinguished from Rousseau’s because it is framed by a picture or his knowledge of that picture, or on a metalevel by the authority of the museum and art history. This is the act of imagining yourself “walking” through a painting in a museum that observes the hierarchy of art history, but where nature interrupts in the form of landscapes. This is not the same as rambling through a museum in which the experience depends upon nature occasionally, but physically, interceding in the form of light and atmospheric phenomena, which clearly changes the way painted landscapes are viewed in museum situations, something I shall consider in a companion post. Diderot is not concerned with how architecture captures and structures light since he says nothing about the aesthetics of the museum in his “sites.” Meier on the other hand stresses the “periodic interval,” the gaps in the museum space through which nature is glimpsed through the walls of the museum, not depicted nature interrupting, though these views of Los Angeles visible through the gaps might be seen as the equivalent of painted views enjoyed by the hilltop viewer in the same way as the Grand Tour traveller marvelled at Rome from well-chosen vantage points, like in Turner’s Modern Rome: Campo Vaccino at the Getty..
“We need to provide many intervals for visual relief, rest and reflection, for it defeats our purpose to tax the visitor’s body and overload his senses. Looking at art should be an intense experience. After a while recovery is necessary, for which we need to provide appropriate spaces.
Getty’s instructions to Richard Meier.[6]
As an architect Meier is obviously thinking of interval in terms of the physical building, which invites comparisons between civilization and nature. However, an analogy which dispenses with architecture and civil society exclusively in favour of the natural setting would be walking through a wood rather than a built manmade structure where nature periodically appears. Visual interval in this imaginative locale would also be construed as natural, namely the flickering of light through the branches of trees, natural interruption though not as “syncopated” as in Meier’s architectural aesthetic where interval is paced evenly. What is useful about the wood analogy for the museum is that it brings nature mentally into the act of moving through picture galleries, which is not what Meier intended at all. According to this modification, the random play of light through the branches suggests the associative, impressionistic mode of reverie which isn’t what the Getty aesthetic would actually accomplish, just a periodic emission of light, the visitor marching to the beat of the museum. The idea of reverie stimulated by nature occurred to me last year while walking through the narrow, crepuscular back passages of the Kunsthistorisches Museum in Vienna. On my expedition, I performed my own “natural light experiment” by imagining that I was ambling along a path in a darkened wood, and that entering large rooms of old masters was akin to emerging into large clearings open to the sky where the light was brighter. I had come up with this idea several years after visiting the Getty, and now reading about Meier’s architectural vision, I can see the appropriateness of Rousseau’s naturalised promenade for thinking about the ideas I’m exploring here.
Heading towards a conclusion. Though I would accept Meier’s point about nature as temporary relief from modern “museum fatigue”, I am still cautious about extending this model to museums generally. I am too much of a museum introvert to want to share the external world with the gallery despite the glorious vistas on offer. If the Getty does mark an outward turn in museum culture, it is one I deplore. Whilist I am sociable in everyday life, the museum for me symbolises a refuge from modern life and crowds. Though respectful of its public mission, I need to have a private calming experience which unhappily is threatened in the age of the neo-liberal museum. Though this warrants a blog post of its own, if we think about this outward turn in terms of personality, it might be argued that museums are less likely to appeal to introverted people who want to introspect in front of paintings in museums. As institutions are pulled towards what could be called the “extraverted” model by the neoliberal dogma, which pressurizes museums to turn towards the outside world in order to stress their accountability to civic society, the opposite of Rousseau’s tranquillity in nature, the consequences for what I am calling the museum introvert are sobering.
My emphasis here is not in applying personality types to museum demographics, though it is an interesting idea, but in speculating on how this outward turn might affect what we could call cognitive style, the varied ways of reflecting on pictures in gallery space as well as thinking about the process of thinking itself as affected by the conditions within the gallery including natural and artificial light. The challenge is to come up with ways of reacting to that aesthetic and cultural shift in museums, and my Vienna experiment might be regarded as both a symptom of the condition I’ve just described as well as a way of developing a cognitive style that reacts against the outwardly orientated museum and its appropriation by civil society and neoliberalism. In order to preserve a private, introverted experience in the modern externally -orientated museum, I imagined myself as Rousseau’s solitary walker seeking a kind of privacy in nature, where inner reveries, thoughts, fragmentary associations, stimulate mental processes inside the visitor’s head, augmented by images of the outside world on the gallery walls. As the neoliberal museum (the walk through BP at Tate Britain comes to mind) begins to influence gallery display, is the inside of our heads going to be the only place where we find recovery without the “assistance” of the museum ?
There will be a related post on natural light and museums after Christmas.
[1] David Carrier, “The Display of Absolutely Contemporary Art in the J. Paul Getty Museum” in Museum Skepticism: A History of the Display of Art in Public Galleries, (Duke University Press, 2006), 170.
[2] Quoted in Carrier, 174.
[3] John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 105.
[4] Carrier, Museum Skepticism, 174.
[5] John Armstrong, The Intimate Philosophy of Art, (Allen Lane, 2000), 63.
[6] John Walsh and Deborah Gribbon, The J. Paul Getty Museum and its Collections: A New Museum for the New Century, (Getty Publications, 1997), 88.
Forged: Why Fakes are the Great Art of Our Age, Jonathon Keats, Oxford University Press, 2013.
“No authentic modern masterpiece is as provocative as a great forgery. Forgers are the foremost artists.”
Jonathon Keats is a journalist who has written for a variety of art journals in the States, and his book has been written not for an academic audience, but for a wider readership. The book’s structure is interesting: an essay on the art of the forger; a middle section comprised of six sections, each dealing with a specific forger and theme; and an epilogue which roams far beyond art into the realms of politics, law, science and philosophical issues. This makes the book somewhat incoherent, and at times it reads like a cross between a newspaper feature and a blog post. The opening and closing essays might appeal to readers interested in the history of art fakes and how forgeries and forgers fit into the wider cultural situation, while the middle chapters serve as useful introductions to master forgers. Keats's main claim that fakes are the great art of our times isn’t really developed as an argument at all, just a convenient peg to hang a number of written, but suggestive explorations upon. The nearest thing to a conventional account of art forgery is Keats’s first chapter, an interesting potted history of the fake from Hadrian's Roman copies of Greek sculpture to Van Meegeren’s fabrication of “Vermeers” which allows Keats to pursue a number of themes which provide a useful taxonomy of forgery, though there is no systematic presentation of this and the reader may find themselves lost in the welter of ideas and insights.
An important strand running through this opening section is the question of how forgeries are appreciated, the psychological engagement with the fake which is as equally central as the material process by which the object is counterfeited. Many of the landmarks here will be familiar to readers well read in in the genres of art crime and the history of forgery: Michelangelo’s modern Cupid that mimicked an ancient marble; Andrea dal Sarto copy of Raphael’s Portrait of Leo X; and perhaps the most audacious, and blasphemous forgery of all, St Luke’s painting of the Virgin and Christ, faithfully copied by many artists. Here is where counterfeiting and religion converge which reminds us of the role of faith and belief in the culture of forgery. This is what Keats calls “pious fraud”, but he also examines how the sacred fake crossed over into humanism, which in the renaissance bolstered the cult of the artistic genius who brought psychology, craftsmanship and attribution into art history. Vasari was of course the first real connoisseur, and to read his Lives of renaissance painters to observe the scaffold of modern art connoisseurship being constructed before our eyes. Keats also charts the legislative implications of fakery from Durer’s complaint towards Marcantonio Raimondi to the Hogarth Act which gave that artist the kind of protection and rights sought by Durer two centuries ago. Though art fraud is disciplined and contained to some extent by legislative and institutional frameworks, Keats reminds us that the forger can destabilise these as in the case of Van Meegeren’s fooling of the Rembrandt scholar Bredius which had grave implications for connoisseurship and scholarship in the Netherlands. Here, the forger becomes trickster or prankster like Eric Hebborn or Tom Keating whose fakery subverted authority and turned (art) history into farce and theatre, which attracted the public. In this sense the faker has a ameliorative influence on the sclerotic body of art history, though this may simply be a side effect because we must never forget that the main motivation for forgers is monetary gain or vengeance on a profession that they perceive- rightly or wrongly- to have slighted them.
“Art must take up the forger’s means without the forger’s goals, to work on the far side of legitimacy without the limitations of making a point or a buck.”
Keats is possibly right in his main claim since forgers and counterfeiters do provoke extreme reactions while the old masters elicit respectful admiration, but his second claim about forged art as the great art of our age? This will attract some scepticism especially as many forgers turn out to be frustrated artists lacking the power and vision of many true artists, let alone the talent of a Rembrandt or a Titian. If however the terms of the forgery debate are broadened, as Keats does in his closing section, than maybe the second half of his statement can be entertained. Forgers and counterfeit art are barometers of certain trends in our society. For example, forgers may suggest anxieties about our modern, or should that be postmodern condition, in which claims for truth evaporate in the atmosphere of pluralism. Some might object to this reading because it turns forgery into a critique of the moral relativism that underwrites our age. By widening the terms of the forgery debate however, Keats does break new ground and invites speculation on the nature of forgery in an age of mass media and information overload. What do we make of pranksters like Franco and Eva Mattes who “forged” a copy of the Vatican’s official web site “with some slight modifications” including the Pope advocating soft drugs, pop music, and invitations for sins to be absolved by e.mail. This simulacrum of the Vatican web site ceased to exist when the Papal organization wondered why they were getting less hits. Hacking could be considered an art form du jour. After all, questions of attribution relate to web sites as well as works of art; that word “official” on the titles of web sites is proof of that. Interestingly, both these artists, Franco and Eva Mattes insisted on calling their art “attribution-art” rather than “appropriation-art” which Keats believes aligns them with old school forgers like Hebborn and Keating who were also anonymous, until they became celebrities, another mark of our superficial age. Appropriation-artists (Duchamp and Warhol) literally “traded on borrowed status” since they retained the essence of originals like the Mona Lisa, but replicated it using the method of mechanical reproduction. Legitimate artists like Warhol with their appropriation of past art, come close to forgery, but they never attempt to deceive for financial gain unless you claim modern art is some kind of elaborate con in itself which is to open up old debates about the legitimacy of modern and contemporary art.
“The modern Western response to forgery is anxiety. The mood of modern Western Art is anxious.”
One of the main themes that appear in this book is how art forgeries reflect our uneasiness about our times. Keats claims that forgery reflects cultural anxiety. The roots of this appeared in the age of Romanticism in the early nineteenth-century, when questions about originality made artists reflect more on their relationship with the past. More than a century later the literary critic Harold Bloom coined the term, “anxiety of influence,” to describe the psychological conditions of creativity of writers who turned to notable predecessors as models. Bloom himself wasn’t exactly saying anything new as T.S. Eliot in his famous essay “Tradition and the individual Talent” worried about the burden of literary ancestors on modern poets. This “anxiety of influence” has impacted on all kinds of cultural production, from attribution of paintings in museums to problems of conscious or unconscious student plagiarism.
Though art dealers and art historians would never admit that the fake does have a certain cachet, it achieves a truth value by being false. Consider for example this 19th century imitation of a Madonna by the minor renaissance artists, Francia. This painting appeared in a recent exhibition at the London National Gallery who own it, in the context of a display of forged, problematic and dubious works of art. The fact that the National Gallery decided to stage this exhibition is significant in itself since it was admitting that these imitations had certain legitimacy within the history of the gallery. They were still forgeries, fabricated non-autograph works of art, but they belonged to the history of art and were part of the gallery’s story, hence they could not be disavowed or expunged from the gallery’s historical record. The acceptance of forgeries into the museum may simply be down to “time healing” which allows us to retrospectively view the object with some sympathy; or it may mask more profound issues such as our problematic relationship with fakes which in the case of the museum is managed by what could be called semi-appropriation, an acceptance of both its validity and falsity, which surely reflects the way we deal with truth in our ambivalent age. Whether this line of thought is accepted or declined, what is beyond doubt is that Keats’s book opens up the topic of forgery to fresh and provocative interpretations.
Six Portraits of Forgers, each framed by a Theme.
Lothar Malskat BELIEF
Malskat may not be a name known to many, but he earned his place in the pantheon of forgers for his part in perpetrating a deceit upon the people of Lübeck Lübeck.Against a backdrop of carpet bombing, urban damage and religious miracle, Malskat emerged. Hired by the restorer Dietrich Fey, Malskat was employed on the task of restoring wall paintings in the Lübeck church of St Mary, the Marienkirche. Inspecting the damage wrought by Churchill's bombing campaign, Malskat and Fey pronounced the paintings completely obliterated. Yet only three years later in the presence of the West German Chancellor Konrad Adenauer, the Gothic saints and Virgin were miraculously to be seen thanks to some creative restoration by Fey and Malskat. For reasons of nationalism, civic pride, ego, and of course money, Malskat and Fey elected to fabricate what had been lost and pass it off as the original damaged art brought to life by the restorer's brush. As with so many of these forgery collaborations the deception was unmasked when Malskat went to the authorities dissatisfied with the meagre pay he was receiving compared to his mentor. As Keats states, the revelation was psychologically damaging because the German people had seen the re-appearance of the medieval saints as a miracle in the face of their war-time suffering. Revealing the deception resulted in the "theft of a miracle." This is an example of what Keats calls "pious fraud", divine deceptions traceable back to the first religious painter St Luke who counterfeited the appearance of the divine. The Lübeck story was not yet complete however. After the forged paintings were covered up and forgotten, the pastel images saw the light again after an air raid in 1942 which caused a fire that removed the coat of whitewash. Forgery was vindicated through divine intervention since the paintings are favourably mentioned in travel books despite the fact they are modern creations.
Alceo Dossena- AUTHENTICITY
Dossena was a sculptor from Cremona who proved to be one of the most versatile of modern forgers. Proficient at producing sculpture that looked like it came from the age of Phidias as well as renaissance work modelled on artists like Giovanni Pisano and Simone Martini, Dossena was able to sneak his art into leading museums, especially in America. His exposure was similar to Malskat: resentment at his poor wages compared to the dealers who made millions by exploiting his talents. Angry at this Dossena confessed which resulted in some embarrassment for the curators and museums that had approved and bought his work under more illustrious names. Without a mentor, Dossena studied the old masters by trying to emulate their style, not by reading about them like other scholarly forgers on this list. He said that he "assimilated" the old masters. Supplied with photographs from his accomplice Fasoli, Dossena worked from them which inevitably led to mistakes that were detected. Keats uses the story of Dossena to explore the concept of authenticity, which is what governs the minds of experts; can it have meant anything to Dossena at all? A subsidiary topic is the aesthetics of forgery. Notwithstanding that the object is tainted by its status as a forgery, is it possible to still like it, to regard it as an object of beauty? Without excusing his duplicity, as far as this author is concerned Dossena's sculpture has much merit and deserves to be in museums, though under his own name of course!
Han van Meegeren- AUTHORITY
Van Meegeren is almost as famous as the artist he made a career out of forging- Vermeer. I found this chapter the least interesting. I've probably read too many books on him, such as the by Lopez which heavily influences this chapter. Read my review here. The idea of forgery as an act of revenge on the experts begins with Van Meegeren. Unwilling to capitulate to prevailing avant-gardist trends, a staunch anti-modernist, and opposed to artists such as Mondrian and Theo van Doesburg who sought to take nature out of the painting, VM found himself hopelessly out of step and unable to pursue a career, This was bad enough, but he had to endure the contempt of the art establishment who dismissed his work as old fashioned. Van Meegeren therefore decided to wage war on the Dutch art establishment fooling such authorities as Alfred Bredius who validated one of the forger's works as a genuine Vermeer. Though VN's initial motivations might be sympathised with, his revenge and mockery of the authorities was inseparable from greed and financial profiteering. Worse, VM had dubious connections with National Socialism which haven't yet been satisfactorily unravelled. His impact has been great and his ghost continues to haunt the world of Dutch art history.
Eric Hebborn- HISTORY
Hebborn can be regarded as the Til Eulenspiegel of forgers; a trickster who distorted the art history record. Well, that's the claim of Keats who produces his most interesting chapter in this account of the recalcitrant and difficult artist who had many enemies, which probably led to his untimely death at the hands of an unknown assailant with a hammer in Rome. On his way up, Hebborn enjoyed the ear of eminent scholars like Anthony Blunt and Ellis Waterhouse, not to mention the London art market, all of whom he fooled with his fakes for many years. As Keats reminds us here, if there is one thing that master forgers like Hebborn highlight, it is the flaws in connoisseurship and the assumptions that they operate under. Like Van Meegeren, Hebborn identified the reasoning of connoisseurs and art scholars when campaigning against them. Thus to give one example, in forging a preparatory sketch for Corot's Portrait of Louis Robert, Hebborn reasoned that the Colnaghi dupe would know the portrait in the Louvre and a sketch at Harvard both of which would have a "family resemblance" to Hebborn's faked drawing. Hebborn also convinced himself that his forgery was the real thing by Corot in order to make his pitch to the dealer more convincing. In his autobiography Drawn to Trouble Hebborn declared that he'd "sabotaged the historical record" by placing modern drawings into many museums. Just one more example. This drawing in the Met is said to be by Jan Brueghel, but it was previously owned by Hebborn, who stated that it was one of his forgeries. Despite the fact the Met is satisfied this is an autograph drawing by Brueghel, there will always be doubt about it, and no amount of scholarship, connoisseurship, or museum re/de attributions can change that. This is an example of what I called above semi-appropriation. But there is a wider issue her; doubt remains about Hebborn's claims overall. What as Keats says, if Hebborn's greatest achievement was to "fake his own fakery?" What if Hebborn was faking his own sabotaging of the historical record?
Elmyr de Hory- IDENTITY
In addition to forging old masters, many fabricators are skilled at creating entirely new identities as part of their ruse. The man known as Elmyr de Hory had many aliases. He could have been the son of a Jewish bourgeois who entered the Budapest Academy of Art. This individual would later claim to to have known Picasso, Leger, and the artists known collectively as the "School of Paris." Whoever he was, he successfully managed to forge paintings by artists like Dufy, Modigliani and move through the United States spreading his illicit cargo. Impeccably well groomed, to use one of his aliases, "Baron Hertzog" cultivated wealthy patrons and managed to convince museums that his forgeries of Braque, Matisse and other modern masters were the real thing. For example, the Fogg bought drawings thought to be by Matisse, and only retrospectively have they been identified as non-autograph. A trained curator or connoisseur of drawings should be alert to every nuance of an artist's style, and the same is true for spotting the style and artistic proclivities of forgers. Though de Hory captured something of Matisse's line, it always looked the same. How can the forger retrieve the complexity of a famous artist's style in their illegal experiments is one of their most pressing problems they face. Graphic detections aside, perhaps the most bizarre episode in this case is the role of his biographer Clifford Irving who appeared in an Orson Welles's film, "F is for Fake" in which the director described him as "the author of "Fake" - de Hory's biography- who was himself a faker, and the author of a fake to end all fakes- Irving perpetrated a literary hoax, the Autobiography of Howard Hughes. Finally, Welles himself was a master-faker whose hoax "The War of the Worlds" has passed into legend. To be a forger is to walk through a hall of mirrors.
Tom Keating- CULTURE
Tom Keating was a lovable rogue who became a celebrity on a television series, "Tom Keating on Painters” on the BBC in which the forger demonstrated how you could create your own Constables and Turners in your kitchen. Hugely popular with the public because of his down-to-earth attitude- and lack of art jargon (he called his fabrications "Sexton Blakes, cockney rhyming slang for fake), Keating fought the class war through his forgery. Denied formal schooling due to poverty, Keating clawed his way up by painting works in the style of the American genre artist Krieghoff before graduating to impressionist artists like Sisley and Renoir which he dropped into art fairs. Culture is the unifying thread here, and Keating uses it to compare the socialist artist with the patrician Kenneth Clark whose landmark series Civilization was broadcast several years before Keating's kitchen sink master classes. This isn't an entirely fair comparison as Clark brought art history to a mass audience, though there is no doubt that his aristocratic disdain rubbed some people up the wrong way. It was another autobiography, Keating's The Fake's Progress that spilled the beans about his forgery. Keating ended up in court pleading that he'd intended no deception but had simply wanted the "spirits of the old masters" to speak through his art, so that he could continue their struggles against a corrupt art market. This obviously cut no ice with the law, but when Keating became terminally ill, the prosecutor dropped the case.
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The author accepts no responsibility for the same article appearing on other web sites; or the article appearing on other web sites that look like this one; or links that go from this web site to sites calling themselves by the name of this web site. Accept no substitutes; this is the OFFICIAL AHT website, On the other hand….
And so we come to the end of the Old Masters in America course. Some compare the Getty to an American Louvre; others dismiss it as clinical, authoritarian folie de grandeur in the Californian hills. Whatever you think of it, it’s part of the L.A. culturescape, and impossible to ignore.
