Notes from the 6th session of Seven Ways of Thinking About Art, Tate Modern
This week we focused on two related aspects of original works of art:
1) Originals: how does knowledge that a work of art before us is an
original (rather than a forgery or a copy) affect our understanding and
appreciation of it?
2) Originality: what is the relevance of an artist’s creative originality, in the sense of doing something distinctively new?
These questions link back to issues we’ve discussed in previous
sessions about the relevance of factual knowledge to the appreciation
of works or art, and the part played by context and an artwork’s
presumed aetiology (the history of how it came to be as it is).
Forgeries
Han van Meegeren, the most famous forger, painted and
artificially aged early ‘Vermeers’ with great success. In particular he
convinced the eminent art historian Bredius that his ‘Supper at Emmaus’
(1937) was a masterpiece by Vermeer. Van Meegeren’s success was in part
based on his painting images in the style of Vermeer rather than
copying particular paintings (so there was no risk of a point by point
comparison of two images), by his choice of a period of Vermeer’s
career from which there were few extant examples (an exception being
the painting in the National Gallery of Scotland by Vermeer, Christ at
the House of Martha and Mary) - there is, however, a more characteristic Vermeer forgery in the RIjkmuseum here. Once van Meegeren had had one of his
forgeries accepted as original, this helped set the ‘precedent class’
of early Vermeers and acted as a touchstone for future attributions.
This in part explains the art historians’ gullibility. Also, much of
the attribution was conducted in war conditions, so most of the
paintings which were to act as comparisons were hidden away in vaults.
Van Meegeren was exposed because he had been accused of selling off
national treasures to the Nazis – his confession to the lesser crime of
forgery wasn’t surprising.
A recent case of forgery in the case of CD recordings, that of the
pianist Joyce Hatto and her posthumous increase in reputation, raises
interesting parallel questions to the question about originality in the
visual arts. For more on this, read philosopher Denis Dutton on the
Joyce Hatto case.
Another interesting recent case is that of a forgery of a Gauguin sculpture of a Faun...this was only detected by tracing provenances, not by any forensic evidence about materials or stylistic evidence of incongruity.
Some people have argued that if a work has appropriate aesthetic
qualities, it doesn’t matter who painted or performed it. Its beauty
and profundity are all that matter. Arthur Koestler, for instance
suggested that much of our preference for original works is mere
snobbery.
However, the important point in the cases of both van Meegeren and
Joyce Hatto is that part of our appreciation of art is an appreciation of it in the context of its being an artistic creation by a particular person at a particular time:
it is not just a question of appreciating beautiful patterns, or subtle
interpretations of a score. (In our earlier session on Art as Conceptual we looked at Danto and Dickie's views on the non-identity of visually indiscernible objects: the idea that two apparently identical paintings can have completely different artistic qualities because of the history of how they came to be as they are).
One reason why origins might be important could be to do with the
way in which artists typically create their own repertoire of
expression through their oeuvres. If Mondrian’s ‘Broadway Boogie
Woogie’ turns out to have been misattributed to Mondrian when it was
actually painted by Jackson Pollock in his later years, then this would
be transformed from a painting expressive of joy and exuberance, to one
that seemed repressed and highly controlled. If a forger successfully
inserts forgeries in the style of an artist into that artist’s known
repertoire, then he or she prevents the artist from communicating by
changing the expressive power not only of the image in question but
also distorts the whole repertoire (imagine if van Meegeren had
inserted thirty ‘early Vermeers’ into Vermeer’s quite small oeuvre of
paintings – we would come to see him as an artist who had turned away
from religious painting for some reason, and perhaps make very
different interpretations of each of the later works in the light of
the earlier).
So one answer to the question ‘What is wrong with a forgery in the
style of a particular artist?’ is that it can prevent that artist
communicating effectively with us.
We also discussed Nelson Goodman's idea that the knowledge that a painting is a forgery actually affects what we see, that seeing isn't simply a matter of what meets the back of the eyeball, but rather as Ernst Gombrich stressed, we need to take account of 'the beholder's share', how our knowledge and beliefs affect what we see...Goodman's views on this topic are summarised here.
Further Reading
Denis Dutton has an excellent short piece 'Forgery and Plagiarism' which I strongly recommend you read if you are interested in getting an overview of the main philosophical issues here. It also provides an account of the Van Meegeren forgeries and the career of the forger Eric Hebborn.
By far the best book in this area is edited by Denis Dutton: The Forger's Art. Sadly it is currently out of print, but you might find it in a library. It contains a very interesting essay about Van Meegeren followed by all the most important recent philosophical articles on the aesthetic status of forgeries.
Alfred Lessing 'What is Wrong With A Forgery?' is reprinted in Nigel Warburton (ed.) Philosophy: Basic Readings, 2nd ed., as is Jorge Luis Borges' story 'Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote' which explores ideas about the non-identity of indiscernible objects...