THE FORGER’S DILEMMAS
If you can’t tell the difference, what IS the difference?
I wasn’t always a forger. That idea and occupation took me by surprise in early 1975 when I was on the first leg of a book tour for my youthful Sherlock Holmes novel, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution. In those palmy days, if your book was heading steadily north on the bestseller lists, publishers paid for book tours.
I landed in Pittsburgh after a tempest-tossed descent where I was met at the airport by a young reporter from the local newspaper. From his first question, it was evident he viewed this assignment unworthy of his talents.
“How does it feel to be a successful forger?” was his opening salvo.
Shaky, following our landing, it may have been some moments before I managed a feeble riposte: “The book doesn’t say ‘by Nicholas Meyer’,” I protested. “It says, ‘as edited by Nicholas Meyer’, so nowhere do I claim authorship.”
We went on somehow from there, but I remember trying to fall asleep in a strange hotel room that night, perturbed by the notion that despite my disclaimer, I was in fact a kind of forger. While writing my novel, I took it for granted people would understand I was playing a literary game, pretending to have discovered a missing Watson manuscript, etc.
But, I now realized, it was more than possible some people were going to view my book as genuinely written by John H. Watson, M.D. (I once was asked in all seriousness, when did Sherlock Holmes die?)
Thus began my interest in forgery, a perplexing legal, ethical, aesthetic as well as cultural minefield that has bedeviled society since the first man put his handprint on the wall of the Dordogne caves. Fingerprints, as we know, remain important identifying signposts to this day.
What is forgery, anyway? The dictionary defines it as the act of producing a copy of a document, banknotes or work of art with the object of passing it off as original.
But there are exasperating sub-categories. What, for example, is the difference between a forgery and a copy? Answer: something that cannot be seen - the intention. A copy makes no attempt to deceive; it declares itself, typically with a label: I am a copy, the reproduction of an original piece of work. I am for sale at the museum store.
A forgery, on the other hand, tries to pass itself off as the Real Thing.
But the hair-splitting does not end there. The minefield has now become a labyrinth worthy of King Minos. What is the difference between forgery and plagiarism? Like man and the ape, are they both more or less queasily descended from the same place? Two sides of the same coin? A plagiarist passes off another’s work as his own; a forger tries to pass off his work as another’s. In the world of forgery we must further differentiate between copies (indistinguishable as possible from the originals), and what the French call, a la maniere de, that is to say not an exact duplication, but an image in the style of or fashioned in the manner of the artist. Creations under this rubric are neither copies nor forgeries; they are attempted syntheses of the originator’s style. There is nothing that could be termed an infringement of authorship or copyright, nothing has been literally replicated.
Insofar as forgery is concerned, a key question from a legal standpoint is whether the artist’s name has been affixed to the canvas or chiseled into the marble. As a famous forger defiantly remarked, “That’s not art, that’s autographs.”
Someone – presumably a man - was first to say a woman’s lips were like a rose. He made a what may be termed a poetic observation, but because he said it first, it was also an original observation. The man who said it next was not making an original observation. At the least, he was a copycat. Therefore an also-ran. If, instead of saying a woman’s lips were like a rose, he said a woman’s lips were like a blooming flower, he was working a la maniere de, territory. But if he copied the words, claiming them as his own without citing or paying their original author,
he was, legally, a plagiarist. And a forger. (Forgers are plagiarists, though if you ask lawyers the hair-splitting goes on ad nauseum).
We place a mighty premium on originality. We insist originality is worth something, financially and in terms of the prestige we accord the designated originator. We revere, or at the least acknowledge, the person who said it, wrote it, or painted it, first. This applies not only to works of art (originals as distinguished from copies or forgeries), but also in science, where the uncredited duplication or appropriation of someone else’s work is likewise denounced as plagiarism, again with potential legal consequences.
I, a novice forger, was in fact sued by a professor at Yale, who maintained that I had plagiarized the idea for The Seven-Per-Cent Solution from an article written by him. It’s not hard to imagine the devastating effect his lawsuit had on my young self. Here I had finally done one successful thing in my life and now I was being accused of having stolen it. In the professor’s case it was equally easy to imagine him walking across campus and hearing, “Hey, professor, that guy ripped you off.” This was the more galling as I had troubled to acknowledge the professor’s article in my book. I was obliged to defend myself and, on the advice of counsel, ask for something called summary judgement, meaning the facts in the case were not in dispute – I HAD read the professor’s article – what was at issue was the legal definition of plagiarism. It turns out you cannot copyright an idea; you can only copyright the expression of an idea – in other words, the words. As I had used none of the professor’s words while concocting my Watson-Holmes story, I won the lawsuit.
Getting sued is one way to learn you’re a hit.
But Minos’s labyrinth keeps sprouting rabbit holes. Say we are confronted by two portraits of a smiling woman. By no means – technical or technological – can they be distinguished from one another. One picture was painted by Leonardo Da Vinci and the other by myself, but again, by no means can we tell which is which. That being the case, why is one smiling woman more to be valued than her identical twin?
The best answer I heard to that is that one of the two smiling women could not have existed without the other.
And while we’re on the subject, how many undetected forgeries today hang in museums and private homes around the world, bringing pleasure to the millions who see them? Passing off someone else’s original work as your own may be criminal, but are admiring museum-goers somehow wrong to be moved by what they behold? Not legally wrong, surely. Is there such a thing as being aesthetically wrong? If, after being deeply affected by a painting, you learn it is a fake, does that undo or negate your original response? Were tourists gawking at the crown jewels on display in the Tower of London to learn they were splendid replicas, would they retract their awe? Is the diamond less beautiful if you learn it’s zirconium? Just asking.
The minefield that become a labyrinth is now morphing into tall weeds. We are entering the world of recycling…
All art is a history of cut and paste. Artists build on what has come before. As Michael Chabon has pointed out, all fiction is fan fiction. The Odyssey is a fanboy sequel to the Iliad; The Aeneid a fanboy sequel to The Odyssey, and so on. Not convinced? Check out Bart Giamatti’s likening The Odyssey to baseball – in order to get home, you first have to leave home. Mozart re-orchestrated Handel’s Messiah, pop songs are covered left and right, not always with credit specified or royalties changing hands. The recent novel, JAMES, by Percival Everett, re-tells (builds on, is a fanboy sequel to) Mark Twain’s novel, HUCKLEBERRY FINN, from the slave, Jim’s, point of view. Because Twain’s novel is acknowledged, (and, as it happens, currently banned in several states), we might term it a pastiche, but correctly call JAMES a novel, neither forgery nor plagiarism.
Likewise Tom Stoppard’s play, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, is at pains to acknowledge Hamlet and Shakespeare as its source – which is more than Shakespeare was prepared to do, having stolen the plots for most of his plays, offering neither credit nor compensation for his thefts. And Shakespeare did more than steal plots. In Antony and Cleopatra, Enobarbus’ description of Cleopatra’s barge is verbatim copied (albeit in translation), from Plutarch.
Copyright laws were a long way off, but in the first of his Henry IV plays Shakespeare was threatened with court action by the Oldcastle family over his use of a character by that name, obliging him to change the character’s name to Falstaff.
But even Shakespeare got his just deserts when Leonard Bernstein, Jerome Robbins and Stephen Sondheim helped themselves to Romeo and Juliet, calling the result West Side Story, again with neither credit nor cash sullying the appropriation. (And nothing for the earlier Italian play’s author).
Copyright laws made their first appearance in the early eighteenth century, but it was a while before they took hold. Handel, accused of stealing another composer’s tune remarked, (presumably in German), “That’s right, I stole it. That idiot didn’t know what to do with it. I showed him!” And put his name on the page as the author. Forger? Plagiarist? Both?
Again showing that what goes around comes around, Handel himself was ripped off by Johann Christoph Pepusch, who, by 1728, eighteen years after the first copyright law, still had no qualms about setting the march from Handel’s opera, Rinaldo, to John Gay’s own snarky lyrics in arguably the first musical, The Beggar’s Opera. The hit show, produced by John Rich, was known as the opera that made Rich gay and Gay rich. Handel never saw a dime.
How many composers have taken a whack at Paganini’s irresistible Caprice 24? And produced some great music in the process. You lose count. Any money change hands towards messr Paganini or his estate? You know the answer to that one by now.
When we hear Rossini’s William Tell overture, no one thinks of the eponymous, never-performed, opera; we think of The Lone Ranger radio, tv series, and movie. Anyone tithing or crediting any Rossinis?
And everyone helps themselves to Carmen. Monsieur Bizet could have used the money.
Today, computers enable people to “sample” the music of others. Are they plagiarists? Forgers? Legally engaging in something helpfully labeled “fair use”?
Now we come to the big guns: Ossian and Chatterton. Van Meegeren. Elmyr de Hory. Thomas Keating. Eric Hebborn. Clifford Irving. These are forgers, plain and simple, working not only with intent to deceive but also to profit. While unabashedly mercenary, their motives, one suspects, are also gleefully vengeful. The forger, frequently a disgruntled, underappreciated painter or writer, plots to exact a pleasing vengeance on the world that has ignored his attempts at originality. Such was certainly the case of van Meegeren, whose initial (dare we call it original?) idea was to make fools of the experts, denouncing their authentication of his fake Vermeers to humiliate them and ridicule their profession.
But when vast sums of money were being offered for his fakes, van Meegeren abandoned his first plan in favor of his swelling bank account.
There is no such thing as art for art’s sake.
It was Mark Twain who observed that fooling people is hard, but getting them to believe they’ve been fooled is still harder. Just try it with the MAGA crowd. Owners of van Meegeren’s Vermeers have since sued, insisting the forger’s crappy Vermeers are genuine.
Forgers can be quite… creative in crafting their fakes, using antique canvas, grinding pigments by hand, the old-fashioned way, ingeniously finding tricks to make the paint harden as if with age, then creating and filling the craqueleure (cracks) in the varnish with dirt from the right neighborhood, and so forth. Such legerdemain includes sculpture. The Latin origin of the word sincere can be traced to the practice of rubbing wax in the dings and crevices of stone or marble to conceal imperfections or damage from prospective buyers. Sin, without; cere, wax, equals a statue without wax, i.e. with no imperfections concealed. Sincere.
And what about those works that are neither copies nor forgeries, nor a la manieres, but a kind of tip of the hat, meant in some way to honor original works while perhaps commenting on them, as well. We call these homages. Example? How about the mustache Marcel Duchamp painted on the Mona Lisa? More cut and paste, but no Euros for Da Vinci.
But the forger’s difficulties do not end here. Forgers have still another enemy to contend with:
Time. All works of art are ineluctably products of the time in which they were created. Mozart doesn’t just sound like Mozart; he also sounds like late-eighteenth century middle-European orchestral music. Renoir isn’t just inimitably Renoir, he is also late nineteenth century French Impressionism.
Pity the poor forger, then, whose work is also inevitably the product of the era in which it was created. Those Vermeers painted in the 1930’s by the Dutch forger Han van Meegeren, authenticated by experts and sold for astronomical sums as the real thing? Today they leap out at us as pathetic art deco daubs that would could never in a million years be mistaken for genuine Vermeers. Time, not expertise, has thrown their true origins into sharp relief. The art historian, Sir Kenneth Clark, famously exposed a medieval triptych, pointing out that the Madonna at its centerpiece too obviously resembled a starlet in Photoplay magazine, a 1920’s criterion of beauty and the forger’s evident inspiration. Time helps separate the wheat from the chaff.
Art historians, themselves, by the way, are not always… reliable. In Colin Simpson’s intriguing book, Artful Partners, and in Chasing Beauty, Natalie Dykstra’s recent biography of Isabella Stewart Gardner, we learn that the great Renaissance art historian, Bernard Berenson, secretly colluded with world-famous art dealer, Joseph Duveen, to authenticate spurious Old Masters – apparently receiving a kickback each time he signed off on one.
More recently, fancy art galleries and those who operate them have been accused of all sorts of malfeasance and chicanery, selling art stolen by Nazis, inflating the value of items, faking their provenance, etc. The siren song is always the same; only the snooty patter of the Prada-suited has acquired new, high-falutin’, vocabularies.
Do the forgers ever win? Setting aside all the sightseers gawking at de Hory’s phony Modiglianis, there is at least one notorious example of a forgery that, no matter how many times exposed as fraudulent, refuses to die. I refer to the so-called Protocols of The Learned Elders of Zion, first published in Russia in 1903 and sweeping the world to this day. Purporting to be the minutes of a secret meeting of Jews intent on world domination, it turns out the “protocols” themselves were copied from an entirely different set of forged documents pertaining to the reign of Napoleon III and having nothing whatever to do with Jews. Forgery and plagiarism in one package. The scurrilous “protocols” in question were concocted by the Okhrana, Tsar Nicholas II’s secret police, doubtless to pin the blame on someone for Russia’s failure to industrialize. In the 1920’s, the Times of London exposed the “protocols” as fake but that didn’t stop Henry Ford from publishing them in their entirety in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent. Anti-Semites from Louisiana to Egypt have made free use of them ever since. I had Sherlock Holmes take them on in my novel, The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols.
It is one of the few times Sherlock lost.
All this and we haven’t even got to AI. AI is going to give forgers a bad name. What was once a hand-crafted occupation, (I won’t go so far as to dignify it by calling it a profession), like other luddite endeavors, forgery is going the way of all flesh. Add 3D printers and Rembrandts can now be created in seconds.
With AI all bets are off. AI will do for forgery what Zirconium has done for diamonds. As Cole Porter has it, Anything Goes. AI insatiably scoops up all manner of originality – copyright or not - to feed its gaping maw, regurgitating it on demand, perhaps altered just enough to qualify as a la maniere de, enabling the programmers stay ahead of the law and deny its true creators credit or profit. Originality – authorship itself - no longer signifies. AI can dream up almost the same thing – whatever it is – in seconds. And let’s face it, most folks can’t tell a diamond from its manufactured counterpart. AI tramples on and makes nonsense of such distinctions.
Putting aside the vexing question of whether we WANT to live in this brave new world (that decision has been made for us by others long since), what has become of the luddite forger?
It’s a sad reality, but as Gilbert has it in The Mikado, “It’s an unjust world and virtue is triumphant only in theatrical performances.”
Stay tuned.