The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (review)

What's so funny about crimes of attribution? Like plagiarism, art forgery is a cardinal sin within tightly constrained circles, but elsewhere—think of Orson Welles's 1974 film F for Fake—it tends to be seen as a form of pardonable naughtiness, its practitioners half-admired for supplying the market with fresh masterpieces and for entertaining us with fresh scandal when they get caught. Aviva Briefel's marvelous new book brushes against this light grain, but its seriousness does not aim to restore forgery's criminal severity. Instead, The Deceivers reads nineteenth-century fiction, images, and essays about art forgery as attempts to stabilize dominant social hierarchies and to insist on human sovereignty over objects. The fake would seem to be an exemplarily docile object insofar as its meaning and being are determined by human notions of authenticity. But in Briefel's analysis, the fake is really an exceptional, transgressively autonomous object because it is bound neither to its attributed creator nor to its actual anonymous one. As The Deceivers daringly puts it, "the fake never allows us to forget that it is both an object and a person" (16), and this hybrid status lets the fake give the lie to ruling ideologies that attempt to enlist it in their consolidation.

These are abstract claims, but Briefel substantiates them in a series of deeply attentive and contextualized readings. The fake's dual status as object and person becomes especially tangible in discussions of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Marble Faun (1860), and E. M. Forster's 1930–31 "The Classical Annex" (published 1972). That the last two occur in a chapter on the restoration of antiquities shows that Briefel thinks laterally about her subject: far from slogging through an inventory of Old-Master shams, The Deceivers looks at categories that are analytically adjacent to its central case. The readings of restoration rely quite heavily on a series of homologies (for example, between copying and restoration), but the chapter's critical allegorism is ballasted by a detailed account of nineteenth-century debates that linked restoration to forgery under the sign of national prestige. Artworks displayed in the century's growing number of national museums were thought to testify doubly: to their historical moment of origin and to the exhibitor nation's caretaking capacities, which in turn functioned as a kind of modernization index. In Briefel's reading, the Victorian texts that gave the artwork features of organic life—the ability to age, to mate, to languish from neglect, to be abused, tortured, dismembered, or grafted—registered how the national stakes of its custodianship were conferring a partial personhood on the art object. No longer merely serving as evidence, the work of art could give evidence—and, in the case of the forgery, it could perjure its testimony about its historical origins.

One of The Deceivers's chief insights is that forgery was not "a full liberation from nineteenth-century codes and definitions" but "already an overdetermined field" (82). Briefel's emphasis falls on three figures—the copyist, the expert, and the dealer—in relation to whom the forger gets defined, in the process fortifying hierarchies of gender, sexuality, and race. The female copyist, who painted her registered reproductions in museums where she was herself on display, acted as an enabling foil to the male forger. Invisible, anonymous, and endowed with a particular kind of genius, he could forge his way into the bourgeoisie and go straight, whereas the copyist, usually figured as either prostitute or spinster, was irremediably deviant—a bad copy of both the male forger and the respectable bourgeoise. The gendered metaphysics that thus conflated the female and the fake served, in turn, as a cover for the alliance between the forger and the expert, men whose seeming agon over the feminized work of art masked both their perpetuation of male privilege and...