Many years ago, I met a man in a pub in Bloomsbury who said he worked at the British Museum. He told me that every single item on display in the museum was a replica, and that all the original artefacts were locked away in storage for preservation.
I was shocked and challenged him. It surely could not be the case that millions of annual visitors to the British Museum were encountering and experiencing not tangible, concrete treasures of human history, but the shallow simulacra of replicas. I may have even used the term “fraud”.
Yet on my way home that night, I began to question my own experiences at the British Museum. I wondered what it meant if the Greek water jar I had been so moved by, depicting a woman who may have been Sappho bent over a scroll, had in fact been a worthless copy. Did that make the experience any less real?
Later, Googling, I discovered that none of what the man had told me was true. The artefacts in the British Museum are original, unless otherwise explicitly stated. It was the man who claimed to work there who was a fake.
Are the brushstrokes too rough, the colours too unusual? … visitors admire Samson and Delilah by Peter Paul Rubens at the National Gallery in London. Photograph: Guy Bell/Alamy
So began my years-long fascination with the question of fakes, and the way we feel in their presence. If that Greek water jar had been a fake, I could never have known just by looking with an inexpert but appreciative eye. Would it devalue my overwhelming sense of connection to the past in the moment I saw it? This is one of the questions that led me to write my new novel, The Original, about fakes and the people who fall for them. Following a female art forger at the end of the 19th century, the book is about making and believing in fake art, fake stories, and fake people. I wanted to think, in the story, about the experience of being duped, because we live in a world that feels, at times, increasingly fake.
Thomas Hoving, the former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, has suggested that about 40% of artworks for sale are fake. Yan Walther, chief of the Fine Arts Expert Institute, puts the figure at 50%.
Last month, debate over the authenticity of Rubens’ Samson and Delilah, bought by the National Gallery for £2.5m in 1980, reignited. The painting, dating from 1609 or 1610, was lost for centuries, and since arriving at the National Gallery has been subject to repeated controversies surrounding its authenticity. Are the brushstrokes too rough, the colours too unusual? Is the composition too different to copies of the original that were made at the time it was painted? Speaking to the Guardian, the former National Gallery curator Christopher Brown, who oversaw its original acquisition, appeared to suggest that the gallery itself had been responsible for replacing the painting’s backing board, so destroying evidence about the painting’s real age and provenance (he later went back on this statement) which sparked suspicion the Gallery may have covered up a fake for decades. The National Gallery responded by saying: “Samson and Delilah has long been accepted as a masterpiece by Peter Paul Rubens. Not one single Rubens specialist has doubted that the picture is by Rubens. A full discussion of the panel was published by Joyce Plesters and David Bomford in the Gallery’s Technical Bulletin in 1983, when Christopher Brown was the Gallery’s curator responsible for the picture. Their findings remain valid, including their unequivocal statement that the panel was attached to a support before the picture was acquired by the National Gallery.”
Co-owner of the Vienna Museum of Art Fakes Diana Grobe with a Tom Keating work painted after the French impressionist Jean Puy. Photograph: Alex Halada/AFP/Getty Images
This latest controversy follows a study conducted a few years earlier, during which an AI analysis of its brushstroke patterns found there was a 90% probability the painting was fake. I visited the painting after that story broke, having by then developed a slight obsession with questions of authenticity. It was the autumn of 2021 and we were all still adjusting to existing in the world beyond lockdowns. Seeing a painting in the flesh felt novel; the colours vivid: Delilah’s illuminated neck, Samson’s gleaming muscles, the shadowed scissors at the moment his hair is cut. The texture of those questionable brushstrokes was exhilarating. I stood in front of the painting and I wanted it to be real because I liked it so much.
A 2014 study published in the journal Leonardo tested how the belief in authenticity of art shapes our perception of it. Participants were shown paintings labelled either originals or, erroneously, copies, then asked to rate their experience. Paintings that were labelled as copies were consistently rated as less moving, less well-made, less well-composed and the work of less talented artists. It’s a stark example of the extent to which our experience of art is moulded by the story we are told about it: the value we place on authenticity trumps reason, perception, our own eyes. A copy is automatically worse, even when it’s not really a copy.
Woman Reading Music, 1935-1940, by Han van Meegeren. Photograph: Heritage Images/Getty Images
This same quirk of human impulse comes up in all sorts of other contexts. There are those expert sommeliers who are unable, under study conditions, to tell the difference between cheap and expensive wine. So-called “dupes” of high-end fashion items are a part of the clothing industry’s ecosystem; the internet is full of videos of vox pops in which people fail to identify, when faced with two near-identical outfits, which one cost tens and which thousands of pounds. Human beings are pretty inept at understanding our world without context, without story.
As you wander through the Museum of Art Fakes in Vienna, an institution dedicated to showcasing the art of forgery, what strikes you most is how unconvincing it all is, how hazy and dilapidated the fakes look. The colours look wrong. The materials look cheap. The brushstrokes look lazy and the way the paint adheres to the canvases seems insubstantial. But then, how could these pieces look otherwise, housed as they are in the Museum of Art Fakes? Removed from this cheapening context, Han van Meegeren’s Vermeers, once pronounced “the finest gems of the master’s oeuvre”, appear lovely, almost otherworldly. To emerge from the Museum of Art Fakes and head straight into Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum to view works by Vermeer and Rubens is an upending experience: you feel so certain, looking at those paintings, that you’re in the presence of originals. Then you think about how they might appear if they were displayed in the unassuming basement gallery of the Museum of Art Fakes, and that certainty begins to fade.
It’s striking that we have turned to AI to help us solve our authenticity questions (where humans err, artificial intelligence can distil brushstroke patterns to mere data points) when AI is simultaneously creating fakes at a rate previously unimaginable. Our online world is littered with photographs of people who don’t exist, articles recommending books that have never been written, videos of imaginary places. Even as we learn to spot the tell-tale glitches of an AI-generated image (too many fingers, those terrifying misaligned teeth, an Escher-like impossible quality to the structure of buildings, furniture, bodies), AI improves and outpaces us again. It’s embarrassing to admit to having felt a rush of interest or pleasure at a video of, say, a lamp-lit hillside village in the rain, only to realise it’s a nonsense, empty fantasy, and worse: twee. To realise you have fallen for an AI-generated image, song or essay, untouched by a human mind, is to feel at once less human and horribly, vulnerably human: foolish and naive.
Master forger Tom Keating in 1977. Photograph: John Dee/Shutterstock
Human fakes, when contrasted with the emptiness of AI, start to seem quite affecting: the mischief of them, the skill and the audacity of the endeavour. Even the art market, on occasion, agrees: the works of prolific forger Tom Keating, who produced thousands of fakes in the 1950s, 60s and 70s, are now collector’s items in their own right, to the extent that fakes of Tom Keating fakes began to appear too. Perhaps it’s no wonder that such forgeries can move us, designed as they are to do just that, to be paintings of paintings and at the same time, blank canvases upon which we project all the things we want to care about and experience when we look at art.
When I think back to my conversation with the man in the pub years ago, it strikes me that there is something wonderful in having believed him. Perhaps there is beauty in embracing the lessons taught by fakes, that what we bring to art is our human selves: subjective, easily bamboozled, ready to be moved. The man who entertained himself one winter’s night by telling a silly lie to a credulous stranger, inadvertently led me instead to something true.
The Original by Nell Stevens is published by Scribner (£16.99). To support the Guardian, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply.