Exhibit of the week: Fakes, Forgeries, and Mysteries

Detroit Institute of Arts

Through April 10

Most museums would probably shy away from mounting “a show made of fakes,” said Eve M. Kahn in The New York Times. Not the Detroit Institute of Arts, whose new Fakes, Forgeries, and Mysteries lets the public “in on some of their most embarrassing moments.” Aiming for transparency, curators have assembled more than 50 “inauthentic or questionable objects” from the museum’s own collection that at various points in time either aroused their suspicions or duped them in their assessments. Works ostensibly dating to the ancient Sumerians challenge viewers to put their own powers of discernment to the test, while various interactive tools clue them in to “how connoisseurs and scientists have identified impostors.”

Subscribe to The Week

Escape your echo chamber. Get the facts behind the news, plus analysis from multiple perspectives.

SUBSCRIBE & SAVE

Sign up for The Week's Free Newsletters

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

From our morning news briefing to a weekly Good News Newsletter, get the best of The Week delivered directly to your inbox.

Sign up

As the exhibit makes clear, there are levels of deception, said David Runk in the Associated Press. Baroque painter Annibale Carracci’s Vision of St. Francis (1600) is mounted next to a painting once thought to be a Carracci but probably painted by one of his students, an example of several “stylistic replicas” that weren’t intended to fool the art market. In contrast, the painting A Female Saint, once attributed to Italian artist Sandro Botticelli, is exhibited alongside an authenticated Botticelli, The Resurrected Christ (1480). Curators eventually determined Saint to be an outright forgery. Still Life With Carnations, attributed to Vincent van Gogh, met “immediate suspicion” among museum scholars when the Institute received it as a gift, in 1990. But the debate was rekindled when experts found that the way its paint was layered was “consistent with van Gogh’s canvases from the 1880s.” Its authenticity remains in question.

In some cases, the fakes are “easy to spot,” said Mark Stryker in the Detroit Free Press. “The awkward letters in a supposedly 1,200-year-old Koran,” for instance, “scream forgery.” But after getting a chance to study an authenticated van Gogh canvas, Vase With Zinnias and Geraniums (1886), it’s easy to see why even the best scholars have a hard time ruling on whether he also created a lesser painting in a nearby room. The show is not without its weaknesses. Most notably, there’s “next to nothing about the history of forgery” or about the most renowned counterfeiters, some of whom, including Icilio Federico Joni and Han van Meegeren, have recently even gotten solo museum shows. Still, it’s a bold move on the part of the museum to acknowledge it “made mistakes.” In doing so, the curators have created a thoroughly enjoyable exhibit that brings out the art sleuth in us all.