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25/2/2004

True & False

National Museum, Stockholm

True & False has a primarily educational goal. The exhibition is about verifying originals as well as copies, replicas, forgeries, pastiches, paraphrases and plagiarisms. We reveal some of the methods used by the museum's curators and conservators to distinguish between the categories.

The exhibits include works from antiquity to modern times: sculptures, paintings, miniatures, enamels, drawings and applied art. Dominating the main stairway are the oldest exhibits: plaster casts of original antique statues. It is not possible to apply to older art the distinction of originality in the way we do today. During the Renaissance and the baroque periods, master artists oversaw large workshops where assistants and pupils participated in the production of artworks under the master's direction. The master would present an idea and plan the composition, then guide his workers. Quite often, the master would make the finishing touches then sign the work.

One of Nationalmuseum's Rembrandts, St. Anastasius, also known as A learned Christian in a vaulted room from the 1630s, was challenged when a group of Rembrandt researchers in the 1980 inventoried the artist's early works. It came as a shock to many that a painting, admired by generations of museum visitors, was no longer accepted as a genuine Rembrandt. A journalist even wrote that 'Nationalmuseum is showing a fake Rembrandt'. But reality is far more complex. And the current exhibition was conceived to illuminate the background to the re-evaluation of such a famous painting.

Obviously, mistakes have sometimes been made when art has been purchased for the museum. What once was considered original perhaps turns out to be fake. On the other hand, we are consistently making new discoveries among our collections. Research may uncover that works believed to be from a master's hand may have been done by a pupil or an apprentice, and other more anonymous works can be revealed as the production of masters.
Nationalmuseum's The Cornshocks was purchased in 1914 as a work by van Gogh, but since the 1940s, it has been questioned by experts. Recent technical tests in Paris have proved that it is indeed not by van Gogh. The genuine von Gogh painting, from 1888, is at the Toledo Museum in Ohio.

Copies
A copy of an original has generally been made by someone other than the original artist. Copies are made for different purposes, the most common being the desire to learn a master's style and technique. Nationalmuseum has copies of Rembrandt's paintings by Ernst Josephson. Josephson simply wanted to practise what he had learnt. In recent times, copies have been made in the course of academic instruction, but also by professional copyists on commission. A variation is the work made by a copyist then signed by the master himself. The Greek artists Apelles and Fidias signed works by their favourite pupils to help them become established. Rembrandt's pupils created works in the master's style, which he signed. Boucher signed the best works by his pupils, as did Corot, who sometimes also re-worked or signed imitations of his paintings.

Replicas
A replica is a copy made by the master himself or his assistants in the master's studio. Anders Zorn painted two of his Midsummer Dance. The original version hangs in Nationalmuseum and was signed 1897. In 1903, Zorn painted a replica, in a slightly smaller format. The exhibition also includes a forgery, painted from the Nationalmuseum original. Police seized the fake when two people tried to bribe a museum official to certify it as authentic.

Forgeries
There have been art forgers throughout history, motivated chiefly by money. The painter Han van Meegeren, who lived and worked in the Netherlands before and after the Second World War, felt misunderstood as an artist and was driven by a desire to extract revenge on the art establishment. He found special satisfaction in fooling a number of prominent art researchers who pronounced some of his paintings to be early works by the 17th-century master Jan Vermeer van Delft. The exhibition shows van Meegeren's Christ and the Adultress, a painting that found its way into the art collection of Hermann Göring. Later, when it was discovered that a painting 'believed to be' a famous work by Vermeer had been illegally exported, van Meegeren was found guilty and sentenced as a conspirator. To convince a panel of experts that the painting in question was actually his own work, van Meegeren painted another canvas in the style of Vermeer while in prison. When it comes to sculpture, it is difficult to define authorship, originality and replication. A bronze or marble statue can exist in several examples, all originals, even though the sculptor himself might have made only a study in clay or plaster which was then enlarged and cast in bronze or carved in marble by assistants.

Pastiches
A pastiche is a composition based on fragments of art works. Its author will occasionally use details from various works by a single artist. Ernst Billgren has picked details from the works of several Renaissance artists for his Black Tattooed Woman (Svart tatuerad kvinna), included in the exhibition. The pattern in her dress is recognizable from a portrait by Bronzino and other details are from works by Leonardo da Vinci.

Paraphrases
A paraphrase is a work of art that openly imitates an older work.

Plagiarisms
A plagiarism is an unattributed loan from another person's production. In unimportant cases, it is seen merely as a sign of lack of independence, but in more serious cases as a breach of copyright punishable by law. Plagiarism is the opposite of forgery: a forger claims that his work is another artist's, while a plagiarist pretends someone else's work is his.
Copied trademarks or plagiarised design objects are common in our day. The exhibition includes a lamp called Electric fly (Elflugan), put on the market in 1997 and swiftly followed by a pirate copy.

In modern art, the borderline between false and genuine is more blurred. When Marcel Duchamp exhibited his 'readymades' - from bottle-driers to urinals - his point was that art is determined by the context rather than the object. Many artists now claim that the artist is an interpreter of our common history and that the image he or she wants to create in fact already exists, somewhere.

It is considered permissible to recycle artworks. Mike Bidlo has titled his works in the exhibition: 'Not Duchamp', 'Not Picasso' and 'Not Warhol'. Since these are exact copies, they cannot be called paraphrases, quotes or plagiarisms. They represent a new category called 'appropriations'. Modern art theory assumes that every image has a connection to another.

Image: Not Picasso, Mike Bidlo

Exhibition curator: Görel Cavalli-Björkman +46 8-5195 4301.

National Museum
Södra Blasieholmshamnen
Stockholm

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