Coptic Antics: The Story Behind the Brooklyn Fakes

Not Coptic: Limestone Relief of a Paralytic Carrying a Bed on His Back, Brooklyn Museum

For those of you who have heard my WNYC commentary, Fake Art at the Brooklyn Museum, here's more:

Edna Russman, Brooklyn's curator of Egyptian art, told me last week that the problem pieces that will be displayed as part of the museum's Coptic sculpture show, Feb. 13-May 10, were known to have come from Egypt, especially from the village of Sheikh Ibada. The limestone from which they were composed was, in fact, unearthed from authentic Coptic sites.

Those sites, she said, were being dug up "mostly by people looking for papyrus. They threw the stone blocks around." The modern fakes were made "on the remains of very damaged ancient pieces." They traveled first to Europe (primarily Switzerland), then to the U.S.

Brooklyn's 10 outright forgeries and five substantially reworked pieces were acquired in the 1950s through early 1970s, mostly through purchase but partly through gift. By the late 1970s, doubts were already being raised by Thelma Thomas, now associate professor at NYU's Institute of Fine Arts and Gary Vikan, now director of the Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore. (We can only hope Vikan will soon add an entry about this contretemps to his own very lively and opinionated blog on the Walters' website.)

At first, the American scholars' doubts (which ran counter to the views of respected authorities in Europe) were "just one opinion," Kevin Stayton, Brooklyn's chief curator and vice director for curatorial affairs, told me last week. "It sometimes takes years for conviction to grow in a curatorial body." It's always considered a worse crime to demote a piece that's authentic than to allow a piece to be deemed innocent until proven guilty.

Russman noted that a previous generation of scholars had wanted to believe that the sculptures contained Christian imagery (hence the name "Coptic," which refers to early Christianity in Egypt), but they were "making it up as they went along." The forgeries, with unambiguous Christian references, played to preconceptions of the time.

Brooklyn was already revising its view of the period (4th-7th century A.D.) by the time of its 1997 handbook of the permanent collection, which noted that an illustrated Coptic openwork relief, although "almost certainly" created for a religious building, was nevertheless "completely lacking in Christian iconography." This illustrated "the problems inherent in interpreting 'Coptic' as an exclusively religious designation."

The cardinal rule of fake detection is that spurious works generally remain convincing for, at most, a generation, because they reflect the tastes and prejudices of the era in which they were produced. Stayton told me:

We are now able to look back and see these objects as fakes. But with an object made for our own tastes, we would have a harder time.

The lesson to be learned, he said, is that "we always have to be very careful," examining provenance and thinking "about whether a piece is too good to be true."

Kudos to Martin Bailey of The Art Newspaper for breaking the story, and Kate Taylor of the NY Sun for a fascinating follow-up.