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Cover of the book under review. [Click to enlarge it.]
orgery,” claims Aviva Briefel in The Deceivers, "has its own indelible
history" (82). Adding her own mark to that history here, Briefel
usefully reorients a discussion that has tended to focus on literary
forgery and its perpetrators — such as Chatterton, Ireland, and
MacPherson — by turning our gaze to the subject of art forgery in the
nineteenth century. She adopts a transatlantic perspective, examining
selected works by
Wilkie Collins,
du Maurier, de Maupassant, Freud,
Hawthorne,
Henry James, and Wilde, as well as twentieth-century film, in
the context of a range of French, British, and American discourses on
art forgery. In doing so, Briefel casts a critical eye upon not only
forgery itself but also the assumptions about cultural value that
permeate a range of cultural narratives surrounding the fake and the
forged, including the gendering of the forger and the copyist; the
homosocial realm of the connoisseur; collections, nation, and
restoration; anti-Semitism and the art dealer; and imitation jewelry and
female fraudulence.
Briefel’s introduction reveals the complex range of attitudes that surrounded forgery in its "golden age." She makes a convincing case for forgery's paradoxical cultural status in the nineteenth century, claiming that the forged object is seen as at once "a cultural disease and cure" (10), and identifies the frequent "dissolution of the boundary between forgers and experts" (60). The existence, circulation, and collection of forged works of art, she points out, in many ways served to bolster the value of the "authentic," offering a point of demarcation that was the source of cultural value.
Briefel's work also draws attention to the hierarchy of value governing assumptions about forgery in its various forms. There emerges in nineteenth-century culture a certain degree of fascination if not comfort with art forgery, as the aesthetic is presumed to occupy a realm apart from the grubby dealings of capitalism and the "cash nexus." Here, one need only look to the contrast between the stern penalties for financial forgery (which was a capital offence until the 1832 and 1837 Forgery Acts) and the comparatively limited penalties faced by art forgers. Although Briefel does not dwell at length on this important legal distinction, she convincingly illustrates that, rather than posing a threat to the functioning of capitalism, art forgery was broadly (though certainly not universally) "considered a containable offense" (21) and in many ways instrumental to the functioning of the art market. The forger worked within the system under the cloak of invisibility and anonymity that his fakery demanded and enabled.
In her treatment of the typology of the forger, Briefel effectively scrutinizes the construction of the "forger-genius" (23), pointing out that the conventional view of the forger as a "quasi-revolutionary figure" (20) has made him the subject of so much fascination. That him is a critical pronoun in Briefel’s view. Indeed, an especially welcome contribution made by this book is its treatment of women’s relationship to mimesis, aesthetics, and connoisseurship. In the dominant narratives of forgers and their history, Briefel shows, women are neither considered experts with specialized knowledge (connoisseurs), nor are they presumed to be possessed of the kind of aesthetic creativity that is the province of the forger and artist alike. The result: the "pervasive gendering of the fake [art object] as female" (82).
The third chapter makes a compelling case for the relationship between restoration and nationhood in the context of an expanding museum culture. Briefel’s treatment of Hawthorne’s Marble Faun draws on an illuminating contextual discussion of the relationship between forgery, museum practices, and national identity. In such a context, restoration becomes a rather precarious activity, as a "fraudulent restoration may suggest that a nation’s cultural authority is as spurious as the repaired object" (90). Briefel carries this reading of the connection between nation and the aesthetic through to her analysis in her fourth chapter of the anti-Semitic typing of the art dealer, which she concludes with an engaging discussion of du Maurier’s Trilby and the hypnotic power of the forger and his fake.
Suggesting here that Trilby "leaves us to wonder whether [the Jewish dealer] has also invaded the privileged space of authorship" (145), Briefel ventures closest to a sustained engagement with a question that her very readings of the literary representation of forged art implicitly raise: that of the relationship between legitimate art and literature. Although, as I said above, The Deceivers usefully broadens the discursive parameters of our thinking about forgery and authenticity beyond the realm of the literary, it may prove impossible to completely untangle the conceptual connections between art forgery and assumptions about the constitution of authentic authorship. Such questions preoccupied nineteenth-century authors and played no small part in the representation of forgery, aesthetic, financial, and otherwise, in their works. Indeed, as Patrick Brantlinger has observed, "[N]ineteenth-century realists [...] often [...] metaphorized their novels as counterfeit” (140). This tendency to see all art forms as inherently counterfeit or fake produc- tions seems especially relevant to the commodity culture of the fin-de-siècle that forms the focus of Briefel's final chapter. The narratives of deceptive fake jewelry by James and de Maupassant, whose plots, as Briefel illustrates, are linked in a complex relationship of literary indebtedness and replication, invite further consideration in this regard.
But this question of authentic authorship is most relevant to Briefel's treatment of Wilkie Collins, whose portrayals of forgers of both art and money in his fiction are, I would suggest, more inflected by his frustration with the limited legal protection accorded to authors in this period than Briefel's readings admit. Desirous of more social and legal respect for authors and artists, Collins was, as John Kucich notes, a founder of the Society of Authors and later became its vice-president (107). His letters consistently betray his anger at the law's failure to protect authors from exploitation by plagiarists and piracy, and he was fiercely proud of his protective attitude toward his works’ copyright. In Collins's view, the fiscal forger holds more interest for the law than the plagiarist because forgery threatens chiefly moneyed interests in its assault on capital. Acknowledgment of such views would, I suspect, ultimately modify Briefel’s claims about Collins’s laudatory representation of the forger "as a model of middle class identity" (91) in his 1856 A Rogue’s Life.
While it would be helpful for Briefel to give further attention to these intersecting issues, a single volume certainly cannot, may I say, forge a single, coherent history of such a broad subject. Overall Briefel has staked out some important new ground in a book that challenges us to rethink the mutually constitutive relationship between the fake and the authentic in forgery’s "golden age" — a time when, as she often compellingly points out, all was certainly not as it appeared.
Links to Related Material
- Review of Sara Malton's Forgery in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture: Fictions of Finance from Dickens to Wilde
- Victorian Frauds and Scandals: A Bibliography
- Victorian Art Criticism and the Rise of a Middle-Class Audience
Bibliography
[Book under review] Briefel, Aviva. The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2006.
Brantlinger, Patrick. Fictions of State: Culture and Credit in Britain, 1694–1994. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1996.
Kucich, John. The Power of Lies: Transgression in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1994.
Created 22 May 2024
Last modified 23 May 2024