Janus Thinking

Most people go to an art museum to appreciate fine art and broaden their cultural horizons. Is this still the case when the art on display is known to be fake? Next year the Brooklyn Museum in New York will put on a show featuring pieces of Coptic sculpture known to be counterfeit. Acquired between the late 1950s and early 1970s, these pieces have never before been shown to the public, and their provenance is dubious at best. One example from a recent article in the New York Sun:

One New York dealer, Jerome Eisenberg, acknowledged in a phone interview that he had sold the museum one piece now considered to be fake, a roundel with a border of palm fronds and a central bust. The museum acquired the piece in 1960.

Asked where he bought the roundel, Mr. Eisenberg said that he purchased it from a “very reliable, very ethical” dealer in Cairo, a Copt named Kamel Hammouda. Asked if he knew where Mr. Hammouda got the sculpture, Mr. Eisenberg said that it was against the rules of the trade at the time to ask such questions.

“When you’re buying antiquities in Egypt or Beirut or Turkey or Algeria, you don’t ask the dealer who dug things up,” he said.

Hopefully the museum will provide enough information in the exhibition such that visitors can learn what characteristics make these pieces forgeries–that will certainly foster the connoisseurship of Egyptian art.

[Photo by Dan Diffendale]