Keats, an art critic for San Francisco Magazine who has previously published on art forgery in Art & Antiques, wants to argue that the problem with forgeries is a problem with us: "We need to examine the anxieties that forgeries elicit in us now. We need to compare the shock of getting duped to the cultivated angst evoked by legitimate art, and we need to recognize what the art establishment will never acknowledge: no authentic modern masterpiece is as provocative as a great forgery. Forgers are the foremost artists of our age."
Keats highlights "six modern masters." After World War II, Lothar Malskat, a German restorer, fakes a mural in a damaged 13th century church. In the 1920s, Alceo Dossena, an Italian sculptor, creates antiqued marbles. In the 1930s, Han van Meegeren, a successful Dutch portrait artist, forges six paintings by Vermeer and sells them to the Nazis.
This book review is continued in the ninth issue of The Journal of Art Crime, edited by ARCA Founder Noah Charney. It is available electronically (pdf) and in print via subscription and Amazon.com. Associate Editor Marc Balcells (ARCA '11) is a Graduate Teaching Fellow at the Department of Political Science, John Jay College of Criminal Justice -- The City University of New York.
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