Art: Fakes

It is nothing new for artists to fake antiques. Nor is it new for confidence men to take in wealthy suckers by posing as artists. But in France and in Lexington, Ky. last week two extraordinarily clever fakers provided two new twists to an old gag.

Back in April 1937, a peasant named Jean Gonon was doing his spring plowing on a farm not far from Lyon, when he uncovered a figure of Venus. Features and limbs were damaged, but otherwise the figure, a gentle drape about its hips, was in beautiful shape. Officials examined it, pronounced it authentic Greek, and Farmer Gonon made money exhibiting it.

Last month there popped up at St. Etienne a dour, baldish, 31-year-old Italian sculptor named Francesco Cremonese, who swore that the Venus was his. He completed it, he said, in 1936, buried it because nobody paid attention to his work, hoping to make a name for himself when it was dug up.

Experts belittled him, said that he could not have exported Carrara marble from Italy at the time he claimed. Cremonese said he could show pieces of the eye he had chipped off. But Farmer Gonon would not let him try to fit the missing pieces to his Venus. Cremonese said he would produce the model, then had trouble remembering her name; it was Anna Something. Anna Strudinka, Polish waitress in a night club, turned up, announced she had been the model, permitted her neck to be measured (it coincided with the neck of the figure) but refused to let the investigation go any further.

At this point a jury of National Education Ministry officials stepped in, investigated, announced last week that yes, it was Cremonese’s statue.

The case in Lexington, Ky. was a good deal more complicated. There, four years ago, appeared a sculptor in his middle 30s who said that his name was Augustus Donfred H. Build. He was the son of a New York physician, said he, had studied in Florence for seven years, and met his pretty wife, Corinne, while executing a commission in Tennessee.

Among the horse-and-dog lovers of Fayette County, Build flourished. For his heroic statue of Guy Axworthy, famed trotting stallion, he was reported to have received $15,000. He made a bust of a dead superintendent of schools, of the founder of the Lexington Leader, statues of several champion great Danes, of a trotting mare and sulky. Then he disappeared.

Last week, in Fayette Circuit Court, witnesses told why. They knew Build, they testified, as J. D. Amason, operator of a bankrupt poultry farm at Flintville, Tenn. But beyond that they unfolded a stranger story: Build-Amason had served four prison terms, including one at Atlanta (where he learned his art), and had once shot his way out of a hanging case in Texas.

Not his statues but his poultry farm got him in trouble. When it went bankrupt he tried to flee Tennessee, taking his automobile (on which he had three mortgages) and a truckload of chickens. Chased by deputy sheriffs to Nashville, the sculptor abandoned his car, ran across country, got away, leaving a lawsuit between the three finance companies and his statues of horses and dogs, to mark his strange passage through the bluegrass country.