Art: Foggy Final

Murmuring scholarly pleasantries, a pride of art professors and museum officials gathered amidst the grainy oak paneling and ostentatiously plain furniture of Manhattan’s Harvard Club, only to find the place set with traps. For cocktail-hour amusement before a dinner of the Friends of Harvard’s Fogg Museum, the Fogg’s director, tweedy John P. Coolidge of the Boston Coolidges, had arranged a jolly academic jape: the walls were hung with forged art—or was it all forged?

One of the first items in the quiz was a Crivelli Pieta, and the trick was to tell what part was original and what part had been restored. Except for certain slick parts, most of the crackled surface seemed beyond reproach. It might even have fooled the Fogg, had the man who donated the painting not also given two photographs of it. one taken in 1907 and the other in 1909. The earlier photograph showed that before restoration about half of Christ’s body had peeled off.

The test went on to two heads, one by the 16th century Italian painter Annibale Carracci and one an excellent copy by a contemporary. But the most fiendish items were three drawings of a Mother and Child, all apparently Picassos.

The Foggmen had taken extraordinary pains with these. To produce the two forgeries, they made a printed facsimile of the original. They then went over the reproductions with charcoal, smudging a bit here, rubbing a bit there. They went over the signatures in pencil, even reproduced two tiny fungus growths that appeared in the original. As a final touch, they placed one of the forgeries in the handsome frame and mat belonging to the original.

Even the secretary of the Fogg flunked this question—not to mention the chairman of Princeton’s art department. Other guests scored themselves on sheets of paper, compared their verdicts with the officially announced facts, and quietly crumpled their papers. One expert was too cagey to take the test at all. “I could say.” said James Rorimer, director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, “that I can’t see without my glasses.” A trifle icily he added: “People shouldn’t come in to a dinner party and give offhand opinions about what’s genuine and what’s fake. They don’t in the medical profession.”