Sacred and Stolen

by Gary Vikan

  It was now late morning, Monday, October 29th. I was standing in the long entrance hall of Dumbarton Oaks in front of the wall case exhibiting the gold seal ring. In place of its companion piece, the real gold key, there sat the little Lucite block with a color print of the missing item, now lost forever, I assumed gloomily. After a journey of a thousand years, after being dug out of the beach sand of Istanbul, the gold key was now somewhere between Long Island and Washington, DC, buried in some vast postal warehouse. Maybe its label had come off—damn that stupid lawyer!

  I began to confess the whole story to my colleague Susan Boyd, Curator for the Byzantine Collection: the tale of the gold key that I could have brought back but did not. Then, quite unexpectedly, through the front door at the end of that hall appeared Dominique de Menil, whom I absolutely did not want to see just then, or for a really long time, until the story of the now-lost key had blown over. She was wearing that signature white sable coat of hers, the one I was told her friend Magritte liked so much. Despite her age at the time, 71, her eyes and mind were wonderfully keen. Which meant that she spied me instantly and headed my way. But as she marched down the hall, a second figure appeared through the front door behind her, stopping at the security desk. He was wearing a uniform and, even from where I stood, I could see that he was delivering a small box.

  I ran past Dominique to grab the box, which had Riverhead as its return address, and fell into step beside her, striding toward the wall case. As Sue Boyd opened the case, I opened the box from Riverhead. Inside was the Byzantine gold key that for more than a year had been my quest. It was heavier than I expected, but what I did expect was true: it fit perfectly onto the Dumbarton Oaks gold signet ring. The act of joining was quick and without ceremony. Yet it occurred to me and, I think, to Dominique de Menil, that the two had not been one in more than a millennium. It was a moment of pure magic. And I knew we had bonded.

  Chapter Four

  Trouble with Fakes

  For some reason I’m very good at spotting fakes, which is lots of fun. But sometimes it makes for big problems. And I’ve had plenty of opportunity for sleuthing, given that my entire professional life has been in museums formed by private collectors buying from dealers and not by way of archaeological digs or, in the case of the Louvre, through Napoleon’s plunder of archaeological sites. This means that at places like Dumbarton Oaks and the Walters there were plenty of opportunities for fakes to slip in, and they did. Also, I have always been attracted to fakes. Because a fake is a fake, and unlike academic arguments for dating and localizing a work through its style or subject matter, which can go on for decades and never be resolved, the determination “fake” is usually definitive and final. Sometimes, the conservation lab, with this or that test, can solve it. But mostly for me it has been my “eye” and intuition, and then some detective work. Of course, lots of people—dealers, collectors, curators, and museum directors—get really angry when someone spouts off about fakes they have sold or bought or are exhibiting. It’s about money, for sure, but mostly it’s about reputational embarrassment. And they will let you know.

  MY BIGGEST FAKES ADVENTURE BEGAN in late 1976 when I received a letter from the chief curator at the Hirshhorn Museum. I was mid-way through my second year at DO, Elana was teaching French at a local private school, and we were just scraping by, with baby Nicole’s crib filling most of the living room of our tiny garden apartment. We were desperate for a little extra cash, and I had not yet latched onto the Smithsonian Resident Associates Program, for which I began teaching in 1977 all manner of things Byzantine for $55 a class. At the time, this Smithsonian gig was referred to around the Vikan household as “Talking for Dollars,” after a popular TV game show of the ’70s called “Bowling for Dollars.” Pins knocked down, minutes talked, meant money. But $55 an hour was less than $1 a minute, and that’s not counting the hours of prep time that got it down to probably four cents a minute, which was about minimum wage at the time.

  So that letter from the Hirshhorn was very exciting, given that it meant real money. Like $300 all at once. All they wanted me to do was to examine and then write up three pieces of Coptic (early Christian Egyptian) sculpture that Joseph Hirshhorn had picked up along the way and that they now didn’t know what to do with. It should be easy, I figured, since I had already learned a lot about Coptic art writing up the dozen pieces the Blisses had collected.

  Those three limestone sculptures in the basement of the Hirshhorn seemed to me on first view to be straight-out fakes. All three were apparently stelae or grave markers with portraits sculpted in relief of a male, presumably the decedent. Two were bust-length and carved into shallow niches, while the third, a youth with a Dutch-boy haircut, was nearly full length and in high relief.

  Why did I think that they were bad? In part, I decided this because all three figures had simpering, vacuous expressions that seemed to me totally at odds with the forceful integrity that I was familiar with in the faces on genuine Coptic grave markers. Of course, that was just my intuition. Much more easily demonstrable as indicating a fake was their condition. All three were painted in bright colors over precisely carved surfaces, and none among them showed any weathering. Naturally, this seemed very odd to me, given that they were supposed to be nearly 2,000 years old and were apparently grave markers. Under ultraviolet light all three glowed bright blue. I took this to mean that there was no weathering or normal aging, nor was there any evidence of repair (also very odd given their reputed age), which would show as areas of discontinuity under UV light. Rather, each of the three was “of a piece” and, to my eye, clearly modern.

  I went back to Dumbarton Oaks and checked out the definitive book on Coptic art by the esteemed German scholar and theologian, Klaus Wessel, Koptische Kunst: Die Spätantike in Ägypten. This was the obvious place for me to begin, and what I quickly discovered amazed and puzzled me. I found that those seemingly faked limestone reliefs in the basement of the Hirshhorn matched up in some way—either stylistically or in subject matter—with nearly one-third of the Coptic sculptures illustrated in Wessel’s book. This meant that either I was wrong and those Hirshhorn pieces were genuine, or that all their look-alikes, and there were dozens of them in Wessel’s handbook of Coptic art, were fakes.

  I felt I was on to something big, and so I started some investigating. The first interesting thing I learned was that not one of those Wessel look-alikes had a history before 1958. I also discovered that many had been purchased by a small German museum, the Ikonen-Museum in Rechlinghausen. And with a little more detective work, I found out that Klaus Wessel was the museum’s advisor on things Coptic. All of this I figured out in no more than a few hours.

  According to Wessel, this spate of works recently coming out of Egypt was the result of a fantastic new find in a place called Sheikh Ibada (pronounced, as Elana was fond of saying, like “shake a body”). This amazing “discovery,” Wessel believed, filled in the blanks between ancient Egypt and early Christian Egypt. I was all but certain, though, that the whole Sheikh Ibada group was fake—or at best, substantially re-carved in modern times. So I went on a quest the following summer to see all the Sheikh Ibada sculptures I possibly could. Some were easy to get to, like those in the storerooms of the Brooklyn Museum and the pair in the Art Museum at Princeton University, bought, according to KW, by someone else when he was on sabbatical. But there were many more in Europe, in Rechlinghausen (nearly four dozen in all), Berlin, and Paris, and almost everywhere else that there was an installation of Coptic art. Before long I was up to 120 look-alikes to those Hirshhorn fakes, and still counting.

  The encounter with Sheikh Ibada in the (then) Skulpturengalerie in Berlin is the one that sticks with me, because it got me into some trouble. The curator and buyer was Victor Elbern, a formidable giant in the medieval art world. And in his galleries was where I found two large relief sculptures of naked little “Coptic” boys holding up crosses, one boy in his left hand and the other boy in his right hand. Klaus Wessel wa
s very keen on these two sculptures because they proved, for him, that the early Christians of Egypt segued comfortably from pagan subjects (naked boys) to Christian subjects (naked boys with crosses). Even for a lapsed Lutheran, that nakedness was scandalous.

  But what I noticed by that time, after having seen at least eighty Sheikh Ibada fakes close up, was that the chisel marks on many of these sculptures (no matter what their apparent date or function) were made by the same chisel, at about 1.5 centimeters wide. Weird, I thought. Though maybe not so weird. Plus, there was so much screwy iconography (naked boys with crosses), no weathering, and no history before 1958. But Shiek Ibada had enthusiastic and smart defenders, including Klaus Wessel, and now, Victor Elbern.

  Curator Elbern happened not to be around during my July 1977 visit. I was told that he went each year to a regenerative spa some place in Italy to enjoy the mud baths. So I sent him a letter a few weeks later with my thoughts. He responded quickly and with the authoritative Germanic voice of a scholar of high rank and keen sensibility—as one who was accustomed to being right and to being acknowledged as right. Elbern suggested that I should “be prepared to use more caution in defining a fake.” And what did I care about this criticism? Not much.

  So I unloaded on him in a second letter with a detailed condemnation of pretty much that entire Coptic room of his, including my measurements of the 1.5-centimeter chisel marks on his naked-boy sculptures. This time, in response, I got a scolding, which was my first but hardly my last for calling out fakes. Usually the scolding invoked the cautionary dictum of Max Friedlaender, the consummate connoisseur and the gentleman I was not. The idea according to Dr. Friedlaender was that it was a “mistake” to call a fake a genuine work of art, but it was a “sin” to call a genuine work a fake. And therefore I was obviously in the sinning business. This second time Elbern wrote back to me in German and quoted in the spirit, if not the voice of Max Friedlaender, an amerikanischen Kollegen who he said had recently written to him about the dangers of calling out fakes:

  I feel very strongly that one has no right to label objects forgeries unless he has the right kind of proof. It is so easy to say an object is false, so hard to prove it, and so much harder to disprove it.

  So this unnamed American colleague of Victor Elbern’s, and presumably of mine, was telling me to behave myself.

  WHILE THIS SHEIKH IBADA DISPUTE with Berlin was simmering, my sleuthing of fakes got me into hot water much closer to home. It was the spring of 1981 and I was again on the staff of Dumbarton Oaks (after two years with Dominique de Menil), this time with an open-ended appointment as Associate for Byzantine Art Studies.

  I had been called into the office of the Director, Giles Constable; I thought I had done a good thing, but I was expecting to be scolded, or worse. After all, when was the last time DO had been covered on the evening news? Back in May 1938 when Nadia Boulanger premiered Igor Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks Concerto in the Music Room? Or in October 1944 when the Great Powers, at the conclusion of the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, announced the formulation of the United Nations? The splash this time was nothing more than a passing micro-buzz in the local DC media market created by one of the tiny exhibitions I put together in the hallway outside the Music Room. The show was called Questions of Authenticity Among the Arts of Byzantium, which goes a long way toward explaining why I was in trouble.

  My little forgery show included mostly mundane and ugly fakes that were, if not already familiar to those who followed such matters, easily and universally condemnable. This usually meant no controversy and no push back. But the very first work in the show was different. It was a marble relief sculpture showing the Healing of the Blind Man, which was believed to have come from Istanbul when it was acquired by DO in 1952. From the beginning, it was understood to be a fragment of a larger work—apparently an early Christian altar table, which are fairly common. At least that was the conclusion of Ernst Kitzinger, who had a major hand in its purchase, as he was then on the faculty of Dumbarton Oaks. Not only that, he had published the piece in a long article in 1960 in the Dumbarton Oaks Papers and invoked it frequently to help demonstrate his thesis that there was a “renaissance” under the Theodosian Dynasty, around 400, when Christian artists working in the emerging world of Byzantium adopted classical figure style.

  That all made sense to me until the morning of January 1, 1980. I was at home, hungover from the previous night’s celebrations and unable to sleep, so I began reading term papers. Among the several things I did at DO that were counter to its culture (and in this case counter to its published Mission Statement, as articulated by Mildred Bliss herself) was to offer courses to undergraduates and graduate students at area colleges like Catholic University and Johns Hopkins. One of my students had chosen to write on the Healing of the Blind Man relief, which I welcomed, since there was something about it that just didn’t seem right, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

  The student wrote something in his paper that prompted me to look again at the lower edge of the sculpture. And, given the liberating power of a hangover, I saw something obvious and damning that I had never before seen—or at least had not recognized. The lower border has a simple bead decoration, which is fine. But the odd and condemning thing I finally noticed about those beads was that there is a large central bead with a cross on it, and precisely nine beads to the left and nine beads to the right. And at the far edges, left and right, the last of the nine in each direction is finished off completely with no hint of the beginning of a tenth bead.

  Bingo! This means that this is not a fragment at all, but a complete and independent composition that was created to look like a fragment. Once I recognized this, it was obvious that the DO relief was a fake. This invited me to look for the models that the forger was copying, and I found them in short order in museums in Berlin and Istanbul. Clearly, I concluded, the Healing of the Blind Man relief is a modern pastiche.

  I was really proud of that discovery and led off my little show with this work, and it was also the first work in the exhibition catalogue. Fine, but not so fine, and for two reasons. First of all, Ernst Kitzinger, the towering German-Jewish émigré medievalist and faculty member at Harvard, was the “symposiarch” of the DO Spring Symposium that year. And my little show would be up during the symposium, which would draw scholars from around the world with Ernst Kitzinger kicking things off at the podium in the Music Room. Everyone would see this little exhibition and read about the fake—about his fake. And most would likely know that Kitzinger had based his “Theodosian renaissance” idea in part on this single work. And now it was being labeled a fake by a junior, mostly unknown DO staffer.

  This problem appeared to worsen after I heard about the whispers that circulated when the piece was bought in 1952—that it was thought back then by some to be modern, and quietly labeled “Kitzinger’s fake.” I learned this from KW, who for some reason was not so fond of Ernst Kitzinger.

  But the second problem—the real problem—was what I learned about from Giles Constable that morning in his office: Ernst Kitzinger had threatened to withdraw from the upcoming Spring Symposium—from his symposium. That would be a scandal that would rank at or at least near the top of all scandals in the history of that ever-so-proper institution. And it would be my fault. (This made me think that I should have accepted the assistant professorship at Princeton that I had turned down six weeks earlier. I had turned it down because I was having too much fun at DO.) To my credit, I had written to Professor Kitzinger (whom I hardly knew) at Harvard with my conclusions some weeks earlier. And I had framed the catalogue entry on the Healing of the Blind Man as if my idea that it was fake was a hypothetical, a hypothetical that could explain the puzzling things about the work that were inconsistent with it being an authentic fragment. Given Kitzinger’s immensely good reputation (he was then 68) and with my relative lack of reputation (I was then 34), I figured that mine was the most at risk in this debate. But that’s not how Ernst Kitzinger saw it. He pai
d a visit to Director Constable and laid it on the line. And then Giles called me in.

  But what was to be done? Sure, I acknowledged that we had a problem—in fact, a big problem—and that if I did not exist, this problem would not exist either. But we couldn’t put the genie back in the lamp. And in any event, it didn’t seem fair to me, nor was it in harmony with the scholarly standards of Dumbarton Oaks, to suppress my discovery. But since I felt it was my job to be flexible, I suggested to Giles that I take the Healing of the Blind Man out of the show and that we “deep six” the catalogue—that is, put all the copies in a box in the basement and forget they ever existed. Or better yet, put them in the dumpster. But of course, it was not that simple. My disingenuous little plan put Constable and Kitzinger in the position of censors, and after all this is Harvard, and such things simply cannot happen at Harvard.

  As the drama played out that day, we, Kitzinger and Vikan, agreed through the mediation of Giles Constable that we would respectfully agree to disagree about the authenticity of the now-notorious Healing of the Blind Man relief. And like gentlemen and scholars, we would meet privately to discuss the matter. This was Kitzinger’s idea, and I liked it.

  So we convened in the small study room in the basement of DO at the far end of the hallway on the left (the room where the coins and seals were then kept). Professor Kitzinger, who had arrived before me, was sitting at one of the desks, and I sat down in a chair to his right, near the door, which I closed. He turned toward me, but before he could say anything, he got a gushing nosebleed. The only good news was that Kitzinger was of a generation that carried a handkerchief, which, when employed, made it hard for me to hear and understand him. But finally it was made clear: We should meet another time, he said. Of course, we never did.