Wright and wrong

David Ekserdjian

The Art of the Forger Christopher Wright (Gordon Fraser £7.95)

Christopher Wright's photograph on the .....,back cover of The Art of the Forger reveals him to be Lech Walesa's double. How fitting, therefore, that his story should tell of a crusade: a 15-year crusade on behalf of Georges de La Tour against the infidels of the art establishment, which reads more like a picaresque novel than a scholarly tome. Chapters have titles like 'The author launches a second attack denouncing the Fortune Teller as a forgery, with unforeseen results', and one of the illustrations is captioned: 'The face from a Vogue fashion photograph of 1946 by Norman Parkinson, with a hairstyle super- imposed from a photograph of the author's mother holidaying in Skegness in the late 1940s'. No doubt the film of the book will be called 'Carry On Forging'.

The cast list is impressive, including a galaxy of art historians, dealers, museum curators and restorers, who are at best fools and at worst crooks almost to a man, but there are in addition three big stars. They are Anthony Blunt, Director of the Courtauld Institute, Wright's former teacher and boss; Benedict Nicolson, Edi- tor of the Burlington magazine, co-author with Wright of a book on La Tour pub- lished in 1974; and last but not least, Wright himself. Blunt's Courtauld is a 'rigid institution', a 'benevolent despot- ism', while Blunt is seen 'in all his vulner- ability', 'furious', 'very angry', 'in a biting rage', and 'throwing a tantrum'. If Wright and not Skardon had interrogated Blunt, a confession might have been extracted, for it is only too obvious that Wright had a knack of making Blunt lose his cool. Nicolson emerges as a far less clear-cut character, self-deluding about the 'fakes', pressurised by Blunt not to publish Wright's article claiming that the Fortune Teller was a forgery, yet at the same time possessed of 'an independence of spirit which made him unimpressed by the grand of this world' and 'intellectual honesty'. Which is more than can be said for Wright, who freely admits that Nicolson was willing to publish his article, but warned that, if he did so, their collaboration on the La Tour book would be at an end. Our hero went ahead with the book, not the article, and comes out of the episode looking more like Blifil than Tom Jones.

Wright may never have been a pupil at the Nihil Nisi Bonum School of Biography, but his character assassinations (and char- acter suicide) should not be allowed to distract criticism from the book's deeper faults. After all, in the end it is the arguments, not the personalities, that mat- ter. His main attack is against three La

Tours: the Fortune Teller in the Metropoli- tan Museum, New York, and two versions

of a composition called the Cheat, one ill

the Louvre, and the other formerly in a Geneva private collection and now in the

Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth. He argues on two fronts, stylistically to show that the paintings are not by La Tour, and historically and technically to prove that

while the 'dubious' Kimbell Cheat is 17th-century but not by La Tour, the

Louvre Cheat is a 1920s fake based on

and the Fortune Teller a 1940s fake based on the Louvre Cheat. Modern scholars'

exemplified by Nicolson and Wright's volume, divides La Tour's work into an early group of daylight scenes, mostlY secular in content, and a latter grouP

candlelight scenes, almost all of which are religious. The three disputed pictures have normally been regarded as fitting more °r less comfortably into the early daylight group. Wright's solution is devastatinglY simple — none of the daytime pictures are by La Tour either. He attributes them to an anonyni0,4115 artist, whom he christens the Hurdy-G1-114t Master, and then proceeds to point 011` differences between the 'fakes' and the La Tour night scenes. In so doing, he omits one crucial piece of evidence. This is 3 picture of St Thomas, signed by La Toni: accepted by Nicolson and Wright but no` discussed or illustrated here, which is 3 daylight picture. Even Wright accepts two daylight La Tours, a Man and a Woman in San Francisco, and furthermore two daY" light scenes of St Jerome are blatantly hYf the same hand as the signed night scene ° Job and his Wife. The Hurdy-Gurdy Mas- ter, more trouble than he is worth, IS a figment of Wright's imagination. The idea that the pictures are outright forgeries is based on a variety of argliA-

ments, mostly to do with signatures an'

costume dating. Sadly the word `MERDE', which Wright correctly spotted on the is

Fortune Teller, and which aroused h

supicions in the first place, has be cleaned off, and turns out to have been th,e handiwork of a restorer. The Metropoh" tan's scientific tests, done in conjunction with a team of international experts, Sur port the notion that the painting is I, century. Wright is forced to deny °lei validity of such tests and reject an archiva, reference which takes the Fortune

Teller.

history back to 1879. The Cheat is an evell less plausible fake, because Wright adinits it must date from the 1920s, when La Tor was unknown and not worth forging. In any event, how did the forger gain access to the other Cheat, and how did he know to Sign his fake 'La Tour'? All of this just doesn't add up, and the final chapter, in Which a man called Delobre is suggested as the forger of a whole array of pictures, including the La Tours, is unworthy even of the rest. Wright can't manage to read the date on a 'fake' Petrus Christus, and his lake' Rogier van der Weyden has a prove- nance stretching back to 1859, 14 years before Delobre was born. It will be argued that this book is a disgrace to art history, and its author wildly irresponsible, but at least they put art on the map. Normally an actual forger is required, but even if Delobre is not des- tined to do for La Tour what Van Meegeren did for Vermeer, or Keating for Palmer, the merest whiff of scandal has sufficed to reach the parts learned mono- graphs cannot reach.