Fake or Real: How did you guess?
The four images on blue backgrounds in the Surrey Street window are all famous works of art, praised and authenticated by leading curators and art historians. But some of them of fakes. Did you spot which ones?
Velázquez’s Old Woman Cooking Eggs is authentic, painted when the artist was still a teenager.
Poussin’s Triumph of Silenus was thought for a long time to be a fake, before being authenticated in the last few years.
The ‘Vermeer’ is a fake, one of the most extraordinary cons of the 20th century, perpetrated by Han van Meegeren. The books on display in the window tell the full, astonishing story.
Finally, the Getty Kouros. This is a fascinating case, worth looking at in more detail below.
The Getty Kouros, 530 century BCE
- Dolomitic marble, Thasos , 2.06 m (over life-size)
- Broken but complete with plinth
- John Paul Getty Villa, Malibu, 85.AA.40
The marble figure of a nude male youth was offered to the Getty for an estimated seven - nine million dollars in 1983, and the purchase was made despite reservations, as complete statues from this time period are rare. Most jarring to experts are the eclectic mixture of regional styles from different time periods in the carved features from the statue’s Egyptianising beaded hairstyle to its anatomically complex feet. The provenance documents claimed the statue was from the collection of a wealthy Geneva doctor since the 1930s but they were exposed as forgeries after the purchase and the family had no recollection of the statue in his collection. Since its purchase, scholars have debated the authenticity of the kouros on the grounds of style, carving technique, conservation and stone analysis culminating in a colloquium in 1992.
After the statue’s return from Athens, the Getty displayed the kouros with objects and text that investigated the problems with determining the authenticity of the statue and inviting visitors to consider the situation. It seems only newly excavated fragments or modern evidence from a forger’s workshop will definitively solve the question, but there is a growing consensus that the statue is a forgery by a master sculptor. In 2018, the kouros was removed from permanent display.