Faking the Ancient Andes

Karen O Bruhns, Nancy L Kelker

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781598743944
• eBook ISBN:
  9781315428550
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

Nasca pots, Quimbaya figurines, Moche porn figures, stone shamans. Fakes and forgeries run rampant in the Andean art collections of international museums and private individuals. Authors Karen Bruhns and Nancy Kelker examine the phenomenon in this eye-opening volume. They discuss the most commonly forged classes and styles of artifacts, many of which were being duplicated as early as the 19th century. More important, they describe the system whereby these objects get made, purchased, authenticated, and placed in major museums as well as the complicity of forgers, dealers, curators, and collectors in this system. Unique to this volume are biographies of several of the forgers, who describe their craft and how they are able to effectively fool connoisseurs and specialists. This is an important accessible introduction to pre-Columbian art fraud for archaeologists, art historians, and museum professionals alike. A parallel volume by the same authors discusses fakes in Mesoamerican archaeology.

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1
IMAGINED HISTORIES

THE PROBLEM OF FAKES

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Thomas Hoving (1996, 17), former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and editor of Connoisseur Magazine, reported that a full 40 percent of the works (some 50,000 items) offered for sale to the Met during his tenure as director were fakes or were so overly restored as to be virtual fakes. Unfortunately, not every museum has the staff and scientific detection resources of the Met, and yet, even with those resources, the Met is not fake-free. Far from it. The 40 percent forgery statistic has also been reported in the few statistical studies of Precolumbian works that have been undertaken, such as Pickering’s (1994, 4) study of Colima dogs. Thus, it is safe to assume that in the average sales gallery, the average museum display, the average full-color illustrated Precolumbian art book, four in every ten works are frauds. More problematic is that this percentage carries over into scholarship, and we can well assume that 40 percent (at least) of the art history that has been constructed for the ancient civilizations of the Americas based on these fraudulent exemplars is simply wrong—imagined histories written by seriously misled scholars. It is almost enough to validate Preziosi’s analogy of the museum as a work of fiction, although not for the reasons he proposes.

The problem of forgeries in South America, as in Mesoamerica, has been centuries in the making, and it will doubtless take generations more to sort out all the faux works from the real, given the general reluctance of the museum community to deal with the problem (see Kelker and Bruhns 2010). Ironically, it may well be that the very art market responsible for the problem will ultimately provide a solution. For the pragmatic participants of the art market, the 20problem of forgeries is one of economics and reputation, since the value of a work of art is inextricably tied to its presumed authenticity. As Clarissa McNair (2008, 199) notes:

Fraud in the art world is rife. However, an auction house, unlike a street vendor or website, stands behind the products that change ownership under its banner. There is responsibility for authenticity whether it is a painting, a tapestry or a silver chalice. The provenance, the seals, the hallmark, the signature can all be examined and verified. There are experts at Sotheby’s and Christie’s, but still fakes appear.

And most importantly, unhappy purchasers demand their purchase price and commission back and sometimes sue for a great deal of money.

F IS FOR FAKE

Forgeries of South American antiquities represent a variety of artisan skill levels, ranging from the simple copy to the original creation or “replivention.” At the low end of the market is the copy or replica of an authentic work. In the Andes these are especially common, given the widespread use of molds in the manufacture of ceramics in ancient times. Many of these molds have survived and are being used by fakers to make new “old” pots. Where many of these faux works fall short is in the painted decoration, which typically reveals errors in iconography or the miscomprehension of formal aspects by the faker (cf. Donnan 1978b). Copies are the most common class of faux work, typically hawked to tourists at archaeological sites, in curio shops, and at airports. These works, some of which may be sanctioned replicas that have had their identifying marks sanded off by unscrupulous dealers, regularly show up on eBay and low-end (also some high-end) American sales galleries (Sonin 1982, 2; Stanish 2008).

The prototypes used by copyists may be actual artifacts or, in some cases, earlier forgeries; it is not uncommon for families of forgers to continue in the business over several generations, continuing to produce “good-sellers” first created by their parents or grandparents. The survival of ancient molds, of course, makes creation of the ceramic form much simpler for the enterprising forger. Moreover, the abundance of full-color illustrations in books, auction catalogs, and on the Internet has been a boon to the copyist trying to replicate authentic painted decoration.

21More sophisticated than the copy is the pastiche, or pasticcio. A common fallacy concerning forgery is that the faker is always a copyist, but the pastiche-maker, realizing that plagiarism will reveal his products as frauds, strives to dissemble. Instead of copying the decoration of a particular piece, the forger selects motifs from various sources—archaeological examples or illustrations in books—and then assembles the borrowed elements into a new creation, which, while imitative of the style, does not exactly copy any single known work. Such works are often termed “false restorations” because entirely new vessels are constructed using portions of incomplete but genuine artirfacts.

Zenón Gallegos Ramírez reports, speaking of his job in a restoration workshop in Nasca, Peru, “My work consisted of washing (the ancient pieces and bits), selecting parts of the same vessel to attach together; I had to make (new pieces to replace) the pieces that were missing, many times the major part of a vessel was restoration.”¹ Typically, the fragments are joined with plaster, over-painted and lacquered (Sawyer 1982, 21–22). Since lacquer is impervious to most solvents, traditional swab-tests² are ineffective; and since fragments of genuine vessels are used in the construction, thermoluminescence testing might fail to identify the work as a forgery. An interesting example of such a concocted work can be found in the Arthur M. Sackler collection. When acquired, the work (accession no. N–205) was presented as a blackware Moche portrait bottle with a stirrup spout. However, when the black paint from its construction began to peel off, conservators took a closer look at the piece and discovered that the base was an authentic open cranium portrait cup onto which had been plastered artifact fragments used to create the headdress, spout, and handle of the portrait bottle (Katz 1983, 148).

A subset of the pastiche is over-restoration. Over-restoration may use pieces of other ancient objects, or it may simply involve making the painting “better” or replacing (or inventing) inlay, or adding adornments where some may, perhaps, have existed. At its most inventive, as in the case of the hand mirrors discussed in Chapter 7, over-restoration has created an entirely new type of artifact, based on modern European prototypes but realized in an “ancient” style, often with an ancient mirror embedded in the fictional frame and handle.

The highest class of forgery is the “original forgery” or “replivention,” often the work of a master artist. Such artist forgers are able to create works that can deceive the experts because they do not copy or assemble but rather create new works in antique styles. The master forgers of Central America, such as Brígido 22Lara and Rodolfo Torres,³ use authentic materials, tools, and techniques to create works that are nearly undetectable and indistinguishable from the real thing. These works are sold in high-end galleries and frequently end up spotlighted in galleries, where they easily mislead the unwary and also seriously corrupt scholarship. In South America, people like the late Eduardo “Chino” Calderón and the forgers of “Las Animas” in Ecuador similarly produce new works of art in ancient traditions, as do many unknown Peruvian, Ecuadorian, and Colombian artists (not to mention their Nicaraguan, Costa Rican, and Panamanian brothers and sisters) in ceramics, metal, stone, and any other available, and salable, medium. And, as we shall show, they are also not above inventing new traditions in materials irresistible to the modern market.

THE ARTFUL FORGER’S CRAFT

The ancient cultures of South America modeled in clay; carved wood, stone and shell; worked objects of gold, silver, and copper; and wove fine textiles of natural materials. Because of the environmental conditions of the west coast of South America and of the Andean chain, many spectacular examples of art in perishable media of ancient cultures have survived. These have provided a wealth of inspiration for motivated forgers whose creations are only limited by their skill and ambition.

Ceramics

As mentioned above, many of the ancient Andean cultures used molds to construct their ceramic vessels, something that has been a boon to forgers. Many of the ancient molds have survived, and if a forger has good contacts with the huaquero industry, it is not too difficult to obtain authentic molds that are still serviceable. And because many ancient ceramics were frequently made as multiples from the same mold, the appearance on the market of similar vessels is not necessarily a red flag. Thus ceramics are a convenient and frequent medium for forgers. Good clay is readily available, and aging it convincingly is not difficult. Best of all for the forger, ceramic materials are, according to Julie Jones, “apparently among the most difficult in the world to test” (Kutner 1987). This is due to the paucity of chemical and petrographic characterization of ancient clay sources; nevertheless, since many of the better forgers are mining the original clay sources, even if the data were available, it might not help at all. Thermoluminescence 23does not work on all clays, nor is it accurately performed by all labs. And given that many museums do not have conservation labs, much less the advanced equipment needed for accurate testing, it is not always possible for museums to perform the appropriate analyses on the objects in their collections, should they even wish to do so—which, mainly, they don’t.

The aging of ceramic faux works is more an art than a science, in that much of what the forger does is designed to meet the expectations of the buyer. If a ceramic pot has been buried in the ground for a few hundred years or more, one would expect it not only to be dirty but to show the appropriate mineral deposits (or, in the case of the Andean coastal regions, salt or saltpeter accretions). One might also expect a little breakage or at least a few chips here and there. Thus fakers frequently break new pieces and patch them back together; alternatively, when an intact artifact is required, the vessel might be knocked about a little to give it a few nicks and abrasions. This is followed by burial in damp earth in order to mellow the clay body and to give it that freshly looted look and smell that buyers expect. Chicken manure (Andean peoples do keep chickens) or just the filthy soils of an uncleaned coop are among the world’s most effective aging compounds.

Wood

Because the Peruvian and Chilean coasts provide excellent conditions for the preservation of perishable materials, a number of wood artifacts (and a fair amount of ancient wood) have been preserved. Such forgeries are trickier to expose scientifically because the base material is often genuinely old. Forgers use ancient wood to create new faux works that would be undetectable based on scientific dating alone. Radiocarbon and other dating technologies only tell us the age of the wood, not the age of the carving.

However, fresher wood is easier to carve, and wood is among the easiest of media to age. Truly believable aging can be created using common household ingredients such as ammonia for darkening, vinegar and rusty nails to turn wood gray or brown, rust and saltwater to give it an orange-red, hematite-like color, or household lye, which can be used as a bleaching agent. General surface abrasion is easily accomplished by wire-brushing or sandblasting. Cracking can be induced in selected areas by soaking the wood, followed by rapid drying with alternating cold and hot air blowers (such as a handheld hair dryer). Although microscopic analysis of a carving’s edges can sometimes reveal if the carving was 24done on old (very dry) wood or fresher wood, the means of making a new carving look old can obscure the edges enough that only an extremely diligent analyst can see what has been done. Need we say that such diligence is quite rare in the world of dealing, collecting, and donating?

Stone, Lapidary, and Shell-Work

Monumental stone carving, either bas-relief or fully in the round, was practiced by only a few of the Andean and related cultures. Examples of this art can be found at a number of sites in Nicaragua, Costa Rica, and Panama, at San Agustín and associated sites in Colombia, at Tiahuanaco and throughout the Altiplano in Bolivia, and at sites in Peru associated with the Chavín, Pucara, and Huari cultures, among others. These sculptures were frequently carved in andesite or sandstone. Both stones are relatively easy to carve and “age” through chemical hydrolysis, when buried in warm, moist, acidic soils such as are found in Mesoamerica. However, in the Andes these conditions are not present. Aging of faux sculptures must be accomplished through mechanical means. To remove the telltale signs of modern tools used in carving, the forger “antiques” the sculpture by rubbing it with pebbles and silicates to abrade and scratch the surface. Since bore-markings are commonly scrutinized for signs of modernity or antiquity, conscientious forgers will use ancient drilling methods on their more expensive works. However, when modern drills are used, care is generally taken to polish out the resulting tool marks (Peterson 1953, 179). Pieces are then “roughed up” a little bit (not enough to impinge upon their desirability), and off they go to market.

The techniques of carving and polishing remain largely the same for small-scale carvings or lapidary as in Mesoamerica. Although Andean lapidary was never as well developed, examples of these art forms are known from several cultures in the Andes. The Chavín cultures carved beautiful steatite cups, and most cultures made some sort of ornaments out of diorite, turquoise, and Spondylus shell, often inlaid with tesserae of turquoise, mother-of-pearl, pyrite, lapus lazuli, or calcite. Of these, the most often forged are the Chavín stone cups and Huari inlaid shell objects. In Colombia, the Tairona culture was known to produce very nice stone beads and pendants. Today, as in the past, lapidaries working in Bogotá are cranking out lots of these Tairona-style goodies—all offered for sale as genuine, of course.

25Textiles

Textiles rank among some of the earliest and most elaborate artworks of ancient South American peoples. The dry deserts of coastal Peru and Chile have preserved an astonishing record of the textile art form, with technical and aesthetic development equal to anything ever seen in the rest of the world. This fact has not escaped the attention of forgers.

Painted textiles were the first to be forged, and so many fraudulent ones are circulating that one must very carefully consider the style and details of any painted textile on the market. Until recently, it has been too expensive to have new textiles produced out of old thread. Composite pieces, ancient textiles sewn together into a new piece, were and are relatively common, often mixing archaeological cultures with gay abandon. However, with the Sendero Luminoso terrorist movement of the 1980s and 1990s, many skilled indigenous weavers fled their villages to escape certain death and went to the cities. Some of these women were discovered by dealers who have them “repair” ancient textiles and, apparently, produce new ones. The price is now sufficiently high to assure a handsome profit even while paying an Indian woman minimum wage for six months. The real problem here is that ancient textiles are insufficiently studied in practically every aspect save the iconographic one, making it difficult to discern finely woven textile forgeries that are not blatantly wrong in decorative iconography. Radiocarbon dating is no help, as the thread used is genuinely old. Only if a piece purports to be from a culture far different in time from the thread can one use this method to eliminate fraudulent pieces. Far more useful may be the continuing chemical studies of dyestuffs, as these are often turning out to be culturally distinct. But then, ancient yarn is frequently colored, so lots of luck.

Metallurgy

Metalworking in the New World is believed to have originated in the Andes and spread north through the Isthmo-Colombian region. S. Henry Wassén notes (1982, 63) that the first fake Peruvian silver and copper vessels began appearing in donations to museum collections in the 1930s and reached a high point about 20 years later. More recently, fake gold and tumbaga (gold/copper alloy) figures, marrying various Peruvian and Colombian cultural styles, have turned 26up on the pages of glossy catalogs and on Internet websites hosted by sales galleries in the United States and Europe. In both cases, the forgeries copy the style and motifs of authentic ceramic vessels, or they are pastiches of objects from a number of cultures. The first silver forgeries were readily detected through trace element analysis which indicated the presence of impurities, specifically zinc and nickel, unknown in Prehispanic times. Simulating the natural corrosion (verdigris) or patinas of long-buried copper and silver artifacts is easily achieved with chemical means. While to our knowledge little metallurgical analysis has been done on the unprovenanced gold and tumbaga items (even those in public collections), their stylistic and iconographic errors are unmistakable.

CONNOISSEURSHIP: THE EYE OF DETECTION

Before the New Art History rendered study of the art object largely irrelevant, connoisseurship was an important part of the training for future scholars and museum professionals. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the practice of developing an eye for style and technique required considerably more than “book learning” and the occasional museum visit; it required total immersion in the deep end of the art pool. Most often the connoisseur came from a wealthy background (as did a lot of art historians in that era), which gave them the freedom and the access to collections necessary to hone their “good eye.” It is this “good eye,” coupled with a fine-tuned intuition, that allowed the connoisseur to see the excellence or excrescence of a work, when neither may have been apparent to the average viewer, academically trained or otherwise. The problem is, of course, that all connoisseurs believe themselves to have the “good eye” when relatively few actually do. The fake-spotting record of some of the contemporary practitioners of this craft is pretty abysmal; they have authenticated Postcolumbian fake after Postcolumbian fake. Generally, such faulty practitioners are said to have “wooden eyes,” but it is entirely more likely that they have a case of “currency eye.” Since the fee charged for authentications is a percentage of the value assigned to the work, the connoisseur making a living as an appraiser/dealer has no incentive to find anything false. Authenticity is the currency of the art world as much as money. Art is no longer collected simply because the collector has a passion for the work; it is a commodity, an investment purchased for speculation. As Donald Kuspit (1988, 109) observed:

Everywhere one sees signs of an increasing importance of art as an investment property. It has clearly reached unexpected heights of economic hyperbole. . . . 27In an eloquent tautology, art’s monetary value has become its sublime value. Art and money have exchanged roles: money becomes “divine” by being “translated” into art. But that’s enough to give art the only clear and absolute meaning—meaning as universal and substantial as money—it’s going to get in this farcical world.

But even when the connoisseur is not corrupted by the market, his ability to distinguish the good from the bad may be seriously ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Dedication
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• CONTENTS
• ILLUSTRATIONS AND CREDITS
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• INTRODUCTION
• 1. IMAGINED HISTORIES: THE PROBLEM OF FAKES
• 2. ARTISANS, ATELIERS, AND THEIR FAUX WORKS
• 3. ALL THAT GLITTERS IS NOT OLD
• 4. ALL SLIPPED UP AND EVERYWHERE TO GO
• 5. CLAY-MATES, OR IMAGINATION RUN RIOT
• 6. HARD CHEESE FOR HARD ROCKS
• 7. POCKET CANDY: LAPIDARY ARTS AND OBJETS DE VERTU IN THE ANDES
• 8. WOODCARVERS, WEAVERS, AND FAKE MUMMIES?
• 9. PHOENICIANS AND DINOSAURS: THE SQUIRRELLY SIDE OF FORGERY
• EPILOGUE: MONEY, MONEY!
• NOTES
• REFERENCES
• INDEX
• ABOUT THE AUTHORS