Fakes in the Met?!

October 17, 2006 9:55 AM

Madonna and Child by Duccio di Buoninsegna (ca 1300) “is widely considered a key forerunner of the Italian Renaissance style and a landmark in Western European painting”. The painting “resides in a Plexiglas case in the middle of a room of medieval Italian paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” and was purchased in 2004 for about $50million, the most expensive acquisition in the Met’s history. However James Beck, Columbia professor, founder of ArtWatch “established for the dignity of the art” (previously mentioned in this forum), is emphatic: “It’s a poor painting and it is a fake.” In a recent interview to Paul Hond in the Columbia Magazine Fall 2006 issue he admitted that such a bold and counter-mainstream proposition is “…calling attention to the mistakes of our favorite institutions of great power would not have been readily available if I didn’t have tenure.”
posted by carmina (18 comments total)

It's a sad testament to the proliferation of mass media that, upon reading the headline, I thought "Yeah, I'd heard about her arriving in England this morning."

If someone as media unaware as myself thinks that way, there's no hope for anyone.
posted by owenkun at 10:01 AM on October 17, 2006

FYI, the text of the article in the "it's a poor painting" is a copy of, and credited to, the article in the "it's a fake" link.
posted by George_Spiggott at 10:05 AM on October 17, 2006

oops, yes. I was supposed to link one of the two. Admins, hope me!
posted by carmina at 10:09 AM on October 17, 2006

I've always thought of James Beck as a self-promoting gadfly. He sometimes has a hint of a point, but he is SO annoying that it's hard to listen to him or take him seriously.
posted by cccorlew at 10:10 AM on October 17, 2006

The painting has an interesting history.
posted by horsewithnoname at 10:18 AM on October 17, 2006

Well, so now the question for serious art historians is: where does this painting belong in the development of early renaissance painting? Does it stand without its provenance? It would seem that the curator who authorized the check for 50M was the poor scholar; I suspect the Met won't fire him or her... why is the painting itself poor? (I can't find the quote in the links you posted.) Simply because it's not a Duccio? Is it because it's a poor fake, or a very good fake?

Don't be sad, ownekun, I shared your mild cognitive dissonance, and it certainly seems just as controversial.
posted by DenOfSizer at 10:27 AM on October 17, 2006

Beck's comments on the quality of the painting and the refutations by the Met staff.

Den, thank you, you solved ownekun's riddle for me. No pun was intended, although I do enjoy the coincidence!
posted by carmina at 10:45 AM on October 17, 2006

I find Beck's tortured explanations for why the painting cannot be authentic almost laughable.

I'm highly influenced by the fact that a family friend, an amazing painter and art professor, bought into Beck's line about the Italian frescoes. "They're too bright! The Renaissance painters were dark!" seemed to be the basic underpinning -- encrusted centuries of received wisdom.

The instant I saw the cleaned frescoes ... it was mind-blowing. This had to be how they were intended to be seen. The setting called for it.

So anyway, my opinion of this guy (who also peddled a "they don't know exactly how many Jews were killed in Europe" argument) was diminished, although I will always thank him for what he challenged me to create in class, and my opinion of Beck is pretty close on the dial to my opinion of David Irving.
posted by dhartung at 10:48 AM on October 17, 2006

"The Missing Madonna: The story behind the Met’s most expensive acquisition", The New Yorker, July 2005.
posted by stbalbach at 10:49 AM on October 17, 2006

oops, New Yorker link repeat of horsewithnoname's link, sorry.

According to this older article in the Times $50m 'masterpiece' is poor forgery, says arts professor, Beck was supposed to publish a book about it in September of this year called The Crisis of Connoisseurship: from Duccio to Raphael, however Amazon doesn't show anything.
posted by stbalbach at 10:55 AM on October 17, 2006

Well, so now the question for serious art historians is: where does this painting belong in the development of early renaissance painting? Does it stand without its provenance?

Huh? Because one guy, regarded by many as a crackpot, says it's a fake, all "serious art historians" have to fall in line? I'm no art historian (though I used to room with one), but this quote from the New Yorker article (which you should have linked to, carmina) is far more convincing to me:

Expert opinion diverges on the degree of workshop contributions to several of the surviving works by Duccio, but only one scholar, the Swiss art historian Florens Deuchler, has ever questioned the attribution of the “Madonna and Child.” (Deuchler places the painting, which he has never seen, among works from “the orbit of Duccio”; he doesn’t say why, and the fact that he includes several other long-accepted Duccios in the same category leads Christiansen and others to describe his scholarship as “eccentric.”) Everyone else has accepted the picture as a signature work, complete in itself, and painted by Duccio’s own hand.

So we have one eccentric Swiss who's never seen the painting, and now one guy who makes a career of being controversial and bucking the "establishment," against the considered judgment of art history. Not saying common judgments are automatically right, but it's going to take a lot more than this to make serious art historians say "uncle."
posted by languagehat at 11:10 AM on October 17, 2006

which you should have linked to, carmina

umm, why? Other people did. I can tolerate paternalism if it comes in a lighter tone than in your comment.
posted by carmina at 11:25 AM on October 17, 2006

I also found his comments on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel to be interesting. He claims in one of the links that the cleaners removed some of Michaelangelo's original pigments and basically ruined the works.

I wanted to see the difference, and after searching I found this page.
posted by ducksauce at 12:12 PM on October 17, 2006

Madonna & Child?



Too obvious?
posted by mrzer0 at 12:16 PM on October 17, 2006

beat me to it mrzer0
posted by StrasbourgSecaucus at 1:14 PM on October 17, 2006

I also found his comments on the restoration of the Sistine Chapel to be interesting. He claims in one of the links that the cleaners removed some of Michaelangelo's original pigments and basically ruined the works.

Ducksauce, that's been a fairly common complaint, but it's been impossible to prove. People were describing the painting as ruined even before Loenardo had died, and its been repainted and reworked so many times (and even had a door cut through it) that we really can't say exactly what it originally looked like in really basic ways (for example, the design on the floor, if any, is controversial).

Leo Steinberg has a really neat book about the Last Supper, complete with an appendix that features pictures of most of the extant copies of the mural. He generates what I thought of as a Grand Unified Theory of Apostolic Gestures that I was very taken with. Really a neat book.
posted by rogue haggis landing at 1:58 PM on October 17, 2006

Except that's a different painting, you know.
posted by rikschell at 2:47 PM on October 17, 2006

rogue seems to be talking about the wrong work, but Beck basically made the same claims in both cases.
posted by dhartung at 5:45 PM on October 17, 2006