Basking

Paul Seabright

• The Forger’s Art edited by Denis Dutton
  University of California Press, 276 pp, £18.00, June 1984, ISBN 0 520 04341 3
• Of Mind and Other Matters by Nelson Goodman
  Harvard, 210 pp, £14.90, April 1984, ISBN 0 674 63125 0
• Fact, Fiction and Forecast by Nelson Goodman
  Harvard, 131 pp, £4.20, April 1984, ISBN 0 674 29071 2
• But is it art? by B.R. Tilghman
  Blackwell, 193 pp, £15.00, August 1984, ISBN 0 631 13663 0

One evening last September, millions of viewers watched three young men forge a Modigliani sculpture live on Italian television. Three things distinguished the programme from other forgers’ At Homes, such as the BBC’s regular visits to the studio of Tom Keating (a sale of whose work had raised £274,000 at Christie’s that very day). The men were undergoing a public trial of their claim to be the sculptors of one of the three heads found underwater in the Fosso Reale in Leghorn in July, and declared by a hallelujah chorus of critics to be among ‘the crowning achievements of Modigliani’s oeuvre’. Unlike Keating, the three had had no training in artistic technique. And their method of producing Modigliani forgeries – including the one that had been described by Cesare Brandi, one of Italy’s most prestigious critics, as having ‘an interior light, like a veilleuse’ – was to lean on an old paving slab with a Black and Decker drill. ‘Though they do not yet have the characteristic, marvellously elongated and consumptive shapes,’ Brandi continued, ‘here in these stones we see their annunciation, their presence.’