The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Aviva Briefel

Published by Cornell University Press 2006

The Deceivers

Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century

Aviva Briefel

https://doi.org/10.7591/9781501726873

Overview
Contents

About this book

The nineteenth century witnessed an unprecedented increase in art forgery, caused both by the advent of national museums and by a rapidly growing bourgeois interest in collecting objects from the past. This rise had profound repercussions on notions...

Author / Editor information

Aviva Briefel is Associate Professor of English at Bowdoin College.

Reviews

Ellen Rooney, Brown University:

The Deceivers is engaging, persuasive, and both historically and critically illuminating. Aviva Briefel's prose is alive and unfailingly lucid. Her readings of a wide variety of texts are smart, nuanced, and rich. Briefel manages her diverse materials expertly, forging a cogent narrative of the place of the fake in a persistent social imaginary, one whose effects we still in some sense confront.

The book reads like a fascinating collection of obscure items, yet it is deceptively relevant. It tells a coherent story of the allure and impenetrability of artworks that are neither true nor false.

Briefel's concise and elegant study is... about the 'rich rhetoric of forgery' that arose in the literature of that period in England, France, and the United States. Briefel sets out to identify the various identities created by this literature and to show how they reflected biases relating to 'categories of gender, class, race, and nationality.'... The Deceivers presents many original ideas on the complexities of fakery and identity, as well as an authoritative overview of previous scholarship. The text is enriched with a number of black and white illustrations from contemporaneous publications. Briefel's writing is as lively and humorous as that from Punch, making this book a pleasure to read.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction. The Golden Age of Forgery Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Imperfect Doubles: The Forger and the Copyist Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	19
2. Intimate Detections: Connoisseurs, Forgers, and the Thing between Them Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
3. Restorations: Cultural Authority and the Life of Objects Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	83
4. Real Sons of Abraham: Jewish Art Dealers and the Traffic in Fakes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	116
5. Paste and Pearls: Drawing the Boundaries of Female Identity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Conclusion: Magic Tricks Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	181
Works Cited Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	217
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233

(Deutsch)

Language: English
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Audience: General/trade;
Pages
- Main content: 248
Illustrations
- Other: 10 halftones
Keywords: History; Art History; Literary Studies

eBook

Published: July 5, 2018
ISBN: 9781501726873