Clodion (1738-1814) and "Clodion Mania" in Nineteenth-Century France

Collecting Deception. Definitions of a Forgery and Collecting Mania in Nineteenth-Century France

Hugo Scheithauer

Introduction

Close study of Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs conducted during the Spring of 2019, combined with discussions with experts, has indicated that the two terracotta sculptures that entered the Columbia collection in 1976 as works by Clodion (1738-1814) are in fact late nineteenth-century productions, as reported in Sarah Jane Kim’s essay. This paper proposes to give this finding, which establishes the sculptures as forgeries, a conceptual and historical framework.

Forgeries are problematic objects, the subject itself is controversial. Forgeries are indeed not considered valuable artefacts and are believed to abuse one’s credulity.1 The main power of a forgery is its ability to trick anyone, from the aspiring amateur to the most qualified art historian. For instance, the Dutch painter and portraitist Han van Meegeren (1889-1947), who painted in the manner of the Old Masters and sold his paintings as such, is considered one of the best forgers of the twentieth century. Renowned for his forged Vermeers, which deceived many experts, it was only when he faced judicial charges that he confessed to his fraud.2 Scholars have written numerous books and articles on his ability to dupe, his impact on art history and aesthetics, and the disorder he caused in the study of Vermeer’s paintings during the twentieth century.3

However, in choosing to study and display two forgeries in this exhibition, we posit that Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs are intellectually and artistically valuable objects.4 The literature on forgery is substantial, and often a place where art historians attack forgers for being outlaws and mere deceivers. The latter fight back by also writing books, which defend the profession and the ability to trick. For example, in The Art Forger’s Handbook, published posthumously in 1997, the English painter and art forger Eric Hebborn (1934-1996) not only offers advice for the forger apprentice, but also attacks art historians, art dealers, and collectors for being shallow and snobbish.5 Furthermore, he criticizes art history for its obsessive urge to classify everything chronologically, thus often creating artificial artistic categories.6 Forgeries disrupt the art historical narrative, which is why it is unsettling to imagine them being displayed in a museum. However, the very notion of the forgery also provides an opportunity to reassess some core values of art history, such as authenticity and artistic originality. In this paper, I discuss the historical value of Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs. I show how these two works of art, instead of illustrating a specific moment in Clodion’s career, tell a completely different story: that of a collecting mania that flourished during the nineteenth century and that has to be assessed through a specific conceptual, historical, and artistic framework, distinct from the one that would have been relevant to discuss genuine Clodions.

What is a Forgery?

According to the philosopher Alfred Lessing, a forgery is a “moral or legal normative concept.”7 Moral because it implies deception, and legal because forgers usually face criminal charges. A forgery, indeed, is intended to deceive a potential buyer, whether it is a collector or an institution. The art historian Hans Tietze specifies that such objects are made with “the intention of passing it off as the work of a different hand or of a different period.”8 Forgeries thus differ from fakes and emulations, which are not intended to be viewed as genuine.9 A fake only becomes a forgery when it is sold as an original; otherwise, as Carolyn Embree and David Scott explain, it is only “a copy or work in the style of an artist [...].”10 As works signed “Clodion” and dated “1779” and “1778” respectively, Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs were meant to trick a potential buyer, i.e., qualify as forgeries and should be studied as such.

For the anthropologist Ross Bowden, forgeries cannot hold any cultural value in Western societies because, in addition to involving deception, they add nothing new to knowledge.11 Similarly, Hans Tietze writes: “An important factor is to be sought in the very nature of artistic activity itself. The artist is by definition the man who produces something which has not existed before, and who forces the spectator or listener to believe in his creation.”12 In contrast, according to Lessing, it does not matter whether the object a beholder is looking at is genuine or not. Historical, biographical, legal, and financial qualities are irrelevant as the value of the object resides in the aesthetic experience it offers. The aforementioned elements are mere facts that cannot be visible, in that they remain external to the aesthetic encounter with the work of art.13 Accordingly, Lessing defends critics and experts who praised pieces that were later revealed to be forgeries, as in the Van Meegeren case. In a similar spirit, the philosopher Constantine Sandis argues that the aesthetic experience of a museum visitor or art collector does not need to be approved by art experts.14 Yet other philosophers defend the notion of the original. Nelson Goodman, for instance, argues that an aesthetic difference does exist between an original work of art and its forgery. It does not matter if one cannot tell them apart at first because ultimately, differences will emerge, whether it is through mere observation or by means of scientific analysis.15 Once an object has been recognized as a forgery, it cannot be experienced aesthetically as an original can, even though both may be visually the same. Luise H. Morton and Thomas R. Foster have criticized Nelson’s arguments, claiming that they rely entirely on the functioning of the modern art world, where the aesthetic experience is privileged, therefore excluding other categories of analysis that may be important for understanding a forgery.16 Similarly, in his essay “The Problem of Perfect Fakes,” Mark Rowe argues that a work of art is more than just its visual appearance.17 Two lookalike artefacts are different from the moment they are created since they have different histories, including the history of their production. This is the lens through which Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs should be studied.

Forgers and Collecting Mania during the Nineteenth Century

In the catalogue Playing with Fire: European Terracotta Models, 1740-1840 from the eponymous exhibition that took place at the Metropolitan Museum in 2003, Guilhem Scherf claims that terracotta as an artistic medium increased in value throughout the nineteenth century in France, as exemplified by the taste of collectors such as Louis Charles Thibon (1761-1837).18 This interest grew even stronger during the Second Empire (1852-1870), on the impulse of the influential collectors Edmond (1822-1896) and Jules (1830-1870) de Goncourt (Fig. 1). The art of Louis-Félix de la Rue (1731-1765?) (Fig. 2) – a student of Lambert-Sigisbert Adam (1700-1759) as Clodion was – Pierre-François Berruer (1733-1797) (Fig. 3), and Clodion himself, spread in France. Their works decorated the interiors of the wealthy bourgeoisie who preferred light-hearted subjects modeled in clay over academic bronzes and marble reductions. 19

The exhibition catalogue Fake? The Art of Deception describes the nineteenth century as “the great age of faking.”20 This phenomenon is seen as a symptom of the “collecting mania” that characterized the period.21 Many objects from Antiquity, the Middles Ages, the Italian and Northern European Renaissance and the eighteenth century, as well as non-European objects, were forged and flooded the market because of an increasing demand on the part of the upper bourgeoisie and museums alike. For instance, an ivory head of a king, believed to be an original gothic statuette by its owner, the famous architect William Burges (1827-1881), was bought by the British Museum in 1874, and turned out to be a fraud (Fig. 4): the head emerges from an open-collar, which betrays a neo-Gothic inspiration widely popular in England during the Victorian era (1837-1901).22 The dishonest intention could also be on the dealer’s side.23 The Saïtapharnès tiara illustrates such a case (Fig. 5). Two art dealers known as the Hochman brothers commissioned a craftsman, named Rouchomowsky, a tiara in the manner of a Greek Antiquity artefact; Rouchomowsky was unaware that the dealers intended to sell it as a genuine object to the Musée du Louvre, who acquired it in 1896.24 Likewise, an Egyptian statuette made of limestone and inscribed with the name “Queen Tetisheri,” acquired by the British Museum in 1890 from the Luxor dealer Mohammed Mohassib (1843-1928), became known as one of the most important remains of Egyptian sculpture from the late seventeenth (1580 BC-1550 BC) to early eighteenth (1549/1550 BC-1292 BC) dynasties (Fig. 6). However, language inconsistencies later revealed that it was a forgery.25 These examples speak to a need, partially fulfilled by dealers and forgers, to find a balance between supply and demand at the end of the nineteenth century.26 As Aviva Briefel states, during this period, the forger, as well as the copyist, the expert, the dealer, and the restorer “emerged as concrete roles within the art world.”27 The increase of art journals and the development of the museum as a public institution gave forgers access to all the information they needed in order to create effective forgeries, including biographical details about artists from the past and visual examples of their production.28 An article from The London Times, dated February 1, 1826, even supports forgery, calling it a “mutual advantage” for the dealer and the buyer, financial for the former, prestigious for the latter, as they believe they acquired a masterpiece. Unaware of the deception, they are satisfied with their acquisition.29 Rather than a crime, the article describes forgery as a trend that was becoming a decisive part of the nineteenth-century economy of art.

Supply and Demand: Nineteenth-Century Collectors and "Clodion Mania"

“Clodion mania,” a term coined by Guilhem Scherf, is a symptom of the nineteenth-century collecting mania.30 Clodion’s own interest in commerce – the sculptor had multiple connections with dealers and amateurs who sold and bought his art – resulted in the development of a market for copies and forgeries that began at the end of the eighteenth century.31 (For more information about Clodion’s career, see Lowell Sopcisak’s timeline.) Clodion mania gained momentum in the nineteenth century through the increasing development and use of mechanical reproduction; the shifting social order which allowed more individuals, eager to demonstrate their social status, to buy works of art; and through the expansion of distribution networks for works of art.32 Clodion’s works in-the-round were imitated by sculptors such as Jean-Joseph Foucou (1739-1815), while many of his reliefs were copied by both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century workshops and manufactures. Finally, many renowned foundries and bronze dealers commercialized clodionesque subjects in the nineteenth century, including Graux-Marly, Denière, and Barbedienne, first creating marble or terracotta statuettes (Fig. 7) and then casting them in bronzes.33

Edmond de Goncourt: Shaping the Nineteenth-Century French Artistic Taste

The French novelists Edmond and Jules de Goncourt played an important role in the development of Clodion mania, as their taste for eighteenth-century French art, including the art of Clodion, permeated the collector sphere in nineteenth-century France.34 (See also Nicole Sussman’s essay on George Blumenthal, a former owner of Nymph and Two Satyrs and Satyr and Two Nymphs, as an example of a late nineteenth- early twentieth-century American collector who acquired eighteenth-century French art.) In 1881, Edmond de Goncourt published La Maison d’un artiste, in which he describes the display of his substantial art collection, specifying the works of art present in each room and commenting on their aesthetic qualities.35 Importantly for our purpose, he writes:

“The gouaches and terracottas of the eighteenth century – I once had the idea of collecting only these – are so pleasant to the eye, so stimulating to the art-lover’s daydreams, so titillating for those of delicate taste! Is it not a hint of painting, the modeling of dreams, an almost immaterial beauty?”36

La Maison d’un artiste reflects not only Edmond de Goncourt’s collecting choices, but also how he regarded art, including his own collection, as an object of aesthetic pleasure. Praising the artistic skills of numerous eighteenth-century painters and sculptors, including Clodion, he mentions several sculptures by the latter that were in his possession, such as a terracotta statuette representing a satyr and a bacchante dancing together – a subject close to the Columbia sculptures – displayed in his vestibule.37 In addition to offering a formal description of the work, the author recounts that he acquired it in an auction house where art dealers had mistaken it for a work by Michelangelo, based on its aesthetic qualities and its apparently misleading signature, “Michel.”38 The author goes on to describe the other Clodions he owned, that is, two candelabra that were placed in his dining room, as well as two terracotta vases and one statuette that were on view prominently in his Grand Salon. Edmond de Goncourt believed that no other artist than Clodion managed to create an art so well suited for apartments and living spaces, where wealthy people led a life of delight.39

Interestingly, Edmond de Goncourt was portrayed by Félix Bracquemond in a print dated 1882. The writer is represented smoking in his interior, surrounded by his collection, while a relief presumably by Clodion depicting a maenad carried by a satyr and a putto is hanging on the wall, in the background (Fig. 8). Furthermore, a photograph from July 1883 by Fernand Lochard documents the Grand Salon, featuring the two vases by Clodion on the mantelpiece, flanked by the female statuette as discussed in the book (Fig. 9).

The Goncourt brothers collected eighteenth-century engravings and bronzes, Sèvres porcelains, Clodion terracottas, Japanese kakemonos, and other objects, that they found during their strolls through art dealer shops in Paris. According to Aviva Briefel, they collected obsessively, “for the sheer pleasure of collecting.”40 This conception of collecting helped shape how upper and upper middle-class collectors lived and collected.

Conclusion

Edmond de Goncourt did not write much about authenticity, and one wonders, considering the nineteenth-century collecting mania, if his entire collection was genuine. It is likely that he was deceived at least once.41 Regardless, even if forgeries were accidentally collected by Edmond de Goncourt, his writings speak to the aesthetic pleasure that his collection offered him.

As Aviva Briefel argues, the nineteenth-century view on forgery reflects a duality of values. The increasing number of forgeries produced during this time indicates that the art market developed so fast that the balance between demand and supply was hard to achieve. At the same time, forgeries provided a solution for collectors aware of their existence, as it prompted them to restrict their consumer behavior.42 As such, forgeries were both poison and remedy.

  • 1See Thomas P. F. Hoving, “The Game of Duplicity,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin, New Series 26, no. 26 (February 1968): 241-246. Thomas Hoving (Museum executive, consultant and Director of the Metropolitan Museum from 1967 to 1977) distinguishes originals, which he praises, from their forgeries, which he devalues, based on stylistic considerations: “Contrast the vigor of the good one, on the left [the original], with the sickliness of the other [its forgery]. (Don’t hesitate to use derogatory adjectives in describing forgeries. They should not be given any sort of adulation, despite the fact that at certain times in art history people have collected forgeries for their own sake. I’m not one of that school.)” (243). He categorizes three type of forgery: the direct copy, the pastiche, and the forgery that “tries to pick up the spirit of the time” (243), hoping to give future generations of curators the keys to recognize a forgery.
  • 2Jonathan Lopez, The Man Who Made Vermeers: Unvarnishing the Legend of Master Forger Han van Meegeren (Orlando: Harcourt, 2008). Han van Meegeren was arrested and charged with fraud and abetting with Nazi officials by the Allied forces in May 1945. One of his forged Vermeers had been bought by the Nazi banker and art dealer Alois Miedl in 1942, who then gave it to Hermann Göring. Han van Meegeren, facing accusations of being a Nazi collaborator and on the verge of being sentenced to the death penalty, confessed that he had been forging Vermeer paintings for years. To prove his claim, he painted a scene representing Jesus among the Doctors in the manner of Vermeer in front of authorities and experts, who then recognized the deception. He was released in early 1946, then charged again by Dutch authorities for forgery and fraud.
  • 3See Nelson Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merill, 1968), 110; Hoving, “The Game of Duplicity,” 243; and Alfred Lessing, “What is Wrong with a Forgery?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 23, no. 4 (Summer 1965): 461-471. Hoving uses Han Van Meegeren as the best example for his third type of forgery. Indeed, Han Van Meegeren painted in the manner of Vermeer and tried to imitate his style, hence creating new paintings that would be incorporated in the corpus of Vermeer’s works (see supra footnote 1).
  • 4Aviva Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2006), 10-11. Similarly, Briefel states that several nineteenth-century critics already proposed to consider forgeries and works of art in private collections and museums as equals. An article written in 1907 and published in The Art Journal pointed that the Musée d’archéologie de Saint-Germain-en-Laye and the Conservatoire des Arts et Métiers in Paris both had a department dedicated to forgeries and suggested that museums in England should have the same policy. In her book, Briefel gives an in-depth review of the nineteenth-century forgery phenomenon. She discusses numerous nineteenth-century journal articles and literature about forgery. Her book gives the reader a broad and interesting panorama of the phenomenon. Her main thesis is about how the importance of forgery in nineteenth-century culture resulted in the construction of new social identities.
  • 5 Eric Hebborn, The Art Forger’s Handbook (London: Cassel, 1997).
  • 6Ibid., 157. “What the art historian […] attempts to do is give an appearance of order to what, in fact, never had any order. The way the art historian imposes order on to the lives and works of past artists is rather like the way the diligent gardener imposes order on his roses by tying them to a trellis: the trellis dictates the pattern of the plant’s growth.”
  • 7Lessing, “What is Wrong with a Forgery?” 464.
  • 8Hans Tietze, Genuine and False. Copies, Imitations and Forgeries (Londres: M. Parrish, 1948), 9.
  • 9David A. Scott, Art: Authenticity, Restoration, Forgery (Los Angeles: Cotsen Institute of Archaeology Press, 2016), 56 and 186. For further discussion about emulation, see Sandor Radnoti, The Fake: Forgery and its Place in Art (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 1999).
  • 10Carolyn EmBree, and David A. Scott, “The Multifarious Nature of Art Forgery in France: Four Case Studies of Belle Epoque Fakes and Forgeries,” Journal of Art Crime, no. 13 (Spring 2015): 4.
  • 11Ross Bowden, “What is Wrong with an Art Forgery?: An Anthropological Perspective,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 333-343.
  • 12 Tietze, Genuine and False. Copies, Imitations and Forgeries, 9.
  • 13Lessing, “What is Wrong with a Forgery?” 461 and 470. As Lessing argues, the aesthetic experience is “wholly autonomous.”
  • 14Constantine Sandis, “An Honest Display of Fakery: Replicas and the Role of the Museums,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 79 (2016): 244.
  • 15Luise H. Morton, and Thomas R. Foster, “Goodman, Forgery, and the Aesthetic,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 49, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 155-159. See Goodman, Languages of Art: An Approach to a Theory of Symbols.
  • 16Morton and Foster, “Goodman, Forgery, and the Aesthetic,” 158-159.
  • 17Mark Rowe, “The Problem of Perfect Fakes,” Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 71 (October 2012): 151-175; and Sandis, “An Honest Display of Fakery: Replicas and the Role of the Museums,” 241-259.
  • 18James David Draper and Guilhem Scherf, Playing with Fire. European Terracotta Models, 1740-1840 (New York: Metropolitan Museum, Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, and New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003), 7.
  • 19Ibid.
  • 20Nicolas Barker, Paul Cradock, and Mark Jones, eds., Fake? The Art of Deception (London: Trustees of the British Museum by British Museum Publications, 1990), 161-233.
  • 21 Ibid., 161.
  • 22Ibid., 182. However, Neil Stratford, curator of Medieval and Late Antiquity at the British Museum between 1975 and 1998, suggests that this statuette, which is based on the head of king Edward II of England (1284-1327) from his tomb in the choir at Gloucester Cathedral, circa 1330, may have been carved originally without the intention to deceive, but rather with the intention to be sold to the Victorian upper class as an image of a famous English king. But Burges was nonetheless convinced that it was a medieval piece when he presented it to the British institution in 1874.
  • 23Tietze, Genuine and False. Copies, Imitations and Forgeries, 9. He indeed specifies that “The author of the work or object need not always be directly involved in the fraud. His work may have been merely an innocent imitation of an admired master of style, which has subsequently been passed off by a third party as a creation of precisely that master or period.”
  • 24EmBree and Scott, “The Multifarious Nature of Art Forgery in France: Four Case Studies of Belle Epoque Fakes and Forgeries,” 6-7.
  • 25Ibid., 162.
  • 26Barker, Cradock and Jones, eds., Fake? The Art of Deception, 161.
  • 27Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, 2.
  • 28Ibid., 4.
  • 29Ibid., 7.
  • 30Guilhem Scherf, “Autour de Clodion : variations, répétitions, imitations,” Revue de l'art, no. 91 (1991): 47-59; Guilhem Scherf, “A la manière de Clodion,” in Clodion, 1738-1814, ed. Anne Poulet and Guilhem Scherf (Paris: Réunion des Musées Nationaux, 1992), 361-414.
  • 31Guilhem Scherf, “A la manière de Clodion,” 361.
  • 32Ibid., 363.
  • 33Ibid.
  • 34Edmond de Goncourt and Jules de Goncourt, L'art du XVIIIe siècle (Paris: G. Charpentier, éditeur, 1881).
  • 35Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste (Paris, 1881).
  • 36Draper and Scherf, Playing with Fire. European Terracotta Models, 1740-1840, 7, quoting Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d’un artiste, 166-167.
  • 37Edmond de Goncourt, La Maison d'un artiste (vol. 1, Dijon: L’échelle de Jacob), 12.
  • 38Ibid., 13.
  • 39Ibid., 181-182.
  • 40Briefel, The Deceivers: Art Forgery and Identity in the Nineteenth Century, 3.
  • 41Ibid., 6. For example, an anonymous dealer wrote an article in The London Times, dated December 30, 1825, in which he warned his readers about the quantity of forgeries that were then flooding England.
  • 42Ibid., 9. An article from 1879 published in the >i>Magazine of Art indicated: “It is well, perhaps, that the hope of gain which any buyer of pictures may cherish should be counteracted by a corresponding chance of loss; for he would not wish to see the spirit of commerce invading with anything like a (or another word missing?) system the realm of art.”