When we think of forgeries we think of paintings, not least due to the great forgery scandals of the last few decades (Knoedler, Beltracchi). But if we take a look at museum archives, they reveal an entirely different picture: a wide range of forged art objects, from aquamanilia to relics, occupied museum people in the early twentieth century. In 1898, they founded an association to combat forgeries and swapped photos and texts about current forgeries. Parts of the association’s archives can be accessed digitally. The texts printed internally and the comprehensive register make it easy to research the extensive material. This seminar will look at the history of the fight against forgeries in museums. We will take the various genres and epochs of forgeries in the digitalized archive as a starting point in order to come up with our own case studies.
Archive des Aussortierten. Fälschungen im Museum (Archives of the Discarded: Forgeries in the Museum)
Master’s seminar for Art Studies students being held by Dr. Lukas Fuchsgruber at the TU Berlin