The art world wants to be deceived.

That is certainly the conclusion one comes away with after reading A Real Van Gogh, Henk Tromp’s thoroughly researched, highly readable, fascinating new book, which uses the history of van Gogh authenticity and forgery debates to discuss what happens in the art world when someone cries wolf. It is not a pretty picture for the expert who deigns to proclaim a work inauthentic.

Tromp’s book does an admirable job of balancing a text that is rigorous in its academic research (use of primary source documents, copious citations, application of methodologies), with a gripping narrative. The book’s core involves a series of lawsuits, some of which turned into real courtroom dramas, surrounding the authenticity of works by van Gogh. It is more common to hear about contemporary cases in which the authenticity of ancient or Old Master works are in question. But it is interesting to find the debate about van Gogh raging a mere three decades after his death, in 1890. The central figures in this story are a series of experts and connoisseurs—which are now becoming somewhat dated terms. Scientific analysis and provenance research are the preferred means of authenticating; however, personal expertise maintains a strong, pseudo-mystical foothold in the art world, even today.

The issue of the art world’s refusal to accept bad news from experts, and the rivalry among experts within the battles to authenticate the work of van Gogh, form the core of Tromp’s excellent book. The most famous case involves the trial of Otto Wacker, who claimed to be the dealer for a Russian who escaped the Communists and needed to sell his collection of thirty-plus van Goghs to save his family. Wacker refused to reveal the name of this Russian, who quite obviously did not exist. Wacker was brought to trial for fraud, falsification of documents, and breach of contract when a number of the buyers of his “van Goghs” learned from experts that they were fakes.

The resulting trial was a showcase of expert versus expert. Tromp’s protagonist is Jacob Baart de la Faille, author of the first major catalogue raisonné of van Gogh’s work. But de la Faille wound up vacillating, changing his mind about the authenticity of the Wacker van Goghs five different times. His rival was H. P. Bremmer, a pompous, condescending, and self-important art expert who once said of an Odilon Redon drawing that even if Redon himself declared the drawing one of his best, Bremmer would still know that it was a fake, because declaring authenticity was Bremmer’s job, not the artist’s.

The 1932 Wacker trial may be the result of the first police investigation of a suspected forger in the modern era. The police discovered that Wacker’s brother, Leonhard, was the forger—unfinished “van Goghs” were found in his studio, and it was later learnt that Otto and Leonhard’s father, Hans Wacker, had been an Old Master forger. Otto was sentenced to a year in prison, appealed, and to his dismay found his sentence raised to a year and seven months.

Tromp emphasizes the damage that can come from even the suspicion of inauthenticity in personal, financial, and collective national cultural spheres. On the one hand Tromp shows the collector Chester Dale stubbornly insisting, in spite of all the contrary evidence, that a painting he had purchased is a van Gogh, saying: “I know of course that this is a controversial painting, but as long as I am alive, it will be genuine.” But nations grapple with the subject, as well. William Goetz, the U.S. head of Universal Studios, bought Study with Candlelight, a newly discovered work that de la Faille championed as a van Gogh masterpiece, but which was considered a fake by Willem Sandberg, director of Amsterdam’s Stedelijk Museum. Goetz was enraged and immediately sent his lawyer to Amsterdam, demanding expert examination of the painting and a symbolic payment of ten cents for libel damages. The city of Amsterdam, which runs the Stedelijk, steadfastly refused to participate in the discussion, stating that this was a matter of personal opinion between Sandberg and Goetz. The city feared a souring of Dutch/American relations, which threatened to scupper a proposed blockbuster van Gogh monograph exhibition that was planned to tour the United States. In the process of this debate, the press declared Sandberg a Communist for deigning to denounce a work in a U.S. collection. The Dutch government asked Sandberg to keep his opinions to himself for the sake of international relations. From a personal to a national level, the unspoken rule of the art trade is the same: in questions of authenticity, one should remain noncommittal.

In the end, Dale chose to believe that his van Gogh was authentic. He also hid scientific evidence and falsified provenance in order to trick the National Gallery in Washington, DC, into accepting and displaying his fake. Goetz bullied with threatened lawsuits and political power plays until the nay-sayers felt compelled to hush up. Bremmer was so confident in his own abilities that he would overturn the pronouncement of an artist about the artist’s own work. And Wacker so fervently argued his innocence in the blatant forgery sales for which he was tried that he seemed to have convinced himself that he was guiltless.

The moral: keep your mouth shut and will every questionable artwork to be legitimate. If everyone believes it is legitimate, whether it is or not, it is.

Continuing the theme of forgery versus homage, Lisa Pon offers an intriguing set of Renaissance examples in her excellent Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi: Copying and the Italian Renaissance Print. Pon focuses on the numerous prints made by the Venetian-based Raimondi, after woodcuts by Dürer (very much without the sanction of the artist), and after paintings by Raphael, in a far less problematic relationship.

It is thanks to Raimondi’s prints after Raphael that Raphael’s reputation grew and flourished across Europe. The two artists collaborated, a master printer and a master painter. Pon develops their relationship well, showing what it meant to painters to have prints made of their work—one might think of a parallel in translations of a novel from its native language (Italian, for instance) into a single language that all the world can read (perhaps English), resulting in an expansion of the original author’s recognition. Pon does well to draw parallels between translating and printmaking from another author’s work, since in both processes there is an inevitable degree of alteration. Some changes are made that can be attributed to the printmaker, even if she or he is trying to be true to the original. In Raphael’s case, they were generally with his blessing. But the far more interesting case is with Raimondi’s alleged forgeries of Dürer woodcuts.

In 1506 Dürer was already arguably the most famous artist in Europe thanks to his paintings and his masterful prints which circulated around the princely courts, disseminating his genius in a portable, affordable medium. One of his prints from the original 1502 Life of the Virgin series was sent to him from Venice. He discovered that it was nearly identical—but it was not his handiwork. Thus began what can only be described as a crusade on the part of Dürer to stamp out forgeries of his work. Dürer’s name, monogram, and prints were of such renown throughout Europe that as early as 1494 at least six different printmakers were producing copies of Dürer prints and selling them as originals. Dürer was determined to fight to protect his name and his work from piracy. He would bring what might be considered the first Intellectual Properties lawsuits in the arts—first against a madman in his native Nuremberg, who was doodling nonsense onto canvas and selling it in front of the town hall as Dürer paintings, and then, in 1506, when a more serious case was held in Venice.

Without giving away too much of what makes for quite a spellbinding plot, Raimondi had made a series of identical copies of Dürer’s prints, including Dürer’s trademark AD signature, but also with three alterations, including the addition of Raimondi’s own monogram (modeled on Dürer’s). They were not, therefore, identical copies but it seems that the dal Jesus family, which commissioned and sold Raimondi’s prints, may have been selling the prints as Dürer originals, which were obviously far more valuable than copies after Dürer.

The lawsuit in Venice ended unsatisfactorily for Dürer: it was declared that the copies were not identical and that Dürer should be flattered that there were those who thought his work good enough to warranting copying. But Raimondi and dal Jesus would have to remove the AD trademark, and would not be permitted to sell the prints as Dürer originals. Dürer stormed back to Nuremberg, and—in time for a second printing of his Life of the Virgin—he added what may be the world’s most cantankerous copyright warning, in which he threatens bodily harm to anyone who forges his works.

Using the examples of Raimondi’s prints after Dürer and Raphael, Pon’s book seeks to define authenticity in the culture of art studios. She shows how the signature of an artist, or monogram in the days before signatures regularly featured, was a sign that the artist was personally present during the creation of the work, and that this would later morph into a “brand” name. Prints, however, were traditionally signed by both the artist (the designer of the print or of the work on which it was based) and the printmaker. This was an unusual display of overt collaboration.

So, one might argue, by retaining the AD monogram but also adding his own, Raimondi was crediting Dürer with the invention of the print, and crediting himself with a non-mechanical reproduction of it. But that AD led buyers to believe that it was by Dürer’s hand, and therefore it could sell for far more—hence the lawsuit.

Pon’s well-researched and clearly written book is a nice complement to Tromp’s A Real Van Gogh in that it shows how issues of authenticity extend throughout the history of art. Her tales of Renaissance copying versus forgery are good points of departure not just for art-historical discussions, but also for legal ones, especially if Intellectual Property as a field of law has its origins, for the visual arts at least, in the trial of Dürer versus Raimondi.

The points made by Tromp and Pons are useful even today, as seen by the rigorous scientific treatise on the forensic investigation of copies and forgeries by Paul Craddock of the British Museum. Nevertheless, Scientific Investigation of Copies, Fakes, and Forgeries is a mammoth book, and should be considered in a distinct category from the other two in this review. Lay readers, with little or no art-historical background, can open and enjoy Tromp’s A Real Van Gogh; its lucid, entertaining narrative contains all that one needs in order to grasp the series of legal battles it presents. While Pon’s Raphael, Dürer, and Marcantonio Raimondi is geared toward art historians, it is likewise easy to follow, though it is not a page-turner like Tromp’s book, nor does it attempt to be. Craddock’s treatise on scientific approaches to examining copies, fakes, and forgeries is written for fellow scientists and conservators, and those are the only readers who will really be able to follow its contents. The book is almost alone in its field, for while there are similar scientific essays in academic journals and in catalogues raisonée, there are very few books that specifically deal with forgery, and fewer still that look at the science of it. Most conservation manuals are about authentication, whereas Craddock approaches the same field from the opposite side.

The book is timely, because shortly before it was published (and almost certainly while Craddock was compiling it), the British Museum became a high-profile victim of the most diversely successful art forger in history, Shaun Greenhalgh. They were not alone: for seventeen years Greenhalgh and his family fooled everyone from Sotheby’s to the Ashmolean Museum to the Art Fund with an astonishing array of forgeries, brilliantly linked to authentic provenance, from ancient Egyptian sculpture to twentieth-century works, from watercolors to coins, to busts, to scientific equipment.

The British Museum was fooled, but they also had the last laugh. It was thanks to a curator there that Greenhalgh was finally caught and arrested by Scotland Yard. Greenhalgh’s father was trying to get the British Museum to authenticate one of his son’s forged relief sculptures, meant to be seventh-century Assyrian. They would have gotten away with it, but the son had misspelled a word carved on the relief in cuneiform.

Craddock’s book explains the science as clearly as is perhaps possible, but it still results in a text that is best suited to conservators, forensic scientists, and others of a similar training or persuasion. It is both useful and admirable that someone from an institution like the British Museum, which has occasionally been victimized by forgers, should take the lessons learned and compile them in order to stop future forgers from getting away with their crimes too easily. Lay readers will be bogged down, and the numerous illustrations and diagrams are for the serious student of art crime only. That is not meant as a criticism, merely as a guide for potential buyers. Every museum in the world would do well to have a copy of Craddock’s book in their Conservation department, but it is not ideally suited for the bedside table.