FORGERY

in law, making of a false writing with an intent to defraud. Writing, to be forgery, must either have legal significance or be commonly relied upon in business transactions. It need not be handwriting; the law of forgery covers printing, engraving, and typewriting as well. In most jurisdictions, however, writing excludes objects such as works of art, which when misrepresented are legally considered to be falsifications or frauds. Checks, negotiable instruments, contracts, wills, and deeds are examples of documents that may be forged. But forgery also encompasses some documents that have no legal efficacy but are commonly relied upon in the business world, such as a false letter of recommendation for employment. The forger may begin with an entirely blank piece of paper, with an incomplete genuine instrument with blanks to be filled, or with a complete genuine instrument that may be altered. The usual manner of forging is to prepare a false writing and sign another's name to it or to make a material alteration to a valid writing already signed by another. But a writing that contains false statements is not necessarily the false-writing that forgery requires. A check drawn on a bank wherein the drawer has no funds is not a forgery even though the drawer implies that he has funds there, but it is a genuine writing containing lies; the crime, therefore, is that of obtaining property by false pretenses. It is not forgery to sign another's name or to fill in blanks or alter a genuine writing in the honest, though mistaken, belief that such conduct is authorized. There must be fraudulent intent. If such intent is present, there is forgery even if no one is actually defrauded by the false document. One who does not himself forge an instrument may be guilty of the related crime of uttering a forged instrument, that is, the offering as genuine of a writing that the offender knows to be falsedone with intent to defraud. Some modern statutes include this crime with forgery. See also counterfeiting. in art, a work of literature, painting, sculpture, or objet d'art that purports to be the work of someone other than its true maker. The range of forgeries extends from misrepresentation of a genuine work of art to the outright counterfeiting of a work or style of an artist. Forgery must be distinguished from copies produced with no intent to deceive. The most common type of fraudulence in art is forgerymaking a work or offering one for sale with the intent to defraud, usually by falsely attributing it to an artist whose works command high prices. Other fraudulent practices include plagiarism, the false presentation of another's work as one's own, and piracy, the unauthorized use of someone else's work, such as the publication of a book without permission of the author; both practices are generally in violation of copyright laws. Forgery most often occurs with works of painting, sculpture, decorative art, and literature; less often with music. Plagiarism is more difficult to prove as fraud, since the possibility of coincidence must be weighed against evidence of stealing. Piracy is more often a business than an artistic fraud; it frequently occurs in the publication of editions of foreign books in countries that have no copyright agreement with the nation in which the work was copyrighted. A stage production, the reproduction of a painting, the performance of a musical composition, and analogous practices of other kinds of works without authorization and royalty payments also fall into this category. The fundamental consideration in determining forgery is intent to deceive. The act of copying a painting or other work of art is in itself not forgery, nor is the creation of a work in the style of a recognized painter, composer, or writer or of a particular historical period. Forgery may be the act not of the creator himself but of the dealer who adds a fraudulent signature or in some way alters the appearance of a painting or manuscript. Restoration of a damaged painting or manuscript, however, is not considered forgery even if the restorer in his work creates a significant part of the total work. Misattributions may result either from honest errors in scholarshipas in the attribution of a work to a well-known artist when the work was in fact done by a painter in his workshop, a pupil, or a later followeror from a deliberate fraud. Excluded from the category of literary forgeries is the copy made in good faith for purposes of study. In the matter of autographs, manuscripts in the handwriting of their authors, forgeries must be distinguished from facsimiles, copies made by lithography or other reproductive processes. Some early editions of Byron's work, for example, contained a facsimile of an autograph letter of the poet. If such facsimiles are detached from the volumes that they were intended to illustrate, they may deceive the unwary. The commonest motivation for fraudulence is monetary gain. Fraudulence is most likely to occur when the demand for a certain kind of work coincides with scarcity and thus raises the market prices. Unprincipled dealers have encouraged technically skilled artists to create forgeries, occasionally guiding them to supply the precise demands of collectors or museums. This is by no means a modern phenomenon: in the 1st and 2nd centuries AD, sculptors working in Rome made replicas of Grecian works to satisfy the demands for the greatly admired Grecian sculpture of the preceding five centuries. These copies or adaptations apparently were not offered as contemporary work but as booty from Greece at the extraordinarily high prices paid for such works in imperial Rome. Similar circumstances may account for the discovery of a manuscript or autograph by a dead author or composer, although many such finds are quite legitimate and have been authenticated. The history of the arts reveals instances of persons who have used forgery either to gain recognition of their own craftsmanship or to enjoy deceiving the critics who had rejected their genuine work. A legend told about Michelangelo illustrates this point. At the age of 21, he carved in marble a small sleeping Eros, or Cupid, based on ancient Roman works that he admired. Some time later this carving was sold as an antique to the well-known collector Cardinal Riario, who prized it highly. When Michelangelo stepped forward and claimed the work as his own he won immediate fame as a young man who could rival the work of the greatly venerated ancient sculptors. Two further motivations behind forgery must be noted: forged documents have been produced from time to time to exalt or malign some religion, political party, or race; and forgeries are sometimes created as a hoax. Some hoaxes are intended to confound or ridicule the experts; others are intended to parody or burlesque an artist or genre. There are basically three methods of producing a forgery: by an exact copy, by a composite of parts, and by a work done in the style of an artist or period and given a deliberately false attribution. These methods apply most directly to the visual arts but can be discerned in literature and music as well. The Editors of the Encyclopdia Britannica in art, a painting, sculpture, or objet d'art that purports to be the work of someone other than its true maker. The range of forgeries extends from misrepresentation of a genuine work of art to the outright counterfeiting of a work or style of an artist. Forgery must also be distinguished from copies produced with no intent to deceive. Art forgeries have existed as long as there has been a market for art, and during those millennia many means for counterfeiting art have arisen. The work of a minor artist, for example, may be altered to pass for the work of a master. Alternatively the forger may paint a scene on old material, thereby lending credibility to any claim of extreme age. Even more confusing are forgeries and copies coeval with the original work. Such objects show the results of natural aging processes and must be detected by connoisseurship instead of by technical means. Forgeries made long after the original, however, often betray their age through anachronisms in costumes, composition, iconography, technique, or materials. The last two variables named enable the investigator to detect a fraudulent work with a large arsenal of technical facilities, including chemical analysis, microscopy, radiography, and X-ray, infrared, and ultraviolet photography. Such techniques are effective in analyzing paintings with their relatively large number of different materials. Technical analysis, however, is of little use on stone sculpture, unless it is polychromed, because the work consists entirely of chemically inert, homogeneous material. Forgers sometimes parade their work as an extreme rarity, such as an unknown painting whose existence is suspected from historical evidence, hoping to deceive even connoisseurs through lack of comparable material. More often, however, a forger will mimic the popular, easily recognizable styles of such artists as El Greco, Vincent van Gogh, or Amedeo Modigliani because a novice buyer often shows more enthusiasm than prudence. Such tactics are so successful that there are now more fake paintings attributed to the French artist Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot than there are genuine ones. Prospective buyers should note that a signature on a work of art is no guarantee of authenticity. Indeed, forgeries almost never lack a signature, while genuine articles sometimes do. Nor is the authenticity of a signature a proper guide, because many genuine masterpieces have the correct signature forged at a later date. Great care should be taken to ascertain a work's provenance, although many forgeries are also accompanied by forged documentation. A suspicious work should be accepted as genuine only after research confirms its authenticity. Additional reading Literary forgery J.A. Farrer, Literary Forgeries (1907, reprinted 1969), provides a good introduction, which may be supplemented by H.T.F. Rhodes, The Craft of Forgery (1934); and S. Cole, Counterfeit (1955). For individual forgers and forgeries, see E.H.W. Meyerstein, A Life of Thomas Chatterton (1930); T.G. Ehrsam, Major Byron (1951); A.N.L. Munby, Phillipps Studies, vol. 4 (1956), on Constantine Simonides; and B.A. Morrissette, The Great Rimbaud Forgery (1956). E.J. Goodspeed, Modern Apocrypha (1956), gives an authoritative account of modern forgeries of Christian writings. On medieval forgeries, see the classic essay by T.F. Tout, Medieval Forgers and Forgeries, John Rylands Library Bulletin, 5:208234 (1919); and for an example of forged charters, R.W. Southern, The Canterbury Forgeries, English Historical Review, 73:193226 (1958). On the detection of forgeries see W.R. Harrison, Suspect Documents: Their Scientific Examination (1958), and Forgery Detection: A Practical Guide (1964); and J.V.P. Conway, Evidential Documents (1959). Forgery in the visual arts Sepp Schuller, Flscher, Hndler und Experten (1959; Eng. trans., Forgers, Dealers, Experts, 1960); and Heinrich Schmitt (pseudonym Frank Arnau), Kunst der Flscher, Flscher der Kunst (1959; Eng. trans., Three Thousand Years of Deception in Arts and Antiques, 1961), are both standard anthologies. Dietrich Von Bothmer and Joseph V. Noble, An Inquiry into the Forgery of the Etruscan Terracotta Warriors in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (1961), is the exhaustive technical and art historical study of an important group of clever forgeries. A similar article is Joseph V. Noble, The Forgery of Our Greek Bronze Horse, Bulletin of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 26:253256 (1968). Stories of frauds told from the viewpoint of the forgers are given in Lawrence Jeppson, The Fabulous Frauds (1970). Joseph Veach Noble Gerald Bonner