Mock stars

NEW YORK POST, October 14, 2025

Mock stars

The famous forgers who fooled everyone — even the experts

In the words of Cole Porter, “Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?” Art Fraud: 50 Fakes That Fooled the Art World,” the new book by Susie Hodge, will leave you wondering whether any work of art is the real McCoy. “Art fraud is rife,” Hodge begins. “Many experts believe that as much as 50 per cent of all art on the market today is forgery.”

If the 50% statistic sounds phony, you don’t know the half of it. “Art Fraud” casts a gimlet eye on the most famous forgery cases to reveal the truth behind the art world’s worst-kept secret. From the greatest experts on down to the most naïve online bidders, just about anyone can, and will at some point, be duped by the mock.

Of course, artists have always traced out the styles and techniques of others. The ancient Romans made such a business of copying Greek sculptures that scholars still cannot chisel out the source of one discus thrower from the next. Even the greatest artists played the copy game. In the Renaissance, Michelangelo passed off one of his cupids as a Roman original. Canova painted a fake self-portrait by Giorgione. And so on.

“Good artists copy; great artists steal,” said Pablo Picasso, an artist well known for taking up other artists’ innovations as his own (bonjour, Georges Braque).

The Louvre has a longstanding tradition of artists who come to copy the works on the museum’s walls. Manet even met Degas when he was copying a Velázquez painting. But there’s a difference between just duplicating a work of art and passing it off as someone else’s. At the Louvre, a copy must be stamped and cannot be created in the same size as the original. The strict French regulation tells us much about the slippery slope between copy and fraud and the latter’s temptations.

“Art Fraud” offers quick sketches of the range of famous fakers who went that extra step and succeeded in passing off their art as someone else’s, at least for a time. (Of course, it’s very possible the best of them have never been caught.) “Art Fraud” considers their various techniques and motivations — and frankly will leave you with a newfound respect for the fraudulent arts.

Often, it’s not just about the money. Ego plays a role as forgers pass off their own work as the creation of a master, whether old or modern. Sometimes forgers want to expose the art market and disrupt the way works are collected and esteemed, creating forgeries in the process that are designed to be exposed. And sometimes the forger is just another victim, paid a pittance by unscrupulous dealers to create fakes under false pretense, not even aware their creations are being used to defraud.

Alceo Dossena didn’t know dealers were passing off his recreations of Gothic and Renaissance sculpture as the real deal.

The Italian sculptor Alceo Dossena (1878-1937) was one such sad case. A student of the Old Masters, in the early 20th century he demonstrated an uncanny ability to carve sculptures in the Gothic and Renaissance style and artificially age them in a way that could fool even the top experts of his time. Two Roman dealers, Alfredo Fasoli and Romano Palesi, ordered up plenty from Dossena, convincing him he was creating work for an American church that had requested new statuary that looked old and weathered.

Carving in the styles of Simone Martini, Giovanni Pisano, Donatello, Michelangelo and Giambologna, Dossena artificially aged his creations in baths of urine. He scraped them, baked them and darkened their finishes to add 500 years of wear to order. Fasoli and Palesi paid Dossena a fraction of the millions they took in as his misattributed work made its way into the collections of Helen Clay Frick, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Louvre. Only when new X-ray technology was applied to his sculpture, revealing modern nails, did the ruse begin to come to light.

In another era, Dossena might have been hailed as an esteemed artist in his own right. “We had witnessed the reincarnation of a Renaissance master and an Attic sculptor,” said the German art historian Hans Cürlis once the deception was discovered. Alfred Frankfurter, the editor of Art News, wrote of the “quality of sincerity in Dossena, the almost incredible ability of the man to have worked without affectation and without malevolence in the spirit of the dead past and its masters.” Dossena was cleared of any crime and continued to sculpt, but few wanted his work once the world learned the artist behind it was not an Old Master but just old Alceo Dossena.

The Dutch painter Henricus “Han” van Meegeren (1889-1947) had no such illusions. The most famous faker of all, he tossed off dozens of Vermeers and other works purportedly from the Dutch Golden Age and made the equivalent of tens of millions of dollars. At one time the Dutch art expert Abraham Bredius praised the work, declaring, “It is a wonderful moment in the life of a lover of art when he finds himself suddenly confronted with a hitherto unknown painting by a great master, untouched, on the original canvas, and without any restoration — just as it left the painter’s studio. And what a picture!”

American soldiers found in a Nazi leader’s home the work “Christ and the Adulteress” — which everyone wrongly believed Vermeer painted.

As van Meegeren sourced old canvases and ground his own pigments, his work convinced even the dreaded Nazi Hermann Göring, who traded away genuine looted art for a van Meegeren fake. Only after the war, when van Meegeren faced the death penalty for despoiling Dutch heritage during Nazi occupation, did he admit to his deception. Painting a fake Vermeer in front of an audience, he proved the only loser in his deception was the dead Reichsmarschall.

Han van Meegeren paints a “Vermeer” before an audience — proving he was a forger, not a Nazi collaborator.

Through van Meegeren’s use of modern Bakelite plastic to harden his paints, subsequent false canvases continue to turn up, most recently at London’s Courtauld Institute in 2011. The case of the American forger Mark Landis (b. 1955) is particularly compelling. Never interested in money, he created fake pictures and fake personas to enjoy the attention that would be lavished on him as a museum donor. Drawing works in a matter of hours with materials purchased at Walmart, he stated, “I felt an impulse to give away pictures. I’d watched so much TV and learned about philanthropists — wealthy people who gave to others — so I gave a picture away, and I was treated with so much respect and deference and friendship. Those are things I had never experienced before. I really liked it, and I got addicted to it.”

Mark Landis quickly made copies (bottom) of famous works like Charles Courtney Curran’s “Three Women” (top).

To pass off a fake, forgers need not only period materials and a convincing style but also a plausible backstory or what the art world calls provenance. The British painter John Myatt (b. 1945) at one time advertised himself as a copyist for hire. His materials were far from historical — emulsion paint and K-Y jelly. Nevertheless, his accomplice John Drewe created convincing backstories by adding fake documents to artist archives and replacing pages in art catalogues, creating historical records for work that in fact never existed.

The most recent headline case of art fraud, involving the loss of tens of millions of dollars and shuttering of New York’s oldest art gallery, now reads like a copy of Alceo Dossena. The art dealer Glafira Rosales claimed to have discovered a trove of modern masterpieces. Her source was a mysterious “Mr. X Junior,” whose father, she said, had secretly collected the work through a gay liaison.

The reality was far more prosaic: Pei-Shen Qian, an immigrant living in Queens, unknowingly painted the abstractions in a garage to order. Like that modern nail in Dossena’s statue, an ahistorical pigment was the nail in the coffin.

Art frauds can be easy to spot in retrospect but are far more challenging in the moment. Nowadays, few would say a van Meegeren is anything but a van Meegeren. The stories in “Art Fraud” reveal how people believe what others believe. We accept labels and defer to experts. This is especially the case when there’s little to gain from exposing the lie aside from knowing the truth.

Today, as we look to a future of generative artificial intelligence and “deep fakes,” the only real certainty is the unreliability of anything we may see. Copy that.

Good on Paper

THE NEW CRITERION, March 2025

Good on paper

On “Paper, Color, Line,” at the Wadsworth Atheneum.

“Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum,” the exhibition now on view in Hartford, Connecticut, goes against every diminished expectation of what a major museum show today ought to be.1 Just consider the words in its subtitle. European? Master? Drawings? All from the museum’s permanent collection? Swish that vocabulary around your palate like you’ve just supped some pre-phylloxera wine—you probably assumed such old-vine vintages had been long since emptied from the cellars of contemporary politicized discourse. Then book yourself a train to Hartford, as I did, or drive, fly, or walk, and rejoice in the opportunity to see an exhibition whose sole purpose is to rekindle the art of close looking. Such connoisseurship informed the creation of this drawings collection a century ago. It still does today. While you are at it, stay on for the other highlights from the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, on view here in one of the country’s oldest museums, with both Old Master and modern treasures and a grand salon-style paintings hall. The leaders of this museum once envisioned the Wadsworth as a pilgrimage site for important art. It might just be that way again.

“Paper, Color, Line” is the initiative of Oliver Tostmann, the Wadsworth’s Susan Morse Hilles Curator of European Art. His exhibition of over sixty works on paper from the sixteenth through twentieth centuries, selected from the museum’s holdings of 1,250 drawings, watercolors, pastels, and collages, serves not only to put these rare sheets back on display. It also presents the opportunity for a wholesale reassessment of this overlooked aspect of the Wadsworth’s permanent collection, along with advancing the essential restoration, reconditioning, and remounting of these fragile objects. Just as important for the endurance of this project, even after this exhibition comes down, has been the production of a sizable catalogue, the Wadsworth’s first publication dedicated to its European drawings collection. The scholarly entries here are all written by Tostmann himself, unencumbered by the synthetic stuffing we might find from guest contributors. Supplementing the exhibition’s informative wall labels, his catalogue delves deep into each drawing on view as well as the history of how they all happened to end up in Hartford.

In terms of the narrative arc it traces of American museum-making, the Hartford chapter of this story can be surprisingly compelling. Founded in 1842 by Daniel Wadsworth (1771–1848) on the grounds of his family home at the center of Hartford, open to the public since 1844, the Wadsworth predates the establishment of other major East Coast art institutions by more than a generation. The Atheneum bills itself as the oldest continuously operating museum in the United States. Enlarged through the philanthropy of local Gilded Age grandees, including the Colt family and none other than John Pierpont Morgan, himself Hartford-born, this institution grew expeditiously during the early decades of the twentieth century but has struggled since. The museum’s current concatenation of architectural styles, from neo-Gothic to Beaux-Arts to International Style to bunker Brutalism, speaks to the highs and lows of its civic fortunes.

Giuseppe Cesari, called Cavaliere d’Arpino, The Discovery of Romulus and Remus, 1596, Red chalk, Charles H. Schwartz Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Drawings began entering this collection with one of Daniel Wadsworth’s earliest bequests. Tostmann introduces his survey with a pair of pastels by the British artist James Sharples of George and Martha Washington, each created circa 1798 and accessioned by the institution in 1848. (A tool of the trade, especially relevant here but useful whenever reading a wall label, is to note a work’s accession number. More often than not, the number begins with the year the work entered a collection, followed by a period and a second number indicating the order of its accession in that given year. Sharples’s George Washington and Martha Washington carry accession numbers 1848.18 and 1848.19, respectively.)

The Sharples pastels were first owned by Daniel Wadsworth’s father, Jeremiah, a sea captain and statesman who represented Connecticut in the Continental Congress and the House of Representatives. He was also a friend and confidant to George Washington. A plaque erected at the corner of the museum notes that Colonel Wadsworth entertained Washington on that spot in 1775. In 1780, Washington returned to the Wadsworth home with Lafayette, General Knox, and Governor Trumbull for their first meeting with Count Rochambeau and Admiral Verney in order to “concert joint military and naval plans.” The rest, as they say, is history. Tostmann surmises that young Daniel must have met the Father of our Country during one of Washington’s many return visits to Hartford, a fact that gives these portraits and their bequest to the new museum, founded on the very spot where Washington turned the spindle of the world, extra significance. It is interesting to note that Governor Trumbull’s son, the painter John Trumbull, became Daniel Wadsworth’s closest mentor and joined Thomas Cole and Frederic Edwin Church as his artistic advisor.

For the next eighty years, drawings entered the Wadsworth in fits and starts, including via a gift of sixty European prints and drawings in 1914 by the descendants of Cassius Welles. That all changed in 1927 with two auspicious arrivals. One was a $1.1 million bequest from the estate of Frank Sumner, a donor whose family had deep roots in Hartford, which established a significant acquisitions fund for paintings. The second was the appointment of A. Everett Austin Jr. (1900–57), the brilliant young director known as “Chick” Austin, just twenty-six years old at the time, who knew how to leverage this gift for the museum’s great benefit—and interpreted the Sumner bequest to include the acquisition of drawings as well as paintings.

Léon Bakst, Costume Design for Vaslav Nijinsky as the Faun, from “L’Apres-Midi d’un Faune,” 1912, Graphite, tempera, watercolor & gold paint on illustration board, The Ella Gallup Sumner and Mary Catlin Sumner Collection Fund, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Austin arrived as the Atheneum’s first academically trained director, having graduated from the fabled museum course offered by Edward Waldo Forbes and Paul J. Sachs at Harvard University’s Fogg Art Museum. (For more on Sachs and the story of another one of his graduates, Perry Rathbone of the Saint Louis Art Museum and the Boston mfa, see “The Boston Perry,” my review in the October 2024 issue of The New Criterion.) Tostmann credits Sachs with instilling in Austin a special appreciation for drawings, which he pursued energetically during his tenure at the Wadsworth. Such acquisitions continued after his retirement in 1944 under his immediate successor, Charles C. Cunningham, who served as director until 1966. In part, these purchases were strategic. Even with the Sumner fund, Austin could be easily outspent for top-flight oils by larger institutions. When it came to works on paper, not always by name-brand artists, he stood a fighting chance. His acquisition budget simply went further with drawings than paintings.

Beyond mere finances, however, Austin put in practice the lessons he had learned from Sachs in valuing drawings qua drawings. Sachs lectured often about the importance of drawings. He collected his thoughts in a 1951 publication called The Pocket Book of Great Drawings—tracing a line from the disegno of Giorgio Vasari to an appreciation of drawings as the locus of artistic understanding:

Drawing is, indeed, the fundamental element in all great picture making, just as grammar is at the root of all good writing. . . . A great drawing . . . instantly brings to us the thought, the emotion of the artist at the time of creation. . . . It is in his drawings that the artist makes his most spontaneous statements, and enables us to follow his thought in the very act of creation.

We can just about hear Sachs’s words in Austin’s and Cunningham’s ears as we survey the Wadsworth’s highlights, mostly presented by Tostmann chronologically by their year of creation. As quoted by Sachs, Vasari himself called drawing “the necessary beginning of everything [in art], and not having it, one has nothing.” One of the first sheets up is Vasari’s own Jupiter Sacrificing on the Island of Naxos (1557, acquired by the Wadsworth in 1948). This ethereal drawing of pen, ink, and brown-ink wash, with lead white over graphite underdrawing, “demonstrates not only Vasari’s economical and pragmatic work habits,” writes Tostmann, “but also his erudition, succinct storytelling, and technical skill.”

Giorgio Vasari, Descent from the Cross, ca. 1550, Pen, ink wash & chalk on paper, Purchase through the gift of James Junius Goodwin, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

In acquiring both drawings and paintings, Austin largely looked beyond the household names of the High Renaissance to the art of the Baroque, which he championed much as Sachs had done. The Holy Family (ca. 1760, acquired 1930) by Giovanni Battista (Giambattista) Tiepolo, depicts a tender embrace in a liquid sheet of rippling line. “In all of his prolific work,” Sachs said of Tiepolo, “we delight in the illusion of Italian sunlight which suffused his rapid sketches as it does his vast compositions. . . . The light beloved of all Venetians shines on his pages with a brilliant whiteness.” In this deft work of pen and brown ink with gray wash, the untouched areas of cream paper are allowed to shine with their own light of the world.

Another highlight of highlights here is Honoré Daumier’s The Departure of the Clowns (Le déplacement des saltimbanques) (ca. 1866–67, acquired 1928). Austin spent far more on this drawing, $16,000, than he would even on drawings by Cézanne or Renoir—no doubt again encouraged by Sachs. “No man who ever lived was more of a translator of life into contemporary, everyday terms by means of masterly drawing,” Sachs wrote of the illustrative Daumier:

His ability to depict through facial expression—punctuated by the emphasis of gesture—fleeting and conflicting human emotions is unequalled. In the whole field of art there are no finer examples than those by Daumier of drawing from memory.

Austin and Cunningham are not the only ones to thank for establishing this farsighted drawings collection—which includes outstanding works by Karl Friedrich Schinkel, Gustave Courbet, Gustave Doré, Edgar Degas, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Egon Schiele, Paul Klee, Joan Miró, Henry Moore, and the Leipzig School’s Werner Tübke, as well as an essential suite of designs for the Ballets Russes by Léon Bakst, Natalia Goncharova, and Mikhail Larionov. A stunning Ingres, the Portrait of the Architect Louis-Pierre Haudebourt (ca. 1814–18), is not an Austin acquisition at all but a 2023 bequest by Susannah Shickman that would have no doubt pleased both Austin and Sachs. In this dashing portrait—“animated by the contrast between Haudebourt’s highly finished face and the loosely sketched body,” says Tostmann—we readily appreciate what Sachs called Ingres’ “accounts of the outer rather than the inner man.” Ingres, Sachs continued, displays a

rare combination of subtle intuition, skillfully minute delineation, and fidelity to appearance which gives his drawings their special character and charm—a charm not unlike that of the characters in the novels of Jane Austen.

The Ingres acquisition reminds us that drawings continue to be an active interest at the Wadsworth. A Helmeted Warrior with Two Separate Studies of His Head, and Two Other Studies (ca. 1645, acquired 2024), a sketch by Giovanni Francesco Barbieri, called Il Guercino, appeared just a year ago on the Upper East Side wall of Nicholas Hall and W. M. Brady & Co during Master Drawings New York, a part of the city’s essential week for Old Master dealers (see my “Brown in town” in the March 2024 issue of The New Criterion). Such ongoing Old Master acquisitions speak to the continued foresight of the Wadsworth in not simply going in for the latest contemporary bauble, as well as the cultural value of a healthy marketplace for art.

Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres, Portrait of Louis-Pierre Haudebourt, Pencil on paper, Bequest of Susannah Shickman, Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford.

Just a final note for when you arrive in Hartford: the display of these drawings could look better. Spanning the walls of a bright-yellow room, with landlord paint covering the electrical outlets, the linear arrangement does not reward visitors as much as it should or help them slow down for the careful viewing these works deserve. Drawings are best presented in domestic scale, with alcoves and seats to aid in their unfolding discovery. When Austin inaugurated his Avery Memorial wing at the Wadsworth in 1934, he installed a drawings center right on the ground floor, with desk and chairs available for close study. These rooms were torn out in the 1970s at a time when the Wadsworth had tossed aside its entire interest in collecting European works on paper. With that interest rekindled today, why not bring these rooms back? This is the ultimate hope for “Paper, Color, Line”—that an essential line of inquiry has now been drawn from the connoisseurship of Sachs and Austin to the museum world of today and beyond.

1. “Paper, Color, Line: European Master Drawings from the Wadsworth Atheneum” opened at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, on January 16 and remains on view through April 27, 2025. 

A Lion in Zion

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2024

A lion in Zion

On “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York.

The raid on the town can only be described as an atrocity. Terrorists from across the border descended on the remote village and quickly overran its defenses. Trained and supported by a hostile state, which had planned the attack as part of a larger proxy war, tribal mercenaries went door to door “with horrid shouting and yelling,” according to one eyewitness account, “like a flood upon us.”

Over the course of the day, the attackers brutalized and murdered as many residents as they could find. They bludgeoned and burned the townspeople in their homes. People of all races and backgrounds fell victim to the assault. Anyone the terrorists could not round up to take back across the border as either a hostage or domestic slave was slaughtered. Women and infants, along with the infirm, were specifically targeted.

By the next day, ten men, nine women, and twenty-five children lay dead out of a population of 291, with more than a hundred people taken hostage. Nearly half the town was reduced to ashes as the attackers looted what remained. Even if they survived the initial onslaught, husbands and fathers had to watch as their wives and children were slain for not keeping pace on the forced march back to enemy territory.

Meanwhile, those who survived back home attempted to raise the funds to pay the kidnappers for the return of their kin—often in vain. Negotiations dragged on for years while the participants in the raiding party fought over the booty. Hostages had to renounce their faith as they were forced to live with their attackers. Half the captives never made it home. Eventually, one survivor gave witness to the massacre in a book that galvanized public opinion. Its title was The Redeemed Captive Returning to Zion.

The Deerfield Massacre of February 29, 1704, described above, is a reminder of the brutalities Americans endured in the creation of what became the United States. The attack on a remote village in the Connecticut River Valley by Mohawk Indians and their allies, crossing the border from Canada along with their French enablers, was just one episode in what historians know as Queen Anne’s War (1702–13), part of the greater War of the Spanish Succession.

Nation-building is a difficult business. Often the outsize burden of cultivating a wilderness and taming a border can only be endured through faith. America’s early settlers, persecuted across the Atlantic, found power in their belief in the City upon a Hill, in creating the New Jerusalem that would become their Manifest Destiny. Some three centuries on, a similar faith in a Promised Land, a Zion, inspired Theodor Herzl (1860–1904) to envision what became, just a few decades after his death at age forty-four, the modern State of Israel.

A small but potent exhibition now on view at New York’s Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica called “All About Herzl” delivers on its promise to reveal this latter-day nation-builder through primary documents and the iconography that came to surround him.1 Drawing on the Central Zionist Archives of the World Zionist Organization (here mostly in facsimile) and the David Matlow Collection of (original) Herzl memorabilia, the fascinating exhibition curated by Warren Klein presents the Zionist behind Zion and the cultural artifacts he and others deployed to inspire Israel’s creation.

A delegate card from the First Zionist Congress in Basel in 1897, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

The exhibition begins on East Sixty-fifth Street, where a banner for the show depicts Herzl in profile, hands clasped together beneath his Assyrian beard, leaning over a railing and gazing out at the Fifth Avenue façade of Temple Emanu-El and the Brooklyn Bridge. As with much Herzl iconography, this image represents a wishful concatenation. Herzl never visited the United States. The picture is rather a combination of Ephraim Moses Lilien’s 1901 photograph of Herzl overlooking the Rhine from his hotel balcony in Basel, Switzerland, taken as he attended the fifth Zionist Congress, with modern images of New York. For the exhibition-goer, a further opportunity to be seen in Herzl’s shadow continues just inside the lobby. Here visitors can stand beside a life-size statue of Herzl, arms folded, positioned in front of a backdrop of a Zionist Congress.

Trigger warning! These early chances to see yourself beside the founding father of the State of Israel, even the option to take a selfie with him, reveal a show that is unabashedly pro-Herzl, pro-Zionist, and upbeat about his nationalist vision. Like the energized state he inspired, Herzl understood the joys that could be released from Jewish sorrow, a fact reflected in the show’s sometimes lighthearted application of Herzl-iana. The mascot for David Matlow’s own “Herzl Project,” for example, based in Toronto, Canada, and established “to inspire people to be a little like Herzl and pursue their dreams,” is a Herzl-faced hockey player. At a moment when Israel’s frontiers are under vicious assault and cosplaying Mohawks are attacking America through its ally, the absence of doubt here for Herzl’s vision is refreshing. For those looking for a counterpoint, there is always Columbia University.

Whatever else you think of him, Theodor Herzl must be the most consequential theater critic in modern history. The Austrian-born playwright went from working as a cultural correspondent in Paris to inspiring what has become a nuclear-armed state. In the final eight years of his life, Herzl foresaw the descent of liberal Western Europe into barbarism as well as his own reburial in his future nation (by design, he was initially interred in Vienna in a transportable metal casket).

Herzl identified the mechanisms to turn his vision into a groundswell and to set its gears in motion. He mapped out a state that would serve as a beacon and bulwark for the region. In his utopian novel of 1902, Altneuland (The Old New Land), he envisioned a desert transformed into a Jewish metropolis. One translation of this book’s title provided the name for the city of Tel Aviv.

Herzl was not your obvious nation-builder. Born into an affluent, assimilated Jewish family in what is now Budapest, he attended a Protestant high school, where he studied German literature and poetry and at first looked down on “shameful Jewish characteristics.” The exhibition includes such artifacts as Herzl’s second-grade report card (in facsimile, ca. 1867) from the Israelitische Hauptschule Pest along with a rare photograph of him clean-shaven (ca. 1880).

When his family relocated to Vienna, Herzl joined a German nationalist fraternity and remained a member despite its growing anti-Semitism. In 1891, he moved to Paris as a correspondent for Vienna’s Neue Freie Presse at a moment of populist turmoil in the French Third Republic. Three years later, anti-Jewish sentiment came to a head in the trial of Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish artillery officer falsely accused of spying for the German Empire. The exhibition contains several illustrations from this trial and the subsequent degradation ceremony that divided French opinion. If liberal Western Europe could turn so fiercely against its Jews, Herzl reasoned, no amount of assimilation would solve what he called the “Jewish problem.” The only solution, he argued, could be found in the title of his 1896 manifesto, Der Judenstaat (The Jewish State). Several editions, including English, Spanish, Hungarian, Yiddish, Polish, and Arabic translations, are here on display.

A bust of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

Calling in his preface for the “restoration of the Jewish State,” Herzl maintains that the “world resounds with outcries against the Jews, and these outcries have awakened the slumbering idea.” The “misery of the Jews,” he continues, can be turned into a new nation’s “propelling force.” History has shown that “the absorption of Jews by means of their prosperity is unlikely to occur,” since the hatred directed at them by their host nations—of “vulgar sport, of common trade jealousy, of inherited prejudice, of religious intolerance, and also of pretended self-defense”—is a “remnant of the Middle Ages, which civilized nations do not even yet seem able to shake off, try as they will.” In fact, the “longer Anti-Semitism lies in abeyance the more fiercely will it break out,” Herzl continues, since the “world is provoked somehow by our prosperity, because it has for many centuries been accustomed to consider us as the most contemptible among the poverty-stricken.” On the question of where this new Jewish state should be established, in one famous passage, Herzl weighs the two areas of recent settlement—“Palestine and Argentine:”

Palestine is our ever-memorable historic home. The very name of Palestine would attract our people with a force of marvelous potency. If His Majesty the Sultan were to give us Palestine, we could in return undertake to regulate the whole finances of Turkey. We should there form a portion of a rampart of Europe against Asia, an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism.

Driven by necessity, Herzl concludes that the “Jewish question is no more a social than a religious one, notwithstanding that it sometimes takes these and other forms. It is a national question, which can only be solved by making it a political world-question.”

By expanding Judaism from a shared ancestry and religion into a “political world-question,” Herzl found his earliest critics in assimilated Jews. They saw his Zionist call (a term he did not invent but deployed in a new way) as unnecessarily tendentious. At the same time, many orthodox observers believed that only Hashem, and not man, should aspire to return the Jews to Jerusalem (a handful of their descendants can today be seen joining the campus Hamas-niks). It was in the unreformed East, where Jews lived with no pretense of assimilation, that Herzl found his most fervent believers and the misery to shape his nation’s “propelling force.”

A bas-relief portrait of Theodor Herzl, Collection of David Matlow, Toronto. Photo: Kevin Viner.

As Herzl devotes much of his book to the mechanics of nation-building—the handling and reselling of assets, the corporate and social entities that must be created, the use of negotiorum gestio, that “noble masterpiece . . . the Romans, with their marvelous sense of justice, produced”—The Jewish State can be a dry read. Yet the manifesto’s arid structure proved to be the kindling that ignited the movement.

As Herzl traveled to Constantinople to negotiate (unsuccessfully) for a parcel from the Ottoman sultan, his followers flocked to see him at the rail stops. Zionist chapters formed in cities across Europe and (to a lesser extent, at first) America. With the paintings, posters, photographs, pamphlets, books, medals, and statues that came to represent him, “All About Herzl” picks up with the abundant memorabilia produced around the early meetings of the Zionist Congress, the annual black-tie affairs that Herzl produced with enough pomp and circumstance to make his vision a reality. “If you will it, it is no dream,” he proselytized. The second Zionist Congress created the Jewish Colonial Trust and its Anglo-Palestine Bank, which went on to become Israel’s Bank Leumi. The fifth Zionist Congress created the Jewish National Fund for the purchase of land, with the suggestion (made by a Galician bank clerk) that a collection box be placed in every Jewish home.

Herzl gave his life for his cause, dying from the fevered urgency of his dream. In death he became a political martyr, his image an icon, as represented in the exhibition’s final, salon-style hanging of twentieth-century depictions of him, which are inventively varied. In a Rudi Weissenstein photograph from Tel Aviv in 1949, a year after Israel’s founding, we see Herzl’s casket lying in state before its reinterment in Jerusalem—another redeemed captive returning to Zion.

1. “All About Herzl: The Exhibition” opened at the Temple Emanu-El Bernard Museum of Judaica, New York, on September 17, 2024, and remains on view through January 23, 2025. ↩