Churchill's Chutzpah

NEW YORK POST, October 26, 2025

Churchill’s Chutzpah

Royal biographer Andrew Morton sizes up the America-loving icon

Not just any biographer gets portrayed in a Netflix series. But Andrew Morton is no ordinary biographer.

Morton released “Diana: Her True Story” in 1992. The source of his blockbuster biography was the princess herself, a fact Morton only revealed after Diana’s death. The details of those melancholy interviews, recorded secretly on cassette tape, appeared in the fifth season of “The Crown.”

“In a funny kind of way, the actual buildup to the Diana book was more dramatic than they portrayed it,” Morton tells The Post. “We swept the room for bugs. There was a lot of counterintelligence work going on there.”

Morton is in New York for the launch of “Winston and the Windsors: How Churchill Shaped a Royal Dynasty,” his latest book on the royal family. As he marks the publication of his 25th biography, Morton is soft-spoken as he enters the grand library of the gilded-age clubhouse where he has just given a reading. It could be the memory of bugged rooms still stings.

“What a beautiful library. It’s almost as big as mine,” he says in his clipped Yorkshire English.

While “Winston and the Windsors” tracks the connection of Britain’s greatest prime minister to the lives of six monarchs, the conversation first turns to New York. Many fail to realize the English statesman was, in fact, half Brooklynite. Churchill’s mother, Jennie Jerome, was born in Cobble Hill in 1854. A “dollar princess,” she married into the British aristocracy and conferred a certain New-York toughness in her America-loving son.

“He’s got the English bulldog and the New York chutzpah,” says Morton. “And unlike many of those who’ve been born in palaces and in high places, he was pushy, he was shovy. He used his elbows to get where he wanted. He didn’t wait for the glittering prizes to fall into his lap. He opened them up, opened the wrapping, and consumed them.”

If New York was part inspiration, the city almost once did him in as well. In December 1931, just up Fifth Avenue from where Morton now spoke, at 76th Street, Churchill was struck down by an unemployed motorist from Yonkers. Churchill had exited a taxi in the middle of the street and forgotten to notice the flow of American traffic.

“It was bad enough to make headlines around the world,” Morton notes, as Churchill was whisked away to Lenox Hill Hospital, saying on intake he was a friend of the king. “And for the king to ask his advisers to get him on the phone, in the days when transatlantic phone calls were tricky, it was a measure of his fame or infamy.”

Churchill at the time was a 57-year-old member of Parliament in need of money after the 1929 stock-market crash, and he made the best of a bad situation. “All the New York papers sent people along to try and interview him. A girl dressed up as a nurse. She was caught by a detective,” Morton recounts.

Instead of giving away the story, Churchill sold his accident to a British newspaper. “So he goes in, and he tries to waft away the nurses and the doctors because he’s on the phone, dictating 2,000 words or whatever on ‘my New York misadventure.’ For which he’s paid the princely sum of $2,500. Which enables him to go off to the Bahamas on holiday.”

The accident also provided Churchill with a doctor’s note for a “naturally indefinite” amount of alcohol to be consumed each day, “especially at mealtimes” — a not-so-sobering script to receive during American Prohibition.

Such New York chutzpah may be one reason Churchill gets admired more today in America than in Great Britain.

“Revisionist history,” Morton laments of the British reception. “Churchill is accused of all kinds of heinous crimes, which he had nothing to do with.” In America, however, “he was someone whom both sides of the aisle admired. When he spoke at Congress, he got standing ovations. People on both sides of the aisle believed him because he’d been right about the German expansionism of the 1930s just as when he gave his famous Iron Curtain speech in 1946. I don’t think it’s any coincidence that Trump ordered the bust of Churchill as one of the first things back into the Oval Office.”

For Churchill, the transatlantic affection was mutual. “His big idea,” adds Morton, “was always follow America, always go with America. He believed that Britain’s future lay with America, and America’s future lay with Britain. Yes, and together they could do great things.”

“Winston and the Windsors” covers Churchill’s life across six monarchs, from his birth during Queen Victoria’s reign through Edward VII, George V, Edward VIII, George VI and, finally, Elizabeth II. “There’ve been lots of politicians and statesmen who have advised a single president or prime minister,” says Morton, but “there’s not been a politician or statesman who has advised a whole dynasty as Churchill did.” 

The frequent turnover tells us much about Churchill’s long 63 years of public service as well as something of the era’s royal disorder. Such turmoil came to a head in 1936 with the freshly minted Edward VIII’s abdication over his twice-divorced American lover and intended wife, Wallis Simpson.

Surprisingly, as someone who cared both for the monarchy and the new monarch, “Churchill felt that Mrs. Simpson was a good thing for Edward VIII,” says Morton. “Because as Prince of Wales, he was often drunk. He was late to events. His timekeeping was poor. He let people down. And Wallis emphasized the need for manners. She gave him calm, so that all these ticks and things that he did, he became calmer.”

Churchill spent much political capital defending Edward, whose intended marriage stirred up a constitutional crisis. “He’s concerned that politicians can tell the monarch who he can or can’t marry. And that’s overstepping the bounds of the constitution,” Morton says of Churchill’s view of the critics.

“He speaks in Parliament again, and he’s howled down for asking for more time,” Morton explains of Churchill’s defense of the beleaguered royal. A confidant tells Churchill, “In three minutes or five minutes, you’ve done more damage to yourself and the monarchy than anybody could have.”

“So Churchill is a lonely, forlorn figure. But when it comes to the actual days of the abdication, he speaks in the House of Parliament very convincingly, and some people are moved to tears.” 

“Edward gave up his throne and the greatest empire we’ve all ever seen,” Morton says. “He was in love with her.”

Churchill stayed loyal to Edward and Wallis, says Morton, even as the royal family swept them aside and the former king drew close to Hitler and his Nazi ambassador Joachim von Ribbentrop.

“It was a great relief to everybody when he finally left because he was in the pocket of Hitler and Ribbentrop,” says Morton, adding, “Ribbentrop was alleged to have had an affair with Wallis.”

And yet even when this started to come out, Churchill didn’t turn away.

“One of the things about Churchill is that he’s very, very loyal to his friends. He was loyal to the nth degree.”

As George VI replaced Edward VIII and Britain entered World War II, Churchill “did a signal service in making the monarchy seem relevant and sympathetic,” says Morton. “When Buckingham Palace was bombed, there’s a famous photograph of Churchill, George VI and the queen going through the rubble. He was the great showman. He got the press there to take pictures of them because he was talking to an audience of one, and that was Roosevelt.”

In its darkest hour, as the Nazis made final preparations for an invasion of the English homeland, Britain’s last hope was America. 

“They pulled out all the diamonds and rubies from the crown jewels, put them in a hatbox and hid them in the basement of Windsor Castle,” Morton says of the royals, persuaded by Churchill to stay put in England rather than flee to Canada. “The queen was learning to shoot and would shoot rats as target practice. Churchill didn’t expect to live more than three weeks.”

Churchill and the new king drew close through the war. “George VI proved to be an admirable counselor and a silent drum” for the prime minister, says Morton. “The king would be let in on these secrets by Churchill, who was carrying this great burden with him. And George VI helped carry that burden.”

When George VI died in 1952 at the age of 56, Churchill became a surrogate parent to Elizabeth II as she ascended the throne at just 25 years old. “He was a father figure, not just to her but to the family,” says Morton.

Asked how Churchill might have viewed this biographer’s other famous princess, “He would have been enamored with Diana,” Morton replies. “What senior statesman, and I include Henry Kissinger and others, wasn’t enamored by Diana?”

Thinking about what happened just up the street nearly a century ago, what would the world be like if Churchill hadn’t survived that car crash?

“We might all be wearing brownshirts,” Morton says of the fascist garb, shifting in his seat. “Churchill was blessed with good luck. He took part in the last-ever cavalry charge. He was lucky to escape injury in the Boer War. He was fortunate not to be pulverized by shells in the First World War when he went back to the trenches after the disaster of the Dardanelles. A series of fortunate events saved him.”

“But it is also fortunate for us,” Morton concludes. “Absolutely fortunate.”

Kingdom Come

THE NEW CRITERION, November 2025

Kingdom Come

On “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” at the Frick Collection.

Among the many miracles to come from Jerusalem, “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum,” now on view at the Frick Collection, is the latest revelation.1 The wonders of the works on display, with some sixty-eight individual pieces, are only outshone by the tales of their survival and the connections these treasures maintain to that singular place.

Since its rediscovery in the fourth century A.D., the location of Jesus’s tomb—the Holy Sepulcher—has been the most important pilgrimage site in Christendom. In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, at a time when European monarchs could not visit the Holy Land, then under Ottoman rule, the courts of Europe sent treasures to the church built over the tomb for use in rituals and veneration. “To the Holy Sepulcher” represents the first pilgrimage of these objects stateside. The exhibition is the result of an unprecedented loan from the Custody of the Holy Land, the Franciscan division charged since A.D. 1309 with protecting the Roman Catholic treasures in Jerusalem and beyond. The American tour anticipates the opening of the Terra Sancta Museum, a Franciscan facility now under construction at the Monastery of Saint Saviour, by Jerusalem’s New Gate, designed to safeguard and display these objects back home.

The astonishing history of these treasures is made all the more remarkable by their appearance in New York. As the Holy Land comes to Fifth Avenue, we must thank Xavier F. Salomon, the Frick’s deputy director and chief curator. He organized this exhibition after first learning about the Terra Sancta Museum a few years ago, with the help of Jacques Charles-Gaffiot and Benoît Constensoux of the Terra Sancta Museum’s scientific committee. The exhibition marks this young curator’s final effort at the Frick before his departure for the Calouste Gulbenkian Museum in Lisbon, Portugal, where he is the incoming director. For a scholar so invested in both the fine and decorative arts of Europe, “To the Holy Sepulcher,” we might say, is a fitting swan song of Salomon.

The exhibition leads off with the one item here actually created in the Holy Land: a model of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher itself, crafted in the eighteenth century. Be sure not to miss it just outside the gallery entrance; on the day I visited, it was not easy to double back. Carved in Bethlehem of local olive and pistachio wood, mother-of-pearl from the shells of the Red Sea, and camel bone, the dollhouse-like assembly was created to be a gift for Europeans from the Franciscans—a memento from rather than for the Holy Sepulcher. The jeweled model reminds us of all this footprint contains and how this church has come down to us through time.

Look up this church in the index of Jerusalem, Simon Sebag Montefiore’s recent history of the city, and the subcategories give some indication of the site’s vicissitudes:

Church of the Holy Sepulchre: and Arab conquests . . . construction by Empress Helena . . . and Crusades . . . daily rituals . . . and Descent of the Holy Fire . . . destruction by fire . . . Fatimid destruction . . . latrines . . . and Mongol raids . . . and Napoleonic invasion . . . Persian destruction . . . and religious conflict . . . and Tartar conquest . . . and Turkish conquests . . .

The layout of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher is far different from the grand vision of the Vatican or what one might expect from this axis mundi of Christianity (there is, in fact, a spot in the church marking the very axis point). A concatenation of surprisingly small Romanesque buildings, all of which were built, burned, and reconstructed over various periods, the church has been a site of veneration, speculation, and contention for two millennia—and is made all the more wondrous in its strangeness. No two of the extant floor plans of this church look exactly alike. It is easy to get turned around among its domes and passages, its priests and pilgrims. Make a left turn at the Chapel of Adam, where the blood of Christ ran through Adam’s skull; go past the Stone of Unction, where the body of Christ was cleaned before burial and which pilgrims now rub down with oil; and you might come across a wall of medieval graffiti carved to collect its holy dust.

Robert Landry, Reliquary of the True Cross, 1628–29, Gilt silver and glass, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Today the church is located within the Old City, a short walk from the Temple Mount through narrow, winding streets of Jerusalem stone, and is little changed from that eighteenth-century model. In the time of Jesus, the tomb was part of a sloped cemetery that existed just outside the city walls. Following Titus’s destruction of Jerusalem in A.D. 70, Hadrian recast the city as Aelia Capitolina in A.D. 130. Even by then, the tomb had become a site of veneration for the earliest Christians. Hoping to redirect their attention to the Roman gods, Hadrian walled off the tomb, flattened the site, and constructed a temple to Venus in its stead. Nevertheless, the memory of the location endured. Two centuries on, as Rome accepted Christianity with the Edict of Milan, Helena of Constantinople—mother to Emperor Constantine, and Saint Helena to Christians—traveled to Jerusalem and reopened the tomb in 326; her son dedicated the new church on its site in 335. In a nearby well, Helena also discovered pieces of what she believed to be the True Cross. The site of the Crucifixion, known as Calvary Hill or Golgotha, is just 150 feet from the tomb and was soon incorporated in the church grounds.

Regarding the tomb’s history, Evelyn Waugh wrote in his introduction to Helena, his historical novel of 1950, that

if we do accept its authenticity we must, I think, allow an element of the miraculous in its discovery and identification. We do know that most of the relics of the True Cross now venerated in various places have a clear descent from the relic venerated in the first half of the fourth century. It used to be believed by the vulgar that there were enough pieces of this “true cross” to build a battleship.

Much as Waugh encountered them, today the tomb, Calvary Hill, and Helena’s well—in addition to archaeological evidence of Hadrian’s Temple of Venus—are all connected under one roof within the warren of buildings that comprise the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. Making this real estate even more complex—and explaining its general appearance of deferred maintenance—the Roman Catholic, Greek Orthodox, Armenian, Coptic, Syrian, and Ethiopian churches all share in the church’s administration under an arrangement reached in 1757, in the days of the sultan, known as the Status Quo.

“To the Holy Sepulcher” is made up of a selection of precious objects used by the Latin church in its annual rituals around the site and in other places under its protection in the Holy Land. Only recently have these objects been, like the tomb itself in Helena’s day, brought to the light—in this case, after the Cuban Italian scholar Alvar González-Palacios began researching them in the 1980s and exposing them to the greater museum world (his fascinating story gets its due in the exhibition’s lavish catalogue, which also features updated photographs of these freshly cleaned treasures).

Before then, as the Franciscan custodians tell it, these treasures were hidden in plain sight—brought out for special ceremonies but otherwise squirreled away in closets and storerooms, miraculously safe from looting, vandalism, and whatever authority was ruling Jerusalem at any given time. In fact, the greatest threat to such treasures has come from intrachurch rivalry. A sanctuary lamp (ca. 1758–59) of gold and gilt silver attributed to Johann Caspar Kriedemann, showing reliefs of episodes from the life of Christ, was most likely created from the gold of earlier Latin treasure that had been destroyed by the Greek clergy in an attack on the eve of Palm Sunday in 1757. The same goes for the pair of torchères from 1762, remade in Venice by the workshop known as al San Lorenzo Giustinian from the 1,304 ounces of silver recovered by the Franciscans from those destroyed and stolen treasures.

Al San Lorenzo Giustinian Workshop, Torchère, 1762, Silver and gilt silver, Terra Sancta Museum, Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, despite the challenges faced by the church and city, the many treasures in Franciscan custody at the Holy Sepulcher have fared far better than their counterparts in Europe. “To the Holy Sepulcher” contains examples of European metalwork that are otherwise no longer extant—melted down long ago for their raw materials. The sections of the exhibition are therefore divided by region of origin, denoting the French, Iberian, and Germanic sources of these gifts given by European monarchs to Franciscan emissaries for delivery to and use in the Holy Land.

It is, after all, the continuous liturgical function of these ritual objects that has defined their design and sustained them. “Their survival over the centuries is a direct result of their continued use,” says Salomon. As the outgoing director of the cultural heritage office at the Custody of the Holy Land, Friar Stéphane Milovitch explained at the Frick opening, “If the Ottomans knew we had all these kinds of things, they would have liked to take it. So during many centuries we use and we hide—but we used.”

To understand such metalwork and textile, it helps to envision it carried, elevated, illuminated, and worn. At the opening, I met one friar looking at the subtle wear on a section of fleurs-de-lys on a crozier (1654–55) created by Nicolas Dolin. He wanted to see just where the bishops grasped this imposing pastoral staff of gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stones, made in Paris and given to the Franciscans by Louis XIV.

Nicolas Dolin, Chalice, 1661–63, Gilt silver, glass, and semi-precious stone, Terra Santa Museum, Jerusalem.

A special alchemy takes place when such treasures of sculptural relief, created from metal and stone, are held in the lamplit liturgies of the church. Objects such as Dolin’s chalice and paten (1661–63) and Jean Hubé’s ciborium (1668–69) are so finely detailed, with minuscule images from the life of Christ alongside symbols of the holy ancestors of the French kings, that these messages are more intended to be felt than seen. While European monarchs could not travel to Jerusalem in person, their presence was conveyed to the holy altars through the symbolism preserved in these finely wrought materials.

To encounter such objects in a museum setting is therefore a trade-off. Salomon has done what he can to reproduce an altarlike feel in some of these displays, with vested mannequins arranged among the treasures. Nevertheless, we experience them as never intended, not in candlelit glimpses but in close-up stares. Ornate objects such as a solid-gold Neapolitan monstrance of 1746, Antonio de Laurentiis’s throne of Eucharistic exposition of 1754, and a Neapolitan crucifix of gold and lapis lazuli of 1756 are just about too much to take in under the light of the Frick’s spare new special-exhibition space. The same goes for Robert Landry’s reliquary of the true cross (1628–29), containing at its center a fragment of Helena’s fourth-century find.

As an exhibition of holy objects, “To the Holy Sepulcher” ultimately tells us little about the liturgical role of these materials back in Jerusalem. As a display of European metalwork and textile design, however, the show connects us to relics of the European past as never before. This connection is not lost on the Franciscan custodians of these works, who rightly see American institutions such as the Frick as upholding the legacy of Christian Europe even in a post-Christian, post-European age. Today, these treasures speak to the resurrection of Western culture as much as the Resurrection from that Jerusalem tomb. In either context, they represent singular objects of faith.

1. “To the Holy Sepulcher: Treasures from the Terra Sancta Museum” opened at the Frick Collection, New York, on October 2, 2025, and remains on view through January 5, 2026. The exhibition will also be seen at the Kimbell Art Museum, Fort Worth (March 15–June 28, 2026. 

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.