Brooklyn Museum’s Crop of Coptic Art a Historical Farce

One of the earliest Christian carvings, according to Scripture and various Charlton Heston movies, is the Decalogue: the Ten Commandments.  Inscribed by a Divine Hand, the stone tablets revealed a collection of ten laws, including one that the Brooklyn Museum probably wished that their 1960s-era Egyptian art suppliers had followed a bit more closely:

“Thou Shalt Not Lie.”

Before the official revelation of the fake Coptics, Brooklyn Museum was billed as housing the second largest collection of Coptic Art in North America (immediately after New York’s Metropolitan Museum).  With 30 Coptic sculptures, the vast majority of which acquired in the years between 1960 and 1970 from Switzerland and New York, who acquired the sculptures directly from Egypt, the Brooklyn Museum’s collection of Coptics was nothing to sneeze at.

Coptic Sculpture refers to Christian sculpture created in Egypt between the 4th Century Anno Domini and the year of the Arab Invasion, 641 AD.  Carved from limestone, coptic sculpture has served as the artistic bridge uniting the artisan styles of Pagan and Christian cultures.  It is also credited with existing as historical evidence of the continuity of the large-scale sculpture form made standard during the Classical period.

For scholars like Coptic art specialist Thelma Thomas, a professor at New York University, Coptic art represents something besides continuity and cultural conduits–Coptic art has practically become synonymous with “fake,” as more and more supposedly authentic Coptic sculptures, upon closer inspection, prove to be false.

10 of Brooklyn Museum’s collection of 30 sculptures have been officially declared false.  An additional ten have been determined to have been recarved and repainted in the modern era.  The remaining 10 may well be authentic–but the damage has clearly been done.

What is Brooklyn Museum doing in response to the recent official denouncement (rumblings have been heard in the past, but no voice from the mountain had come down quite yet) of the authenticity of their collection?

Why having an exhibition, of course!

On February 13, 2009, the Brooklyn Museum will unveil an exhibition detailing the voyage of the forgeries.  The false sculptures have gleaned their own history from the fraud, and have become valuable in their own right (though clearly  not so much as the 1,000 original, authentic Coptic sculptures which supposedly still exist).

Never underestimate a national art gallery’s ability to spin fraud into profit.