Sound Familiar?
Fake, reproduction, revival
Common Sense Antiques
By Fred Taylor
The study of antique furniture has its own specialized language which permeates all of the field, whether it be collecting, buying and selling, restoring, or vicarious interest. Much of the vocabulary is self explanatory, but some terms need a little closer attention. Three terms often heard loosely bandied about the trade are fake, reproduction, and revival. Each has its standard definition, and its own twist in the world of antiques.
The Pocket Webster School & Office Dictionary defines fake as â??a fraud or hoax; counterfeit.â? The American College Dictionary defines it as â??designed to deceive or cheat.â? That pretty much covers it doesnâ??t it? Or does it? Are there degrees of fake?
In her deeply informative but still witty book Fake, Fraud or Genuine? Myrna Kaye takes a close look at the first item on her â??Most Unwanted Listâ?: the object entirely made fake, built from scratch to fool you. Her prime example is the 17th century Pilgrim chair in the Henry Ford Museum. The chair was made in the 1920s by a disgruntled wood sculptor with the express goal of fooling the experts. It worked. Even after the hoax was revealed to the Museum, it took another four years of study to verify the fake.
But what about other types of fakes? Ms. Kayeâ??s second example on her list is the â??Old Parts/New Objectâ? category. This type of reconstruction is of growing concern in todayâ??s market. In some cases this type of fraud is even more difficult to spot than the entire fake, because some or most of the parts are genuinely old. Its just a matter of how they have been reassembled among new parts to create another object. One example of this is the partial disassembly of five chairs, salvaging enough genuine pieces to construct the sixth chair and put some new parts in all the other chairs. The result is a matching set of six chairs, all with some obvious and presumably honest repairs but with enough genuine parts to pass as the real thing.
There are other culprits on Kayeâ??s list, such as the â??Made Up Setâ? and the â??The Remade Objectâ? to name only a couple, but they all have one thing in common: they are all made to fool. It seems that motive, not method, is the determining factor of a fake.
RK
|