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Book Fakes  Forgeries  and Fictions

Download or read book Fakes Forgeries and Fictions written by Tony Burke and published by . This book was released on 2017 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like ""intended to deceive"" or ""true origins"" even mean in various historical and cultural contexts? The papers in this volume, presented in September 2015 at York University in Toronto, discuss texts from as early as second-century papyrus fragments to modern apocrypha such as tales of Jesus in India in the nineteenth-century Life of Saint Issa. The highlights of the collection include a keynote address by Bart Ehrman (""Apocryphal Forgeries: The Logic of Literary Deceit"") and a panel discussion on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, reflecting on what reactions to this particular text--primarily on biblioblogs--can tell us about the creation, transmission, and reception of apocryphal Christian literature. The eye-opening papers presented at the panel caution and enlighten readers about the ethics of studying unprovenanced texts, the challenges facing female scholars both in the academy and online, and the shifting dynamics between online and traditional print scholarship. ""Fakes, Forgeries and Fictions is an impressive and provocative collection of essays about the hundreds of apocryphal texts and pseudo-gospels that Christians have written through the centuries. In the process, the essays ask challenging questions about the intentions of these early authors, and just what we mean when we label works as forgeries or fictions. This very informative book offers a rich array of good stories, and fine scholarship."" --Philip Jenkins, Baylor University ""Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions moves the field forward by leaps and bounds. Through richly illuminating studies of ancient (and not-so-ancient) sources, it illustrates the high stakes of ethical practice in scholarship: how we communicate our work to the public, and how committed we are to equality and access in our scholarly communities, are not peripheral issues, but central to the quality of our intellectual work. A must-read for scholars of antiquity in the twenty-first century."" --Eva Mroczek, University of California, Davis; author of The Literary Imagination in Jewish Antiquity ""Are apocryphal Christian texts fakes and forgeries? Were they intentionally written to deceive Christians? Do they contain facts or fictions? Why were they composed? These are old questions that today's experts on apocryphal literature have taken up anew in this edited volume. The answers are as varied as the stories themselves, from intentional fakes meant to deceive like the fragment known as the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, to honest attempts to capture ongoing religious revelation like the Revelation of the Magi. This volume is a valuable contribution to how we understand authorship of ancient Christian texts, whether we define them as fakes or the real deal."" --April D. DeConick, Rice University; author of The Gnostic New Age: How Gnostic Spirituality Revolutionized Religion from Antiquity to Today Tony Burke is Associate Professor of Early Christianity at York University in Toronto, Ontario. He is the coeditor of New Testament Apocrypha (2016) and author of Secret Scriptures Revealed (2013).

Book Fake It

    Book Details:
  • Author : Mark Osteen
  • Publisher : University of Virginia Press
  • Release : 2021-08-13
  • ISBN : 081394628X
  • Pages : 431 pages

Download or read book Fake It written by Mark Osteen and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2021-08-13 with total page 431 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: How many layers of artifice can one artwork contain? How does forgery unsettle our notions of originality and creativity? Looking at both the literary and art worlds, Fake It investigates a set of fictional forgeries and hoaxes alongside their real-life inspirations and parallels. Mark Osteen shows how any forgery or hoax is only as good as its authenticating story—and demonstrates how forgeries foster fresh authorial identities while being deeply intertextual and frequently quite original. From fakes of the late eighteenth century, such as Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems and the notorious "Shakespearean" documents fabricated by William-Henry Ireland, to hoaxes of the modern period, such as Clifford Irving’s fake autobiography of Howard Hughes, the infamous Ern Malley forgeries, and the audacious authorial masquerades of Percival Everett, Osteen lays bare provocative truths about the conflicts between aesthetic and economic value. In doing so he illuminates the process of artistic creation, which emerges as collaborative and imitative rather than individual and inspired, revealing that authorship is, to some degree, always forged.

Book Fakes  Forgeries  and Fictions

Download or read book Fakes Forgeries and Fictions written by Tony Burke and published by Wipf and Stock Publishers. This book was released on 2017-05-31 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Fakes, Forgeries, and Fictions examines the possible motivations behind the production of apocryphal Christian texts. Did the authors of Christian apocrypha intend to deceive others about the true origins of their writings? Did they do so in a way that is distinctly different from New Testament scriptural writings? What would phrases like "intended to deceive" or "true origins" even mean in various historical and cultural contexts? The papers in this volume, presented in September 2015 at York University in Toronto, discuss texts from as early as second-century papyrus fragments to modern apocrypha such as tales of Jesus in India in the nineteenth-century Life of Saint Issa. The highlights of the collection include a keynote address by Bart Ehrman ("Apocryphal Forgeries: The Logic of Literary Deceit") and a panel discussion on the Gospel of Jesus' Wife, reflecting on what reactions to this particular text--primarily on biblioblogs--can tell us about the creation, transmission, and reception of apocryphal Christian literature. The eye-opening papers presented at the panel caution and enlighten readers about the ethics of studying unprovenanced texts, the challenges facing female scholars both in the academy and online, and the shifting dynamics between online and traditional print scholarship.

Book Splendide Mendax

    Book Details:
  • Author : Edmund P. Cueva
  • Publisher : Barkhuis
  • Release : 2016-02-25
  • ISBN : 9491431986
  • Pages : 380 pages

Download or read book Splendide Mendax written by Edmund P. Cueva and published by Barkhuis. This book was released on 2016-02-25 with total page 380 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Many new and fruitful avenues of investigation open up when scholars consider forgery as a creative act rather than a crime. We invited authors to contribute work without imposing any restrictions beyond a willingness to consider new approaches to the subject of ancient fakes and forgeries.

Book Hoax  A History of Deception

Download or read book Hoax A History of Deception written by Ian Tattersall and published by Black Dog & Leventhal. This book was released on 2018-03-20 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An entertaining collection of the most audacious and underhanded deceptions in the history of mankind, from sacred relics to financial schemes to fake art, music, and identities. World history is littered with tall tales and those who have fallen for them. Ian Tattersall, a curator emeritus at the American Museum of Natural History, has teamed up with Peter Névraumont to tell this anti-history of the world, in which Michelangelo fakes a masterpiece; Arctic explorers seek an entrance into a hollow Earth; a Shakespeare tragedy is "rediscovered"; a financial scheme inspires Charles Ponzi; a spirit photographer snaps Abraham Lincoln's ghost; people can survive ingesting only air and sunshine; Edgar Allen Poe is the forefather of fake news; and the first human was not only British but played cricket. Told chronologically, HOAX begins with the first documented announcement of the end of the world in 2800 BC and winds its way through controversial tales such as the Loch Ness Monster and the Shroud of Turin, past proven fakes such as the Thomas Jefferson's ancient wine and the Davenport Tablets built by a lost race, and explores bald-faced lies in the worlds of art, science, literature, journalism, and finance.

Book Forged

    Book Details:
  • Author : Jonathon Keats
  • Publisher : Oxford University Press
  • Release : 2013
  • ISBN : 0199928355
  • Pages : 206 pages

Download or read book Forged written by Jonathon Keats and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2013 with total page 206 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: According to Vasari, the young Michelangelo often borrowed drawings of past masters, which he copied, returning his imitations to the owners and keeping originals. Half a millennium later, Andy Warhol made a game of "forging" the Mona Lisa, questioning the entire concept of originality. Forged explores art forgery from ancient times to the present. In chapters combining lively biography with insightful art criticism, Jonathon Keats profiles individual art forgers and connects their stories to broader themes about the role of forgeries in society. From the Renaissance master Andrea del Sarto who faked a Raphael masterpiece at the request of his Medici patrons, to the Vermeer counterfeiter Han van Meegeren who duped the avaricious Hermann Göring, to the frustrated British artist Eric Hebborn, who began forging to expose the ignorance of experts, art forgers have challenged "legitimate" art in their own time, breaching accepted practices and upsetting the status quo. They have also provocatively confronted many of the present-day cultural anxieties that are major themes in the arts. Keats uncovers what forgeries—and our reactions to them—reveal about changing conceptions of creativity, identity, authorship, integrity, authenticity, success, and how we assign value to works of art. The book concludes by looking at how artists today have appropriated many aspects of forgery through such practices as street-art stenciling and share-and-share-alike licensing, and how these open-source "copyleft" strategies have the potential to make legitimate art meaningful again. Forgery has been much discussed—and decried—as a crime. Forged is the first book to assess great forgeries as high art in their own right.

Book Fakes  Forgeries  and Frauds

    Book Details:
  • Author : Nancy Moses
  • Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
  • Release : 2020-02-15
  • ISBN : 1442274441
  • Pages : 217 pages

Download or read book Fakes Forgeries and Frauds written by Nancy Moses and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2020-02-15 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A fascinating read about fakes, forgeries, and frauds. What’s real? What’s fake? Why do we care? In this time of false news and fake science, these questions are more important than ever. Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds goes beyond the headlines, tweets, and blogs to explore the true nature of authenticity and why it means so much today. This book delivers nine fascinating true stories that introduce the fakers, forgers, art authenticators, and others that populate this dark world. Examples include: Shakespeare—How an enterprising teenager in the 1790s faked Shakespeare and duped Literary London. Rembrandt—How art history, connoisseurship, and science are re-shaping our view of what Rembrandt painted and how the canvas changed over time. Relics—Was Saint Cecilia, the patron saint of music, a real Roman teenager who was martyred 1,800 years ago in the same place where her church stands today? Jackson Pollock—How do experts pick out the real Pollocks from the thousands of fakes? Nuremberg—How repeated reconstructions of medieval Nuremburg—including one by Adolf Hitler—show how historic preservation became a tool for propaganda. Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds also raises provocative questions about the meaning of reality. What happens when spiritual truth conflicts with historic fact? Can an object retain its essence when most of it was replaced? Why did some art patrons value an excellent copy more than the original? Why do we find fakes so eternally fascinating, and forgers such appealing con artists? Fakes, Forgeries, and Frauds is a full-color book with 30 color photos. It shows that reality, exemplified by discrete physical objects, is actually mutable, unsettling, and plainly weird. Readers discover things that are less than meets the eye—and might even reconsider what’s real, what’s fake, and why they should care.

Book Genuine Fakes

    Book Details:
  • Author : Lydia Pyne
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
  • Release : 2019-08-08
  • ISBN : 1472961811
  • Pages : 288 pages

Download or read book Genuine Fakes written by Lydia Pyne and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-08-08 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Lively, thought-provoking and consistently surprising. Lydia Pyne is the real deal.' Ed Yong, author of New York Times bestseller I Contain Multitudes Does an authentic Andy Warhol painting need to be painted by Andy Warhol? Why do audiences feel outraged when they find out that scenes from their beloved blockbuster documentaries are staged? Can people move past assuming that a diamond grown in a lab is a fake? What happens when a forged painting or manuscript becomes more valuable than its original? This is a book about genuine fakes – the curious and complex objects that provoke these very sorts of questions. Genuine fakes fall into the space between things that are real and things that are not; whether or not we think that those things are authentic is a matter of perspective. Unsurprisingly, the world is full of genuine fakes – full of things that defy simple categorisation. From stories of audacious forgeries to feats of technological innovation, historian Lydia Pyne explores how the authenticity of eight genuine fakes depends on their unique combinations of history, science and culture. The stories of art forgeries, fake fossils, nature documentaries, synthetic flavours, museum exhibits, Maya codices and Palaeolithic replicas show that genuine fakes are both complicated and change over time. Drawing from historical archives, interviews, museum exhibits and science fiction as well as her own research, Pyne brings each genuine fake to life through unexpected and often outrageous stories. Genuine Fakes will make readers think about all the unreal things they encounter in their daily lives, and why they invoke the reactions – surprise, wonder, understanding or annoyance – that they do.

Book The Last Painting of Sara de Vos

Download or read book The Last Painting of Sara de Vos written by Dominic Smith and published by Sarah Crichton Books. This book was released on 2016-04-05 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Written in prose so clear that we absorb its images as if by mind meld, “The Last Painting” is gorgeous storytelling: wry, playful, and utterly alive, with an almost tactile awareness of the emotional contours of the human heart. Vividly detailed, acutely sensitive to stratifications of gender and class, it’s fiction that keeps you up at night — first because you’re barreling through the book, then because you’ve slowed your pace to a crawl, savoring the suspense.” —Boston Globe A New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice A RARE SEVENTEENTH-CENTURY PAINTING LINKS THREE LIVES, ON THREE CONTINENTS, OVER THREE CENTURIES IN THE LAST PAINTING OF SARA DE VOS, AN EXHILARATING NEW NOVEL FROM DOMINIC SMITH. Amsterdam, 1631: Sara de Vos becomes the first woman to be admitted as a master painter to the city’s Guild of St. Luke. Though women do not paint landscapes (they are generally restricted to indoor subjects), a wintry outdoor scene haunts Sara: She cannot shake the image of a young girl from a nearby village, standing alone beside a silver birch at dusk, staring out at a group of skaters on the frozen river below. Defying the expectations of her time, she decides to paint it. New York City, 1957: The only known surviving work of Sara de Vos, At the Edge of a Wood, hangs in the bedroom of a wealthy Manhattan lawyer, Marty de Groot, a descendant of the original owner. It is a beautiful but comfortless landscape. The lawyer’s marriage is prominent but comfortless, too. When a struggling art history grad student, Ellie Shipley, agrees to forge the painting for a dubious art dealer, she finds herself entangled with its owner in ways no one could predict. Sydney, 2000: Now a celebrated art historian and curator, Ellie Shipley is mounting an exhibition in her field of specialization: female painters of the Dutch Golden Age. When it becomes apparent that both the original At the Edge of a Wood and her forgery are en route to her museum, the life she has carefully constructed threatens to unravel entirely and irrevocably.

Book False Impressions

    Book Details:
  • Author : Thomas Hoving
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 1997-05-08
  • ISBN : 0684831481
  • Pages : 390 pages

Download or read book False Impressions written by Thomas Hoving and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1997-05-08 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art examines the world of art forgery, from ancient times to the present, sharing anecdotes about some of the costliest, most embarrassing forgeries ever, as well as the motives of the fakers.

Book Provenance

    Book Details:
  • Author : Laney Salisbury
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2009-07-09
  • ISBN : 1101105003
  • Pages : 352 pages

Download or read book Provenance written by Laney Salisbury and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2009-07-09 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A tautly paced investigation of one the 20th century's most audacious art frauds, which generated hundreds of forgeries-many of them still hanging in prominent museums and private collections today Provenance is the extraordinary narrative of one of the most far-reaching and elaborate deceptions in art history. Investigative reporters Laney Salisbury and Aly Sujo brilliantly recount the tale of a great con man and unforgettable villain, John Drewe, and his sometimes unwitting accomplices. Chief among those was the struggling artist John Myatt, a vulnerable single father who was manipulated by Drewe into becoming a prolific art forger. Once Myatt had painted the pieces, the real fraud began. Drewe managed to infiltrate the archives of the upper echelons of the British art world in order to fake the provenance of Myatt's forged pieces, hoping to irrevocably legitimize the fakes while effectively rewriting art history. The story stretches from London to Paris to New York, from tony Manhattan art galleries to the esteemed Giacometti and Dubuffet associations, to the archives at the Tate Gallery. This enormous swindle resulted in the introduction of at least two hundred forged paintings, some of them breathtakingly good and most of them selling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Many of these fakes are still out in the world, considered genuine and hung prominently in private houses, large galleries, and prestigious museums. And the sacred archives, undermined by John Drewe, remain tainted to this day. Provenance reads like a well-plotted thriller, filled with unforgettable characters and told at a breakneck pace. But this is most certainly not fiction; Provenance is the meticulously researched and captivating account of one of the greatest cons in the history of art forgery.

Book The Art of the Con

    Book Details:
  • Author : Anthony M. Amore
  • Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
  • Release : 2015-07-14
  • ISBN : 1466879114
  • Pages : 275 pages

Download or read book The Art of the Con written by Anthony M. Amore and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2015-07-14 with total page 275 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Art scams are today so numerous that the specter of a lawsuit arising from a mistaken attribution has scared a number of experts away from the business of authentication and forgery, and with good reason. Art scams are increasingly convincing and involve incredible sums of money. The cons perpetrated by unscrupulous art dealers and their accomplices are proportionately elaborate. Anthony M. Amore's The Art of the Con tells the stories of some of history's most notorious yet untold cons. They involve stolen art hidden for decades; elaborate ruses that involve the Nazis and allegedly plundered art; the theft of a conceptual prototype from a well-known artist by his assistant to be used later to create copies; the use of online and television auction sites to scam buyers out of millions; and other confidence scams incredible not only for their boldness but more so because they actually worked. Using interviews and newly released court documents, The Art of the Con will also take the reader into the investigations that led to the capture of the con men, who oftentimes return back to the world of crime. For some, it's an irresistible urge because their innocent dupes all share something in common: they want to believe.

Book Caveat Emptor

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ken Perenyi
  • Publisher : Simon and Schuster
  • Release : 2022-04-12
  • ISBN : 163936305X
  • Pages : 235 pages

Download or read book Caveat Emptor written by Ken Perenyi and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2022-04-12 with total page 235 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is said that the greatest art forger in the world is the one who has never been caught. Caveat Emptor reveals the astonishing story of America’s most accomplished art forger. Ten years ago, an FBI investigation in conjunction with the U.S. Attorney’s Office in the Southern District of New York was about to expose a scandal in the art world that would have been front-page news in New York and London. After a trail of fake paintings of astonishing quality led federal agents to art dealers, renowned experts, and the major auction houses, the investigation inexplicably ended, despite an abundance of evidence collected. The case was closed and the FBI file was marked “exempt from public disclosure.” Now that the statute of limitations on these crimes has expired and the case appears hermetically sealed shut by the FBI, this book, Caveat Emptor, is Ken Perenyi’s confession. It is the story, in detail, of how he pulled it all off. Glamorous stories of art-world scandal have always captured the public imagination. However, not since Clifford Irving’s 1969 bestselling Fake has there been a story at all like this one. Caveat Emptor is unique in that it is the first and only book by and about America’s first and only great art forger. And unlike other forgers, Perenyi produced no paper trail, no fake provenance whatsoever; he let the paintings speak for themselves. And that they did, routinely mesmerizing the experts in mere seconds. In the tradition of Frank Abagnale’s Catch Me If You Can, and certain to be a bombshell for the major international auction houses and galleries, here is the story of America’s greatest art forger.

Book Art   Crime

    Book Details:
  • Author : Stefan Koldehoff
  • Publisher : Seven Stories Press
  • Release : 2022-07-12
  • ISBN : 1644211203
  • Pages : 351 pages

Download or read book Art Crime written by Stefan Koldehoff and published by Seven Stories Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 351 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A thrilling, eye-popping look at true crime in the billion-dollar art world. The art world is one of the most secretive of global businesses, and the list of its crimes runs long and deep. Today, with prices in the hundreds of millions for individual artworks, and billionaires' collections among the most conspicuous and liquid of their assets, crime is more rampant than ever in this largely unregulated universe. Increased prices and globalization have introduced new levels of fraud and malfeasance into the art world--everything from "artnapping," in which an artwork is held hostage and only returned for a ransom, to forgery and tax fraud. However, the extent of the economic and cultural damage that results from criminality in the global art scene rarely comes to light. The stories of high-stakes, brazen art crimes told by art experts Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm are by turns thrilling, disturbing, and unbelievable (the imagination for using art to commit crimes seems boundless). The authors also provide a well-founded analysis of what needs to change in the art market and at museums. From the authors of False Pictures, Real Money (about the Beltracchi art forgery case), Art and Crime includes a chapter on art owned by Donald Trump. It is a thoroughly researched, explosive, and highly topical book that uncovers the extraordinary and multifarious thefts of art and cultural objects around the world.

Book Fake

    Book Details:
  • Author : Erica Katz
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2022-02-22
  • ISBN : 0063082608
  • Pages : 320 pages

Download or read book Fake written by Erica Katz and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2022-02-22 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “'Fake' is great fun, offering a peek into a world of glitz that most of us will never glimpse firsthand." —Washington Post From the author of The Boys’ Club, a gripping novel set in the high-stakes world of art forgery that moves across the globe, from the trendy art galleries of Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood to the high-flying international art fairs of Hong Kong. Can you spot the difference? Emma Caan is a fake. She’s a forger, an artist who specializes in nineteenth-century paintings. But she isn’t a criminal; her copies are commissioned by museums and ultra-wealthy collectors protecting their investments. Emma’s more than mastered a Gauguin brushstroke and a van Gogh wheat field, but her work is sometimes a painful reminder of the artistic dreams she once chased for herself, when she was younger and before her family and her world fell apart. When oligarch art collector Leonard Sobetsky unexpectedly appears with an invitation, Emma sees a way out—a new job, a new path for herself, and access to the kind of money she needs to support her unstable and recently widowed mother. But every invitation incurs an obligation . . . and Emma isn’t prepared for what’s to come. As she’s pulled further into Leonard’s opulent scene, she will discover what’s lurking beneath the glitz and glamour. When she does, the past she’s worked hard to overcome will collide with the present, making her wonder how much of her carefully curated life is just as fake as her forgeries . . .

Book Fictions and Fakes

Download or read book Fictions and Fakes written by Margaret Russett and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2006-02-02 with total page 19 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: British Romantic literature descends from a line of impostors, forgers and frauds. Through a series of case-studies - beginning with the golden age of forgery in the late eighteenth century and continuing through canonical Romanticism and its aftermath - Margaret Russett demonstrates how Romantic writers distinguished their fictions from the fakes surrounding them. The book examines canonical and lesser-known Romantic works alongside fakes such as Thomas Chatterton's medieval poems and 'Caraboo', the impostor-princess. Through original readings of works by Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Walter Scott, John Clare, and James Hogg, as well as chapters on impostors in popular culture, Russett's interdisciplinary and wide-ranging study offers a major reinterpretation of Romanticism and its continuing influence today.

Book The Art Forger

    Book Details:
  • Author : B. A. Shapiro
  • Publisher : Algonquin Books
  • Release : 2013-05-21
  • ISBN : 1616203188
  • Pages : 322 pages

Download or read book The Art Forger written by B. A. Shapiro and published by Algonquin Books. This book was released on 2013-05-21 with total page 322 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't miss B. A. Shapiro's new novel, Metropolis, available now! “[A] highly entertaining literary thriller about fine art and foolish choices.” —Parade “[A] nimble mystery.” —The New York Times Book Review “Gripping.” —O, The Oprah Magazine Almost twenty-five years after the infamous art heist at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum—still the largest unsolved art theft in history—one of the stolen Degas paintings is delivered to the Boston studio of a young artist. Claire Roth has entered into a Faustian bargain with a powerful gallery owner by agreeing to forge the Degas in exchange for a one-woman show in his renowned gallery. But as she begins her work, she starts to suspect that this long-missing masterpiece—the very one that had been hanging at the Gardner for one hundred years—may itself be a forgery. The Art Forger is a thrilling novel about seeing—and not seeing—the secrets that lie beneath the canvas.