经济学人238:艺术 伪造大师的作品竟然被拍卖

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　　艺术

　　Imitable

　　是可以模仿的

　　A master forger¹'s works are auctioned³

　　伪造大师的作品竟然被拍卖

　　THE sale of more than 200 drawings on October 22nd by a small auction² house near Salisbury in south-west England has threatened to open old wounds in the art world. The works were by Eric Hebborn, a master forger.

　　10月22日，英格兰西南部的索尔兹伯里市的一家小拍卖行售出了200多幅画，再次揭开了艺术界尘封多年的伤口—这些作品都出自赝品画大师赫伯恩之手。

　　Few have heard of Hebborn, but many museum-goers may have seen his handiwork, masquerading as old masters at major galleries around the world. He claimed his forgeries⁴ found homes in the world's most famous museums, though some friends, and enemies, disputed this. Some in the art world fear that the newly auctioned sketches⁶, collected by his sister after he was murdered in Rome in 1996, could prove to be preliminary drawings which would reveal other major fakes. “This auction is going to open a very large can of worms,” says Simon Wingett, who auctioned Hebborn's works at Webbs of Wilton this week.

　　听说过赫伯恩的人并不多，但是常去博物馆的人可能在各地的大型画廊见过他的赝品。他表示世界最有名的博物馆也收藏着自己的赝品，尽管他的某些朋友或死敌对此表示不满。赫伯恩于1996年在罗马遭到谋杀身亡，之后其妹妹收集了他的素描。有人担心最近拍卖的这些素描可能会扯出其他重要的赝品。这周在威尔顿的韦伯拍卖赫伯恩作品的西蒙·温格特“这次拍卖将打开潘多拉之盒”

　　赝品画大师赫伯恩.jpg

　　Born into a working-class London family in 1934, Hebborn won prizes as a student at the Royal Academy, but his own art brought him little acclaim⁷, leading to suggestions that forgery⁸ was his means of revenge on a snooty art elite⁹. Hebborn maintained that dealers¹¹ were interested in money not art, claiming one paid him ￡750 for a forgery that he sold on for ￡90,000. As for art historians, “they just want to get a knighthood for knowing a lot about Rembrandt”. Art itself was neglected, he believed. He dismissed claims he was a crook¹², saying he, like many before him, simply made imitations.

　　赫伯恩于1934年出生于伦敦的工人家庭，在皇家艺术学院学习的时候他就曾多次获奖，但是他自己的艺术作品却未带来多大的声誉。因而人们猜测他做赝品是为了报复那些目中无人的艺术精英。赫伯恩认为那些商人不过只关注金钱而并非艺术，曾有人给他750欧元画的作品转手就卖了90,000欧元。在艺术历史学家看来，“他们深入了解伦勃朗只为其所谓侠义之气。”而艺术本身则被忽略了，赫伯恩认为。他反驳那些将自己看做是骗子的言论，而称自己跟那些前人一样，不过是做模仿而已。

　　He is thought to have produced about 1,000 forgeries over the course of his life, sold on by bamboozled¹³ dealers as the work of Rubens, Van Dyck, Brueghel and others. In 1978, a curator at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, noticed that two drawings purchased from Colnaghi, a reputable dealer¹⁰ in London, were on the same kind of paper. The dealer admitted to having been duped, and prices on the London market for master drawings fell. In 1984 Hebborn confessed to having forged them and others. But he was never charged; the dealers and experts were too worried about rocking the market and exposing their own ignorance.

　　人们认为赫伯恩一生大约仿造了1,000幅画，大多数是鲁宾斯（姓氏，特指荷兰著名画家）、范戴克、布鲁盖尔（1525-1569，著名风景画家）以及其他著名画家的作品。1978年，华盛顿国家艺术馆的馆长发现两幅购于伦敦著名的交易商——科尔纳吉画廊——的画作使用的纸张是一样的。该交易商承认被骗了，而且伦敦市面上原作的作品价格开始下降。1984年，赫伯恩承认他仿造了这些作品和其他的作品。但他从未因此吃官司，因为交易商和油画专家非常担心会因此震动市场，暴露自己的愚昧。

　　Though few people could tell the difference between his forgeries and the originals, there remains¹⁴ a difference in price. At Sotheby's in New York earlier this year, a painting by Brueghel fetched $5.2m. Hebborn's most expensive sketch⁵ this week went for ￡2,600.

　　尽管几乎没人能分辨出他的赝品和原作之间的区别，价格上还是有所不同的。今年早期在纽约索斯比拍卖行的一场拍卖上,布鲁盖尔的一幅画达到了5200万美元，而这周赫伯恩最贵的一幅画仅为2500欧元。

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