Between representation and the real: the forgeries of Constantine Simonides

If we begin with the forger’s intent to deceive then we might take forgeries seriously as manifestations of a deviant realist impulse. Whereas the nineteenth-century Realists aimed at a form of representational sincerity by which the real could be grasped without the dominance of artifice or style, forgers redeploy this sincerity to lay claim to reality. The reality effects of their products get their efficacy from the co-option of available and authorised ways of seeing. As Nochlin (1971) had argued, Realism is no mere transparent reflection of the world but is situated in ways of doing and being. Forgeries viewed as part of a realist endeavour aim to disrupt and hijack the gaze and thus end up restoring the visibility of Others (the stories and participants left out of authorised history) and the visibility of our engagement with the past (its institutional and technical apparati). They show up what we expect and what we cannot tolerate, how we see and why. As such realism offers a powerful historiographical framework in which to situate forgery as practice and social phenomenon. Through an experimental analysis of Constantine Simonides’ nineteenth century forgeries as works of realism this chapter will examine how complicit we are in the success of forgeries.