September 12, 2025 • 41 mins
In 1998, an art gallery gets a mysterious phone call. The caller claims they have been fooled by a master forger and that many of their prized paintings are fakes. Or are they?
This is the story of the life and lies of the notorious Eric Hebborn. What did he do, and what does that teach us about how we can root out deepfakes without undermining our trust in reality?
For a full list of sources, see the show notes at timharford.com
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Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you don't feel like you're getting enough Cautionary Tales,
I have some very good news. We've just launched the
Cautionary Club over on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra
Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a
newsletter chock full of behind the scenes tidbits and anything
else we dug up in our research. We would love
(00:38):
to see you there. Head to patreon dot com slash
Cautionary Club to find out more. That's patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club. In one wing of Somerset House, one
of central London's grandest palaces, the court Old Gallery displays
(00:59):
a selection of its much envied collection of drawings and paintings.
It's a haven for connoisseurs of the fine arts, but
in nineteen ninety eight, the museum's curator was the receiver
of an unsettling phone call. I imagine it may have sounded
(01:21):
something like this, are you speaking?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Please?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It doesn't matter who I am. I'm a friend of
the gallery and you need to know you've been had?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
What do you mean? Who is this someone.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Who knows the truth? Now? Listen, there are eleven pieces
in your collection that were faked?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Faked? Who are you?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Don't waste time? Have you got pen and paper? Good? Now? Listen.
The Virgin and Child by Michael Angelo isn't by Michael Angelo.
It's a forgery. What you heard me? The Study by
Van Dyke that's a forgery too. The Tepelo drawing of
a pagan Idol, the Venetian Scene by Guardi both fake?
Are you writing this down? There are seven others. I'm
(02:03):
not going to stay on this line all day. I'm writing.
But how did so many fakers manage to get so
many different pieces into our collection? So many fakers? Don't
you get it? They're all by one man, Eric Heborn,
sake to all of them. I'm Tim Harford, and you're
(02:25):
listening to cautionary tales. In the nineteen fifties, the Royal
(02:55):
Academy of Art in London awarded a prestigious prize to
a young student named Eric Heborn. The choice of Heborn
was slightly surprising. He was a gifted draftsman, but drawing
was an unfashionable business. Art was all about high concepts,
not realistic depictions. How come a mere draftsman won the prize?
(03:21):
Maybe there's a story behind it fine. Here's a story.
Once upon a time there was a porter who worked
at the Royal Academy who had a habit of drinking
more than was good for him. He'd find a quiet
spot in the basement and sleep it off, cleverly concealing
himself behind a makeshift screen of pictures that were being
(03:44):
stored down there. One of those pictures Leonardo da Vinci's
only surviving large drawing, a sketch known as the Burlington
House cartoon. Burlington House being the headquarters of the Royal Academy,
in the basement of which the porter liked to sleep,
(04:05):
and one day this sozzled fellow propped the hinch she
drawing up against a hot steam radiator. Unfortunately, the radiator
was leaking, and even more unfortunately, the glue that da
Vinci had used to fix his chalk was far from
steam proof. In the morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed,
(04:30):
and most of the chalk and charcoal had come loose
and slid to the bottom of the picture. Only the
faintest outline remained. The porter, in a panic, summoned the
President of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of
pictures who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery,
(04:52):
who announced that the picture couldn't be restored, it could
only be redrawn, at which point they sent for the
best draftsman in the place, a student, Eric Heborn. Hebor
wielded the chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of
(05:14):
the lost original, or so he claimed decades later in
a drunk and off the record conversation with a journalist.
Why else, boasted Heborn? Do you think the Royal Academy
then gave one of their grandest prizes to me an
unfashionable draftsman? And isn't it curious that they sold the
(05:37):
drawing soon afterwards and spent some of the money on
upgrading their radiators. It's an astonishing story and very hard
to check. The drawing was indeed sold and went to
the National Gallery. But one day a man walked into
(05:59):
the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front
of the drawing, standing about six feet away, and then
pulled out a shotgun and blasted into the heart of
the artwork. The man was arrested and found to be
suffering from a mental illness. The National Gallery had the
(06:22):
drawing restored with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued
back together, But that restoration would have concealed Heborn's handiwork
if Heborn ever touched the cartoon, which is an open question.
The Royal Academy is very firm about its answer to
(06:44):
that question. When Heborn's jaw dropping story was published, they
responded that they were astonished that anyone could fall for
such an unlikely story from someone who made a living
out of being a fake. It's true Heborn made his
(07:05):
living out of being a fake. After he graduated from
the Royal Academy, he moved to Rome and worked both
as an art dealer and what one might you phemistically
called a picture restorer. Hid clean old pictures and retouched them,
(07:26):
and before long he was doing much more than that.
Add a balloon floating over an undistinguished landscape, and you
have what appears to be an important record of the
early steps of aviation and a much more expensive painting.
Or maybe the fashion was for poppies. They were easily
(07:49):
added and made to look as though they'd been part
of the original, Or, as Hebborn himself said, a cat
added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Cats. Everyone likes cats.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Some things don't change, and maybe there's little harm in
adding a cat to an old picture nobody wanted. Soon enough,
Heborn was being asked by dealers in the know to
restore blank sheets of paper or to find lost preparatory
(08:25):
sketches by old masters. Some of these discoveries were sold
to other dealers, some of whom knew what he was
up to, and others who did not. He claims to
have created more than a thousand forgeries. Some art historians
I think he made a lot more than that. Here's
(08:49):
another story, again told by Heborn years after the fact.
Heborn acquired a drawing of Roman ruins supposedly sketched by
the Dutch master Jan Breugeli Elder sometime around the year
sixteen hundred. It was good value, just forty pounds in
(09:09):
nineteen sixty three, about one thousand dollars in today's money.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
But was it really by Breugel?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The frame said so, with the impremature of a respected
London dealer. It had Breugel's signature on it. The paper
was old. Heborn knew a lot about paper as a
dealer in old drawings. He had to, there were so
many fakes around, after all. But the drawing itself didn't
(09:39):
seem right to Heborn. It was too careful, the lines
drawn too slowly. This is not a Brougel, Heborn said
to himself. This is a copy. Heborn supposed that some
forgotten engraver three centuries or more ago had painstakingly copied
(10:01):
Breugel's original. As the first step in making and engraving
the original itself had been lost, Heborn decided to find
it again. In a manner of speaking, Heborn turned over
the frame and steamed off the stiff sheet of brown
(10:21):
backing paper, setting it to one side. Then he teased
out the rusty nails, setting those aside too, Each one
would eventually nestle back in precisely the right hole. Finally,
he taped the old drawing to the side of his
drawing board. Then prepared his materials. A blank page cut
(10:45):
out of a sixteenth century book, carefully treated with a
starch solution to control its absorbency, an eighteenth century paint box,
many of the paints still perfectly good, A glass of
brandy to steady the nerves, and moving precisely but swiftly,
he made his own, more vigorous copy. Very nice, look
(11:09):
more like a Brogel.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
He sold it on again, and it ended up in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Heborn recalled
three decades later, I tore up the thing I copied.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I flushed it down the laboratory.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
I rather wish I hadn't, because it would be nice
now to compare. You know, perhaps I destroyed an original Brougel.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
I hope not.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Heborn announced this forgery to the world in his nineteen
ninety one autobiography Drawn to Trouble, and joked that the
Metropolitan Museum were very happy with his picture. Perhaps so,
but they were not happy with the tale Eric Heborn
told about that picture. They told the New York Times,
(11:59):
we don't believe it's a forgery, and we believe that
the story told by mister Heborn in this book is
not true. What is the fake, the drawing or the story?
Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. In twenty seventeen,
(12:29):
the journalist Samantha Cole introduced the world to a new
technology with the following sentence. There's a video of Galgadott
having sex with her stepbrother on the Internet. The video was,
of course a deep fake, a video swapping the face
of wonder Woman onto a porn performer's body, created using
(12:53):
a particular form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. A
year earlier, post truth was named word of the Year
by Oxford Dictionaries, and it was a fertile time for
anxiety about people finding new ways to lie to us?
What would happen if someone created a deep fake of
(13:15):
Donald Trump declaring war on China. In the following years,
such fears seemed overblown. A few deep fakes made a splash.
In twenty eighteen. The Flemish Socialist Party posted a fake
video appearing to show Donald Trump declaring, as you know,
(13:35):
I had the balls to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement,
and so should you. Then there was the audio deep fake,
released two days before the Slovakian election in September twenty
twenty three. The fake audio was widely shared online and
seemed to portray the opposition leader conniving to rig the vote.
(13:58):
He had been leading in late polls, but lost the
election to a pro Russian rival. Despite such warning shots,
deep fake technology is still mostly used for non consensual pornography.
Part of the reason is that creating deep fakes was hard,
(14:19):
and there are easier ways to lie with video. You could,
for example, misdescribe an existing video. In December twenty twenty
three videos circulated on social media claiming to show Hamas
executing people by throwing them off the roof of a
building in Gaza. The videos are genuine, but the atrocity
(14:43):
took place in Iraq in twenty fifteen, and the murderers
were Islamic State.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Not Hamas.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It's common for real videos and pictures to circulate online
with deceptive labels. Other simple tricks achieve much the same effect.
Let's say it's the twenty sixteen election and you want
to create a joke video of Dwayne the Rock Johnson
singing an abusive song to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and
(15:16):
Kerr reaction. No big deal, just for the laughs. It's easy.
We have footage of the Rock singing an abusive song
about another wrestler, we have footage of Hillary Clinton looking
a bit awkward. Spliced them together, as one troll did,
and you have a crude prank depicting a campaign trail
(15:37):
event that never happened. A shallow fake, if you like.
In his book, about deep fakes. Trust no one. The
journalist Michael Grothaus interviewed the troll in question, who realized
something unsettling once his shallow fake video went viral on
(16:02):
Facebook and the comments rolled in. People had missed the joke. Wait,
the troll told Groathaus, these dumbshits think this is real.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
They did.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Indeed, they and we are busy. They and we are distracted.
We instinctively feel that some stuff is too good to check,
and so we'll all accept lies that really should give
us pause. The Slovakian case should be a warning. With
(16:40):
high stakes elections taking place across the world in twenty
twenty four, The experts I've spoken to are deeply concerned
that it's only a matter of time before a clever,
well timed piece of disinformation has a calamitous impact, deciding
the result of a close run election. It might not
(17:04):
involve a deep fake or another AI generated visual image,
then again, when it might. The technology is getting better.
It's already straightforward to create a convincing deep fake, or
to use generative AI to fabricate a photorealistic scene that
never happened, barely more difficult than editing or redescribing an
(17:28):
existing video and visual images have always been more eye
catching and emotionally compelling than mere text. So have our
fears about deep fakes really been misguided? Or have they
merely been premature?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Or perhaps what.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Should really worry us about deep fakes is something else, entirely,
something exemplified by the tricks to Eric Heborn, who not
only created fakes which pass for the real thing, but
repeatedly claimed that the real thing was a fake. Which
(18:08):
is the fake the mets drawing by Jan Breugel or
Eric Heborn's story about having faked it. Eric Heborn is
very firm about his answer to that question, who cares?
In his sensational autobiography Full of Mischief, Heborn argues that
(18:29):
there's no such thing as a fake work of art,
just a mistaken attribution. I don't like the word fake
applied to perfectly genuine drawings, he explained in a BBC
documentary released the same year as his autobiography nineteen ninety one.
In both the book and the documentary, Heborn cheekly blames
(18:52):
unscrupulous dealers for misattributing his work and in competent experts
for missing the truth. Maybe it was a real Broigle
that he flushed down the loo. Maybe it was a copy,
Or maybe Heborn made up the entire story to amuse
him by trolling the Met Maybe the picture in the
(19:12):
Mets collection really was painted by Yan brougl the elder,
as they originally thought, or Yan Brougle the younger, as
they later decided, or the current attribution circle of Yan Breugel.
It doesn't matter, says Heborn. It's a beautiful drawing whoever
drew it, enjoy it for what it is, and don't
(19:36):
worry about what it Isn't Art is about creating beautiful things,
isn't it? And that is what Heborn did. The BBC
interviewer challenged him about this. If he was just making
beautiful drawings rather than fakes, why did he put the
stamps of famous historical art collectors on the pictures? Well
(20:02):
they look nice for one thing, But weren't they designed
to convince the experts that the pictures were j you in,
I don't think so. If they were experts, they would
have seen that they were false collector's marks. Some of
them were done freehand in watercolor, rather than being stamped.
They did them in a very amateurish way, they shouldn't
(20:23):
have been fooled at all, or, as a later faker said, wait,
these dumb shits think this is real. But beneath the
smile when the winking stories, Heborn seems vulnerable on camera,
he speaks softly, slurring his esses. Maybe he's had a
(20:48):
bit too much to drink. He certainly drank far too much.
His friends worried about that, and all his tricks and
adventures start to seem less fun as Heborn quietly tells
the story of his life to the camera that his overworked,
stressed mother used to take her revenge out on him.
(21:11):
At school, He'd make drawing charcoal out of matches and
was accused of arson by the head master, who caned him.
So the eight year old Eric decided he'd do the
deed for which had been punished and set fire to
the school.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
This is the voice of Eric.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Heborn speaking on the nineteen ninety one BBC documentary Eric
Heborn Portrait of a Master Forger.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I got frightened and I thought I'd better tell the
head master of mister Percy what had happened. So I
poked my smoky face round his door and said to
him because I couldn't. I didn't know how to put
it down. Mean plio, I've set light to the school,
so I recited a little poem we'd learned.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
They went fire fire.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Missus Dyer, Where where Missus Claire? That of smoke? Game injury?
His study? And I found myself in a juvenile court
being charged.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
He was sent to a youth detention center at the
age of eight. It's hard not to feel sympathy for
the old rogue. And there is something very heaborn Esque
about being punished first, then committing the crime after the fact.
Justice turned upside down, truth turned back to front, history
(22:39):
turned inside out. That's Eric heborn, and perhaps that's the
computer generated world that's coming for us. If I'm worried
about all the stupid things that people will believe, I'm
even more worried about all the true things that people
(23:02):
think are faked. In twenty nineteen, the Radio Lab podcast
interviewed an expert about the disturbing new technology of deep fakes.
She wasn't too worried, so they asked her why if
people know that such technology exists, they'll be more skeptical.
(23:23):
She explained, if people know that fake news exists. If
they know that fake text exists, fake videos exist, fake
photos exist, then everyone's more skeptical in what they read
and see. But perhaps we've already taken skepticism too far.
Consider a new analysis in the Journal of Experimental Psychology
(23:45):
from the psychologists Ariana Moudu, Rooster Galian, and Philip Hyam.
They look at online games about fake news designed by
researchers to help warn people about disinformation, even to inoculate
them against being fooled. And these games work sort of.
(24:06):
After playing the games, experimental subs are indeed more likely
to flag fake news as fake news. Unfortunately, they're also
more likely to flag genuine news stories as fake news.
Their ability to discriminate between true and false doesn't improve. Instead,
(24:30):
they become more cynical about everything. Is that an improvement
or is the cure worse than the disease. Deep fakes,
like all fakes, raise the possibility that people will mistake
a lie for the truth, but they also create space
(24:50):
for us to mistake the truth for a.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Lie, true a lie.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Just think about the notorious tape from Access Hollywood in
which Donald Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women. Hey, when
you're a star, they.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Let You Do It.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
It was released in October twenty sixteen and caused a
political explosion. Deep fake audio didn't exist then, but if
it had, Trump could easily just have said, that's not
my voice on the tape. The mere fact that deep
fakes might exist creates a completely new kind of deniability.
(25:32):
That's not just a hypothetical claim. It's already happening. In
twenty twenty three, in a lawsuit over the death of
a man using Tesla's self driving capabilities, Elon Musk's lawyers
questioned the YouTube video in which Musk was talking about
those capabilities. It might be a deep fake, they said.
(25:55):
The judge was unimpressed, but surely this is just a
taste of what's to come. If we're shown enough faked
videos of atrocities or of political gaffes, we might start
to dismiss real videos of atrocities and real videos of
political gaffs too. It's good to be skeptical, but if
(26:18):
we're too skeptical, and even the most straightforward truths are
up for debate, that may explain why. Five years after
Samantha Cole explained deep fake pornography to her astonished readers,
she was writing an article with the stupefying title, is
(26:40):
Joe Biden dead? Replaced by ten different deep fake body
doubles an investigation, it might seem a long road from
that woman waving a sex toy around really isn't Galgadott
to that man giving a speech in the White House
really is Joe Biden. But it's a road that Eric
(27:04):
Heborn would have understood very well. Maybe that Brougel really
is a Broigle, Maybe the da Vinci is just a
da Vinci. If Hebron was telling the truth about replacing
that Broigl with his own drawing, why did he do
it to amuse himself and burnish his reputation as a
(27:25):
master draftsman When he confessed if he lied about it,
why also to amuse himself and burnish his reputation as
a master draftsman. The writer and artist Jonathan Keats, in
his book Forged, said of Heborn, faking his fakery may
have been his master stroke, since no amount of sleuthing
(27:48):
could detect forgeries that never existed. Cautionary tales will return
after the break. In twenty sixteen, two analysts at the
(28:14):
think tank RAND described the evolving propaganda strategy of the
Russian government. The conventional wisdom on propaganda messages is that
they should be true when possible, and whether or not
they were true, they should be believable inconsistent. But the
new Russian approach was quite different. Russian media channels would
(28:39):
post anything, as would social media accounts that would be
operated from Saint Petersburg but were pretending to be out
of Portland or Punk's attorney. It didn't matter whether what
they said was true. It didn't matter whether it was believable.
What mattered was speed, relevance, and volume. The analysts called
(29:02):
this strategy the fire hose of falsehood. That's a nickname
that would have suited Eric Hebber perfectly. As we explored
in our recent episode Missing on Dead Mountain, a Cold
War cold case, there are several reasons why the fire
hose of falsehood can work. Despite the fact that the
(29:24):
individual lies and not especially plausible, vast relevant spin from
lots of different sources, all pushing the same basic perspective
can create an overall impression that feels quite believable. I
see something from one source, and then something sympathetic from
another source, and another and another, and it might start
(29:46):
to seem like the truth, and the fire hose of
falsehood can also deliver results, even if nobody believes a
word of it. When it works, it floods social media
and sometimes the conventional media too, with distractions, toxicity, ship
posting an obvious nonsense. The result may well be to
(30:09):
turn news consumers off completely. Why would you spend time
trying to understand the world when everyone seems to be
lying about it all the time. In a press conference
late in twenty twenty three, Vladimir Putin fielded a video
(30:30):
call from a deep faked copy of himself.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Do you have a lot of doubles?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Asked the software doppelganger. Putin calmly replied to his own
digital double that only one person could speak with the
voice of Putin, and that would be Putin himself. Under
the circumstances, that was absurd. So why arrange such a
stunt to create a moment of levity in a country
(30:58):
at war? Perhaps, but there's also a subtext. You can't
believe your eyes, you can't believe your ears, you can't
believe anything that suits President Putin just fine. In nineteen
ninety five, Eric Heborn followed up his autobiography with another
(31:21):
book written and first published in Italian it was a
scandalous How to Guide the Art Forger's Handbook. A few
weeks later, he was found lying in the street near
his apartment in Rome. The medics thought at first that
he had drunk too much, fallen and hit his head,
(31:44):
but not for the first time in Heborn's life, the
professionals were confused by what they were looking at. Heborn
was ferried from one hospital to another and left lying
on a trolley for hours. When they eventually recognized how
serious his injuries were and operated on him, it was
(32:04):
too late. Heborn died on the eleventh of January nineteen
ninety six, a couple of days after being taken into hospital.
Over the next few days, hints of another story started
to emerge. The autopsy concluded that Heborn hadn't taken a
(32:25):
drunken stumble, he had been killed by a hammer blow
to the skull, and Heborn's apartment had been ransacked while
he was lying in the street. As so often, the
truth about Heborn is elusive. The conventional wisdom is that
Hebborn was murdered, but the murder investigation never happened. Perhaps
(32:48):
there were just too many people who might have wanted
him dead. But others who knew Hebborn well say this
is nonsense. The magistrate opened a murder inquiry when the
circumstances seemed unclear, and it never went anywhere because the first,
simplest explanation was the right one. He was drunk, he fell,
(33:09):
and it was just a tragic accident. It would be
nice to know the truth, but surely we've spent enough
time in Eric Heborn's company to realize that sometimes the
truth refuses to be known. Heborn was a charming rogue.
He told outrageous stories, he embarrassed snooty art critics and
(33:34):
cheated cheats. And let's not forget he made beautiful drawings.
The artist Jonathan Keats invites us to think of Heborn
as creating the work that the old masters were no
longer available to make.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
VILLEM.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Van der Velde would gladly have painted another handsome seascape
that he died in seventeen oh seven. Eric Heborn took
up the commission in nineteen sixty and thank goodness, it's
a heartwarming idea and one that would have pleased Heborn.
That we can create old works of art anew and
(34:13):
art history can expand like an accordion to accommodate them.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
But I wonder.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
I certainly don't feel comfortable in a world in which
we can create alternative facts and squeeze them in next
to the real facts. In a world where Vladimir Putin
has conversations with himself, and where people aren't sure if
that's Joe Biden or ten deep fakes of him, and
even in the world of art, should we welcome all
(34:42):
those heborns. I fear that we lose more than we
gain when we start to lose confidence in the da
Vinci's and the Brougels and the michael Angelo's. After Heborn
claimed to have created a better Brougle and flushed the
old version down the toilet, his former boyfriend and business
partner published his own memoirs, saying that the story about
(35:05):
the Brougle drawing wasn't true. The story about setting fire
to his school has been disputed too. Once there are
enough lies around, it's easy to start doubting will everything.
There's a moment in the BBC documentary Heborn, shaded from
(35:27):
the Italian sun by a floppy peasant's hat. His voice
is soft as he tells the tale of being falsely
accused of arson, of his frightened nursery rhyme, of being
sent to court and then to with attention center at
the age of eight. And I couldn't help that wander
(35:47):
was any of it real? Heborn once told an art journalist,
I like to spread a little confusion. He succeeded, and
he became so notorious that people are now starting to
value the Heborn forgeries in their own right. The trouble is,
(36:07):
wrote one art dsler. Some of the drawings which were
being offered for sale by Heborn's associates and former friends
had a strange feel to them, an unusually lifeless quality
which did not seem true of Eric's work at all.
I had misgivings about the drawings and declined to purchase them.
(36:30):
Genuine fakes, fakes of fakes. Maybe they weren't fakes at all,
just original old masters having an off day. The more
time I spend in the world of Eric Heborn, the
more I start to worry that I'll never know the truth.
(36:52):
Who's speaking? Please, it doesn't matter who I am. I'm
a friend of the gallery, and you need to know
you've been had. The anonymous phone call to the core
to Old Institute which named eleven artworks as being forgeries
by Heborn, took place two years after Heborn died. We
still don't know who made the call or why. The
(37:15):
curator who received it thinks it might have been an
ex boyfriend of Heborn's. I recently visited the court Hold
to look at some of the fakes and wrongly suspected
fakes and the works suspended in limbo. It was a
fascinating experience, but it was also an unsettling one. The
(37:37):
Courthold's research has revealed that of the eleven pictures which
were anonymously accused of being Heborn fakes, eight definitely aren't.
For example, there's a Guardi sketch which was photographed in
the nineteen twenties before Heborn was born. He can't have
faked that one unless he copied it and flushed the
(38:00):
original down the loop. Whoever that anonymous whistleblower was, and
whatever his reasons, he wasn't infallible. But three pictures remain
under suspicion, including the Michael Angelo. We just don't know
whether it's real or not. It's a beautiful, simple sketch
(38:21):
in red chalk and brown ink of the Virgin and
Child by perhaps one of the greatest artists who ever lived,
And yet it seems doomed to have an asterisk beside
it forever. I left the court Old Institute and strolled
towards the National Gallery just down the road, where I
(38:45):
could see Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Burlington House Cartoon.
This is the work that Heborn claimed he'd redrawn after
a drunk porter left it too close to a radiator.
The worker, mentally ill man later blasted with a shotgun,
and I couldn't help wandering if that piece really is
(39:09):
is a da Vinci? Then who damaged it? More the
man and his shotgun or Eric Heborn and his story.
Once you start to worry about what's real and what's fake,
it's hard to stop. For a full list of our sources,
(39:48):
see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
is written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan
(40:12):
at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The
show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massaamn Roe, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
(40:35):
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios
in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
(40:56):
the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot Fm,
slash plus
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Oo
Pushkin.
Speaker 2 (00:18):
If you don't feel like you're getting enough Cautionary Tales,
I have some very good news. We've just launched the
Cautionary Club over on Patreon. We'll be dropping an extra
Cautionary Tales episode each month, a bonus interview, and a
newsletter chock full of behind the scenes tidbits and anything
else we dug up in our research. We would love
(00:38):
to see you there. Head to patreon dot com slash
Cautionary Club to find out more. That's patreon dot com
slash Cautionary Club. In one wing of Somerset House, one
of central London's grandest palaces, the court Old Gallery displays
(00:59):
a selection of its much envied collection of drawings and paintings.
It's a haven for connoisseurs of the fine arts, but
in nineteen ninety eight, the museum's curator was the receiver
of an unsettling phone call. I imagine it may have sounded
(01:21):
something like this, are you speaking?
Speaker 1 (01:23):
Please?
Speaker 2 (01:24):
It doesn't matter who I am. I'm a friend of
the gallery and you need to know you've been had?
Speaker 1 (01:30):
What do you mean? Who is this someone.
Speaker 2 (01:33):
Who knows the truth? Now? Listen, there are eleven pieces
in your collection that were faked?
Speaker 1 (01:38):
Faked? Who are you?
Speaker 2 (01:40):
Don't waste time? Have you got pen and paper? Good? Now? Listen.
The Virgin and Child by Michael Angelo isn't by Michael Angelo.
It's a forgery. What you heard me? The Study by
Van Dyke that's a forgery too. The Tepelo drawing of
a pagan Idol, the Venetian Scene by Guardi both fake?
Are you writing this down? There are seven others. I'm
(02:03):
not going to stay on this line all day. I'm writing.
But how did so many fakers manage to get so
many different pieces into our collection? So many fakers? Don't
you get it? They're all by one man, Eric Heborn,
sake to all of them. I'm Tim Harford, and you're
(02:25):
listening to cautionary tales. In the nineteen fifties, the Royal
(02:55):
Academy of Art in London awarded a prestigious prize to
a young student named Eric Heborn. The choice of Heborn
was slightly surprising. He was a gifted draftsman, but drawing
was an unfashionable business. Art was all about high concepts,
not realistic depictions. How come a mere draftsman won the prize?
(03:21):
Maybe there's a story behind it fine. Here's a story.
Once upon a time there was a porter who worked
at the Royal Academy who had a habit of drinking
more than was good for him. He'd find a quiet
spot in the basement and sleep it off, cleverly concealing
himself behind a makeshift screen of pictures that were being
(03:44):
stored down there. One of those pictures Leonardo da Vinci's
only surviving large drawing, a sketch known as the Burlington
House cartoon. Burlington House being the headquarters of the Royal Academy,
in the basement of which the porter liked to sleep,
(04:05):
and one day this sozzled fellow propped the hinch she
drawing up against a hot steam radiator. Unfortunately, the radiator
was leaking, and even more unfortunately, the glue that da
Vinci had used to fix his chalk was far from
steam proof. In the morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed,
(04:30):
and most of the chalk and charcoal had come loose
and slid to the bottom of the picture. Only the
faintest outline remained. The porter, in a panic, summoned the
President of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of
pictures who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery,
(04:52):
who announced that the picture couldn't be restored, it could
only be redrawn, at which point they sent for the
best draftsman in the place, a student, Eric Heborn. Hebor
wielded the chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of
(05:14):
the lost original, or so he claimed decades later in
a drunk and off the record conversation with a journalist.
Why else, boasted Heborn? Do you think the Royal Academy
then gave one of their grandest prizes to me an
unfashionable draftsman? And isn't it curious that they sold the
(05:37):
drawing soon afterwards and spent some of the money on
upgrading their radiators. It's an astonishing story and very hard
to check. The drawing was indeed sold and went to
the National Gallery. But one day a man walked into
(05:59):
the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front
of the drawing, standing about six feet away, and then
pulled out a shotgun and blasted into the heart of
the artwork. The man was arrested and found to be
suffering from a mental illness. The National Gallery had the
(06:22):
drawing restored with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued
back together, But that restoration would have concealed Heborn's handiwork
if Heborn ever touched the cartoon, which is an open question.
The Royal Academy is very firm about its answer to
(06:44):
that question. When Heborn's jaw dropping story was published, they
responded that they were astonished that anyone could fall for
such an unlikely story from someone who made a living
out of being a fake. It's true Heborn made his
(07:05):
living out of being a fake. After he graduated from
the Royal Academy, he moved to Rome and worked both
as an art dealer and what one might you phemistically
called a picture restorer. Hid clean old pictures and retouched them,
(07:26):
and before long he was doing much more than that.
Add a balloon floating over an undistinguished landscape, and you
have what appears to be an important record of the
early steps of aviation and a much more expensive painting.
Or maybe the fashion was for poppies. They were easily
(07:49):
added and made to look as though they'd been part
of the original, Or, as Hebborn himself said, a cat
added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape.
Speaker 1 (08:02):
Cats. Everyone likes cats.
Speaker 2 (08:05):
Some things don't change, and maybe there's little harm in
adding a cat to an old picture nobody wanted. Soon enough,
Heborn was being asked by dealers in the know to
restore blank sheets of paper or to find lost preparatory
(08:25):
sketches by old masters. Some of these discoveries were sold
to other dealers, some of whom knew what he was
up to, and others who did not. He claims to
have created more than a thousand forgeries. Some art historians
I think he made a lot more than that. Here's
(08:49):
another story, again told by Heborn years after the fact.
Heborn acquired a drawing of Roman ruins supposedly sketched by
the Dutch master Jan Breugeli Elder sometime around the year
sixteen hundred. It was good value, just forty pounds in
(09:09):
nineteen sixty three, about one thousand dollars in today's money.
Speaker 1 (09:14):
But was it really by Breugel?
Speaker 2 (09:17):
The frame said so, with the impremature of a respected
London dealer. It had Breugel's signature on it. The paper
was old. Heborn knew a lot about paper as a
dealer in old drawings. He had to, there were so
many fakes around, after all. But the drawing itself didn't
(09:39):
seem right to Heborn. It was too careful, the lines
drawn too slowly. This is not a Brougel, Heborn said
to himself. This is a copy. Heborn supposed that some
forgotten engraver three centuries or more ago had painstakingly copied
(10:01):
Breugel's original. As the first step in making and engraving
the original itself had been lost, Heborn decided to find
it again. In a manner of speaking, Heborn turned over
the frame and steamed off the stiff sheet of brown
(10:21):
backing paper, setting it to one side. Then he teased
out the rusty nails, setting those aside too, Each one
would eventually nestle back in precisely the right hole. Finally,
he taped the old drawing to the side of his
drawing board. Then prepared his materials. A blank page cut
(10:45):
out of a sixteenth century book, carefully treated with a
starch solution to control its absorbency, an eighteenth century paint box,
many of the paints still perfectly good, A glass of
brandy to steady the nerves, and moving precisely but swiftly,
he made his own, more vigorous copy. Very nice, look
(11:09):
more like a Brogel.
Speaker 1 (11:10):
Now.
Speaker 2 (11:11):
He sold it on again, and it ended up in
the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Heborn recalled
three decades later, I tore up the thing I copied.
Speaker 1 (11:24):
I flushed it down the laboratory.
Speaker 2 (11:26):
I rather wish I hadn't, because it would be nice
now to compare. You know, perhaps I destroyed an original Brougel.
Speaker 1 (11:35):
I hope not.
Speaker 2 (11:37):
Heborn announced this forgery to the world in his nineteen
ninety one autobiography Drawn to Trouble, and joked that the
Metropolitan Museum were very happy with his picture. Perhaps so,
but they were not happy with the tale Eric Heborn
told about that picture. They told the New York Times,
(11:59):
we don't believe it's a forgery, and we believe that
the story told by mister Heborn in this book is
not true. What is the fake, the drawing or the story?
Cautionary Tales will be back after the break. In twenty seventeen,
(12:29):
the journalist Samantha Cole introduced the world to a new
technology with the following sentence. There's a video of Galgadott
having sex with her stepbrother on the Internet. The video was,
of course a deep fake, a video swapping the face
of wonder Woman onto a porn performer's body, created using
(12:53):
a particular form of artificial intelligence called deep learning. A
year earlier, post truth was named word of the Year
by Oxford Dictionaries, and it was a fertile time for
anxiety about people finding new ways to lie to us?
What would happen if someone created a deep fake of
(13:15):
Donald Trump declaring war on China. In the following years,
such fears seemed overblown. A few deep fakes made a splash.
In twenty eighteen. The Flemish Socialist Party posted a fake
video appearing to show Donald Trump declaring, as you know,
(13:35):
I had the balls to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement,
and so should you. Then there was the audio deep fake,
released two days before the Slovakian election in September twenty
twenty three. The fake audio was widely shared online and
seemed to portray the opposition leader conniving to rig the vote.
(13:58):
He had been leading in late polls, but lost the
election to a pro Russian rival. Despite such warning shots,
deep fake technology is still mostly used for non consensual pornography.
Part of the reason is that creating deep fakes was hard,
(14:19):
and there are easier ways to lie with video. You could,
for example, misdescribe an existing video. In December twenty twenty
three videos circulated on social media claiming to show Hamas
executing people by throwing them off the roof of a
building in Gaza. The videos are genuine, but the atrocity
(14:43):
took place in Iraq in twenty fifteen, and the murderers
were Islamic State.
Speaker 1 (14:50):
Not Hamas.
Speaker 2 (14:52):
It's common for real videos and pictures to circulate online
with deceptive labels. Other simple tricks achieve much the same effect.
Let's say it's the twenty sixteen election and you want
to create a joke video of Dwayne the Rock Johnson
singing an abusive song to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and
(15:16):
Kerr reaction. No big deal, just for the laughs. It's easy.
We have footage of the Rock singing an abusive song
about another wrestler, we have footage of Hillary Clinton looking
a bit awkward. Spliced them together, as one troll did,
and you have a crude prank depicting a campaign trail
(15:37):
event that never happened. A shallow fake, if you like.
In his book, about deep fakes. Trust no one. The
journalist Michael Grothaus interviewed the troll in question, who realized
something unsettling once his shallow fake video went viral on
(16:02):
Facebook and the comments rolled in. People had missed the joke. Wait,
the troll told Groathaus, these dumbshits think this is real.
Speaker 1 (16:15):
They did.
Speaker 2 (16:16):
Indeed, they and we are busy. They and we are distracted.
We instinctively feel that some stuff is too good to check,
and so we'll all accept lies that really should give
us pause. The Slovakian case should be a warning. With
(16:40):
high stakes elections taking place across the world in twenty
twenty four, The experts I've spoken to are deeply concerned
that it's only a matter of time before a clever,
well timed piece of disinformation has a calamitous impact, deciding
the result of a close run election. It might not
(17:04):
involve a deep fake or another AI generated visual image,
then again, when it might. The technology is getting better.
It's already straightforward to create a convincing deep fake, or
to use generative AI to fabricate a photorealistic scene that
never happened, barely more difficult than editing or redescribing an
(17:28):
existing video and visual images have always been more eye
catching and emotionally compelling than mere text. So have our
fears about deep fakes really been misguided? Or have they
merely been premature?
Speaker 1 (17:45):
Or perhaps what.
Speaker 2 (17:46):
Should really worry us about deep fakes is something else, entirely,
something exemplified by the tricks to Eric Heborn, who not
only created fakes which pass for the real thing, but
repeatedly claimed that the real thing was a fake. Which
(18:08):
is the fake the mets drawing by Jan Breugel or
Eric Heborn's story about having faked it. Eric Heborn is
very firm about his answer to that question, who cares?
In his sensational autobiography Full of Mischief, Heborn argues that
(18:29):
there's no such thing as a fake work of art,
just a mistaken attribution. I don't like the word fake
applied to perfectly genuine drawings, he explained in a BBC
documentary released the same year as his autobiography nineteen ninety one.
In both the book and the documentary, Heborn cheekly blames
(18:52):
unscrupulous dealers for misattributing his work and in competent experts
for missing the truth. Maybe it was a real Broigle
that he flushed down the loo. Maybe it was a copy,
Or maybe Heborn made up the entire story to amuse
him by trolling the Met Maybe the picture in the
(19:12):
Mets collection really was painted by Yan brougl the elder,
as they originally thought, or Yan Brougle the younger, as
they later decided, or the current attribution circle of Yan Breugel.
It doesn't matter, says Heborn. It's a beautiful drawing whoever
drew it, enjoy it for what it is, and don't
(19:36):
worry about what it Isn't Art is about creating beautiful things,
isn't it? And that is what Heborn did. The BBC
interviewer challenged him about this. If he was just making
beautiful drawings rather than fakes, why did he put the
stamps of famous historical art collectors on the pictures? Well
(20:02):
they look nice for one thing, But weren't they designed
to convince the experts that the pictures were j you in,
I don't think so. If they were experts, they would
have seen that they were false collector's marks. Some of
them were done freehand in watercolor, rather than being stamped.
They did them in a very amateurish way, they shouldn't
(20:23):
have been fooled at all, or, as a later faker said, wait,
these dumb shits think this is real. But beneath the
smile when the winking stories, Heborn seems vulnerable on camera,
he speaks softly, slurring his esses. Maybe he's had a
(20:48):
bit too much to drink. He certainly drank far too much.
His friends worried about that, and all his tricks and
adventures start to seem less fun as Heborn quietly tells
the story of his life to the camera that his overworked,
stressed mother used to take her revenge out on him.
(21:11):
At school, He'd make drawing charcoal out of matches and
was accused of arson by the head master, who caned him.
So the eight year old Eric decided he'd do the
deed for which had been punished and set fire to
the school.
Speaker 1 (21:28):
This is the voice of Eric.
Speaker 2 (21:30):
Heborn speaking on the nineteen ninety one BBC documentary Eric
Heborn Portrait of a Master Forger.
Speaker 3 (21:39):
I got frightened and I thought I'd better tell the
head master of mister Percy what had happened. So I
poked my smoky face round his door and said to
him because I couldn't. I didn't know how to put
it down. Mean plio, I've set light to the school,
so I recited a little poem we'd learned.
Speaker 1 (22:00):
They went fire fire.
Speaker 3 (22:03):
Missus Dyer, Where where Missus Claire? That of smoke? Game injury?
His study? And I found myself in a juvenile court
being charged.
Speaker 2 (22:16):
He was sent to a youth detention center at the
age of eight. It's hard not to feel sympathy for
the old rogue. And there is something very heaborn Esque
about being punished first, then committing the crime after the fact.
Justice turned upside down, truth turned back to front, history
(22:39):
turned inside out. That's Eric heborn, and perhaps that's the
computer generated world that's coming for us. If I'm worried
about all the stupid things that people will believe, I'm
even more worried about all the true things that people
(23:02):
think are faked. In twenty nineteen, the Radio Lab podcast
interviewed an expert about the disturbing new technology of deep fakes.
She wasn't too worried, so they asked her why if
people know that such technology exists, they'll be more skeptical.
(23:23):
She explained, if people know that fake news exists. If
they know that fake text exists, fake videos exist, fake
photos exist, then everyone's more skeptical in what they read
and see. But perhaps we've already taken skepticism too far.
Consider a new analysis in the Journal of Experimental Psychology
(23:45):
from the psychologists Ariana Moudu, Rooster Galian, and Philip Hyam.
They look at online games about fake news designed by
researchers to help warn people about disinformation, even to inoculate
them against being fooled. And these games work sort of.
(24:06):
After playing the games, experimental subs are indeed more likely
to flag fake news as fake news. Unfortunately, they're also
more likely to flag genuine news stories as fake news.
Their ability to discriminate between true and false doesn't improve. Instead,
(24:30):
they become more cynical about everything. Is that an improvement
or is the cure worse than the disease. Deep fakes,
like all fakes, raise the possibility that people will mistake
a lie for the truth, but they also create space
(24:50):
for us to mistake the truth for a.
Speaker 1 (24:52):
Lie, true a lie.
Speaker 2 (24:55):
Just think about the notorious tape from Access Hollywood in
which Donald Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women. Hey, when
you're a star, they.
Speaker 1 (25:04):
Let You Do It.
Speaker 2 (25:06):
It was released in October twenty sixteen and caused a
political explosion. Deep fake audio didn't exist then, but if
it had, Trump could easily just have said, that's not
my voice on the tape. The mere fact that deep
fakes might exist creates a completely new kind of deniability.
(25:32):
That's not just a hypothetical claim. It's already happening. In
twenty twenty three, in a lawsuit over the death of
a man using Tesla's self driving capabilities, Elon Musk's lawyers
questioned the YouTube video in which Musk was talking about
those capabilities. It might be a deep fake, they said.
(25:55):
The judge was unimpressed, but surely this is just a
taste of what's to come. If we're shown enough faked
videos of atrocities or of political gaffes, we might start
to dismiss real videos of atrocities and real videos of
political gaffs too. It's good to be skeptical, but if
(26:18):
we're too skeptical, and even the most straightforward truths are
up for debate, that may explain why. Five years after
Samantha Cole explained deep fake pornography to her astonished readers,
she was writing an article with the stupefying title, is
(26:40):
Joe Biden dead? Replaced by ten different deep fake body
doubles an investigation, it might seem a long road from
that woman waving a sex toy around really isn't Galgadott
to that man giving a speech in the White House
really is Joe Biden. But it's a road that Eric
(27:04):
Heborn would have understood very well. Maybe that Brougel really
is a Broigle, Maybe the da Vinci is just a
da Vinci. If Hebron was telling the truth about replacing
that Broigl with his own drawing, why did he do
it to amuse himself and burnish his reputation as a
(27:25):
master draftsman When he confessed if he lied about it,
why also to amuse himself and burnish his reputation as
a master draftsman. The writer and artist Jonathan Keats, in
his book Forged, said of Heborn, faking his fakery may
have been his master stroke, since no amount of sleuthing
(27:48):
could detect forgeries that never existed. Cautionary tales will return
after the break. In twenty sixteen, two analysts at the
(28:14):
think tank RAND described the evolving propaganda strategy of the
Russian government. The conventional wisdom on propaganda messages is that
they should be true when possible, and whether or not
they were true, they should be believable inconsistent. But the
new Russian approach was quite different. Russian media channels would
(28:39):
post anything, as would social media accounts that would be
operated from Saint Petersburg but were pretending to be out
of Portland or Punk's attorney. It didn't matter whether what
they said was true. It didn't matter whether it was believable.
What mattered was speed, relevance, and volume. The analysts called
(29:02):
this strategy the fire hose of falsehood. That's a nickname
that would have suited Eric Hebber perfectly. As we explored
in our recent episode Missing on Dead Mountain, a Cold
War cold case, there are several reasons why the fire
hose of falsehood can work. Despite the fact that the
(29:24):
individual lies and not especially plausible, vast relevant spin from
lots of different sources, all pushing the same basic perspective
can create an overall impression that feels quite believable. I
see something from one source, and then something sympathetic from
another source, and another and another, and it might start
(29:46):
to seem like the truth, and the fire hose of
falsehood can also deliver results, even if nobody believes a
word of it. When it works, it floods social media
and sometimes the conventional media too, with distractions, toxicity, ship
posting an obvious nonsense. The result may well be to
(30:09):
turn news consumers off completely. Why would you spend time
trying to understand the world when everyone seems to be
lying about it all the time. In a press conference
late in twenty twenty three, Vladimir Putin fielded a video
(30:30):
call from a deep faked copy of himself.
Speaker 1 (30:34):
Do you have a lot of doubles?
Speaker 2 (30:35):
Asked the software doppelganger. Putin calmly replied to his own
digital double that only one person could speak with the
voice of Putin, and that would be Putin himself. Under
the circumstances, that was absurd. So why arrange such a
stunt to create a moment of levity in a country
(30:58):
at war? Perhaps, but there's also a subtext. You can't
believe your eyes, you can't believe your ears, you can't
believe anything that suits President Putin just fine. In nineteen
ninety five, Eric Heborn followed up his autobiography with another
(31:21):
book written and first published in Italian it was a
scandalous How to Guide the Art Forger's Handbook. A few
weeks later, he was found lying in the street near
his apartment in Rome. The medics thought at first that
he had drunk too much, fallen and hit his head,
(31:44):
but not for the first time in Heborn's life, the
professionals were confused by what they were looking at. Heborn
was ferried from one hospital to another and left lying
on a trolley for hours. When they eventually recognized how
serious his injuries were and operated on him, it was
(32:04):
too late. Heborn died on the eleventh of January nineteen
ninety six, a couple of days after being taken into hospital.
Over the next few days, hints of another story started
to emerge. The autopsy concluded that Heborn hadn't taken a
(32:25):
drunken stumble, he had been killed by a hammer blow
to the skull, and Heborn's apartment had been ransacked while
he was lying in the street. As so often, the
truth about Heborn is elusive. The conventional wisdom is that
Hebborn was murdered, but the murder investigation never happened. Perhaps
(32:48):
there were just too many people who might have wanted
him dead. But others who knew Hebborn well say this
is nonsense. The magistrate opened a murder inquiry when the
circumstances seemed unclear, and it never went anywhere because the first,
simplest explanation was the right one. He was drunk, he fell,
(33:09):
and it was just a tragic accident. It would be
nice to know the truth, but surely we've spent enough
time in Eric Heborn's company to realize that sometimes the
truth refuses to be known. Heborn was a charming rogue.
He told outrageous stories, he embarrassed snooty art critics and
(33:34):
cheated cheats. And let's not forget he made beautiful drawings.
The artist Jonathan Keats invites us to think of Heborn
as creating the work that the old masters were no
longer available to make.
Speaker 1 (33:51):
VILLEM.
Speaker 2 (33:51):
Van der Velde would gladly have painted another handsome seascape
that he died in seventeen oh seven. Eric Heborn took
up the commission in nineteen sixty and thank goodness, it's
a heartwarming idea and one that would have pleased Heborn.
That we can create old works of art anew and
(34:13):
art history can expand like an accordion to accommodate them.
Speaker 1 (34:18):
But I wonder.
Speaker 2 (34:20):
I certainly don't feel comfortable in a world in which
we can create alternative facts and squeeze them in next
to the real facts. In a world where Vladimir Putin
has conversations with himself, and where people aren't sure if
that's Joe Biden or ten deep fakes of him, and
even in the world of art, should we welcome all
(34:42):
those heborns. I fear that we lose more than we
gain when we start to lose confidence in the da
Vinci's and the Brougels and the michael Angelo's. After Heborn
claimed to have created a better Brougle and flushed the
old version down the toilet, his former boyfriend and business
partner published his own memoirs, saying that the story about
(35:05):
the Brougle drawing wasn't true. The story about setting fire
to his school has been disputed too. Once there are
enough lies around, it's easy to start doubting will everything.
There's a moment in the BBC documentary Heborn, shaded from
(35:27):
the Italian sun by a floppy peasant's hat. His voice
is soft as he tells the tale of being falsely
accused of arson, of his frightened nursery rhyme, of being
sent to court and then to with attention center at
the age of eight. And I couldn't help that wander
(35:47):
was any of it real? Heborn once told an art journalist,
I like to spread a little confusion. He succeeded, and
he became so notorious that people are now starting to
value the Heborn forgeries in their own right. The trouble is,
(36:07):
wrote one art dsler. Some of the drawings which were
being offered for sale by Heborn's associates and former friends
had a strange feel to them, an unusually lifeless quality
which did not seem true of Eric's work at all.
I had misgivings about the drawings and declined to purchase them.
(36:30):
Genuine fakes, fakes of fakes. Maybe they weren't fakes at all,
just original old masters having an off day. The more
time I spend in the world of Eric Heborn, the
more I start to worry that I'll never know the truth.
(36:52):
Who's speaking? Please, it doesn't matter who I am. I'm
a friend of the gallery, and you need to know
you've been had. The anonymous phone call to the core
to Old Institute which named eleven artworks as being forgeries
by Heborn, took place two years after Heborn died. We
still don't know who made the call or why. The
(37:15):
curator who received it thinks it might have been an
ex boyfriend of Heborn's. I recently visited the court Hold
to look at some of the fakes and wrongly suspected
fakes and the works suspended in limbo. It was a
fascinating experience, but it was also an unsettling one. The
(37:37):
Courthold's research has revealed that of the eleven pictures which
were anonymously accused of being Heborn fakes, eight definitely aren't.
For example, there's a Guardi sketch which was photographed in
the nineteen twenties before Heborn was born. He can't have
faked that one unless he copied it and flushed the
(38:00):
original down the loop. Whoever that anonymous whistleblower was, and
whatever his reasons, he wasn't infallible. But three pictures remain
under suspicion, including the Michael Angelo. We just don't know
whether it's real or not. It's a beautiful, simple sketch
(38:21):
in red chalk and brown ink of the Virgin and
Child by perhaps one of the greatest artists who ever lived,
And yet it seems doomed to have an asterisk beside
it forever. I left the court Old Institute and strolled
towards the National Gallery just down the road, where I
(38:45):
could see Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Burlington House Cartoon.
This is the work that Heborn claimed he'd redrawn after
a drunk porter left it too close to a radiator.
The worker, mentally ill man later blasted with a shotgun,
and I couldn't help wandering if that piece really is
(39:09):
is a da Vinci? Then who damaged it? More the
man and his shotgun or Eric Heborn and his story.
Once you start to worry about what's real and what's fake,
it's hard to stop. For a full list of our sources,
(39:48):
see the show notes at Timharford dot com. Cautionary Tales
is written by me Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines,
and Ryan Dilly. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.
The sound design and original music are the work of
Pascal Wise. Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan
(40:12):
at Brain Audio. Bend A Dafhaffrey edited the scripts. The
show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford,
Oliver Hembrough, Sarah Jupp, Massaamn Roe, Jamal Westman, and rufus Wright.
The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work
of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohne, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brody,
(40:35):
Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey, and Owen Miller. Cautionary Tales is
a production of Pushkin Industries. It's recorded at Wardoor Studios
in London by Tom Berry. If you like the show,
please remember to share, rate and review. It really makes
a difference to us and if you want to hear
the show, add free sign up to Pushkin Plus on
(40:56):
the show page on Apple Podcasts or at Pushkin dot Fm,
slash plus
Speaker 3 (41:09):
Oo
Host
Tim Harford
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