The Forger’s Tale: An Insider’s Account of Corrupting the Corpus of Cycladic Figures

Many of the known Cycladic figures, the late prehistoric human-shaped sculptures from the Aegean archipelago, came from 20th-century illicit excavations, especially in the 1960s and 1970s. It is also known that figures were being faked at the time, and perhaps also earlier: a few fakes have been identified, whilst other figures are under suspicion. Interviews with a man who faked Cycladic figures in the 1980s and 1990s give us a first insider’s autobiographical account of the forging business. This article offers, step-by-step, the method that two forgers developed to create fake figures, to treat them so that they appeared ancient, and to sell them on on. The Forger has identified a few of these forgeries from photographs of figures; his story is consistent with other information, and seems to ring true. By verifying various elements in The Forger’s testimony, from names of well-known figures in the modern antiquities market to small details and dates, we are able to evaluate the validity of the narrative; to use it in order to uncover the true paths that fake objects followed into various collections; and to highlight valuable provenance information that no one involved in trading these objects was ever willing to provide.