News and Farewell

A New York Times article today examines a crisis at the Vietnam Fine Arts Museum. During the tumultuous period surrounding the Vietnam war, the museum, located in Hanoi, worried about what would happen to its collection should the United States bomb the city. In order to protect its collection, the museum commissioned artists to create reproductions (the Vietnamese call them “variants”) of the most important pieces in the collection. These reproductions would replace the pieces on display in the museum, which would be transported to the countryside for safekeeping. However, due to a lack of oversight during those chaotic years, the museum now faces a problem – in the case of roughly 20,000 objects museum officials do not know if they are originals or reproductions. Officials are now working to create an Art Work Evaluation Center to begin the difficult process of trying to determine the authenticity of these pieces.

For any museum in the United States, this situation would constitute a major disaster. However, the circulation and viewing of reproductions has always been a part of the art world in Vietnam, where classical pieces would be reproduced so as to show them to a wider audience. Though the Vietnamese public is now starting to complain about this problem of authenticity, its interesting to consider an art culture that historically has not placed such a high price on the provenance of a work as the West does. Perhaps it is indicative of a greater emphasis on the image, on the actual content of a piece of art – something that often seems neglected in the Western art world.

With my stint as an intern here at the museum ending, I will miss being able to highlight stories like this one – stories of the messy side of the art. I really enjoyed being able to read and write about the controversial figures, the forgers, the thieves, that are a part of the past and the present of the art world. Through working here at the museum, I saw the amount of work, the piles of documentation that go into establishing provenance and maintaining the history of a piece of art. But I also found it interesting to explore the stories of tricksters who defied the meticulousness of the art world – fellows like Han van Meegeren, a Dutch forger who had the talent and the tenacity to sell fake Vermeers to the Nazis. My experience here at the museum was a wonderful look into the many sides of the art world and I can’t wait to return to Athens to see the museum reopened with the new wing.

John Keith, publications intern