Word: alceo
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Five years ago directors of a dozen European museums as well as the Metropolitan, Boston Museum of Fine Arts and Cleveland Museum of Art and Collectors Helen Clay Frick and William Randolph Hearst discovered that they were all supplied with the works of Sculptor Alceo Dossena in his varying moods. They knew them under a variety of other names and the smell the story aroused was not sweet (TIME...
...were anything but his own work. Nor did he make money. Dealers paid him about $200 each for works they sold for as much as $100,000. Even these payments were tardy. The hoax was first exposed when Dossena sued one Alfredo Fasoli, antique dealer, for back pay. If Alceo Dossena is not the greatest forger, he certainly is one of the few imitators of antiquities whose work still has real value after the hoax has been exposed. Last week his surplus stock, now frankly under his own name, went on exhibition before a public auction in Manhattan...
...Alceo Dossena had a good apprenticeship for his profession. He was born in 1878 in Cremona, hometown of the great Violin Maker Stradivari, and apprenticed to a marble mason. With his master he worked for years restoring the balustrades and ornaments of local churches in Cremona, Piacenza, Parma-restorations that not only copied the details but imitated the patina of nearby originals. Soon he was restoring not only marble but bronze, terra cotta and wood...
After the armistice, when Alceo Dossena took off his fighting tunic he was no longer satisfied with repairing other people's antiques. He had handled and studied the work of so many great masters, had learned so many secrets of coloring, polishing and aging stone, that he felt quite capable of doing a little original work of his own. Sculptor Dossena set up shop in a little villa outside Florence, then in one outside Rome. He locked the doors of both to strangers...
...these were the work of Alceo Dossena. His defenders make one important point. Dossena never actually copied any known work by the men he was imitating. To the extent that an elaborate parody is a work of art, Alceo Dossena was an original artist. At the National Galleries last week President Van Baarn explained...