Monet & the Phony Pony

In the museum world, some secrets are out even before they can be classified as secret, others lie quietly covered up for years. Last week New York's Metropolitan Museum gave a rousing demonstration of both truisms and, in the process, announced it was both richer by a handsome new acquisition and poorer by declaring one of its prized Greek treasures to be a fake.

Almost as soon as Monet's The Terrace at Ste. Adresse was knocked down to a London dealer for $1,411,200, thus setting an auction record for an impressionist painting (TIME, Dec. 8), the rumor spread that the buyer was the Metropolitan. Making it official, President Arthur A. Houghton Jr. announced that the Monet had indeed been bought for the Met, by "a small group of intimate friends," presumably including Houghton and Investment Banker Robert Lehman.

Telltale Lines. Two days later it was Met Vice Director Joseph V. Noble's turn to unwrap another kind of a secret. Appearing before a jampacked museum audience gathered to hear a lecture on "The Art of Forgery," Noble displayed a Greek bronze statuette of a horse, bought by the museum in 1923 from a Paris dealer, that has been hailed by critics as "the quintessence of the ancient Greek spirit." It is pictured in the Encyclopaedia Britannica and dated circa 470 B.C. In fact the horse, said Noble, is early 20th century.

Noble has been leary of the steed's bloodlines since July 1961. It has taken six years of sleuthing, and a notable advance in technology, to confirm his nagging suspicions. The Met quietly retired the horse while its ancestry was being checked (though Brentano's book store was still selling a $75 replica when the news was released). What had initially caught Noble's eye while strolling by the horse was a thin line that runs from the top of the mane to the tip of the nose and, less evidently, circles the entire body. "I knew as sure as I was standing there," Noble recalled last week, "that the piece was a fraud." But how to prove it?

Useless Hole. The lines were the filed-down ridges of bronze that seep between the pieces of a mold when a statue has been sand-cast in sections, but this technique was not developed until the 14th century. The ancients used the lost-wax process that produced a seamless, one-piece mold--and a statue with no ridges on it. Another giveaway was a tiny hole on the top of the horse's head. Such holes are common on the life-size marble horses found on the Acropolis: the Greeks fitted spikes in them to keep the birds away. But such a device was purposeless for a Greek statuette, 15 inches high, which would have been shown indoors.

Convinced he had picked up a forger's scent, Noble made tests to determine the specific gravity of the horse, found it was too low for solid bronze but about right if the statue had a sand core, held in place by iron wire and tacks--which is how French bronze statues in the 1920s were cast. Ordinary X-ray equipment would not penetrate deeply enough to show the interior of the sculpture. But on Sept. 15, Noble, using equipment developed to inspect the six-inch-thick steel hulls of nuclear submarines, was able to have a gamma-ray shadowgraph made. "They held up the film dripping wet, and for the first time I could see inside the horse," he says. "I could see the sand core, the iron wire and the iron points. That was it."

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