Not long after Erik Heborn was murdered, an off-the-record interview with the artist-turned-forger was released. In the tape, Hebborn made explosive claims about his time as a student at the Royal Academy of Arts in the 1950s, where he was awarded a prestigious prize. Although he was a gifted draftsman, he was a surprising choice for the award because the art of the era was devoted to abstract concepts rather than realistic depictions. Drawing was not fashionable, so how come an ordinary draftsman won the prize.
Hebborn explained that one day a drunken porter at the Royal Academy was looking for a quiet place to sleep in the basement, and he used some of the paintings downstairs as a partition. One of them was the only surviving large drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, known as the Burlington House Cartoon, after the seat of the Royal Academy. Unfortunately, the doorman placed Da Vinci next to the leaking radiator. By the next morning, the painting was full of moisture. Only the faint outlines of the sketch remain.
In a panic, the porter called the president of the Royal Academy, who called the custodian of the paintings, who called the chief restorer at the National Gallery, who announced that the painting could not be restored, that it could only be redrawn. At that moment, they called in a promising student, Eric Heborn, who impeccably reconstructed the lost original with chalk and charcoal.
Or so Hebborn claimed, pointing out that it was unusual for the Royal Academy to sell the drawing soon afterwards and spend some of the money on repairing the radiator. It was an incredible story that is very difficult to verify. The drawing was indeed sold to the National Gallery. However, one day in 1987, a man in a long coat entered the National Gallery, stopped in front of the drawing, pulled out a shotgun and shot the artwork. The man, who wanted to express his opinion about the social conditions in Britain, was arrested and later sent for psychiatric treatment. The National Gallery restored the painting from small pieces of paper that were carefully assembled. That restoration would hide Heborn's work, if Heborn ever did that drawing. So is it?
When the astonishing story of Hebborn's claims was published, the Royal Academy responded that they were amazed that “anyone could believe such an incredible story from someone who made a living from lying”.
One thing is for sure, Heborn lived a lie. After graduating, he moved to Rome where he made a living as both an art dealer and what one might euphemistically call a picture restorer. He would clean up old pictures and retouch them, and soon he started doing more than that. He would add a balloon floating over the landscape, and you would have what seemed like an important testimony to the first steps of aviation - and therefore a much more expensive picture. Or maybe poppies were in fashion. They were easy to add and looked like part of the original. Or, as Heborn himself said: "a cat in the foreground guaranteed the sale of even the most boring landscape". Soon, Heborn was being asked to "restore" blank sheets of paper, or "find" the lost preparatory drawings of the Old Masters. He would pass these discoveries on to other traders, some of whom knew what he was doing and some of whom did not. He claims to have made more than a thousand forgeries. Some art historians believe he did much more than that.
Here's another Heborn story that's hard to verify. A few years after he moved to Rome, he came across a drawing of Roman ruins, allegedly drawn by the Flemish master Jan Brueghel the Elder sometime around 1600. He got it cheaply, for about 40 pounds in 1963, which in today's value would be about 1000. But was it really Brueghel? It said so on the frame, with the stamp of a prominent London merchant. It also had Bruegel's signature. The paper was old. Heborn knew a lot about paper. As a dealer in old drawings, that was his job. After all, there were a lot of fakes circulating.
However, the drawing itself did not sit well with Heborn. It was too carefully done, the lines were drawn too slowly. "This is not Brueghel," Heborn thought. “This is a copy”. He surmised that some forgotten engraver, three centuries ago or more, had carefully copied the original of Bruegel's work as the first step in making an etching. The original itself was lost. Heborn decided to find him again, in his own way.
Heborn turned the frame and detached the stiff brown backing, setting it aside. Then he carefully pulled out the rusty nails, also putting them away. Each will eventually fit right back into the corresponding hole. In the end, he taped the old drawing next to his drawing table. He prepared his materials: a blank page cut from a 16th-century book, carefully treated with a starch solution to control its absorption; an 18th-century paint bottle, with many of the colors still perfectly good; a glass of brandy to calm his nerves. And, moving precisely but quickly, he made his "more energetic" copy. Very nice. Now it looked more like Bruegel. He sold it again, and it ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.
After admiring his work, Heborn recalls doing something he will “regret... I tore up the drawing I was copying... I threw it down the drain. I wish I hadn't because it would be nice to compare, you know, maybe I ruined the real Brueghel. I hope not".
In any case, Heborn claims that the Metropolitan Museum was satisfied with the copy. However, when he published the story of the forgery in his autobiography in 1991, Metropiliten was not satisfied. They announced to the "New York Times": "We do not believe it is a forgery. We believe that the story that Mr. Heborn wrote in the book is not true”.
Which information is false: the story of Da Vinci's work or the drawing? Bruegel's sketch or the story of its origin? Deciding what is true and what is not is something we have to get used to quickly. I'm not entirely sure we're up to the challenge.
Deepfake pornography
Journalist Samantha Cole introduced the new technology to the world with the following sentence: "There is a video of Gal Gado having sex with her half-brother on the Internet." The recording is, of course, a fake (deepfake), and it was made by placing Gal Gado's face on the body of a porn actress using a special form of artificial intelligence called deep learning.
What's the bigger problem, people who fall for malicious nonsense, or people who refuse to believe in basic journalism?
That was 2017, the year after "post-truth" was named Oxford Dictionaries' word of the year and there was growing concern that people were finding new ways to lie to us. What if someone made a deepfake video of Donald Trump declaring war on China?
In the following years, those fears seemed exaggerated. Just a few deepfake videos have caused a sensation: one that appears to show Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky belly dancing was circulated earlier this month. In 2018, the Flemish Socialist Party published a fake video showing Donald Trump declaring: “As you know I had the balls to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement. You should do that too." Then there is the fake audio recording released two days before the Slovak elections last September. That video was widely shared on the Internet and it appeared that the opposition leader was agreeing to the falsification of votes. According to surveys before the vote, he was ahead, but he lost the election to a pro-Russian rival.
Despite those warning shots, deepfake technology is still mostly used for pornography without prior consent. Part of the reason is that creating deepfakes is hard - there are easier ways to fake footage. You can, for example, incorrectly describe an existing recording. In December 2023, footage circulated on social media purporting to show Hamas killing people by pushing them off the roof of a building in Gaza.
The footage is authentic, but that crime took place in Iraq in 2015 and the killers were members of the Islamic State, not Hamas. It is common for authentic footage and photos to be shared online with a misleading description.
Other simple tricks achieve mostly the same effect. Let's say it's 2016 and you want to take a funny video of Dwayne Rock Johnson singing an offensive song to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, and her reaction to it. No big deal, just kidding. It's easy. We have footage of The Rock singing an offensive song to another wrestler. We have a clip of Hillary Clinton looking a little weird. Put them together - as one troll did - and you have a hoax that describes an event during the campaign that never happened. It can even be said that it is naive.
In his book on fakes, "Trust No One," journalist Michael Grothaus spoke to the troll who made the video, who realized something disturbing after his fake video went viral on Facebook. The comments piled up, and people didn't realize it was a joke. “Wait,” the troll said to Grothaus. "These morons think this is real?"
Indeed they are. They - we - are too busy. We are not focused. We instinctively think that something is too good to check. And so we will accept lies that should actually make us wonder.
The case in Slovakia should be a warning. With high-stakes elections taking place around the world this year, the experts I spoke with worry that it's only a matter of time before some clever, well-timed disinformation has disastrous consequences, deciding the outcome of a close election. It may not be a deepfake or some other artificial intelligence (AI) generated visual. Then again, it could be. That technology is getting better; it's already good enough to make a convincing deepfake, or use AI for a photorealistic scene that never happened. And the visuals were always more striking and emotionally powerful than the text. So are our fears about fake footage really exaggerated, or perhaps premature.
Skepticism has gone too far
Some AI experts dismiss fears about deepfakes, assuring us that we will become smarter once we get used to them.
Professor Ira Kemelmacher Schlizerman, a programmer at Google and the University of Washington, told the Radiolab podcast in 2019 that "if people know that such technology exists, they will be more skeptical." She explained: "If people know that there is fake news, if they know that there are fake texts, fake videos, fake photos, then everyone is more skeptical about what they see and read."
If we are exposed to a huge number of fake footage of crimes, or political gaffes, we may start to reject authentic footage of crimes and real footage of political gaffes
However, perhaps our skepticism has already gone too far. Take, for example, a new analysis of the Journal of Experimental Psychology by Ariana Modirusta Galijan and Filip Higham. They study games like “Bad News” and “Go Viral,” which were designed by researchers at the University of Cambridge to help people spot fake news. And they work to some extent. After playing these games, participants are actually more likely to label fake news as fake news. But, unfortunately, they are also more inclined to characterize authentic news as fake. Their ability to distinguish between true and false did not improve. Instead they became more cynical about everything.
What's the bigger problem, people who fall for malicious nonsense, or people who refuse to believe in basic journalism? I'm not sure. However, it is certainly possible that universal skepticism is a cure that is worse than the disease. Deepfakes, like anything fake, increase the likelihood that people will think a lie is true, but they also open the door for us to think something that is true is a lie.
Just think of the infamous video of Donald Trump bragging about sexually assaulting women. It was published in October 2016 and caused a political explosion. Deepfake recordings were not a topic of conversation at the time, but if they were, Trump could easily say: "That's not my voice on the recording". The very fact that deepfake exists provides a whole new kind of denial.
Research conducted by Purdue University looked at the evidence for this type of risk. 15 Americans participated in the research and they answered the question of how realistic they would consider a series of excuses for political scandals. They found that when the scandal was reported through text, politicians could get away with shouting "fake news". People would believe that the scandal never happened, that the evidence was faked.
If someone showed us enough fake footage of crimes, or political gaffes, it might happen that we would start rejecting authentic footage of crimes and real footage of political gaffes. It is good to be skeptical, but if we are too skeptical then even the most obvious truths are open to scrutiny.
That might explain why, five years after Samantha Cole explained deepfake pornography to her stunned readers, she wrote an article with the startling headline “Is Joe Biden Dead, Replaced by 10 Different Deepfake Doppelgangers? Investigation”.
The transition from "that woman waving a sex toy isn't really Gal Gadot" to "that man giving a White House speech is really Joe Biden" can seem drastic. However, it's a transition that Eric Heborn would understand well. Maybe that Brueghel really is Brueghel. Maybe Da Vinci is just Da Vinci.
The experts were not allowed to miss the truth
If Heborn was indeed telling the truth about replacing Bruegel with his own drawing, the question arises as to why he did it. To have fun and improve the reputation of the drawing master. If he lied, the question arises again as to why. Also to have fun and present yourself as a drawing master. Writer and artist Jonathon Keats, in his book Forged, said of Hebborn: "Faking his forgery may have been his pinnacle, for no amount of research could have discovered forgeries that never existed."
So what is fake, Jan Brueghel's drawing in the Metropolitan, or Eric Heborn's story about him forging it. Heborn's response was: who cares? In His sensational autobiography, he argues that there is no such thing as a fake work of art, only a misattribution. "I don't like it when the word fake is used for perfectly authentic drawings," he explained in a BBC documentary released the same year as his autobiography.
Heborn cheekily blamed dishonest traders for misattributing his works and incompetent experts for missing the truth.
Maybe the real Bruegel ended up in the gutter. Maybe it was a copy. Or maybe Heborn made up the whole story to amuse himself and troll the Metropolitan. Perhaps the painting in the museum's collection was indeed painted by Jan Brueghel the Elder, as originally thought, or by Jan Brueghel the Younger, as was later decided, or in the "Jan Brueghel Circle" as now attributed. It doesn't even matter, said Heborn. It's a nice drawing, whoever drew it. Enjoy what it is and don't think about what that drawing isn't. Isn't the essence of art in creating beautiful things? And that's what Heborn was doing.
A BBC reporter challenged him at one point. If he was really just creating beautiful drawings instead of forgeries, why did he put stamps of famous historical collectors on the pictures? “Well, they look nice,” Heborn replied.
But aren't they designed to convince experts that the images are authentic? “I don't think so. If they are experts, they would see that these are fake collectors' marks,” Heborn replied.
Some of them are done freehand, with water colors, they are not stamped. I did it pretty amateurishly. That should not have deceived them". Or as one forger later said: "Wait, do you idiots think this is true?"
In 2016, two analysts from the Rand Corporation described the development of the Russian government's propaganda strategy. The general attitude when it comes to propaganda messages is that they should be truthful when possible and, in any case, they should be convincing and consistent. However, the approach taken by Russia differed greatly. Russian media channels, portals and paid social media accounts published everything. It didn't matter if it was true. It didn't matter if it was believable. Speed, relevance and scale are essential.
A torrent of lies
Analysts called that strategy a “flood of lies”. That nickname would suit Heborn perfectly. There are several reasons why a "flood of lies" can work, despite the fact that individual lies are not particularly feasible. A quick, relevant spin from many different sources, all pushing the same basic position, can create an overall impression that feels quite convincing. And a flood of lies can also produce results even if no one believes a single word. It's enough to flood social media (and sometimes even mainstream media) with distractions, toxic content, and blatant nonsense. The result can be complete rejection of the audience. Why waste time trying to understand the world when it seems like everyone lies all the time?
At a press conference in late 2023, Vladimir Putin faced a fake call from a deepfake version of himself. “Do you have many doppelgangers?” the software doppelganger asked. The real Putin calmly replied that only one person can speak in Putin's voice, and that is Putin. In the circumstances, it was absurd. So why organize such a thing at all? Perhaps to create a sense of carelessness in a war-torn country. However, there is also another message: you cannot believe your eyes, you cannot believe your ears; you can't trust anything.
With elections in 2024 in Great Britain, the United States and many other democracies, it is worth considering some unpleasant scenarios. Disinformation is cheaper today than ever before. We may see authentic-looking fake audio and video generated automatically and on a massive scale. They can be targeted specifically to one person based on their browsing habits, rather than being published where everyone can see and verify them. We may see striking, carefully crafted propaganda that cannot be unmasked by background checks. We have already seen the use of deepfake videos in the campaigns of renowned politicians, such as former Republican presidential candidate Ron Desantis.
Disinformation is cheaper today than ever before
And regardless of whether any fake material stands out as such, we can certainly expect authentic footage and reporting to be dismissed as fake. Technology is advancing rapidly, and there are a number of unscrupulous actors ready to take advantage of it.
In 1995, after his autobiography, Erik Heborn published a book in Italian, a scandalous instruction that was later in English called "The Art Forger's Handbook". A few weeks later he was found lying in the street near his apartment in Rome. Doctors initially thought he was drunk and had fallen and hit his head. However, as many times in Hebborn's life, the pros were fooled by appearances. His condition was more serious, and not the result of an accident as they had originally thought.
Hebborn died on January 11, 1996, a few days after being taken to the hospital. An autopsy determined that Heborn died, not from a fall, but from a blow to the head with a blunt object. His apartment was ransacked while he was lying on the street. There were plenty of suspects for his murder. There were people to whom he sold forgeries, people whose authentic works he claimed he had forged, merchants whom he publicly accused of knowingly buying forgeries and selling them for fabulous sums. More recent reports suggest that he was also paid by the mob to forge works of art. The police did not bother with the investigation. They didn't know where to start. Too many people wanted Heborn dead.
Jonathon Keats invites us to look at Heborn less as a forger and more as a man who created the works of old masters who could no longer do it. It's a pleasant idea that would surely have appealed to Heborn: that we can recreate old works of art, and art history will expand like an accordion to encompass them.
However, while some may find this idea acceptable when it comes to works of art, I do not feel comfortable in a world where we can create alternative facts and place them alongside the truth, a world where Vladimir Putin is talking to himself and people are not sure if it's joe biden or one of his 10 copies.
And even in the art world, should we embrace all those Heborns? I fear that we will lose more than we will gain when we begin to lose faith in Da Vinci and Brueghel.
After Hebborn claimed to have made a better Brueghel and threw the old version down the drain, his former partner published his memoirs saying the story about the drawing was not true. When lies are all around us, it seems easy to suspect almost everything.
"I like to spread confusion"
Hebborn once told the famous journalist Geraldine Norman, "I like to spread confusion". He succeeded in that. It has become so famous that people are now starting to appreciate Heborn's forgeries.
The only problem is that, as one art dealer said, "some of the drawings offered for sale by Heborn's associates and former friends seem somehow strange, strangely lifeless, which is not in the least consistent with Eric's work."
Real fakes or fakes of fakes? Maybe they are not even fakes, but original works of old masters who were not in good shape the day they were made.
Two days after Heborn was killed, an anonymous phone call to the Cortauld Institute in London warned that 11 works of art in the institute's collection were fakes by Heborn. It is still not known who made the call, or why.
I recently visited Kortauld to look at some of the forgeries and questionable works. It was a fascinating but disturbing experience. One Van Dijk is also under suspicion, but everything seems right in that picture. There is also a drawing by Michelangelo. Fake? The real one? We just don't know. It is a beautiful work by perhaps one of the greatest artists ever. And yet, he seems destined to be forever under the veil of suspicion.
I left the Courtauld Institute and walked to the National Gallery where I saw Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Burlington House Cartoon. It's the work that Hebborn claimed he crossed out after being left too close to a radiator by a drunken porter, the work that was later shot at with a shotgun.
I had to ask myself: if this work is indeed Da Vinci, who did more harm to it, the man with the gun or Eric Heborn and his story?
The text is taken from "Financial Times"
Translation: N. Bogetić
Bonus video:
