True Lies and Genuine Fakes

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in one wing of Somerset House, one of central London's grandest palaces, the Court Old Gallery displays a selection of its much-envied collection of drawings and paintings.

It's a haven for connoisseurs of the fine arts.

But in 1998, the museum's curator was the receiver of an unsettling phone call.

I imagine it may have sounded something like this.

Who's speaking, please?

It doesn't matter who I am.

I'm a friend of the gallery, and you need to know you've been had.

What do you mean?

Who is this?

Someone who knows the truth.

Now, listen, there are 11 pieces in your collection that were faked.

Faked?

Who are you?

Don't waste time.

Have you got pen and paper?

Good.

Now listen.

The Virgin and Child by Michelangelo isn't by Michelangelo.

It's a forgery.

What?

You heard me.

The studies by Van Dyke, that's a forgery too.

The Tiepolo drawing of a pagan idol.

The Venetian scene by Guardi, both fake.

Are you writing this down?

There are seven others.

I'm not going to stay on this line all day.

I'm writing, but how did so many fakers manage to get so many different pieces into our collection?

So many fakers?

Don't you get it?

They're all by one man,

Eric Haborn.

Faked all of them.

I'm Tim Harford, and you're listening to Cautionary Tales.

In the 1950s, the Royal Academy of Art in London awarded a prestigious prize to a young student named Eric Heborn.

The choice of Heborn was slightly surprising.

He was a gifted draftsman, but drawing was an unfashionable business.

Art was all about high concepts, not realistic depictions.

How come a mere draftsman won the prize?

Maybe there's a story behind it.

Fine.

Here's a story.

Once upon a time, there was a porter who worked at the Royal Academy who had a habit of drinking more than was good for him.

He'd find a quiet spot in the basement and sleep it off, cleverly concealing himself behind a makeshift screen of pictures that were being stored down there.

One of those pictures?

Leonardo da Vinci's only surviving large drawing, a sketch known as the Burlington House cartoon.

Burlington House being the headquarters of the Royal Academy, in the basement of which the porter liked to sleep.

And one day, this sozzled fellow propped the da Vinci drawing up against a hot steam radiator.

Unfortunately, the radiator was leaking.

And even more unfortunately, the glue that Da Vinci had used to fix his chalk was far from steam-proof.

In the morning, the picture had been thoroughly steamed, and most of the chalk and charcoal had come loose and slid to the bottom of the picture.

Only the faintest outline remained.

The porter, in a panic, summoned the President of the Royal Academy, who summoned the keeper of pictures, who summoned the chief restorer of the National Gallery, who announced that the picture couldn't be restored.

It could only be redrawn.

At which point, they sent for the best draftsman in the place, a student, Eric Hebborn.

Hebborn wielded the chalk and charcoal in a flawless recreation of the lost original.

Or so he claimed, decades later, in a drunk and off-the-record conversation with a journalist.

Why else, boasted Heborn, do you think the Royal Academy then gave one of their grandest prizes to me, an unfashionable draftsman?

And isn't it curious that they sold the drawings soon afterwards and spent some of the money on...

upgrading their radiators.

It's an astonishing story and very hard to check.

The drawing was indeed sold and went to the National Gallery.

One day, a man walked into the National Gallery wearing a long coat, paused in front of the drawing, standing about six feet away, and then pulled out a shotgun and blasted into the heart of the artwork.

The man was arrested and found to be suffering from a mental illness.

The National Gallery had the drawing restored with tiny fragments of paper being painstakingly glued back together.

But that restoration would have concealed Heborn's handiwork if Heborn ever touched the cartoon.

which is an open question.

The Royal Academy is very firm about its answer to that question.

When Heborn's jaw-dropping story was published, they responded that they were astonished that anyone could fall for such an unlikely story from someone who made a living out of being a fake.

It's true, Heborn made his living out of being a fake.

After he graduated from the Royal Academy, he moved to Rome and worked both as an art dealer and what one might euphemistically call a picture restorer.

He'd clean old pictures and retouch them and before long

he was doing much more than that.

Add a balloon floating over an undistinguished landscape and you have what appears to be an important record of the early steps of aviation and a much more expensive expensive painting.

Or maybe the fashion was for poppies.

They were easily added and made to look as though they'd been part of the original.

Or as Heborn himself said, a cat added to the foreground guaranteed the sale of the dullest landscape.

Cats.

Everyone likes cats.

Some things don't change, and maybe there's little harm in adding a cat to an old picture nobody wanted.

Soon enough, Heborn was being asked by dealers in the know to

restore blank sheets of paper or to

find

lost preparatory sketches by old masters.

Some of these discoveries were sold to other dealers, some of whom knew what he was up to and others who did not.

He claims to have created more than a thousand forgeries.

Some art historians think he made a lot more than that.

Here's another story, again told by Heborn years after the fact.

Heborn acquired a drawing of Roman ruins, supposedly sketched by the Dutch master Jan Bruegel the Elder, sometime around the year 1600.

It was good value.

Just £40 in 1963, about $1,000 in today's money.

But was it really by Bruegel?

The frame said so, with the impremature of a respected London dealer.

It had Bruegel's signature on it.

The paper was old.

Herborn knew a lot about paper.

As a dealer in old drawings, he had to.

There were so many fakes around, after all.

But the drawing itself didn't seem right to Herborn.

It was too careful.

The lines drawn too slowly.

This is not a Bruegel, Heborn said to himself.

This is a copy.

Heborn supposed that some forgotten engraver three centuries or more ago had painstakingly copied Bruegel's original as the first step in making an engraving.

The original itself had been lost.

Heborn decided to find it again, in a manner of speaking.

Heborn turned over the frame and steamed off the stiff sheet of brown backing paper, setting it to one side.

Then he teased out the rusty nails, setting those aside too.

Each one would eventually nestle back in precisely the right hole.

Finally, he taped the old drawing to the side of his drawing board, then prepared his materials.

A blank page cut out of a 16th century book, carefully treated with a starch solution to control its absorbency, an 18th century paint box, many of the paints still perfectly good, a glass of brandy to steady the nerves, and moving precisely but swiftly, he made his own more vigorous copy.

Very nice.

It looked more like a Bruegel now.

He sold it on again, and it ended up in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York.

Heborn recalled three decades later, I tore up the thing I copied.

I flushed it down the lavatory.

I rather wish I hadn't, because it would be nice now to compare, you know.

Perhaps I'd destroyed an original Bruegel.

I hope not.

Heborn announced this forgery to the world in his 1991 autobiography, Drawn to Trouble, and joked that the Metropolitan Museum were very happy with his picture.

Perhaps so, but they were not happy with the tale Eric Heborn told about that picture.

They told the New York Times, We don't believe it's a forgery, and we believe that the story told by Mr.

Heborn in this book is not true.

So, what is the fake?

The drawing or the story?

Cautionary Tales will be back after the break.

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Kevin and Rachel and Peanut MMs and an eight-hour road trip.

And Rachel's new favorite audiobook, The Cerulean Empress, Scoundrel's Inferno.

And Florian, the reckless yet charming scoundrel from said audiobook.

And his pecs glistened in the moonlight.

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In 2017, the journalist Samantha Cole introduced the world to a new technology with the following sentence.

There's a video of Gal Godot having sex with her stepbrother on the internet.

The video was, of course, a deep fake.

A video swapping the face of Wonder Woman onto a porn performer's body created using a particular form of artificial intelligence called deep learning.

A year earlier, post-truth was named word of the year by Oxford Dictionaries, and it was a fertile time for anxiety about people finding new ways to lie to us.

What would happen if someone created a deepfake of Donald Trump declaring war on China?

In the following years, such fears seemed overblown.

A few deepfakes made a splash.

In 2018, the Flemish Socialist Party posted a fake video appearing to show Donald Trump declaring, as you know, I had the balls to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement, and so should you.

Then there was the audio deepfake released two days before the Slovakian election in September 2023.

The fake audio was widely shared online and seemed to portray the opposition leader conniving to rig the vote.

He had been leading in late polls, but lost the election to a pro-Russian rival.

Despite such warning shots, deep fake technology is still mostly used for non-consensual pornography.

Part of the reason is that creating deep fakes was hard, and there are easier ways to lie with video.

You could, for example, misdescribe an existing video.

In December 2023, videos circulated on social media claiming to show Hamas executing people by throwing them off the roof of a building in Gaza.

The videos are genuine, but the atrocity took place in Iraq in 2015, and the murderers were Islamic State, not Hamas.

It's common for real videos and pictures to circulate online with deceptive labels.

Other simple tricks achieve much the same effect.

Let's say it's the 2016 election, and you want to create a joke video of Dwayne The Rock Johnson singing an abusive song to presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and her reaction.

No big deal, just for the laughs.

It's easy.

We have footage of The Rock singing an abusive song about another wrestler.

We have footage of Hillary Clinton looking a bit awkward.

Splice them together as one troll did, and you have a crude prank depicting a campaign trail event that never happened.

A shallow fake, if you like.

In his book about deep fakes, Trust No One, the journalist Michael Grothaus interviewed the troll in question, who realized something unsettling once his shallow fake video went viral on Facebook and the comments rolled in.

People had missed the joke.

Wait, the troll told Grothaus.

These dumbshits think this is real?

They did indeed.

They

and we

are busy.

They and we are distracted.

We instinctively feel that some stuff is too good to check.

And so, we'll all accept lies that really should give us pause.

The Slovakian case should be a warning.

With high-stakes elections taking place across the world in 2024, The experts I've spoken to are deeply concerned that it's only a matter of time before a clever, well-timed piece of disinformation has a calamitous impact, deciding the result of a close-run election.

It might not involve a deepfake or another AI-generated visual image.

Then again, it might.

The technology is getting better.

It's already straightforward to create a convincing deepfake, or to use generative AI to fabricate a photorealistic scene that never happened.

Barely more difficult than editing or re-describing an existing video.

And visual images have always been more eye-catching and emotionally compelling than mere text.

So have our fears about deepfakes really been misguided?

Or have they merely been premature?

Or perhaps what should really worry us about deepfakes is something else entirely.

Something exemplified by the trickster Eric Heborn, who not only created fakes which pass for the real thing,

but repeatedly claimed that the real thing was a fake.

Which is the fake?

The Met's drawing by Jan Bruegel or Eric Heborn's story about having faked it.

Eric Hebborn is very firm about his answer to that question.

Who cares?

In his sensational autobiography, Full of Mischief, Heborn argues that there's no such thing as a fake work of art, just a mistaken attribution.

I don't like the word fake applied to perfectly genuine drawings, he explained in a BBC documentary.

released the same year as his autobiography, 1991.

In both the book and the documentary, Heborn cheekily blames unscrupulous dealers for misattributing his work, and incompetent experts for missing the truth.

Maybe it was a real Bruegel that he flushed down the loo.

Maybe it was a copy.

Or maybe Heborn made up the entire story to amuse himself by trolling the Met.

Maybe the picture in the Met collection really was painted by Jan Bruegel the Elder, as they originally thought.

Or Jan Bruegel the Younger, as they later decided, or the current attribution, Circle of Jan Bruegel.

It doesn't matter, says Heborn.

It's a beautiful drawing, whoever drew it.

Enjoy it for what it is, and don't worry about what it isn't.

Art is about creating beautiful things, isn't it?

And that is what Heborn did.

The BBC interviewer challenged him about this.

If he was was just making beautiful drawings rather than fakes, why did he put the stamps of famous historical art collectors on the pictures?

Well,

they look nice for one thing.

But weren't they designed to convince the experts that the pictures were genuine?

I don't think so.

If they were experts, they would have seen that they were false collector's marks.

Some of them were done freehand in watercolour rather than being stamped.

I did did them in a very amateurish way.

They shouldn't have been fooled at all.

Or, as a later faker said, wait,

these dumb shits think this is real?

But beneath the smile and the winking stories, Heborn seems vulnerable on camera.

He speaks softly.

slurring his S's.

Maybe he's had a bit too much to drink.

He certainly drank far too much.

His friends worried about that.

And all his tricks and adventures start to seem less fun as Heborn quietly tells the story of his life to the camera.

That his overworked, stressed mother used to take her revenge out on him.

At school, he'd make drawing charcoal out of matches.

and was accused of arson by the headmaster, who caned him.

So the eight-year-old Eric decided he'd do the deed for which he'd been punished and set fire to the school.

This is the voice of Eric Heborn, speaking on the 1991 BBC documentary, Eric Heborn, Portrait of a Master Forger.

I got frightened and I thought I'd better tell the headmaster, Mr.

Percy, what had happened.

So I poked my smoky face round his door and said to him,

because

I didn't know how to put it, I mean, please, sir, I've set light to the school.

So I recited a little poem we'd learned.

He went,

fire, fire, Mrs.

Dyer.

Where, where, Mrs.

Clare?

And at that moment, a puff of smoke came into his study and I found myself in a juvenile court being charged.

He was sent to a youth detention center at the age of eight.

It's hard not to feel sympathy for the old rogue, and there is something very Heborn-esque about being punished first, then committing the crime after the fact.

Justice turned upside down, truth turned back to front, history turned inside out.

That's Eric Heborn.

And perhaps...

That's the computer-generated world that's coming for us.

If I'm worried about all the stupid things that people will believe, I'm even more worried about all the true things that people think are faked.

In 2019, the Radiolab podcast interviewed an expert about the disturbing new technology of deepfakes.

She wasn't too worried.

So they asked her, why?

If people know that such technology exists, they'll be more sceptical, she explained.

If people know that fake news exists, if they know that fake text exists, fake videos exist, fake photos exist, then everyone's more skeptical in what they read and see.

But perhaps we've already taken skepticism too far.

Consider a new analysis in the Journal of Experimental Psychology.

from the psychologists Ariana Modirusta-Gallian and Philip Hayam.

They look at online games about fake news, designed by researchers to help warn people about disinformation, even to inoculate them against being fooled.

And these games work.

Sort of.

After playing the games, experimental subjects are indeed more likely to flag fake news as fake news.

Unfortunately, they're also more likely to flag genuine news stories as fake news.

Their ability to discriminate between true and false doesn't improve.

Instead, they become more cynical about everything.

Is that an improvement?

Or is the cure worse than the disease?

Deep fakes, like all fakes, raise the possibility that people will mistake a lie for the truth.

But they also create space for us to mistake the truth for a lie.

Just think about the notorious tape from Access Hollywood in which Donald Trump boasted of sexually assaulting women.

Hey, when you're a star, they let you do it.

It was released in October 2016 and caused a political explosion.

Deep fake audio didn't exist then, but if it had,

Trump could easily just have said, that's not my voice on the tape.

The mere fact that deep fakes might exist creates a completely new kind of deniability.

That's not just a hypothetical claim.

It's already happening.

In 2023, in a lawsuit over the death of a man using Tesla's self-driving capabilities, Elon Musk's lawyers questioned a YouTube video in which Musk was talking about those capabilities.

It might be a deep fake, they said.

The judge was unimpressed.

But surely, this is just a taste of what's to come.

If we're shown enough faked videos of atrocities or of political gaffes, we might start to dismiss real videos of atrocities.

and real videos of political gaffes too.

It's good to be sceptical, but if we're too sceptical, then even the most straightforward truths are up for debate.

That may explain why, five years after Samantha Cole explained deep fake pornography to her astonished readers, she was writing an article with the stupefying title, Is Joe Biden Dead?

Replaced by 10 different deep fake body doubles?

An investigation.

It might seem a long road from, that woman waving a sex toy around really isn't Gal Godot,

to, that man giving a speech in the White House really is Joe Biden.

But it's a road that Eric Heborn would have understood very well.

Maybe that Bruegel really is a Bruegel.

Maybe the Da Vinci is just a Da Vinci.

If Heborn was telling the truth about replacing that Bruegel with his own drawing, why did he do it?

To amuse himself and burnish his reputation as a master draftsman when he confessed.

If he lied about it, why?

Also to amuse himself and burnish his reputation as a master draftsman.

The writer and artist Jonathan Keats in his book Forged said of Heborn, faking his fakery may have been his masterstroke, since no amount of sleuthing could detect forgeries that never existed.

Cautionary tales will return after the break.

In 2016, two analysts at the think tank, Rand,

described the evolving propaganda strategy of the Russian government.

The conventional wisdom on propaganda messages is that they should be true when possible, and whether or not they were true, they should be believable and consistent.

But the new Russian approach was quite different.

Russian media channels would post anything, as would social media accounts that would be operated from St.

Petersburg but were pretending to be out of Portland or Punxatorney.

It didn't matter whether what they said was true.

It didn't matter whether it was believable.

What mattered was speed, relevance and volume.

The analysts called this strategy the fire hose of falsehood.

That's a nickname that would have suited Eric Heborn perfectly.

As we explored in our recent episode, Missing on Dead Mountain, a Cold War Cold Case, there are several reasons why the fire hose of falsehood can work, despite the fact that the individual lies are not especially plausible.

Fast, relevant spin from lots of different sources, all pushing the same basic perspective, can create an overall impression that feels quite believable.

I see something from one source, and then something sympathetic from another source, and another, and another.

And it might start to seem like the truth.

And the fire hose of falsehood can also deliver results even if nobody believes a word of it.

When it works, it floods social media and sometimes the conventional media too with distractions, toxicity, shitposting and obvious nonsense.

The result may well be to turn news consumers off completely.

Why would you spend time trying to understand the world when everyone seems to be lying about it all the time.

In a press conference late in 2023, Vladimir Putin fielded a video call from a deep faked copy of himself.

Do you have a lot of doubles?

asked the software doppelganger.

Putin calmly replied to his own digital double that only one person could speak with the voice of Putin, and that would be Putin himself.

Under the circumstances, that was absurd.

So why arrange such a stunt?

To create a moment of levity in a country at war, perhaps?

But there's also a subtext.

You can't believe your eyes.

You can't believe your ears.

You can't believe anything.

That suits President Putin just fine.

In 1995, Eric Heborn followed up his autobiography with another book written and first published in Italian.

It was a scandalous how-to guide, the Art Forger's Handbook.

A few weeks later, he was found lying in the street near his apartment in Rome.

The medics thought at first that he'd drunk too much, fallen and hit his head.

But not for the first time in Heborn's life.

The professionals were confused by what they were looking at.

Heborn was ferried from one hospital to another and left lying on a trolley for hours.

When they eventually recognised how serious his injuries were and operated on him, it was too late.

Heborn died on the 11th of January 1996, a couple of days after being taken into hospital.

Over the next few days, hints of another story started to emerge.

The autopsy concluded that Herborn hadn't taken a drunken stumble.

He'd been killed by a hammer blow to the skull.

And Herborn's apartment had been ransacked while he was lying in the street.

As so often, the truth about Heborn is elusive.

The conventional wisdom is that Herborn was murdered.

But the murder investigation never happened.

Perhaps there were just too many people who might have wanted him dead.

But others who knew Herborn well say this is nonsense.

The magistrate opened a murder inquiry when the circumstances seemed unclear, and it never went anywhere because the first, simplest explanation was the right one.

He was drunk, he fell, and it was just a tragic accident.

It would be nice to know the truth, but surely we've spent enough time in Eric Herborn's company to realize that sometimes the truth refuses to be known.

Heborn was a charming rogue.

He told outrageous stories.

He embarrassed snooty art critics and cheated cheats.

And let's not forget, he made beautiful drawings.

The artist Jonathan Keats invites us to think of Heborn as creating the work that the old masters were no longer available to make.

Willem van der Velde would gladly have painted another handsome seascape, but he died in 1707.

Eric Heborn took up the commission in 1960 and thank goodness.

It's a heart-warming idea and one that would have pleased Heborn.

That we can create old works of art anew.

and art history can expand like an accordion to accommodate them.

But I wonder.

I certainly don't feel comfortable in a world in which we can create alternative facts and squeeze them in next to the real facts.

In a world where Vladimir Putin has conversations with himself and where people aren't sure if that's Joe Biden or ten deep fakes of him.

And even in the world of art, should we welcome all those Heborns?

I fear that we lose more than we gain when we start to lose confidence in the Da Vinci's and the Bruegels and the Michelangelos.

After Herborn claimed to have created a better Bruegel and flushed the old version down the toilet, his former boyfriend and business partner published his own memoirs, saying that the story about the Bruegel drawing wasn't true.

The story about setting fire to his school has been disputed too.

Once there are enough lies around, it's easy to start doubting, well,

everything.

There's a moment in the BBC documentary, Heborn shaded from the Italian sun by a floppy peasant's hat.

His voice is soft as he tells the tale of being falsely accused of arson, of his frightened nursery rhyme, of being sent to court and then to a detention centre at the age of eight.

And I couldn't help but wonder,

was any of it real?

Heborn once told an art journalist, I like to spread a little confusion.

He succeeded, and he became so notorious that people are now starting to value the Heborn forgeries in their own right.

The trouble is, wrote one art dealer, Some of the drawings which were being offered for sale by Heborn's associates and former friends had a strange feel to them, an unusually lifeless quality which did not seem true of Eric's work at all.

I had misgivings about the drawings and declined to purchase them.

Genuine fakes?

Fakes of fakes?

Maybe they weren't fakes at all, just original old masters having an off day.

The more time I spend in the world of Eric Heborn, the more I start to worry that I'll never know the truth.

Who's speaking, please?

It doesn't matter who I am.

I'm a friend of the gallery, and you need to know you've been had.

The anonymous phone call to the Courthold Institute, which named 11 artworks as being forgeries by Heborn, took place two years after Heborn died.

We still don't know who made the call or why.

The curator who received it thinks it might have been an ex-boyfriend of Heborn's.

I recently visited the Courtauld to look at some of the fakes and wrongly suspected fakes and the works suspended in limbo.

It was a fascinating experience.

But it was also an unsettling one.

The Courtauld's research has revealed that of the 11 pictures which were anonymously accused of being Heborn fakes, eight

definitely aren't.

For example, there's a Guardi sketch which was photographed in the 1920s before Heborn was born.

He can't have faked that one, unless he copied it and flushed the original down the loo.

Whoever that anonymous whistleblower was, and whatever his reasons, he wasn't infallible.

But three pictures remain under suspicion, including the Michelangelo.

We just don't know whether it's real or not.

It's a beautiful, simple sketch in red chalk and brown ink of the Virgin and Child by perhaps one of the greatest artists who ever lived.

And yet, it seems doomed to have an asterisk beside it forever.

I left the Court Old Institute and strolled towards the National Gallery,

just down the road, where I could see Leonardo da Vinci's masterpiece, the Burlington House cartoon.

This is the work that Heborne claimed he'd redrawn after a drunk porter left it too close to a radiator.

The work a mentally ill man later blasted with a shotgun.

And I couldn't help wondering,

if that piece really is a da Vinci,

then who damaged it more?

The man and his shotgun?

Or Eric Heborn and his story?

Once you start to worry about what's real and what's fake,

it's hard to stop.

For a full list of our sources, see the show notes at TimHarford.com.

Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fians and Ryan Dilley.

It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilyn Rust.

The sound design and original music are the work of Pascal Wise.

Additional sound design is by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio.

Ben Nadaf Haffrey edited the scripts.

The show features the voice talents of Melanie Guttridge, Stella Harford, Oliver Hemborough, Sarah Jupp, Masaya Monroe, Jamal Westman, and Rufus Wright.

The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Sarah Nix, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Kiera Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries.

It's recorded at Wardore Studios in London by Tom Berry.

If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review.

It really makes a difference to us.

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This is an iHeart podcast.