statue as well. Hoving always makes a note of the first word that goes through his head when he sees
something new, and he’ll never forget what that word was when he first saw the kouros. “It was ‘fresh’—
‘fresh,’” Hoving recalls. And “fresh” was not the right reaction to have to a two-thousand-year-
thinking back on that moment, Hoving realized why that thought had popped into his mind: “
where we found bits and pieces of these things. They just don’
t come out looking like that. The kouros looked
like it had been dipped in the very best caffè latte from Starbucks.”
Hoving turned to Houghton. “Have you paid for this?”
Houghton, Hoving remembers, looked stunned.
“If you have, try to get your money back,” Hoving said. “If you haven’t, don’t.”
The Getty was getting worried, so they convened a special symposium on the kouros in Greece. They
wrapped the statue up, shipped it to Athens, and invited the country’
s most senior sculpture experts. This time
the chorus of dismay was even louder.
Harrison, at one point, was standing next to a man named George Despinis, the head of the Acropolis
Museum in Athens. He took one look at the kouros and blanched. “
Anyone who has ever seen a sculpture
coming out of the ground,” he said to her, “could tell that that thing has never been in the ground.”
Dontas, head of the Archeological Society in Athens, saw the statue and immediately felt cold. “
kouros for the first time,” he said, “I felt as though there was a glass between me and the work.”
followed in the symposium by Angelos Delivorrias, director of the Benaki Museum in Athens. He spoke at
length on the contradiction between the style of the sculpture and the fact that the marble from which it was
carved came from Thasos. Then he got to the point. Why did he think it was a fake? Because when he first laid
eyes on it, he said, he felt a wave of “intuitive repulsion.”
By the time the symposium was over, the consensus
among many of the attendees appeared to be that the kouros was not at all what it was supposed to be. The
Getty, with its lawyers and scientists and months of painstaking investigation, had come to one conclusion, and
some of the world’s foremost experts in Greek sculpture—
just by looking at the statue and sensing their own
“intuitive repulsion”—had come to another. Who was right?
For a time it wasn’
t clear. The kouros was the kind of thing that art experts argued about at conferences. But
then, bit by bit, the Getty’s case began to fall apart. The letters the Getty’
s lawyers used to carefully trace the
kouros back to the Swiss physician Lauffenberger, for instance, turned out to be fakes. One of the letters dated
1952 had a postal code on it that didn’
t exist until twenty years later. Another letter dated 1955 referred to a
bank account that wasn’
t opened until 1963. Originally the conclusion of long months of research was that the
Getty kouros was in the style of the Anavyssos kouros. But that, too, fell into doubt: the closer experts in Greek
sculpture looked at it, the more they began to see it as a puzzling pastiche of several different styles from
several different places and time periods. The young man’
s slender proportions looked a lot like those of the
Tenea kouros, which is in a museum in Munich, and his stylized, beaded hair was a lot like that of the kouros in
the Metropolitan Museum in New York. His feet, meanwhile, were, if anything, modern. The kouros it most
resembled, it turned out, was a smaller, fragmentary statue that was found by a British art historian in
Switzerland in 1990. The two statues were cut from similar marble and sculpted in quite similar ways. But the
Swiss kouros didn’t come from ancient Greece. It came from a forger’
s workshop in Rome in the early 1980s.
And what of the scientific analysis that said that the surface of the Getty kouros could only have aged over
many hundreds or thousands of years? Well, it turns out things weren’
t that cut and dried. Upon further
analysis, another geologist concluded that it might be possible to “age”
the surface of a dolomite marble statue
in a couple of months using potato mold. In the Getty’
s catalogue, there is a picture of the kouros, with the
notation “About 530 BC, or modern forgery.”
When Federico Zeri and Evelyn Harrison and Thomas Hoving and Georgios Dontas—and all the others—
looked at the kouros and felt an “intuitive repulsion,”
they were absolutely right. In the first two seconds of
looking—in a single glance—
they were able to understand more about the essence of the statue than the team at
the Getty was able to understand after fourteen months.
Blink is a book about those first two seconds.
