Tuduc or not Tuduc - that is the Question! Tuduc forgeries in European, American and Middle Oriental collections
Half of the fun would go out of carpet collecting if there were no fakes or forgeries or at least no wrongly attributed pieces… (Kurt Erdmann)
Tuduc’s forgeries have fooled museum curators, auction experts, famous collectors, great carpet scholars, and many, many others; Tuduc’s fakes have been published as authentic in reputable rug books, auction catalogues, Hali magazine.
Tuduc’s fakes, mostly copied after classical carpets, feature in several important collections in Europe and America, including the Museum for Islamic Art of Berlin, the Victoria and Albert Museum, The Metropolitan Museum, the Textile Museum of Canada, Toronto, The Nickle Arts Museum of Calgary, the Museum of Islamic Arts, Cairo and of course in Romanian museums. It is not infrequent to discover them in reputable private collections and some interesting cases emerged recently.
This presentation is based on 15 years of research covering the main carpet museums, auction houses, carpet dealers and private collections in America and Europe together with field work in Bucharest, Athens, Izmir, Beirut, Budapest, Berlin, London, New York, Toronto, California. The material was assembled in the fifth edition of the publication Handbook of Fakes by Tuduc (160 pages). This is one of the few cases in the rug literature where we have a large body of evidence about the way a forger acted.
For the occasion Stefano Ionescu will showcase the new publication The Transylvanian Heritage – A New Perspective, a massive work, 650 rugs and 336 pages, due to go to print shortly.