Giorgio de Chirico’s artful deception The story of Nathan Cummings’s ‘true-fakes’ scandal

In 1953 Nathan Cummings purchased six paintings from Giorgio de Chirico. Accompanying these works was a letter from the artist indicating the dates and titles of the paintings. Cummings nevertheless came to question the authenticity of the dates of these works. While it may seem odd for an artist to be challenged on the dating of his own work, in de Chirico’s case the doubts raised by Cummings were not without precedent. From the 1920s, de Chirico, frustrated with the art market’s rejection of his later work, created copies or ‘verifalsi’, which played off the compositions and themes of his earlier style and bore dates from his Metaphysical period in the 1910s. There is little doubt that de Chirico backdated the paintings sold to Cummings. The correspondence between the artist, Cummings and James Thrall Soby, the leading authority on de Chirico’s works, reveals much about de Chirico’s reasoning and the treatment his later output received in the art market.