In the heyday of Islamic art collecting around the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of premodern ceramic objects circulated on the international antiquities market. Invisible Hands tells the story of how traditional craft skills of the Islamic world, often thought to have died out with the advent of industrialization, were redirected toward a thriving new market in the colonial era: the fabrication and fictionalizing of antiquities, especially ceramics.
In this stunning work of art history, Margaret Graves shakes the foundations of the discipline, challenging us to reconsider what is and is not art. She traces how sophisticated fabrications—as modern as they were believed to be medieval—moved within an international network of diggers, dealers, and collectors who took advantage of a largely unregulated marketplace to exchange and amass objects that were fabulous in every sense of the word. She looks at canonical artworks as well as many previously unpublished and rarely seen objects, shedding light on the astonishingly varied ways Islamic ceramics were altered and remade by highly skilled craftspeople to meet the demands of Western collectors. Shifting away from the moralizing stance of past studies on reconstructed Islamic ceramics, Graves shows how fabrication and forgery became a major site of participation in modern global capitalism and establishes an entirely new paradigm in the history of art.
Drawing on a substantive new body of provenance research, archaeology, economic history, and laboratory analysis, Invisible Hands centers previously marginalized objects, reframing the practices of fabrication and forgery as crucial forms of invention and artistic skill worthy of study and admiration.
Margaret S. Graves is the Adrienne Minassian Associate Professor of Islamic Art and Architecture in honor of Marilyn Jenkins-Madina at Brown University. Her books include Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam; Ceramic Art (91ÌÒÉ«); and Making Modernity in the Islamic Mediterranean.
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“Original and refreshing. Graves tells the stories of the diggers, skilled forgers, dealers, and brokers who extracted objects and fragments, created whole objects from sherds or made fakes, and worked to develop museum or personal collections to satisfy fictive histories. Invisible Hands is a compelling account that links Tehran and Aleppo with Paris and New York, demonstrating the connections between Orientalism and capitalism at a specific moment in time.”—Edward S. Cooke, Jr., author of Global Objects: Toward a Connected Art History
“In telling new and old stories about objects and their makers, Margaret Graves magisterially brings to light the work of overlooked craftsmen who (re)created these artifacts in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—not in moralizing tones or in the attempt at unveiling fakes—but by giving due credit to their skills and abilities. One rarely has the pleasure of reading such a well-written book.”—Martina Rugiadi, coauthor of Court and Cosmos: The Great Age of the Seljuqs
“This book marks a rare achievement in any discipline. By excavating the margins of disciplinary practice, it undermines the premises that ground its center. What we learn is not how and why people in a distant time and place made art, so much as how modernity recycled such objects and histories to serve new economic and national ideological needs. Invisible Hands brilliantly changes the conversation about the types of narratives art history is capable of telling.”—Wendy M. K. Shaw, author of Possessors and Possessed: Museums, Archaeology, and the Visualization of History in the Late Ottoman Empire
“This pathbreaking book destigmatizes forgery, arguing for its inclusion as a significant category of artistic production in the modern Middle East. The beauty of Margaret Graves’s writing, her empathetic reinsertion of these ceramic artists into the story of collecting, and her remarkable detective work using scientific testing and simple close looking make this a work of serious importance that will have a lasting legacy. Invisible Hands represents a paradigm shift and will be widely read and discussed within the field of Islamic art and beyond it.”—Stephennie Mulder, author of The Shrines of the ‘Alids in Medieval Syria
