ART REVIEW : Will the Real Leonardo Please Stand Up? : ‘The Craft of the Forger’ at Pomona College is drawn mainly from the holdings of a gullible collector.

Which twin is the phony?

That is one question posed by “Artful Deception: The Craft of the Forger.” Just opened at Pomona College’s Montgomery Art Gallery (to Dec. 2), it’s one of those unusual exhibitions that attracts specialists and regular folks.

Fakes and forgeries fascinate everybody. They appeal to a basic, childlike urge to fool people. Bogus art is particularly compelling because art is hallowed as the very shrine of originality and authenticity. A delicious illicit kick comes from seeing some skillful dodger make suckers of the pious guardians of the temple. According to popular lore, all those critics, connoisseurs, scholars and collectors are a bunch of pompous poseurs anyway.

The exhibition is drawn mainly from the holdings of Baltimore’s Walters Art Gallery. Opened in 1934, its founding patron was Henry Walters, a collector whose mistakes cost him about $100,000. He never tried to sweep this under the rug, and once told the New York Times that a museum of fakes should be established for the education of the public. This show is a belated echo of that wish.

A didactic section begins with a copy of Leonardo Da Vinci’s revered “Mona Lisa.” It was not intended to fool anybody and a good thing, too, as it is transparently unconvincing. Rather, it reflects a once-widespread practice among wealthy folks, who had copies of great masterpieces decorating the mansion to show off their superior taste.

A gallery of works from the Claremont Colleges’ collections makes the point that not all artistic look-alikes are fraudulently intended. Here are student copies done for instruction, harmless impersonations made in homage to a master and reproductions so convincing that they are valued as fine examples of the printer’s art.

But enough of that. We want real fakes, not fake fakes.

Some examples are so bad they couldn’t fool you with the lights out. A scene of a fallen deer supposedly by Gustave Courbet looks like somebody put it through a mangle. A so-called J.M.W. Turner “View of the Grand Canal” looks OK across the room but up close turns to melting whipped cream. How could Walters have been such a twit?

Well, nobody is easier to fool than somebody blinded by desire. If you want something badly enough you will find it. This is a genuine Rolex watch which I was lucky enough to buy in an alley for 40 bucks. The guy was very nervous but the watch is real.

It’s also easy to fool people with an object that appeals to their established taste. A “Late Medieval” stained-glass panel is a perfect joke. It makes no attempt to hide the modern techniques behind its glaring glass and the subject is drawn from a Hans Holbein portrait done in the 16th Century. The thing got by because it was made by a Victorian forger for Victorian taste.

Most fakes give themselves away by a combination of mechanical deadness and expressive sweetness. They operate like con men. Nobody is really taken in unless they want to be. Anybody who is fails to come away with a terrible sense of self-betrayal and stupidity. Living a lie is only fun until the sun comes up.

There are those rare counterfeiters skillful enough to vamp the experts. A “St. George Slaying the Dragon” was once ascribed to an unknown Pietro Carpaccio by the renowned Bernard Berenson. It doesn’t look so great today but there are works that do, like a gold ground Italian painting by master forger Icilio Frederico Joni. He was finally unmasked because, like a real artist, he had personal characteristics that got into all his fakes, such as long elegant noses and a weakness for elaborate halos always produced with the same stamping tools.

Other artistically adept forgers made silly mistakes. There is a superb little ivory miniature long accepted as a Gothic devotional plaque until a scholar smelled a rat. It depicts a lowly saint seated in a position of authority over the apostles Peter and Paul. No medieval monk would have committed such heresy.

A French turn-of-the-century imitator known, oddly, as “The Spanish Forger” did stunning pastiches of late medieval manuscript pages. Crafty enough to use authentic vellum pages with calligraphic text, he was also dumb enough not to match the illustration to the story. Eventually somebody noticed. Other common forger’s gaffes include making mismatched meldings of differing styles like an “Italo-Byzantine” monumental Crucifixion where Christ is Byzantine to the waist and then goes Romanesque. Looks like a Volkswagen with tail fins.

Clearly, the circle of forgery involves foolishness on the part of maker and seller alike.

The most entertaining and slightly intimidating section of the exhibition is “Now YOU Be the Judge.” It invites visitors to compare half a dozen sets of similar objects, one genuine, one bogus, and decide which is right.

I got five correct and it was relatively easy. Basically, originals have vitality and assurance. That knowledge guides the eye to the real halves of pairs of Egyptian heads, water colors given to Gavarini and two Gothic devotional scenes in ivory. The rest are tougher because they are closer to crafts objects, which have a built-in mechanical edge. A pair of supposed Chinese “Famille rose” ceramics yields the imitation when you notice that one is a trifle grosser and its pictured scenes use Westernized perspective. The real half of paired “Renaissance” pendants wins by sheer exquisiteness of workmanship.

I missed the call on a pair of Sevres-style ormolu clocks, but a gallery representative says everybody does. If I were a forger, I’d stick to the decorative arts, where it seems to be possible for a copy to be aesthetically superior to the original.

Maybe the real lesson of the section is that it’s much harder to be fooled if an uncertain work is compared to a known original.

“Artful Deception” is a fascinating show on its own hook, but may also represent a dark cultural phenomenon. Last summer, the British Museum did a similar, much grander show and people flocked to it. Stories of fakes are much in the press. We live in a time of blatant doubt of authenticity. Are our politicians corrupt? Is our economy sound? Do the media tell us the truth?

The interest sparked by such an exhibition gets beyond itself. It comes to be about a society that wants to look deception in the eye so it can see reality again.