Last week Paris was enjoying its first public art hoax since the war.
Act I: Salon de la Societé Nationale des Beaux-Arts jurymen ponderously examined a group of paintings secretly padded with two genuine masterpiecesa Whistler and a Mary Cassatt. "Not bad, not bad at all," the jurymen agreed.
Act II: Paris art critics dismissed the exhibition, masterpieces and aspiring blobs alike, as "nothing exceptional."
Epilogue: slick, fashionable Portraitist Jean-Gabriel Domergue, who perpetrated the hoax, asked the public to guess, by ballot, which and what the jokers were. Only one voter found the Cassatt, no one spotted the Whistler.
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