Margaret S. Graves, "Invisible Hands: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics" (Princeton UP, 2026)

Feb 27, 2026

Margaret S. Graves, art historian and professor of Islamic art who studies fabrication and forgery in ceramics. She recounts how 19th-century markets and colonial networks fueled a boom in fabricated “antiquities.” She describes techniques like bricolage, surface remaking, and artificial aging. She also traces production centers, trade routes, and scientific testing that upends assumptions about authenticity.

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INSIGHT

Why Collectors Targeted Islamic Ceramics

Collectors shifted from Chinese porcelain to Ottoman and Safavid ceramics as supply and tastes changed, making 16th–17th century Iznik and later medieval pieces desirable.
Different imperial centers (UK, France, Russia, US) shaped demand and display strategies.

INSIGHT

Why Trade Peaked Before World War I

The pre-WWI era peaked because weak antiquities laws, porous borders, imperial instability, and ultra-wealthy buyers created huge price bubbles.
After WWI centers shifted to the US and prices never matched the prewar highs.

INSIGHT

Three Technical Modes Of Fabrication

Graves categorizes remaking techniques as bricolage, skin swaps, and true forgery, each with escalating intervention from piecing shards to making new objects and artificial aging.
Bricolage often used hundreds of medieval fragments reassembled and overpainted into convincing composites.

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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: Fabrication, Forgery, and the Art of Islamic Ceramics (Princeton University Press, 2026) 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, Dr. 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, Dr. 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.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars. You can find Miranda’s interviews on New Books with Miranda Melcher, wherever you get your podcasts.

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