Introducing Rakewell, Apollo’s wandering eye on the art world. Look out for regular posts taking a rakish perspective on art and museum stories.

At the height of her colossal fame in the late 1960s and ’70s, Barbra Streisand epitomised a kind of unfashionable earnestnesss that ran completely counter to the counterculture of the time. No turning out, tuning in or dropping out for Streisand, whose performing persona was the very definition of trying hard. (Too hard, some critics said, but who among them has lasted the distance the way Barbra has?). Sincerity has always been Streisand’s modus operandi – and her doorstopper of a memoir is no exception.

Your roving correspondent will, we hope, be forgiven for skipping over many of the triumphs and a few of the setbacks contained in the 992 pages of My Name is Barbra. Rakewell is, however, completely riveted by what Streisand’s lifelong love of art and her collecting says about her own personal taste, the way the art market was and the value of persistence (as well as the power of deep pockets).

Streisand writes winningly about hanging up a ten-dollar print of Rembrandt’s Woman Bathing in a Stream in the railroad apartment she rented after being cast in her first Broadway show in 1961. (It smelled of fish and was so small she had to wash the dishes in the bathtub.) She writes equally winningly about her excitement at seeing the real thing at the National Gallery some years later.

She also describes wandering around New York galleries, wondering what it would be like to actually own one of their paintings. In 1964 she took the plunge, thanks to the success of her first album and her starmaking turn in the stage version of Funny Girl. She wasn’t entirely sure about the Matisse she bought for $55,000 from the late Richard L. Feigen – but he offered to buy it back after 18 months if she was still unsure. Streisand even had it authenticated by Matisse’s son Pierre, who told her that it was genuine, but not a particularly special painting. (‘That’s when I realized that just because it’s by a great artist doesn’t mean it’s a great painting.’) This didn’t stop her going ahead, but shortly afterwards, she fell in love with a Modigliani nude at Klaus Perls’s gallery, on sale for $70,000: ‘But I had no money left… I had just bought the Matisse.’ Barbra notes ruefully that she ended up returning the unloved Matisse, and that the Modigliani she missed out on now hangs in the Met. Not only that, but a similar nude recently sold at Christie’s for $170.4m.

Barbra is, of course, nothing but tenacious. Modigliani became her favourite artist and some 50 years later in June 2013, she finally got her man. It’s touch and go – the painting she wants is being auctioned at the same time that she is singing at a gala for Shimon Peres’s 90th birthday in Jerusalem. Streisand’s anguish is real: ‘Why does everything happen at once?’ (She is also referring to the misery of the month before, when she was in the dentist’s chair when another Modigliani, The Jewess, was being sold. On that occasion she was already on Novocain when she commanded the dentist to stop so she could place an unsuccessful phone bid). Fortunately, when she comes off stage after singing for the Israeli president, her heroic personal assistant Renata is yelling, ‘You got it! You got it!’

Streisand stresses that she doesn’t see herself as a real artist – that’s a claim that can only be made by the likes of Rembrandt and, of course, Modigliani. So it’s a heart-warming coda when she’s talking to her old pal and co-star Robert Redford backstage at an awards ceremomy in 2015 (Babs is presenting Bob with an award). Redford tells her, ‘I didn’t want to be an actor, I wanted to be Modigliani.’ It’s always possible to surprise even old friends, it seems.

The prospect of buying another Modigliani even got Barbra back out on tour in 2016 – but that’s an altogether less heart-warming story, according to the star.

Got a story for Rakewell? Get in touch at rakewell@apollomag.com or via @Rakewelltweets.

Authorities in New York have been accused by leading academics in France and Britain of repatriating fake Roman artefacts to Lebanon.

Eight out of nine mosaic panels that the US authorities recently returned to the Middle Eastern country are not what they seem, according to claims made by Djamila Fellague of the University of Grenoble.

She claims to have uncovered proof that forgers had copied designs from original mosaics in archaeological sites or museums in Sicily, Tunisia, Algeria and Turkey. “Eight of the nine ‘returned’ mosaic panels were fakes that [are] relatively easy to detect because the models used are famous mosaics,” says Fellague.

She singled out a panel depicting an Anguiped Giant, that she believes is based on a section of the famous mosaics in the Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily, a Unesco world heritage site.

She also claims to have discovered that a mosaic of Neptune and Amphitrite took as its main model a mosaic found in Constantine, Algeria, which has been in the Louvre in Paris since the mid-19th century. Of the other mosaics returned to Lebanon, she claims that there is only one example for which the forgers were inspired by an actual mosaic from Lebanon – a well-known depiction of Bacchus in the National Museum in Beirut.

Christos Tsirogiannis, a guest lecturer at the University of Cambridge and a leading expert in looted antiquities and trafficking networks, believes the evidence is irrefutable. He said that were the revelation to be shown to be true it would be extremely embarrassing for the office of the Manhattan district attorney (DA), which had announced the repatriation of antiquities to Lebanon on 7 September.

Its press release at the time stated that nine mosaics included in the repatriation ceremony were among dozens of Middle Eastern and north African antiquities that were allegedly brought into New York by a Lebanese antiquities trafficker.

In 2022, the DA’s antiquities trafficking unit (ATU) had obtained a warrant for their arrest and applied for a red notice from Interpol.

“Even if you are not an expert, if you put the fake next to the authentic mosaic, you see how similar they are, but also how the quality is actually not that good,” claims Tsirogiannis.

He added that the alleged forgers had made the mistake of copying well-known mosaics, which have been extensively photographed by tourists with images widely available on the internet and in academic publications. “The whole thing is crazy. The authorities continually do these things without consulting experts.”

Tsirogiannis leads research on illicit antiquities trafficking for the Unesco chair on threats to cultural heritage at the Ionian University in Corfu, Greece. Over 17 years, he has identified more than 1,700 looted objects, alerting police authorities and governments and helping to repatriate items.

As soon as Fellague saw photographs of the mosaics in the press and online, following the September announcement, she says she sensed that most were “obvious fakes”.

“At first I fought against this idea, telling myself that an investigation that led to a warrant arrest, a red notice from Interpol and a restitution to a country must have been the subject of a rigorous scientific study,” she said.

She started to investigate further: “Very quickly, while searching, I found the models used by the forgers to make the forgeries.”

She said: “In the press and official press releases – on both the American and Lebanese sides – there has never been any scientific justification to prove that the mosaics were Roman, looted and plundered precisely in Lebanon.”

Before being seized by the US authorities in 2021, one of the mosaic panels was offered for sale in 2018 in a New York gallery, with an estimate of less than $20,000.

Fellague suspects that a forgers’ mosaic workshop was located somewhere in the Middle East, probably in the 1970s and 1980s, judging from other pieces that have surfaced on the art market.

A DA spokesman denied the accusations. “In order for these antiquities to be repatriated a court had to evaluate our evidence, which included expert analysis about their authenticity and significant details about how they were illegally trafficked. The court found based on the evidence – which these individuals do not have – that the pieces are authentic.”