Margaret S. Graves’ Invisible Hands offers a compelling contribution to an often fraught and moralizing discourse on authenticity in art history by re-examining the material and historiographic foundations of Islamic ceramics.
The publication shifts Graves’ sustained examination of how knowledge is stabilized from hermeneutics (Arts of Allusion: Object, Ornament, and Architecture in Medieval Islam, Oxford University Press, 2018) to the economic and epistemic conditions that produce authenticity. Interrogating how art historical arguments can be grounded in artefacts of partly modern origin, Graves argues that fabrication and forgery are not isolated distortions of a stable corpus, but constitutive of Islamic art as a field of scholarship and collecting. The book’s central claims – that fabrication embodied significant technical expertise, and that the canon of Islamic art rests in part on objects of unstable historical integrity – reframe discussions of authenticity away from expressions of deceit towards an account of labour and colonial knowledge systems.
Focusing on late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century collecting practices, Invisible Hands follows ceramic vessels and tiles through transregional networks of dealers, scholar-collectors, and unrecorded artisans. Tracing the canon’s material constitution through restoration and recomposition, Graves analyses the global antiquities market as a site of production that both responded to and shaped European and North American art historical taxonomies. By situating fabrication as creative agency within global capitalism, notions of authenticity are presented as historically and financially contingent constructs rather than an intrinsic property of objects. The “invisible hands” thus gesture both to the skilled labour transforming fragmentary material into commodifiable assets and to the broader commercial dynamics that structured this process, invoking the eighteenth-century economist-philosopher Adam Smith’s principle that individual actions in a competitive market can produce wider systemic outcomes without central co-ordination.
The book is organized into five chapters, complemented by an extensive bibliography and archival overview. It opens with a discussion of key terms, contributing to ongoing terminology debates within Islamic art history and decolonial discourse. Chapters 1 and 2 situate the emergence of Islamic art collecting within the extraction and circulation of archaeological finds. Graves links the rise of a fabrication-receptive market to the convergence of late colonial expansion, the growth of public and private collecting, and the development of financial, communication, and transportation networks in the decades preceding World War I. Unfolding within weak regulatory regimes and political instability in the Ottoman Empire and Iran, these dynamics created a nexus of capital, demand, and material availability that facilitated the circulation – and fabrication – of ceramics. This is followed by an “extractivist history” of Islamic ceramics, which traces practices of below- and above-ground “harvesting” across West and Central Asia and North Africa. Here, Graves’ perspective challenges conventional narratives structured around the chronological development of technological innovation. She examines how archaeological and commercial activities developed alongside one another, in relation to current concerns regarding site destruction and the loss of stratigraphic information.
Chapter 3 examines techniques of restoration and recomposition fuelled by European and North American preferences for visually complete objects. Fragments from multiple sources were assembled into new configurations, surfaces overpainted, regilded, or refired, and new objects created using techniques of artificial aging that aligned with – and thereby consolidated – emerging scholarly stylistic and chronological expectations. By shifting attention from the object as a self-contained entity to the processes through which it was produced and transformed, Graves destabilizes the boundary between restoration and fabrication, repositioning these practices as central to the formation of Islamic art as an academic discipline in the early twentieth century.
Chapter 4 explores the relationships between largely anonymous workshops and the more visible networks of dealers and collectors that structured supply and demand. The chapter offers a nuanced analysis of how certain groups or individuals became strategically positioned within trade networks. By highlighting unnamed artisans operating within generational chains of transmission both in Europe and Asia, Graves emphasizes the technical expertise that underpinned the antiquities trade while restoring visibility and value to previously unrecognized labour. The author’s sensitivity to this topic is likely further informed by her own extensive studio training.
The final chapter presents a focused case study of a group of vessels from Raqqa, Syria, in Indiana University’s Eskenazi Museum of Art. Questioning the group’s unusually good state of preservation, Graves consolidates her arguments. By presenting evidence for previously unnoticed material interventions that likely shaped authoritative interpretations, the chapter points to the need for further scientific analysis across collections.
The book’s implications for Islamic art historiography are significant, and extend beyond ceramics to other media. If canonical forms derive from modern processes of selection and transformation, the classificatory systems built upon them must be understood as historically contingent. For museum practice, recognizing objects as layered challenges conventions of cataloguing and display that have long relied on stable notions of integrity and origin. As curatorial practice increasingly confronts colonial legacies and reassesses restoration ethics, Graves offers a critical vocabulary for addressing these issues, even if their operationalization within institutional frameworks remains to be developed.
Methodologically, Invisible Hands is distinguished by an interdisciplinary approach that draws on provenance research, laboratory assessment, economic history, archaeology, and art historical analysis. This allows the author to examine how objects acquired credibility within markets and scholarship while exposing the limitations of stylistic analysis. The conceptual reframing of fabrication as skilled production offers an important corrective to narratives that privilege collectors and connoisseurship over producers, the latter of whom have often been reduced to figures of deception. At the same time, the book invites renewed reflection on the role of connoisseurship, both as a foundational practice of the discipline and methodological tool in the present, and raises questions regarding the power asymmetries that structured the antiquities trade in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
Clearly written and richly illustrated with many previously unpublished objects, particularly from understudied collections in the US Midwest, Invisible Hands will serve as an essential reference for the study of Islamic ceramics and the history of collecting more broadly. Its methodological implications extend well beyond Islamic art history, offering an incisive model for understanding how modern markets have shaped the extant corpus of pre-modern artefacts. By foregrounding the nuanced entanglement of craftsmanship, commerce, and scholarship, Graves provides a robust foundation for further inquiry into how the discipline of Islamic art history constructs claims to certainty.
