The Life Scientific: Jehane Ragai

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1:06Hello. I'd like to begin today with a story about perhaps the most famous art forger in history. In the 1930s, frustrated Dutch painter Han van Meegeren, or van Meegeren as we say in English, set out to embarrass his critics by forging apparently lost Vermeers, which turned out so convincing, the experts declared their masterpieces. One was even bought by Hermann Goering during World War II. After the war, Van Meegeren was caught and charged with treason for selling a national treasure to the Nazis, until he shocked everyone by declaring the work a fake, something he proved by painting another on the spot.

1:44He was cleared of collaboration and convicted on the lesser charge of fraud. Pulling off a scheme like that today would be much harder, thanks to modern authentication techniques, a field my guest knows all about. Jihan Raga 'i is an emeritus professor of chemistry at the American University in Cairo with a passion for science matched by her love of arts and culture. Early in her career she helped analyse the great sphinx of Giza and later became fascinated by the world of art forgery, leading to her acclaimed book The Scientist and the Forger. Jihan's life has not been without its trials, but perhaps unsurprisingly as the daughter of renowned feminist activist Doria Shafiq, she's not one to shy away from a challenge.

2:27She says, for me, it's always been about following my two passions, science and arts. And I love teaching my students that lesson. If you have interests, pursue them. Professor Jahan Ragai, welcome to The Life Scientific. Thank you. Now, Jahan, that example I just gave of Van Meagren is from the early 20th century, when of course, we didn't have half the scientific techniques available today. Is forgery still much of a problem now? It is, no doubt. The reason being that forgers are becoming clever. In the past, for instance, forgers didn't mind if they used some anachronistic pigments or an underpainting which was anachronistic with the painting itself.

3:08They didn't worry about it because they didn't know that there would be scientific techniques to unravel. But today, forgers expect scientific analysis, and therefore they become more sophisticated. But in tandem, scientists also are becoming much more sophisticated, and techniques are being used to unravel. So what's the most dramatic modern example of art forgery that you've come across? Well, one is a story of a Chagall painting, which was bought by a businessman for his two daughters, paid a hefty price for it, and had it grace his home for a good while with pride. And then he heard about Fake and Fortune, this program of Fiona Bruce and Ben de Grover and Philip Mould, and decided to submit it to the program.

4:05Now, Vacant Fortune, they're really using serious scientific analysis. They had Raman spectroscopy, which as opposed to x-ray fluorescence, for instance, can identify organic pigments which x-ray fluorescence could not. And in fact, the painting was a forgery because it had two anachronistic pigments, which did not exist during the time of Chagall. But the owner of the painting decided to submit it to the Chagall Committee in Paris, which was run by Chagall's granddaughters. And of course, having received a report saying that there are two anachronistic pigments, they had no choice but to rule it as a forgery.

4:47And according to French law, any painting attributed to a famous painter has to be destroyed if it's found to be forged. Wow. And that was the end of Nude by Chagall. Yeah, well, that is incredible. I mean, surely it's a bit of a shame that it was destroyed, because although obviously a forgery is much less valuable, you could argue there's still cultural value in the fake. In fact, a few years ago, didn't London's National Gallery put on an exhibition entirely made up of paintings that had turned out to be forgeries? Oh, yes, I visited. And I think it's a feather in the heart of the National Gallery to admit that they had some forgeries.

5:26Yeah. I should ask you, before we move on, do you paint at all yourself? No. I think when God created painters, he completely forgot about me. Okay. Well, Jihan Raghai, you were born in Cairo in 1944, and grew up in a household that was a little out of the ordinary because you had such high profile parents. Yes, my mother was ahead of her time. She came from a family which was not aristocratic. She didn't have money to pursue her studies, but her ultimate desire all her life was to get a very high degree in order to come back and serve her country. And she managed, through the help of the well-known feminist Hoda Hanim Shahrawi at the time, to secure a grant.

6:15And she We ended up by having a doctorate at the Sorbonne on philosophy. My father won a grant to pursue studying law at the University of Paris. And that's where they met and they married. And when they came back, when we were born, my sister and myself, we grew up in a family which was actually very liberal. Both were quite busy. We were given a lot of freedom, but a lot of sense of responsibility, which we respected. And in that sense, it was a very unconventional home. I wanted to just pick up something you said about your mother, because she was a remarkable woman, Doria Shafiq. She was a feminist, a poet, an editor, an activist.

7:00She led the Egyptian suffragette movement that won women the right to vote there in 1956. But she also faced a lot of challenges, including several years under house arrest after criticising President Nasser's regime. To what extent did that impact you growing up? When in 1957 she carried out her hunger strike against the authoritarian regime in Egypt, President Nasser put her under house arrest. And so, of course, for three years we had this soldier at the door and then there was our isolation because everybody was prevented from seeing her and what have you. But her most dramatic action was storming the parliament in 1951 at the head of 1 ,500 women, and they got a verbal promise that voting rights would be granted to Egyptian women.

7:54This was fulfilled after a hunger strike in 1954. Again, for us at home, it was a bit of a turmoil, but we were very much in admiration, and my father was very supportive. But this has impacted me personally in many ways. I used to be a swimmer from the age of 12 to 16. I qualified for the Olympics. My record was very close to the world record. but a few days before leaving to Rome in 1960, I was told that I would not be traveling because it's an Islamic country. Women do not wear bathing suits. But the real reason was that on the Olympic Committee was a man from the regime and they got to find out that I was the daughter of Dore Shafi.

8:40And for a week I cried. That's normal. But then, you know, it's not the end. There are other things in life than swimming fast. Well, certainly academically, you aced your baccalaureate at school. And in the early 1960s, you went on to study chemistry at the American University in Cairo. You then stayed on to do a master's in solid state science. Did you have any specific career ambitions at that point? Yes, I wanted to have my PhD.

9:13I like teaching. And in order to be able to teach normal courses, not labs, you had to have a PhD. And I had a hurdle there because I was married and I had a daughter. so there was no way I could leave. And at the same time I could not register in any of the national universities because at the time AUC was not accredited. It was accredited abroad in the States and everywhere else but ironically it was not accredited in Egypt. So you couldn't do your PhD there? No I couldn't but the chair of the department at the time insisted in hiring me as an instructor and I taught many labs, all the labs in fact, from 1968 until 1973.

10:00But then, thanks to a fortunate encounter with a visiting lecturer from the UK, everything changed. Yes, he was the head of the School of Chemistry at Brunel University and my chair shared with him my problem and Ken Singh said, okay, I'm going to interview you and let's see. So he asked me for about an hour, a long, long interview and then he said, you know, I'm going to try and solve your problem by hiring you as our first overseas external student. You can come for two months in summer and pursue your work. So Ken Singh at Brunel gave you this opportunity to do your PhD. And as you say, you were doing it remotely most of the time while you were still in Cairo with a young family.

10:48But just before you finished your PhD, your mother died. in quite dramatic circumstances. She fell from the balcony of her sixth floor apartment. Given how well known she was, there was obviously a lot of press coverage and speculation, which must have been very difficult for you and your family. Oh, yes. Oh, yes. That's very painful. I was very close to her and it was very hard. The whole thing was extremely difficult for me. In fact, this year we are celebrating the fifth year of her passing. But then in 1977, my husband at the time had an appointment in Dubai. So we left and I had finished my research work, but I had not written my thesis.

11:35So we left in early 76. And in a way, it was taking me out of Egypt, out of an environment was very painful. I decided to plunge myself to my thesis. So immersing yourself in the writing of a thesis was a way of... It was a kind of saviour for me. Yeah, yeah. Well, after your PhD, you took on the role of assistant professor at AUC. Then in 1980, you were asked to be a chemical consultant for the American Research Centre in Egypt's Sphinx Project. Now, first of all, can you just explain what the project was? What were you trying to achieve? The project was basically recording everything to do with the Sphinx.

12:18And the American Research Center at the time had this Egyptologist. He is famous now, but at the time he didn't have his PhD, Mark Lenner. And they asked the chair, you know, we need some analysis, some analytical work on the Sphinx. And the chair said, well, why don't you approach Johan? And they came and they said, if there are some pigments that we find, we'd like them identified. but mainly we want you to look at ancient Egyptian mortars and tell us if it could be diagnostic of time because the four pores of the Sphinx have been restored and we want to know if we can get the time from your analysis.

13:00So I did analyse mortars from the heart of the Great Pyramid. I analysed the mortars from the Sphinx and it was all basically gypsum mortar after all. So what did this tell you? Well, it told me that they preferred gypsum water, which is calcium dihydrate. They heat it at a relatively low temperature. You get the hemohydrate, the plaster of Paris, and then you regenerate it. It's cheap and it's easy. If you go to lime water, which was used in Roman times, it's a much more expensive procedure because to change the calcium carbonate to calcium oxide, you need a very high temperature. and therefore what it told me basically is that the Egyptians were clever in being able to find a technique which was not costly in producing water which was actually convenient for Egypt because it didn't train a lot.

13:54Lime water is insoluble, gypsum water is soluble but it didn't really matter in that case because of the environmental dryness in Egypt. I gather your work actually confirmed that the Sphinx had originally been a rather colourful creature. Yes, in the four pores of the Sphinx we found some Egyptian blue. The Egyptian blue is a calcium copper tetrasilicate. It is the first manufactured pigments in fact by the ancient Egyptians from raw materials because all their pigments were natural. But the one they actually did manufacture was Egyptian blue. I went up on the neck of the Sphinx, on the face I took a bit and I found red iron oxide.

14:36I didn't get any from the wings, They say that the wigs also were coloured. But I guess it did tell you that, you know, the ancient Egyptians had a decent knowledge of chemistry. Oh, definitely. First of all, the Egyptian blue, in order to be prepared, they had to be familiar with oxidation process. And some quantitative chemistry had to be used also. But beyond that, I looked at some of the pigments used for eye paint. and the Egyptians, they used galena, which is a lead sulfide, but they actually had some additional pigments which were not naturally produced through chemical processes. So they should know some qualitative, some quantitative analysis, and not only that, how to control the pH.

15:26So all this indicated definitely that the ancient Egyptians were familiar with some of the rudiments of chemistry. Yeah, that's quite fascinating. We tend to think of the ancient Egyptians as, you know, developing things like mummification techniques. But to have this level of knowledge of proper quantitative chemistry rather than just, I guess, alchemy is quite surprising. Well, it was a few years after this Sphinx project that your interest in forged paintings was piqued. Yes, I read a book by Stuart Fleming on the scientific detection of forgery in art. And of course, the techniques there were very rudimentary, but it attracted me.

16:04And then gradually, I became more and more interested in the matter. And because of my experience in the Sphinx, and because of my love in art, I created a new course at AUC called Chemistry, Art and Archaeology. and gradually I was invited here and there lecturing on it and that's how it all developed. That's the beginning. Okay, Jahan, let's talk about the techniques that can reveal art forgeries and before we get to the science we should probably acknowledge some other authentication practices that have been in place for centuries. Of course you had provenance to trace back the ownership way back to the artists who created the artwork.

16:48But this is a very difficult task, and forgers generally resort to the classical thing that it's a family facing some problems and wanting to be anonymous, and so on and so forth. Following the provenance comes the connoisseur's eye. He looks at the brushwork. Is it in keeping with the artist? Looks at the cracks that are formed through the pigments shrinking, and if they seem to be authentic, if they're painted, or what have you. But as we know, people are fooled and therefore science has to come into play. Science has to come in. There are different parts of the painting to focus on here and a few different techniques for each one.

17:24Could you talk me through them? Of course. First of all, you look at the surface of the painting. The cracks have to be looked a bit more than just a magnifying glass, preferably a stereo microscope to make sure that the cracks are genuine and not painted or forged. So forgers generally resort to rapidly drying by adding more drying agent and what have you to have cracks appear more genuine. Van Megren for instance spent four years trying to find a proper way of producing a nice cracklure. And cracklure is the term for the microscopic cracking that occurs across the surface of a painting as the paint ages and shrinks.

18:09Yes. Now, these cracks are normally deep. They have a special pattern, and if they're not organized in a particular manner, they suggest actually that they are forged. Another thing is also ultraviolet fluorescence. If it's an old painting, it fluoresces, but any retouches normally do not fluoresce because of electronic transitions that normally happen in the atom. And therefore, ultraviolet fluorescence indicates what parts are retouched which are helpful. So that's the surface. We come now to two parts of the painting, the body and the underglayer. The underglayer, sometimes there are paintings that are painted over old paintings.

18:55Now, infrared reflectography is one of the techniques. The infrared beams penetrate the painting and are reflected back in a camera and can give indication on the underpainting. If it happens to belong to a painter who lived after the purported painter, then it's a forgery. If there is an anachronism in style, for instance, Picasso belonging to the Blue Period and under it it's a cubist, there's an anachronism in time there. All this can be detected in the underlayer. Comes the body. Of course, you have X-ray diffraction, you have X-ray fluorescence for the inorganic pigments. You have Raman and infrared spectroscopy for determining organic pigments and binding materials.

19:41And then you have cross-section analysis of the whole painting. So there are many techniques that are used. And these are the normal ones, but there are much more sophisticated ones. I mean, basically what you're describing is different wavelengths of light, whether it's infrared, whether it's ultraviolet, whether it's x-rays, these different techniques to allow you to see different aspects of the painting. Clearly, there are many more techniques available now than even just a few decades ago. But presumably, as the technology improves, so do the forgers. So how is it even possible to get away with forging and artwork today?

20:17It's difficult, but some of the techniques are sophisticated and expensive. Normally, you do the ultraviolet, you do the infrared reflectography, x-ray fluorescence, if there is no anachronism, that's it. They don't go beyond that unless they really want to go beyond. Like, for instance, like the case of Van Gogh. Tell me what happened. So Van Gogh wrote many letters to his brother, Theo Van Gogh. And in one of the letters he wrote to him, yesterday, I painted a large painting with two wrestlers. Now, there was, I think, in the Claude de Merle Museum, this big painting, vase de fleurs, a vase of flowers, which was much larger than the normal Van Gogh.

21:05The position of the signature was not exactly what was expected. The lab had tried to analyze it, did an x-ray radiograph, conventional, very blurred, and it was deemed anonymous by an anonymous man. Then came a time where they were reviewing some of the paintings using synchrotron x-ray spectroscopy, much more sophisticated, much more expensive. And lo and behold, when they did, in the underlayer came these two wrestlers, which were alluded to by Van Gogh to his brother, and they could actually find out it was amazing yeah well jehan your fascination with this field laid the ground work for numerous lectures eventually a book on the subject we're going to come to that shortly but in the meantime in 1999 your husband ali suddenly passed away yes unfortunately by a heart attack a sudden heart attack it was very hard on us but you know sometimes fate plays role because in 1973, John Myrick Thomas...

22:21John being the renowned Welsh chemist who taught for many years at Cambridge. Yes. John came to AUC on a six-week visit with his beautiful wife, Margaret, and his two daughters. And he came a good friend of Ali, and Margaret became a good friend of mine, and we'd visit through the years. Ali unfortunately died in 1999, and Margaret in 2002. Six years later, I was invited to give a lecture at Cambridge. And I went and it was in the Department of Material Science. John was chairing the thing and I gave the lecture. And I think it was well received because John and with sustained clapping. And so John went up and he said, if I was 10 years younger, I would marry this young lady.

23:07I told him I never thought of few in their terms. And so we dated for two years. I married John in 2010. And I gather also that John was the person who encouraged you to put pen to paper and turn these lectures that you'd been giving into a book. That was really the first encouragement, which, of course, was wonderfully supported by John. So it was wonderful for me to indulge in my passion. Well, the book The Scientist and the Forger came out in 2015. As well as dissecting authentication techniques, it championed the idea that the science and art worlds must work together. I can imagine there might have been a bit of friction there, you know, a bit like VAR when it was first introduced into football matches.

23:53There's the technology somehow butting up against the art, the instinct, as you say, the connoisseur's eye. What's it like today? Do galleries and auction houses, for example, rely on scientists over art experts? Yes, to a certain extent, but certainly not in Egypt. Because in Egypt, unfortunately, we do not have labs. And my dream is that there should be one. However, in general, this merging of science and art, I think today there is much more of that. Now, Jehan, your second husband, Sir John Marik Thomas, passed away from cancer in 2020. And having spent several years living in the UK nursing him, you decided to move back to Cairo.

24:38How has it been settling back in your home city? Wonderful. You know, I have two lives. my life in Cambridge, which I still go and spend time there and enjoy. And here, culturally, it is filled with wonderful things that I couldn't find elsewhere. Well, you're semi-retired now. You are still busy, of course. For many years, you were a jury member for the L 'Oreal UNESCO Women in Science Award. Today, you're on the judging panel for the Great Arab Minds Awards. So very much in touch with the next generation of scientists, I'd say. What would your advice then be to them, particularly perhaps ones who want to combine seemingly divergent passions?

25:24What I would say is to follow their passion, number one. Number two, not to worry too much about the end product, but to enjoy what they're doing, even if at the end it doesn't work, it doesn't really matter. What matters is the journey. Sound advice. Before we finish, we've talked about how forgers learn to work around the authentication tests. So are there new technologies coming through to deal with that? Yes, there are quite a few. In fact, mind you, they're expensive sometimes. But for instance, the analysis of the radioisotope by technique, which sounds very long laser abductively coupled plasma mass spectroscopy, this particular technique identifies exactly the origin of the lead organ pigments, because if they're using lead carbonate, let's say for Caravaggio, the lead ore would be from Italy.

26:27So if it's produced somewhere else the lead ore would identify that particular... Because it has different proportions or different types of radioisotopes in it. Lead has different isotopes so they can get to know exactly where the ore's origins are and they could identify. I know you said you're not a painter yourself but if you ever fancied picking up an artistic hobby, presumably you'd have a pretty good idea of how to create a decent forgery yourself. I would, I would. But although I always thought that God had forgotten me about, I don't know, draw, I don't know how to sing, I don't write poetry.

27:15I appreciate all that. But then I found myself a hobby, which is jewellery making. because I used minerals, there was chemistry there. And so... You do have an artistic side. Well, it's been a pleasure. Jihan Raga 'i, thank you very much for sharing your life scientific. Thank you so much.

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