Museums: Monet & the Phony Pony

In the museum world, some secrets are out even before they can be classified as secret, others lie quietly covered up for years. Last week New York's Metropolitan Museum gave a rousing demonstration of both truisms and, in the process, announced it was both richer by a handsome new acquisition and poorer by declaring one of its prized Greek treasures to be a fake.

Almost as soon as Monet's The Terrace at Ste. Adresse was knocked down to a London dealer for $1,411,200, thus setting an auction record for an impressionist painting (TIME, Dec. 8), the rumor spread that...