William Gaddis’s The Recognitions is an encyclopaedic collage of 1940s and 1950s American culture, including its art: Abstract Expressionism, appropriation, and a booming market in forgeries. Drawing on letters and unpublished archival material, this chapter shows the ways in which the novel’s focus on authenticity in art, and Gaddis’s work more broadly, arose from his experience of Cold War paranoia and polarization, and his engagement with the legacy of modernist fiction. It then moves on to show the ways in which The Recognitions anticipates with uncanny precision some of the key tensions in subsequent American art between art and objecthood and originality and appropriation, and incorporates these tensions into its own relationship to its historical moment.