A Russian billionaire Viktor Vekselberg is suing Christie's, the world's most prestigious auction house, for damages for having sold him a fake Kustodiev. It is only the latest, striking case in the world of buying and selling works of art, plagued by counterfeiting and shaken by scandals. The business of counterfeiting fine art, according to the FBI (which in recent years has set up an investigative team specializing in forging), is second only to drug trafficking in terms of turnover and "moves" a good 64 billion dollars a year in the United States alone. According to European experts, at least half of the items currently in circulation, which often end up under the hammer of British auction houses, could be fake.
Famous cases – Forgery was born with the art itself. If the first forgeries date back to the dawn of civilization, one of the most famous cases is that of the eclectic British Greenhalgh family. Son Sean, father George, 84 at the time of his arrest in 2006, and mother Olive, 83, had spent nearly two decades fabricating fake paintings, sculptures and miscellaneous artifacts in their garage. The Greenhalghs, who became famous with the nickname of Bolton Forgers, from the name of the town where they lived, at the time of their arrest they had copied, among others, works by LS Lowry, Paul Gauguin and Barbara Hepworth and collected 17 million pounds in 10 years of activity. Among their victims was the Bolton Museum, which shelled out £440 for a fake Egyptian statue (which experts dated to 1350 BC).
Also in Great Britain and in 2006, Robert Thwaites, a 54-year-old Staffordshire painter with no formal education and rapidly deteriorating eyesight, has been arrested for selling fake Victorian paintings to fund his son's schooling. During a search of his home, the police found a manual for the perfect counterfeiter: “The Art Forger's Handbook”. The most recent case, however, is that of the German Wolfgang Beltracchi, former hippy and talented artist, who in 35 years counterfeited 55 works by Max Ernst, Fernand Léger, Heinrich Campendonk, André Derain, Max Pechstein, of modernist and expressionist classics, that have yielded him, according to investigators' estimates, 34 million euro. During the years of his activity – he was arrested only in 2011-, he invented new paintings, linked to the artistic phases of counterfeit painters, or paintings of which there was news but which had been lost and of which there were no images . According to investigators, he acted with the coldness of a gambler, taking advantage of a greedy and overheated art market.
The experts - For some years now, police forces around the world have been tackling the problem with ever more determination, but the fight is only just beginning. “There are still many fakes in circulation – explains David Freeman, head of the international society of verifiers of works of art Freemanart – and many that are about to be introduced, at increasingly alarming rates”. Per Vernon Rapley, head of Scotland Yard's Art and Antiquities unit "wherever there is money and an interest, crime follows". Scotland Yard is monitoring the business of fake works by Russian authors, particularly loved by the oligarchs of Moscow and St. Petersburg, such as Vekselberg who now claims that the painting "The Odalisque" attributed to Kustodiev, and purchased by Christie's for 1,7 million pounds, is a fake.
Auction houses – Artwork verifiers, such as Freemanart, use increasingly sophisticated scientific techniques for analyzing works of art, such as microscopic examinations and dendrochronology, a technique that studies the age of the wood, but verifying the Validity of a work is still a far from perfect process. Auction houses, museums and private clients continue to be defrauded. Greed and the illusion of having managed to get your hands on unknown masterpieces found in attics by (pretend) naive people are among the causes of this phenomenon. Also not helping the investigations is the reticence of the auction houses who do not want to make their mistake public. “In the event of a dispute with the buyer – explains Bendon Grosvenor, a London art inspector – they prefer to refund the purchase price and do not go to the police so as not to get bad publicity”. An action that Christie's has not been able to avoid this time, revealing once again the fragility of a system which is often based on the vanity of the experts, the greed of the operators and the ingenuity of the customers.
