If the field of provenance research has grown steadily in terms of activity in recent years, scientific advances in the art authentication process are traveling at light speed, to the point where science now provides us with the capability to catch even the cleverest fraudster. To lend some perspective as to how far the scientific analysis of paintings has progressed, a 1997 article from Newsweek magazine is illustrative. The piece, which centered around concerns about as many as 100 paintings attributed to Van Gogh that might not have been painted by the great Dutchman, makes the claim that “the only way to authenticate a Van Gogh is through stylistic analysis, which is always a bit subjective,” depicting the prospects for authentication as bleak.23 Today, the possibilities are much greater.
Drs. Nicholas Eastaugh and Jilleen Nadolny are at the forefront in the field of combining science with extensive training in the fine arts. As they have adeptly pointed out in a paper discussing the results of their work on recent noteworthy art forgeries, the work of the technical art researcher is too demanding to be left to one whose expertise lies only in science while lacking experience examining fine art. Instead, the technical art researcher “ideally has mastered skills in technical art history and art technology science.” To do otherwise and limit the field to pure “science,” they argue, “is to ban such professionals from a club composed of art historians, art dealers, art conservators and so forth.”24 In other words, what makes the work of the technical art researcher so unique is that the analysis of a questionable painting is not merely the work of a person trained solely in the sciences reading printouts produced by a computer. Instead, it is the work of the scientist who understands the nuances of paintings, of the artists, of the materials. They write, “It is not simply the use of ‘science’ as it exists in the popular imagination, but a deep and rigorous interdisciplinary analysis of materials and historical technology that should be applied, and recognized, as the appropriate protocol in cases when potential forgeries are studied.”25 Such protocols are useful not just in finding fakes, but also in attributing authenticity. In the summer of 2014, the National Trust in Great Britain used such techniques to verify as authentic a Rembrandt self-portrait that had been in doubt for half a century. Researchers were able to use advanced technology to prove that Rembrandt’s signature on the painting, long thought to be questionable, was in fact applied to the canvas at the time the painting was executed.
Armed with this sort and breadth of expertise, technical art researchers like Eastaugh and Nadolny are able to turn to a wide array of diagnostic tools. But first, they carefully examine the canvas, the stretcher, or the panel; markings, seals, or labels found on the work; layers or ground and priming on the canvas; underdrawing or preparatory work; the pigments used as well as their binding agents; the artist’s technique; patina and signs of aging; and conservation treatments.26 In tandem with the collection of this information, the technical art researcher is then able to consider the result produced by futuristic-sounding technologies like positioning scanners, high-performance color/multispectral imaging, infrared reflectography, dual-laser Raman spectroscopy, and digital X-ray. When this level of technology meets the sort of training in fine arts that experts like Nadolny, Eastaugh, and their colleagues have undergone, the prospects for forgers grow dim with every passing day.
But of course, before science can be used to detect fraud, the defrauded must submit it to examination. And the one thing that science cannot combat is the desire many people have to believe they have discovered the fine art find of a lifetime. Technical art researchers cannot compel duped art buyers to submit their acquisitions to analysis. In fact, in many cases, they likely would rather not know. And it’s that sort of wide-eyed attitude toward art—and well-known artists—that is the chief symptom of the art dupe.
Research undertaken to determine the authenticity of works of art isn’t always done in the name of ethics and integrity. There’s often a lot of money and potential embarrassment at stake, whether it be for a private collector or a well-known institution. A solid provenance and analysis to back up the authenticity of a work pays dividends in terms of the dollar value of a piece of art. But whatever the motive for advances in authentication, the work done by leading minds in the field will only help to protect the artists and owners alike.
A note about terminology: throughout this book, the terms forgery and fake are used quite often. In popular media, the two are often used interchangeably when discussing art. In a piece titled “Fakes and Deception: Examining Fraud in the Art Market,” criminologists Kenneth Polk and Duncan Chappell expertly parse the meanings of the words. They clarify that often times “there is a tendency to apply the term ‘fake’ when there is no demonstrable intention to defraud.”27 For the purposes of this book, the term fake is used only in instances when fraud is intended. Furthermore, Polk and Chappell explain that, in a legal context, forgery applies only to the forging of documents or writing. For instance, forgery is a more legally correct term for a manufactured document used as provenance than it is for the actual painting it purports to support. Nevertheless, contemporary parlance has co-opted the word forgery to describe a painting executed in the style of an artist and then fraudulently sold as having come from his hand. Throughout this book, whether an artist creates paintings that are “fakes” (exact unauthorized replicas of existing works passed off as the original) or “forgeries” (paintings created by an artist in another’s style and name without authorization), I adhere to the conventional use of the term forger to describe him—and it is virtually always a “him.” While women are frequently active if not integral players in the schemes used to sell fraudulent art, the most notorious of history’s forgers are almost exclusively men.
I suspect that those fraudsters listed earlier, and surely others, will scoff at the fact that their story is not told in detail in these pages: modesty is not the strong suit of the forger. There are countless scams that have been perpetrated against innocent—and not so innocent—art buyers over the years, and there is no indication that they are decreasing. Furthermore, it’s not possible to cover every conceivable scheme; it would take a mind much more corrupted than my own to imagine them all. Rather, this book explores the most noteworthy and illustrative of frauds from a multitude of angles within the art world, with a wide variety of inventive cons all focused on illicitly monetizing the creative genius of others. And this much is sure: there will be more scams and new criminally imaginative approaches to them. Moreover, it’s likely that there are forgers, even prolific ones, whose stories have not and might not ever be told, while their works hang in galleries, homes, and even museums bearing the signatures of better-known artists. In the pages to follow you will find art scams from a variety of unique angles, as well as the clever investigative efforts that undermined them. Even as you read this sentence, someone somewhere is concocting a new scheme to use art to make a fortune by bypassing the hassle of ethical behavior.
One
The Forger
Wolfgang Beltracchi went out antiquing with a list of very particular items in mind. Searching diligently through the goods at a local flea market, he soon found just what he was looking for: a vintage 1920s camera and a few rolls of old film to go along with it. He also picked up some enlargers and trays to develop the film. Beltracchi had a bit more difficulty finding 80-year-old paper from the prewar era, but eventually he succeeded there too. With his photographic wares in hand, he headed home and studied the items, intent on creating authentic-looking period pictures.
Beltracchi’s wife, Helene, a slim woman with strong features and graying light-brown hair, was excited by her creative husband’s find and a willing and eager subject for his foray into period photography. Donning what she described as “the kind of blouse that grandmothers used to wear”1 and a strand of pearls, she pulled her long hair back, adopted the somewhat dour expression of her grandmother Josefine Jägers, and sat up straight at a simple
two-chair table upon which rested a cup of tea and a small bouquet of flowers. Wolfgang snapped a few photos of her, careful to include the paintings that hung behind her on the wall—works attributed to masters of surrealism, including Max Ernst and Fernand Léger. These paintings, and many others, were part of a large collection of art that was said to be long absent from the waiting eyes of art lovers everywhere, and that would soon be unleashed to the world from the “Jägers Collection.”
Wolfgang developed the black-and-white photographs of Helene-as-Josefine and closely examined the results. That they were slightly out of focus only added to the impression that they were taken in a bygone era. The finished product lacked but one feature, which he quickly and masterfully improvised by taking scissors and crimping the edges. The couple, who proudly described themselves as hippies, looked at their finished product, quite pleased with their results. But this wasn’t some fun little project for a scrapbook, or a simple form of cosplay between the pair. Instead, the Beltracchis had created something more cunning, and even devious. They had created provenance.
Provenance is proof of the ownership history of a work of art. It is invaluable in establishing authenticity and, in turn, plays a vital role—perhaps the vital role—in determining value. While ironclad scientific proof of authenticity can often be extremely difficult to establish, solid provenance can make or break the sale of a painting. Because Helene had taken to selling valuable artwork that she claimed her grandfather—Josefine’s husband—had left her, the Beltracchis were well aware of the need to prove that the paintings were what they purported them to be. Helene—the salesperson of the pair—had no sales records or receipts for the paintings, no decades-old titles to the works left behind by her family. Nothing aside from Helene’s story of her grandfather and, of course, the obvious skilled handiwork and creativity displayed by each artist in the treasure trove of Impressionist paintings she had for sale. And, thus, the need to produce a record of ownership—like a historic family photograph—became important. After all, the story behind each and every artwork in the world is different, and the art world can be a very murky place, costly to enter and often subject to intrigue.
There are a large number of missing paintings in the world. Some have simply been misplaced by cash-strapped museums unable to retain a skilled registrar on staff to manage the many paintings bequeathed to them by generous art lovers. Others have been destroyed, perhaps by an unfortunate fire or some other accident. Some are in the possession of anonymous collectors who do not wish to make public the value of their irreplaceable works, or have obtained the art under less-than-ethical circumstances. Still others have been stolen and simply disappeared, the thieves unable or unwilling to return them to their rightful owners, even in cases where “no questions asked” and rewards are offered.
Other perilous conditions for cultural property include wars and political upheavals. And while national crises can mean jeopardy for collections both public and private, the evils of the Nazis during World War II marked a particularly vulnerable time for the world’s great art and antiquities. From widespread looting, to collectors hiding their fine art, to the bombing of buildings and churches holding untold beauty, the scale of the disruption to the world’s art is difficult to comprehend, never mind measure. With a large portion of the Second World War fought in European nations rich in masterworks, it’s no surprise that an enormous number of paintings were put at risk under a variety of circumstances, including the wicked looting of art conducted by Hitler’s Sonderauftrag Linz (Linz Special Commission) in an effort to meet his vision for the world’s greatest museum—the Führermuseum—in his Austrian hometown. The Third Reich also implemented a program to rid the world of what it described as Entartete Kunst, or “degenerate art.” This term was used to describe the work of the Modernists of the era, including such notables as Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky. Such was the Nazi contempt for Modernism that the party curated an exhibition of the so-called degenerate art featuring 650 works, each accompanied by a label describing for the viewer exactly what was wrong with coexisting with such deviant works. Never mind the fact that one of National Socialism’s leading figures, chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels (who himself utilized a perverse form of bigoted Impressionism in an effort to pollute the national mood), had expressed approval for some pieces in the degenerate art show; this paradoxical exhibition was meant to show the people what the party believed they should no longer see. As the art writer James Gardner writes, “How ironic, however, that in their desire to purge the nation of this Expressionist threat, the Nazis set out to destroy what was, in fact, the first truly original form of German art . . . to have emerged in nearly five centuries, since the time of Dürer and the elder Cranach.”2
The Nazi effort to purge its burgeoning yet doomed empire of degenerate art resulted in the confiscation of thousands of works, with a relatively small but unknown number of them being destroyed. It was against this historical backdrop that the breathtaking collection of Werner Jägers was introduced to the world by his granddaughter, Helene Beltracchi.
According to Helene, Jägers was a frequent and faithful customer of Alfred Flechtheim, a renowned Berlin art gallery owner. Flechtheim enjoyed enormous success dealing in works by the biggest names in the art of his day, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne, as well as representing important up-and-comers in Germany such as Paul Klee and George Grosz. So great was Flechtheim’s influence in the art world in his time that today a commemorative plaque marks the spot of his Berlin apartment. After a first gallery collapsed while he fought for Germany in World War I, Flechtheim reestablished a gallery in Düsseldorf in 1919 and opened another in Berlin in 1921.3 By then, Flechtheim was a leader in the art scene in Germany, living as extravagantly as the clients he served. As was the case with virtually all Jewish businesses, though, the rise of Hitler meant the demise of Flechtheim’s galleries and collection, and his road from celebrity art dealer to exile was, of course, paved by the Nazis. Within just six months of their rise to power, Flechtheim was broke and living in France, his life reduced to one of intense panic and loss. His friend Thea Sternheim would write, “What horrifies me the most is the senseless fear that has taken hold of Flechtheim. In a completely empty restaurant, he looks left and right, even during the most harmless conversations, to make sure that no one is listening to us.”4
It’s hard to blame Flechtheim for his paranoia. His impressive and important collection of art was gone, with most of it auctioned off by his requisite Aryan partner. To make matters worse, no documentation survived the sale of his property. And when he died suddenly in 1937 after contracting an infection, Flechtheim left no estate behind. Even his widow’s art collection was lost to the Gestapo after she committed suicide rather than be deported to Minsk in 1941.5
Now, decades later, some of the art that had been dealt by the great but tragic Flechtheim was emerging from darkness, as Helene Beltracchi began to offer for sale the paintings her beloved grandfather Werner Jägers had bought from him. But despite the fact that Flechtheim’s story was well known among a wide array of European art dealers, some still demanded provenance from Helene, backing her into a corner to come up with some sort of proof that her family had owned the Modernist paintings she was selling. Thus, for the Beltracchis, the falsified photographs that she and her husband produced were a necessary evil. It was clearly fraud, but millions of dollars were at stake, and the staged pictures seemed a rather harmless crime considering the fortune at stake.
Additional efforts were made to prove the authenticity of the paintings in Helene’s Jägers Collection. For instance, the Beltracchis paid esteemed art historian Werner Spies a huge sum—rumored at over half a million dollars—to appraise seven of their works attributed to Max Ernst.6 Spies’s stamp of approval on the paintings would make their authenticity ironclad; the influential historian was not just well schooled and experienced, but had also been friend
ly with Ernst himself.7 Spies’s conclusion: all seven were unquestionably painted by the late surrealist Ernst. Spies’s fee was money well spent: the certificates of authenticity the expert provided proved to be a boon for the Beltracchis, allowing them to sell at least five of the Ernsts from the Jägers Collection, including La Forêt (2), which was purchased from the pair for $2.3 million and ultimately sold for $7 million.8
Helene’s first sale was much more modest. In the early 1990s, she approached one of Europe’s leading auction houses, Lempertz, with a painting she said was by Georges Valmier, a French painter whose styles evolved from Impressionism to Cubism and finally to Abstractionism. Almost immediately, the appraiser sent by Lempertz was ready to make a deal, and Helene settled on a final price of 20,000 deutschmarks (about $15,000). Years later, the painting would sell for $1 million.9 Though it would be a few more years before she would present the Jägers Collection to the world, Helene was intoxicated by the thrill of selling her Valmier to Lempertz. As she would later tell Vanity Fair, “The first time, it was like being in a movie. It was like it had nothing to do with me. It was another person—an art dealer, whom I was playing.”10
The Art of the Con: The Most Notorious Fakes, Frauds, and Forgeries in the Art World Page 2