The most famous fakes in art. Ways to determine the authenticity of paintings

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curator - creator exhibitions dr Doron Lurie.

Forgeries (falsifications) can be found in various areas of our life: art, archaeological artifacts, consumer goods, money, documents, documentary photography, and much, much more.

Let's start with art.

A rich man, an American collector, buys a Titian painting in Italy, sends it for examination, confirms that it is Titian. He wants to buy it, but current legislation does not allow such a picture to be taken out so famous author from Italy because it is a national treasure. Then the collector asks the Italian artist to paint some kind of landscape on top of Titian in order to take out the picture as modern. Having brought the painting to America, the collector gives it to a familiar restorer to take it off. upper layer and discovered Titian. After some time, the collector receives a call from the restorer: "I removed this landscape, removed Titian at the same time, discovered a portrait of Mussolini. Continue or stop?"
(Joke).

Here is a vivid illustration of this anecdote: this picture is painted on top of another picture. To fake an old painting, it is important that the canvas itself be old, of the time that the painting claims to be. Here we see the upper painting of the 17th century, which is painted over the painting of the 16th century. But in fact, this is a fake of the 19th century, made by the artist-restorer Lattanzio Quarena.

Fake Renaissance painting, late 15th century.

"Portrait of the Bishop of Chester", unknown artist, 1560. In the 19th century, the painting was passed off as a portrait of Henry the Eighth. A more well-known model can also be sold for more.

It is advisable to fake famous artists, big names.

"Jesus and 12 Kohanim in the Temple", painted over a male portrait. It was attributed to Rembrandt, but it turned out that it was written 30 years after the death of the artist.

"Saint Jerome", attributed to A. Durer.

Here it is immediately clear that we are talking about A. Modigliani. On the left is a fake, and on the right is a painting, the author of which is supposedly A. Modigliani.

Is it a copy or a fake, I don't even know.


You see, there are two almost identical portraits with their interesting history that took place in 1916.

"Self-portrait", Han van Meegeren

(...)

"Yitzhak blesses Jacob", another fake Vermeer by van Meegeren.

For the "credibility" of his paintings, van Meegeren used antique canvases and appropriate pigments. The exhibition presents their replicas.

Another famous forger presented at the exhibition is Moses Shapira.

He is still considered one of the biggest falsifiers of archaeological artifacts.

On May 11, 1884, the corpse of 54-year-old Moses Shapira, a collector and dealer in antiques, was found in a small room in a provincial hotel in Rotterdam. Shapira shot himself. The reason for Shapira's suicide was the cancellation of his grandiose deal with the British Museum for the sale of the so-called "Moab idols".

"Head of a Man", made in a stone-cutting workshop in Jerusalem, commissioned by Shapira.

Movitanian archaeological antiquities appeared after the famous King Mesh Stele (known in the 19th century as the "Moabite Stone") . Shapira was accused of making the Moabite antiquities a forgery.

Shapira was also accused of selling fake ancient manuscripts allegedly found in the Dead Sea region. Unfortunately, these Shapira manuscripts have disappeared and it is now impossible to compare them with the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were found in Qumran 64 years after Shapira's manuscripts. Maybe it was a big mistake and a loss for archeology? It is believed that not all the things he sold were fakes.

Menorah, basalt, allegedly made in the 5th-6th century AD, in fact, in the 20th century, in Syria.

This sculpture is an incorrect copy of Miron's "Disco Thrower" and is specially presented at the exhibition to test our attention to detail. Few of the visitors can find its difference from ...

Correct sculpture.

Copies are not fakes.

The Tel Aviv Museum of Art has a large number of copies of various famous sculptures. This museum, from its very foundation, sought to show the role of Jews in the creation of world civilization and therefore collected images in the form of copies of famous Jews (Moshe, David, etc.) by famous authors (Michelangelo, Bernini, etc.). It is not the only such museum in the world, it is enough to recall the Museum. Pushkin in Moscow or the Museum-Academy in Venice or the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, etc. This idea was not developed in the Tel Aviv Museum of Art, and now we have what we have.

A set of ordinary silver utensils, Germany, 18th century. The Hebrew text בורא עץ הדר (who created the citrus tree) was added to the sugar bowl and thus turned the sugar bowl into an etrog box, and the entire set of utensils into "Judaica", which can be sold for more money.
Real etrog storage boxes, specially made for this purpose, can be seen in my story for Sukkot.

Many people think that photo falsification appeared only with the advent of Photoshop, but in fact, fakes appeared with the advent of photography itself as a form of human activity.

Here a prime example how one out of 4 people turned out ... Depending on the policy.

shakko: Original fromphoto of 1926, there are 5 people on it: Antipov, Stalin, Kirov, Shvernik and Komarov. Later print: Komarov, standing on the right, was cut off (he was shot in 1937). On next year Antipov was shot, and he was cut off on the right. Then Stalin remains alone with his late friend Kirov. The string of reproductions ends with a ceremonial portrait of the leader, painted by Brodsky from the same photograph. Here Stalin is generally alone.

The famous photograph that every Israeli student knows: the meeting of T. Herzl and Kaiser Wilhelm.
The meeting took place in Mikve Israel in 1898.
It's actually a photo montage!

Photographed by D. Wolfson, but the picture failed. There were 2 pictures.

Herzl, alone, without the Kaiser.

Kaiser alone, without Herzl.

I had to make a photomontage of two photos without photoshop and combine both.

"Death of a Republican", famous shot Robert Capa , taken in 1936 during the Spanish Civil War, may be the most famous photograph of that war ... In our time, they say that it was staged.

Forgeries for a noble purpose. There is also a kind of forgery.

Usually the very word "fake" is understood by us as negative. But there are also examples to the contrary.
A striking example of such a forgery for important purposes is the forgeries of the Mossad, for which a variety of documents are falsified in a multitude. The exhibition presents some of the documents and objects used in the operation to capture Eichmann.

Eichmann's capture took place in Argentina in 1960. Eichmann was responsible for the mass extermination of Jews during World War II. After the end of the war, he fled to Argentina, where he was discovered by the Mossad in 1957, caught and taken to Israel for trial. It was one of the most difficult operations of the Mossad, given the vast distance from Israel to Argentina.

Here is an El Al worker's ID for the then head of the Mossad, Isar Arel, made in 1959 for the operation to capture the Nazi criminal Eichmann in Argentina. Arel personally participated in the operation.
Everyone who makes fake documents is known to make mistakes and it is only a matter of time before such a mistake is discovered.

The certificate says that engineer Chaim Ben-Dror was born in Afula in 1910. The problem is that Afula was founded in 1925 ... It's good that the Argentines were not interested in the history of these places.

The window displays fake license plates of the car in which Eichmann was taken away...

...and a fake bus stop sign - such a number did not exist in those places.
Remember I was talking about the artist Yosefe Bau who saved many lives during World War II with his forgeries and then also worked for the Mossad...

We don't always value originals.
A well-known fact from the biography of Charlie Chaplin. In 1940, he stops incognito in Monte Carlo. Just at that time, the Charlie Chaplin look-alike competition was taking place in the city. He decides to participate in this competition and takes ... only third place. There were those who were more reliable.

Crafts are all around us - any branded consumer item can be counterfeited.

Counterfeiting alcohol brands is a very common counterfeit, no less common than art counterfeiting. A fake can be different, from the simplest one, when one bottle of a drink is poured into two, adding another liquid, or very complex with making labels for expensive drinks and pouring something simpler, but of the same color into bottles ...

With counterfeit brands consumer goods This is what we see almost all the time. This is especially often associated with fashion branded products that are very expensive. And when it is possible to buy almost the same thing for less money, well, who among us can resist?

Only the lazy do not counterfeit money. Counterfeit money, what could be more common?


The most counterfeited Israeli coin is 10 shekels. And I have a few fake copies for the exhibition :)

200 shekels and 50 shekels are actively forged. The most secure Israeli banknote is 20 shekels. I wrote about Israeli money .

Fake 100 dollars, the bill says "fake" in Hebrew.

Exhibition page on the museum website http://www.tamuseum.org.il/he/about-the-exhibition/fake-

Real story from the life of the museum about the preparation for the exhibition in the United States of the collection of miniature rooms of Helena Rubinstein.


For a long trip, the rooms were carefully packed. The same Doron Lurie, the curator of the "Fake" exhibition, was taking the exhibition to the USA. Doron was assisted in packing by students, future art critics.


Packaging for an exhibition is a very difficult job. Tiny items are packed individually. The catalog carefully rewrites and describes all the items from each room. These tiny things are not only carefully packaged, they are also detailed in the catalog, with the material indicated.

On the eve of departure, when everything seems to be ready and there are plane tickets, an instruction comes from the American authority (customs?), which deals with the import and export into the United States of objects made from natural materials that are prohibited in today's world. For example, items made of ivory, tortoiseshell, because. for the sake of these objects many animals were destroyed. It turned out that in the already packed houses there are objects made of prohibited materials, tiny vases, frames, plates .... At the time of the manufacture of houses, modern laws did not exist, and US law sanctimoniously forgets about those works of art that were made in the past.

And at night before the flight, all the student girls of Doron's assistant gather. They unpack all the boxes, take out all the ivory micro-wares, and make cardboard replacements for them, since you can't just take them out. They reprint the catalog and print it in a new way at night in the printing house. It takes place at a time when everything was still on paper.

So fakes were presented at the exhibition in the USA, instead of ivory there was cardboard.
The exhibition of the collection of miniature rooms of Helena Rubinstein can be viewed in the museum on the -1 floor, in the "Old Masters" section, and not at the exhibition referred to above.

Here it is worth mentioning the creator of the exhibition, Dr. Doron Lurie. He is a restorer by education, and as an active restorer, he regularly encounters fakes. It is the restorer who removes layer after layer on a fake painting ...
Doron is also the creator and custodian of the Old Masters museum department, as well as the museum's chief restorer and creator of the wonderful exhibitions in the museum.
I wrote about two of his exhibitions: Delft Porcelain from Israeli Collections and "Russian History. Russian Portrait from Putin to Rasputin"

Much to my regret, I heard rumors that Dorona had "retired". The museum, it turns out, is not interested in such people. So soon there will be nothing to go to this museum for ... Dr. D. Lurie himself will not disappear, he is a person of international fame, we simply will not see his new wonderful exhibitions that could be.

I got to the exhibition "Fake" with an excursion organized by a guide

https://www.site/2017-02-17/iskusstvovedy_ustanavlivayut_podlinnost_i_avtorstvo_starinnyh_kartin_eto_pohozhe_na_detektiv

How to turn $10,000 into $100,000 using intelligence

Art critics establish authenticity and authorship vintage paintings. It's like a detective

Natalya Makhnovskaya Nail Fattakhov

Natalya Makhnovskaya works at the Chelyabinsk Museum of Fine Arts and is engaged in the attribution of paintings - the establishment of the authenticity of works, the features of writing techniques, and so on. “My work is most similar to the work of an investigator,” she admits, explaining her passion for the profession. Her daily work is a real intellectual detective.

Establishing the authorship, the authenticity of the picture, the specific time of its writing significantly increases not only the scientific value of the canvas, but also its commercial value. As a result, a work that is valued at tens of thousands of dollars can rise in price to hundreds of thousands. However, museum staff do not like to talk about it. The museum, of course, has good security and all the necessary security measures are observed, but museum workers are very afraid of provoking criminals.

An interesting discovery has recently taken place. The portrait of the beautiful Countess Bobrinsky by Manizer and the wonderful portrait of a girl, made by the most popular pastel artist in the 19th century Frederica Emilia O'Connell, were considered unrelated. As it turned out, there is a connection, moreover, it stretches through time to the Empress Catherine the Great.

Nail Fattakhov

This is not the only discovery. Natalya Makhnovskaya told some of the most bright stories that took place within the walls of the museum.

Hello from the gallant era

The first thing I did when I came to the museum was Hubert Robert's "Landscape with Washerwomen". He is a famous landscape painter of the 18th century, Russia has the second largest collection of his works after France. Not so long ago, our Robert was found in the catalog of a Japanese museum, which bought it in the 80s.

Now the painting must be taken for X-ray and sent to the Hermitage, where it will be compared with the pictures of the real Robert. Most likely, we have a very good copy made in the 18th century. Robert was very popular, so he had a lot of followers and imitators.

We have a story with Jean Baptiste Oudry, he lived before Robert and was a royal animal painter. He painted dogs for Louis XIII, presented in the Hermitage and the Pushkin Museum. We have his painting “Dogs in front of a killed hare”. This canvas came to us from the Tretyakov Gallery and was attributed as "Unknown Artist of the German School". Can you imagine how in the process of life a picture changes the author, school, country?

Nail Fattakhov

Her provenance is also very difficult. Previously, she was in some branch of the Tretyakov Gallery, the Rogozhsko-Simonovsky Monastery, then the story ends. While working on Robert, I met many specialists in absentia. In 2013, a letter arrived from Guillaume Nicot, who wrote a dissertation on Western European painting in the collections of Russian emperors from Catherine II to Alexander I. Then culture was an indicator of prestige, not like now. Russian imperial collections were the richest.

Niko established that we really have Oudry, and not just Oudry, but from the Bellevue Palace of the Marquise de Pompadour, the mistress of Louis XV. She ordered the artist a series of four paintings for desudéportes - decorations above the door - in her dining room. Behind our dogs we can see some nondescript house, it turned out that this is Bellevue. Niko identified it from the topography. The castle has not survived to this day. At first, rabid revolutionaries broke it, then they demolished it, one park remained.

The most striking thing - and for me in general ecstasy - is that only one of the four paintings in the series has survived and it is kept with us. For our Chelyabinsk, this does not mean anything, unfortunately, it is we here in our community who can die of happiness, and everyone else does not care.

Huchtenburg Mystery

- Since childhood, I have loved Western European art, I collected clippings from Ogonyok, my mother gave me some postcards from the Hermitage. I especially fell in love with Dutch painting. And we had a picture hanging on the second floor at the exhibition, I looked at it and thought: “What a sky! Surely this Dutch painter". The picture was signed “Battle scene. Unknown artist, Flemish school. At that time, I did not distinguish between the Dutch and the Flemings very well, although now, of course, I began to understand much more.

And then you ask experienced people, they will snort something with pathos in response, and you feel like a fool-fool. But in reality it's such subtleties that I think those experienced people and did not know them. Once Google gave out in the search for a picture exactly like ours. But you already know your collection: here is the big sky, here is the battle, here are the trees on the stage. By thread, by thread, I pulled out information that this painting was sold at an auction, in my opinion, Sotheby's, under the name "Copy from a painting by Jan van Huchtenburg." So for the first time the name of the Dutchman surfaced, my intuition did not fail me.

Nail Fattakhov

In the Amsterdam Rijksmuseum, there is an iconographic analysis of Huchtenburg's work in the public domain: the favorite techniques used by the artist. According to the staffing - the characters depicted on the canvas - it is easy to determine the hand of the artist or for whom the copyist works. I compared our painting with Huchtenburg's painting The Battle of Ramilly between the French and the Allies on May 23, 1706 and found about ten matches.

Huchtenburg was very fond of painting horses. Battle scenes allowed him to depict horses in a variety of poses. I compared the images and realized that there could be no chance, both canvases bore the same author's handwriting. Usually, if the artist gets some images, he will duplicate them from picture to picture. This is Huchtenburg. But here the question has already arisen whether we have a genuine Huchtenburg or a copy.

Stylistic analysis had to be supplemented by technological one. Modern artists write with factory paints, at the same time the paints were washed by hand. I removed the planks from the picture, the holes from the nails in the stretcher made it possible to establish that they were square, forged. On the back were wax seals and stamps from the previous owner - "Her Excellency Countess Chernysheva-Bezobrazova." If the painting had undergone a later restoration, these traces would not have been preserved. The Countess owned the painting until 1918, so it was not restored later.

Nail Fattakhov

Microscope studies... It's... luxurious. The tone of the sky, which we perceive as blue, is seen differently under the microscope: it is white interspersed with ultramarine or azurite, which the Dutch washed by hand. These purple crystals look like jewels. I'm sorry, I just love it so much smiling).

Paintings of the 18th century and older reach our time, mostly "duplicated". From time to time, the canvas becomes thinner, and so that the paint layer does not fall off, a new, “duplicating” canvas is placed on the back side. On our canvas, there were losses of the author's canvas, toned later. Yekaterinburg specialists using an infrared camera found a signature that is difficult to distinguish with the eye due to craquelure (a network of cracks in the varnish - ed.). The remains of the signature have been lost along with the canvas, but it is clear that it belonged to Jan van Huchtenburg.

I sent macro shots of the signature to the wonderful researcher Quentin Bouvelo in The Hague, he is a specialist in battle painters. I was advised to contact him at the Rijksmuseum. Of course, in Holland there were no such upheavals as in our country, the paintings were not transported in wagons by crazy revolutionaries. Not like ours. Poor Huchtenburg has gone through no one knows what. But Bouvelo confirmed the authenticity of the signature and congratulated us. I was happy (laughs).

Then we took the picture for X-ray to the Lotos clinic. I doubted the X-ray settings for a long time. The restorers in Omsk told me that they take pictures of their paintings at the Institute of Forensic Medicine and sent me the necessary parameters. It turned out that it is required to adjust the x-ray in the same way as for a picture of a human hand.

Nail Fattakhov

The whole evolution of the picture is visible on the X-ray: here the artist made underpainting, now he began to fill out the form. Or pentimento - when he did not like how he, for example, wrote a hairstyle, and he rewrote it differently. The copyist works differently; on the X-ray of the copy, the entire evolution of the picture is not visible. A snapshot of our picture showed all these alterations. And how these horse bottoms are exquisitely painted and modeled, a complete delight! It's very beautiful, I assure you!

The case of the brazier

Where did the paintings come from in Chelyabinsk museums? Either from the capital's museums, or bought from Chelyabinsk. And where did the Chelyabinsk people get the pictures from? Trophy. We didn't have our own Demidovs or Stroganovs. In our collection, we found a lovely picture "At the brazier." There are two priests of some kind, some kind of brazier, it is written so vividly, wonderfully. There is a signature, "A. Gallego". Expert opinion of the Pushkin Museum ( State Museum fine arts them. Pushkin - approx. auth.), made before selling to us, says that this is Alvarez y Gallego Domingo.

I decided to find out his biography, what kind of artist is he? Internet search turned up nothing. I found only one picture, there are some views, ships, seas - nothing to do with ours. Did I mention iconographic analysis? If the artist Robert painted ruins and landscapes, then he painted portraits very rarely. If an artist works in his favorite genre, he very rarely rebuilds.

I stuck with our Sergei Mikhailovich [Shabalin, the chief curator of the Museum of Fine Arts], he is an amazing person, he knows a lot. He said that from somewhere he remembers that this artist is in the Prado Museum (Madrid, Spain - ed.). I used the Google translator, wrote there and received a response two weeks later. I always write somewhere, like “to my grandfather’s village”, and I’m always so surprised when I get an answer (laughs). And then a beautiful lady from the Prado said that yes, they have such an artist, only another - José Gallegos y Arnosa, who died in 1917.

Nail Fattakhov

Through Wikipedia, I found a link to a site dedicated to the artist and created by his grandson, Paul Gallegos. I wrote to him, sending him an image of our painting, and asked for a sample of my grandfather's original signature for comparison. Gallegos is very well represented at auctions, it sells a lot. He often painted scenes from the life of Catholic priests in luxurious robes, against the backdrop of carved furniture, and even this brazier appears on other canvases.

One thing Gallegos was found in the Hermitage. I wrote to an employee dealing with Spain and received a reply where she writes: “by coincidence, at the moment when I received your letter, I was visiting a descendant of the artist, Paolo Serafini, who came specially to see the picture. I showed him the image of your canvas, and he remembered the brazier that was kept in their family and which he remembers from childhood.

Lecture by Natalia Makhnovskaya on the attribution of painting, dedicated to the portrait of Countess Bobrinskaya and its connection with the pastel portrait of a girl, will take place in art gallery on Labor Street, 92, on Saturday, February 18, at 11 o'clock. The portrait of a girl - pastel on paper - requires special storage conditions and is very rarely exhibited due to the fragility of the material. Visitors to the lecture will have the opportunity to look at him with their own eyes and marvel at the skill of Frederica Emilia O'Connell, one of the most famous portrait painters of the 19th century.

The history of fakes has more than one thousand years. An abridged version of an article by the French researcher Adrian Darmon presents the main milestones in the development of the craft, and sometimes the art of fraudsters and falsifiers from time immemorial to the present day.

The history of non-genuine art objects goes back thousands of years. To observe the rituals and worship the gods, figurines and sacred objects were required, and in large quantities. There were not enough original items for everyone. So there were copies. If you want - the essence of the same fakes. First, people learned to imitate the methods of production of these objects, then their styles ... In the era of ancient civilizations, the demand for art was very high. Egyptian artists and craftsmen provided "sources of inspiration" to various copyists from neighboring countries, and later to the Greeks. The art of Mesopotamia was actively copied in the countries of the Middle East and Central Asia, and even in China.

In the mighty Roman Empire, the main inspiration for all artists was the heritage of the ancient Greeks. Some masterpieces of Greek art formed the basis of the canons of beauty among the Romans. At first, copies were simply made from Greek statues, but wealthy patricians wanted to own the originals by all means. So some merchants discovered the opportunity to get rich quickly: having mastered the art of falsification to perfection, they sold copies to the rich under the guise of real ancient Greek sculptures.

It is necessary to distinguish between the concepts of "copy" and "fake". Making copies can be quite an innocent occupation - for example, many aspiring artists from the most ancient times copied the works of masters in order to learn how to create works of art as well as they do. The fate of these copies was different: some artists destroyed them, considering them to be ordinary studies, others honestly sold them as mere imitations of the originals. Still others simply forgot about them and left them in the workshop (where they could later be found and mistaken / passed off as originals by famous artists). And some saw this as a way to make money and began to create copies solely for the purpose of selling under the guise of any well-known works. In general, when the goal of someone who copies a work of art becomes deceit, then an ordinary copy becomes a fake, a “fake”. As we can see, back in the era of antiquity, many realized that it was possible to make very good money on stamping such "tricks" ...

The counterfeit industry Ancient Rome was suppressed with the arrival of the barbarians. The barbarians were not distinguished by religious tolerance and tolerance: they destroyed temples (recall, most of the works of art were religious), destroyed antique statues. With the spread of Islam, the threats to ancient and Christian works became even greater: the Koran forbids any depiction of humans and animals. Many monuments of ancient, and later Christian culture were lost forever.

Christianity, firmly established in Europe, in turn, established its indestructible canons for creating works of art. All art has now become religious. From the 6th to the 14th century, there were almost no fakes. Only the relics of saints and various Christian relics were forged. The most famous example of such a religious forgery is the Shroud of Turin. For a long time it was believed that this relic is the same canvas in which Joseph of Arimathea wrapped the body of Jesus Christ after his suffering on the cross. A scientific analysis of the shroud showed that it was created no earlier than the 13th century, but even this did not dissuade Christians who continue to believe that this canvas is indeed the imprint of the body of the Son of God.

At the dawn of the Renaissance, a new trend emerged: orders for artists began to come not only from the church. Kings and princes, as well as the Roman patricians many centuries before them, began to collect works of art and patronize their creators. At the end of the 13th century, the art of antiquity was rediscovered. Artists and sculptors of the Italian Renaissance began to depict mythological characters, nudes in their works ... Such famous creators as Donatello, Andrea Verrocchio, Antonio del Pollaiolo, Andrea Riccio admired antiquity , Jacopo Sansovino, Michelangelo, Giambologna, Stefano Maderno, Pietro Tacca, etc. Copying Greek and Roman masters has become a common practice and an indispensable element in the training of young artists and sculptors. Of course, the passion for the masters of antiquity led to the emergence of many fakes, the manufacture of which did not shy away from famous artists. Michelangelo, for example, used a fake in order to teach a lesson to one cardinal, who offended him with the words that his work "does not reach" the level of ancient creators. The famous artist created a sculpture and presented it to the cardinal under the guise of a Roman one. Upon learning that he had been deceived, the prelate smashed the figurine in a rage. Even then, the original work of art was given great importance. But the artists did not stop "indulging" in the creation of fakes. In the 17th century, many of them, wishing to achieve the favor of the monarchs, gave them their copies of the works of their favorite artists. At the beginning of their careers, such creators as Velazquez (Diego Rodríguez de Silva y Velázquez) and Lebrun (Charles Le Brun) did this.

Some artists copied the works of celebrities in order to shock the public: for example, the titan of the Renaissance Raphael (Raphael) created several "Perugino's paintings" (Pietro Perugino). A century later, Van Dyck (Anthony Van Dyck) amused himself by writing the Rubens, and two centuries later, paintings in the manner of the same Rubens (Peter Paul Rubens), as well as Greuze (Jean-Baptiste Greuze), Watteau (Jean-Antoine Watteau) and Velazquez created french romantic Eugene Delacroix.

In the 19th century, the forgery industry reached a decent level. Collecting works of art has ceased to be the privilege of aristocrats. The role of industrialists and merchants in society became more and more significant, huge wealth was concentrated in their hands, and, accordingly, the demand for art increased many times over.

In the 18th century they became popular works Flemish painters hundred years ago, which were actively copied by artists of the second rank. Many of these copies were later discovered by art dealers and sold as originals. A century later, the popularity of the 18th century - Watteau, Fragonard (Jean-Honoré Fragonard), Boucher (François Boucher), Reynolds (Joshua Reynolds) and Gainsborough (Thomas Gainsborough) - consequently, a huge number of imitators appeared, whose creations settled in the collections of wealthy bourgeois under the guise of paintings by great masters.

Demand was also influenced by such a factor as the fashion for traveling around Europe, introduced by English aristocrats at the beginning of the 18th century. The nouveau riche of the 19th century, who decided to follow this fashion and go, for example, to Italy, wanted to buy a canvas or other of some famous old master there. Of course, naive tourists were often fooled by enterprising sellers, slipping fakes on them. The flourishing of tourism in Italy led to the emergence of whole artels of fake makers, specializing in the manufacture of "paintings of Italian primitives", which were sold like hot cakes. Forgers began to master new technologies: for example, the mechanical production of reduced copies of sculptures, "thanks" to which bronze statues began to be forged in industrial sizes. The French architect and theorist Eugène Emmanuel Viollet-le-Duc pioneered the fashion for the Middle Ages, and copyists immediately rushed to produce fake Limoges enamel. Nevertheless, in the 19th century, the "scale" of the activities of falsifiers was still not so huge. Only once did the fake case really stir up the public - when the Louvre bought a gold tiara, allegedly created by Scythian nomads, but in fact turned out to be the work of the Odessa jeweler Israel Rukhomovsky.

The famous museum was deceived by two crooks, the Hochman brothers. They announced that the tiara (which was engraved with the inscription "To the great and invincible Tsar Saitafarn. Council and people of the Olviopolites") was found in southern Russia, on the territory of ancient Olbia, and sold to the Louvre for a million francs. The tiara was put on display on April 1, 1897 (what a symptomatic date!). However, experts soon began to doubt the authenticity of the precious exhibit: the inscription on the tiara was very well preserved, as if it had been made quite recently, and not 23 centuries ago! The curator of the Munich Museum announced that the tiara was "molded" from antique elements of various origins. The investigation led to the workshop of the Hohman brothers in Ochakovo. Israel Rukhomovsky stated that it was he who created the tiara, but did not know that it would be used as a fake and end up in the Louvre under the guise of an antique piece. In order for the French experts to believe that it was he who made the tiara, Rukhomovsky came to Paris and, in front of the astonished Louvre experts, recreated part of the precious headdress.

A similar incident occurred in 1873, when other brothers named Penelli made an "Etruscan sarcophagus" and sold it to the British Museum. For several decades, the sarcophagus was the main exhibit in the Etruscan hall of the museum, until one of the brothers, tormented by remorse, told the truth.

One of the most forged painters at that time was the famous Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot). Moreover, he often collected enthusiastic imitators in his studio, whose paintings he sometimes “corrected”. For added glamor, he put his signature on them. Now it is almost impossible to figure out which of the "Coros" are genuine and which are not ... Perhaps what we can see in some museums is the work of talented imitators. Another artist whose paintings were forged a lot during his lifetime was Adolphe Monticelli, famous for his mastery of the impasto technique.

In the late 1870s, the Impressionists entered the artistic arena. Progressive and visionary art dealers such as Paul Durand-Ruel (Paul Durand-Ruel), as well as the almighty American collectors-tycoons and some Russian aristocrats were the first to see the undeniable artistic value of the works of Edouard Manet (Edouard Manet), Claude Monet (Claude Monet) , Camille Pissarro, Pierre-Auguste Renoir and others. Active forgery of these artists began during the First World War. Then the industry of "fake" reached an unprecedented flourishing: at the end of the war, the Brussels counterfeiters sold a huge number of fakes to the officers of the German occupying army. At least 10,000 were sold by Corot alone! Even Maurice de Vlaminck himself, at the beginning of his career, was engaged in the manufacture of "Coros" and "Cezannes" in order to have something to live on ...

In the 1920s, the demand for the works of Vincent van Gogh increased, becoming famous years fifteen years after death. Since the artist's reasonable catalog had not yet been published, it was not very difficult to pass off some artfully made fake as a Van Gogh painting. In the 1920s, the number of art lovers increased, and many sellers works of art(even such respected ones as the famous antiquarian Lord Duveen (Lord Duveen)) did not disdain to supply fake "Van Goghs" to the rich, not very sophisticated in painting.

The "golden age" of counterfeiters came in the second half of the 1920s. Not only paintings were forged - in Orleans, for example, there was a salon of André Maifert, where "furniture of the 18th century" was made. The copies were so good that no one thought to doubt that they were originals. Andre Maifer himself did not participate in the marketing of his products. He never questioned the "authenticity" of the items he supplied to antique shops and took great pride in producing furniture of such excellent quality.

In the 1930s, the Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, dissatisfied with the fact that his painting was not a success with critics, decided to take revenge on them and cranked grand scam. Van Meegeren was engaged in the restoration of paintings for a long time, and also taught painting in Delft, which allowed him to gain in-depth knowledge of the work of the great Dutchman Jan Vermeer, whose paintings art historians knew no more than forty. He was on fire with the idea of ​​“complementing” the heritage of the famous master from Delft: he decided to paint several paintings on religious themes and pass them off as works by Vermeer, for which he scrupulously studied all his painting techniques.

"Randomly discover no one famous painting Vermeer" was easy: the works of the Delft master were discovered only in the middle of the 19th century, and the first retrospective (in Rotterdam) was organized already in 1935. Three years earlier, the enterprising forger Van Meegeren settled in Provence, where he began to study Vermeer's technique and the colorful pigments he used to create his masterpieces. In 1934 he purchased picture XVII century, erased the paint layer from it and wrote on an old canvas "Christ at Emmaus". Under the guise of "accidentally found Vermeer," he presented this picture to an art history expert Abraham Bredius (Abraham Bredius), who, seeing a sensational find, almost fainted from an excess of feelings - so good was the work.

The fake was bought in 1937 by the Royal Gallery of Rotterdam (for 500,000 florins). Encouraged, Van Meegeren began to churn out new Vermeers. Forgeries appeared one after another: first “Isaac blessing Jacob”, then “The Last Supper”, “Christ and the Sinner”, “The Passion of the Christ”, “Laundress”… auction for 1.25 million florins.

Of course, some experts could not help but wonder: why did so many unknown Vermeers begin to appear on the market, and even with an obscure history of existence? . Only when the Nazis were defeated did the authorities of the liberated countries seriously address the problem of looted masterpieces. Van Meegeren, who did not disdain to sell his Vermeers to the enemy, also fell under suspicion. During the war, he sold "Christ and the Sinner" and four other works to Marshal Goering (Hermann Goering) and other high-ranking German officials. At the end of the war, Van Meegeren was accused of collaborating for selling national treasures to Hitler's henchmen. And he made a shocking confession: it turns out that all the masterpieces with which he stuffed the art market for almost ten years were written not by Jan Vermeer from Delft, but by himself ... just wanted to fool the Nazis.

The forger told how he acquired 17th-century canvases and what pigments he used, spoke in detail about his technology for aging fakes ... But the Dutch court did not believe Van Meegeren, and he offered to write another Vermeer in the presence of two experts. The picture "The Young Christ Preaching in the Temple" was not very good, but, nevertheless, convinced the judges that Van Meegeren did not squander national treasures, but only sold his fakes. Pigments similar to those used by Vermeer were found in Van Meegeren's workshop, as well as an unfinished painting depicting a woman reading a letter.

Van Meegeren was sentenced to just one year in prison. But the stress experienced by the forger during the trial led to his premature death. Van Meegeren died of a heart attack on October 31, 1947, just two weeks after being taken into custody.

However, we can say that Van Meegeren died a winner: he still managed to wipe the nose of all the critics who once called him a bad artist. Thanks to this story, the paintings of Jan Vermeer gained unprecedented popularity, although the curators of museums around the world were in a panic: it turned out that many of the "Vermeers" from their collections were fakes. Even the famous painting "The Girl at the Harpsichord" was declared fake. In 1993, this painting was submitted for examination by the Sotheby's auction house, and it took experts ten years to establish that the work was in fact genuine. After restoration, The Girl at the Harpsichord was sold in 2003 for more than 24 million euros.

Now Van Meegeren would probably not be able to fool the experts: the methods of chemical analysis of works of art are now much more advanced than in the 1930s. However, even in the post-war period there were craftsmen who were able to deceive not only art lovers, but also high-class professionals. For example, in the 1980s, the English swindler John Cockett (John Cockett, aka John Drewe) sold fake paintings by Ben Nicholson and other famous painters, written by his accomplice - the unrecognized artist John Myatt (John Myatt) . Cockett incited his acquaintances, who have influence in the art market, to sign documents indicating that the paintings belong to them, and also produced letters allegedly written by forged artists. Not only that, he also found a way to get into the archives of famous museums (such as the Tate Gallery or the Institute contemporary art in London) and entered the names of his fakes in the official registers of works! Cockett was arrested by Scotland Yard in 1999 and sentenced to six years in prison, of which he spent two in prison.

One of the most famous scams in the art world dates back to the late 1960s. The main characters were the Hungarian Elmir de Hory (Elmyr de Hory) and his partner, former dancer ballet Fernand Legros, who managed to sell many fakes on the American market.

Elmir de Hory (aka Elmir von Howry, aka Baron Elmir Hoffman, aka Joseph Dori, aka Joseph Dori-Buten) was born in Hungary in 1905, since 1961 he lived on the island of Ibiza, posing as a wealthy aristocrat in exile . In Ibiza, de Hori settled in a luxurious mansion, where he arranged secular evenings, marked by the presence of the entire elite of the island. According to legend, de Hori made a huge fortune selling art and was friends with many celebrities, including Salvador Dali (Salvador Dali). His cloudless life in Ibiza continued until the moment he learned about the arrest of his main accomplice. Fernand Legros and his lover Real Lessard (Réal Lessard) were caught selling fake modernist paintings to Texas oil tycoon and collector Elger Hurtle Meadows (Algur Hurtle Meadows).

Elmyr de Hori took an early interest in art. At the age of 18, a young man, a representative of the "golden youth" of Budapest, decided to study painting and went to Munich. Later he moved to Paris, where from 1926 to 1932 he worked in the studio of the great Fernand Léger. But de Hory never became a famous artist. At the end of World War II, de Hory found himself penniless: the communist authorities of Hungary took away all the property from his wealthy parents. An aesthete, a sybarite and a homosexual, he faced the need to provide for himself on his own. But de Hory did not want to become an ordinary office worker. Without a penny in his pocket, he began to create imitations of the works of famous artists - Pablo Picasso (Pablo Picasso), Henri Matisse (Henri Matisse), Amedeo Modigliani (Amedeo Modigliani). Soon, several rich people who were not very well versed in art began to buy works from him. So de Hory found a way to survive in war-torn Paris and even found foreign clients. He continued to deceive collectors and gallery owners until 1952, when a Los Angeles dealer exposed him and threatened to call the police.

De Hori was very terrified at the prospect of arrest and imprisonment, and even attempted suicide. But in 1958, having met the 27-year-old "art dealer" Fernand Legros, he again decided to embark on an unrighteous path. Legros, who at that time was already the father of the family, but did not deny himself the pleasure of having fun with the young Apollos, was well received in the highest circles of society. Legros' idol was rumored to be Otto Wacker, aka Olindo Lovael, also a former dancer turned art dealer. In the mid-1920s in Berlin, Wacker pulled off some very successful scams with thirty Van Gogh paintings. Well-known expert Bert de la Faille (Bert de la Faille) first recognized them as genuine, but then realized that he had been deceived. In 1932, Wacker was tried, and de la Fay announced that five of his "Van Goghs" were still real.

De Hori was at first very uncomfortable in front of the young, eccentric Legros. He acted like a cowboy from the Wild West, while wearing a hippie beard, a huge amount of jewelry, black glasses, a fur coat and crocodile leather boots. But it was this secular original that helped de Hory regain his zest for life. He persuaded him to go with him to the United States, where the forger again began to churn out forgeries of modernist paintings.

The task of the aging Hungarian swindler was exclusively to paint pictures, and his young partner took over the search for rich clients. He was also very fond of fooling the American customs officers. When transporting fakes made by de Hory, to the question of customs officers “What is in the suitcase?” Legros invariably answered: "Copies." Customs workers refused to believe him and invited experts who concluded that the paintings were in fact genuine, so good was the quality of de Hory's work. Legros had to pay considerable fines, but still had expert opinions on hand, which allowed him to sell his fakes for huge sums.

Despite the success, de Hory did not enjoy working with Legros. The young accomplice was incredibly disgusting to him. Therefore, after living only a year in the United States, the forger went to Ibiza. Legro, meanwhile, met the 19-year-old artist Real Lessar, whom he first seduced and then attracted to his business. He later hired another plagiarist artist, Alin Marthouret.

Nevertheless, de Hori continued to send fakes to Legros from time to time. And he, who had been looking for the ideal client for a long time, finally found him in the person of Elger Hurtle Meadows. He managed to sell the magnate about forty paintings, mostly fakes by Picasso, Modigliani, André Derain (André Derain) and Raoul Dufy (Raoul Dufy). The fakes were so good that the French experts signed certificates of authenticity without batting an eyelid.

Realizing that he had been deceived, Meadows sued Legros. He was arrested after a long investigation, which became a favorite topic of journalists. Lessard and de Hory also came under fire. And the uniform panic began in the art market: it became clear that hundreds, if not thousands of fakes were circulating in America. And American collectors, although they loved art, were not as trained in identifying fake works as Europeans, taught by bitter experience. Out of fear of losing face, few collectors admitted to buying art from Legros.

Elmyr de Hory plunged into the abyss of depression. In 1976 he committed suicide. But before that, he managed to write his memoirs and become the protagonist of a film shot by the famous Orson Welles. Wells was a great admirer of de Hory and considered him one of the main forgers of the 20th century. “I was greatly honored - Elmir de Hory himself forged my signature!” - said the director.

And Legros in 1979 was sentenced to two years in prison. But this period was completely covered by the time that he spent in a pre-trial detention cell in France and abroad, and therefore the swindler was released. Legros, a heavy smoker, enjoyed his freedom (and the support of the daughter of billionaire Aristotle Onassis) for a short time before dying of throat cancer in April 1983. His accomplice Real Lessar settled in Morocco and wrote his memoirs. And Alain Martour was very afraid of punishment for complicity with Legros, so he decided to publish his memoirs much later, in 2003.

Another forger who deceived mostly American collectors was David Stein. But he was brought to light by Marc Chagall. The famous artist saw his work allegedly in the window of a gallery, and said that it was a fake. Stein was arrested, his name appeared on the pages of all newspapers. But his talent as a forger helped him to continue to earn a living: many wanted to buy his now official imitations of paintings by famous painters.

Exposing a forger is an incredibly difficult task. There are many reasons why people make fakes. It is difficult to understand what is going on in their souls. Some create "fake" just because it is easy way to make money, others like Han van Meegeren want to teach critics and experts a lesson, still others do it just for fun...

Who had the most fun was the mysterious forger nicknamed "Facsimile", who in the 1980s managed to fool the most sophisticated Parisian experts around the finger. He specialized in still lifes of the 17th century. Having worked for a fair amount of time as a restorer public service for the preservation of monuments of history and art, "Facsimile" acquired an exhaustive knowledge of pigments, which were used by artists of the 17th century. In addition, his work allowed him to thoroughly study the paintings stored in museum collections. To create imitations incredibly close to the original, all he had to do was find an adequate base, canvas or copper plate of the right era. He began to sell his works (at first just as copies) to amateurs. But at one fine moment, the dealers saw the pictures and decided that they simply cannot but be originals! Some copies were recognized as originals, and gallery owners bombarded their manufacturer with orders for still lifes, which could then be attributed to the great French, Dutch and Flemish painters. About forty works of the forger received certificates of authenticity, and Facsimile, feeling that it was embarking on a dangerous path, decided to leave Paris - out of harm's way.

In the late 1970s, the art market boomed, and real expanse came for counterfeiters. Prior to this, their activities still did not have a real scope - mainly because most of the auction sales were made in Paris, where experts had already "knocked their hand" in tracking fakes. But gradually, auction houses in the UK and the US adopted new marketing strategies, and money began to flow to their countries. The US economy continued to develop, and more and more rich people appeared, eager to own large collections of works of art. Prices for the work of the Impressionists and Modernists crept up. New galleries appeared almost every week in New York, Chicago, Los Angeles, Dallas and San Francisco.

The main problem was that most of the experts who were able to distinguish the real picture from the "false" were French, not Americans. Inexperienced buyers bought paintings in batches without taking even the most basic precautions - for example, without checking the authenticity of the certificate of authenticity. Many certificates were issued by experts who are completely ignorant of the work of artists. And some bought the work without any documents at all.

Numerous owners of small galleries took advantage of the situation and began to sell dubious works. Some did not hesitate to issue their own certificates, which, of course, had no value. There were also many enterprising businessmen, like Fernand Legros, who built their business on the sale of fakes.

Of course, not only American collectors were deceived for nothing. Europe also knew "troubled" times. One has only to remember how a few decades earlier the famous Parisian collector Théodore Duret was the victim of forgers. After his death, the heirs learned the cruel truth: many paintings by the Impressionists and other artists bought by Dure turned out to be fakes.

The art market has reached unprecedented heights, but could not protect itself from the inevitable: from theft and "fake". The number of crimes related to art has grown every year. The sly ones from the countries of the Eastern Bloc quickly realized that they could make good money on the increased love for the high. The works of Marc Chagall, El Lissitzky, Suprematists, Constructivists and other representatives of the Russian avant-garde became more and more popular, and forgeries of their works "flowed" to the West. In Soviet times, there was a whole criminal network that supplied fake works by Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Nikolai Suetin, Lyubov Popova to Europe and the USA.

The number of artists listed on the market grew incessantly, and the fake painting industry turned into a giant machine, second only to the fake designer clothes and perfume industry. When the Colombian artist Fernando Botero became famous, there was a whole army of plagiarists copying his canvases and sculptures. The American market was flooded with fake sculptures Erte, Henry Moore (Henry Moore), Auguste Rodin (Auguste Rodin), Alexander Archipenko, Henri Matisse. The phenomenon reached its peak with the advent of the eBay online auction, where every week hundreds of copies and fakes are sold, attributed to Picasso, Matisse, Popova, Botero, Dali, Renoir, Pissarro, Modigliani, Corot, Monet, Rodin, Henry Moore, Diego Rivera (Diego Rivera ), Frida Kahlo, Natalia Goncharova, Childe Hassam, Franz Marc, August Macke, Tamara de Lempicka and many others. A real epidemic! It is not known whether the global economic crisis will kill her ...

These are the laws of the market: if there is a demand for the works of some artist, then fakes immediately appear. So it was with Michelangelo, Rembrandt, Watteau, later with Maurice de Vlaminck, Andre Derain, Giorgio de Chirico, Tsuguharu Fujita, Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, Jean- Michel Basquiat, and now with Robert Combas and other contemporary artists. In addition to the "fake" ones, there are also regular copies. But, as we have already understood, from a copy to a fake is one step. And many criminals are quick to realize that it is much easier to counterfeit paintings than banknotes.

We cannot call fakes copies made by novice painters in the course of training. It is also impossible to accept as fakes works begun by the artists themselves and completed by their students or assistants. The paintings of many famous masters, such as Rubens and Rembrandt, were created in this way. In general, a copy is an exact reproduction of a painting, while a fake is an independent work, an imitation of the artist's style. That is, a “fake” is easier to pass off as an original than a copy: it is more likely to deceive a specialist.

In order to make money easily and quickly, the forger should first of all choose the artist he will forge. Of course it must be famous painter or a sculptor well-quoted in the market. In addition, the fake maker must have talent, be familiar with ancient techniques and colorful pigments, be “friends” with chemistry, thoroughly study the compositional techniques of the counterfeit artist and come up with a plausible history of the existence of the work - in order to explain the sudden appearance of a “miraculously found” masterpiece. In order to avoid the tricky questions of experts, the swindler must also know the artist's biography well and all the circumstances of his life.

Yes, not everyone can be a forger. After making the "fake" comes the next difficult stage: you need to find a dupe to whom you can sell it. But many counterfeiters do not have business acumen (after all, they are primarily artists), and therefore they need some enterprising Legros who can successfully run their business. And without the help of seasoned businessmen, many, even the most talented, imitators get into a mess: they sell fakes written with “sweat and blood” to the first comers, and even for a small price. There is nothing to do here without knowledge of marketing and PR technologies.

It should be noted that even very famous historical characters did not disdain creating fakes and using them for their own purposes. For example, Pope Clement VII ordered a copy of the Raphaelian portrait of another pope, Leo X, and presented it to Frederick II Gonzaga, assuring him that it was the original. The “fake” industry would not have grown to such a size if it were not for characters who are good at deceiving naive people. These include a person with the speaking initials P. R. - a very charming swindler.

P. R. brilliantly played the role of a successful top manager, living with a charming young wife and charming children in a luxurious villa in a fashionable suburb. This was all part of his strategy to deceive gullible art lovers. He published in newspapers and magazines, dedicated to art, ads, where he offered to buy some works from his large art collection. He came up with various reasons why he was "forced" to sell paintings and sculptures: either a pool needed to be built, or some urgent work needed to be financed. P.R. sold genuine works to buyers who found him on the ad at a small price, not forgetting to show them other items from his collection, which he was also going to sell “in case of need”. Naturally, elated clients came to P.R. again, but this time they received “fake” ones. He even enjoyed the confidence of Parisian dealers, to whom he sometimes loaned masterpieces from his collection. The paintings hung on the walls of the galleries for some time, but P. R. made it clear to those who wanted to buy them that he was not going to part with them. Naturally, the works acquired the fame of very rare and inaccessible works, that is, "tidbits" for collectors. P. R. also frequented the Paris auctions at the Hôtel Drouot, where he made occasional bids and interviewed appraisers. So the enterprising businessman created for himself the glory of a serious collector and a very important person in the art market. In the ten-odd years that the scam has developed, he has managed to wrap dozens of people around his finger. Even after the revealing article in the weekly Le Point, P.R. continued to appear in antique shops and sell fakes in his villa! He offered champagne to the guests, while his sweet wife, with a child in her arms, entertained them with conversation. But the hands of justice still reached out to the forger. In early July 2005, he was sentenced to five years in prison. And his charming wife took a written undertaking not to leave.

I wonder how many more such scammers roam the world? We can say for sure that forgers will exist as long as there are art lovers who want to buy some quality work at a bargain price. When a diamond began to be considered a precious stone, fakes immediately appeared. It's the same with art.

Fakes, like theft, are a real curse for the collector. Both scourges can be protected. But if you can avoid theft by strengthening security measures in your house or apartment, then it is much more difficult to protect yourself from a fake. Finding an unknown work of art and determining its authenticity are not the same thing. The latter is much more difficult, especially since most often the verdict of experts is negative or ambiguous. Upon learning that a model of Giambologna figurine, made in Florence around 1660, was recently put up for auction at the Hotel Druot for an unheard-of price of 1.2 million euros, a certain collector who bought a similar one 20 years ago turned to an expert, thinking that and his figurine will reach the corresponding price. However, the expert explained to him that his figurine was made half a century later, in the Gobelin workshop, and that, in his opinion, its price would not exceed 50 thousand euros. However, the same expert valued only 30,000 a model later sold at a mind-boggling price, on the grounds that the inventory number indicating belonging to the Richelieu collection was engraved under the patina, which, according to the expert, indicated a fake. However, if this number was under patina, then this meant that another layer of patina was later applied to the bronze figurine, which should theoretically reduce its price.

That is, what is considered the original is far from always being it. Sometimes the opposite happens - the expert takes the real original for a fake. It can be said that everything depends on the certificate.

Everyone knows that artists often copied their teachers in the course of their studies, but it is often forgotten that plagiarism can be unconscious. When searching own style painters often use other people's findings without realizing it. And critics notice it ... or turn a blind eye to it.

In the early 1950s, the famous American art critic and theorist Clement Greenberg (Clement Greenberg) praised some artists, mainly abstract expressionists (for example, Kenneth Noland) to the skies. If not for Greenberg's enthusiasm, the history of art would have been completely different. The critic argued that Noland's work had nothing to do with the works of Robert Delaunay (Robert Delaunay) of the 1910s, and also argued that another American expressionist, Barnett Newman, did not owe anything to one of the "fathers of abstraction" Piet Mondrian (Piet Mondrian).

In How I Became an Art Dealer, Sami Tarica quotes the French psychoanalyst Daniel Sibony as writing about the first-second complex: The one who comes second does not admit that he borrowed anything from the first, does not say about his intentions to surpass him or anything else, but does his best to be the first, despite the fact that he is not. And because of this violation of the chronology of events, various follies occur. That is, the straight vertical lines of Barnett Newman, thanks to which he became famous, have their predecessors, and very famous ones.

Clement Greenberg ranked among the abstract artists and the famous representative of the French "informal art» (Art Informel) Jean Fautrier (Jean Fautrier), although he vehemently denied his claims. The path to success Fautrier was thorny. He was ignored by galleries and collectors. In 1955, after another unsuccessful exhibition, he wrote to Jean Paulhan: “You always told me that great artists at the beginning of their careers never manage to sell their paintings. You can be happy for me: not a single one of my works was sold at the exhibition!” It was only thanks to Sami Tariq, a carpet salesman turned art dealer, that Fautrier's paintings finally found buyers. Once Tarika showed the artist a dozen works by Serge Polyakov, which he was very proud of. Fautrier told him that of all the post-Cubists, Polyakov was probably the best. By these words, he meant that there is a fundamental difference between "post-" and "authentic". On another occasion, Tarik brought an American client to Fautrier, from whom the artist requested 1,000 francs for a painting. The American said it was too expensive. Then Fautrier took out six similar paintings from the closet and announced that they were sold at a price of 10 francs apiece. To the question of a stunned client why one painting is sold so expensive, and the rest so cheaply, Fautrier answered with pathos: “Because these [for 10 francs. - Ed.] wrote my housekeeper. The American left without buying anything. But in vain: in fact, it was about the series "Multiple Originals", which later became famous.

When Sami Tarika arrived in New York, he was shocked by the importance that Americans attach to the work of abstract expressionists. For him, the paintings of Ben Shahn, Jack Tworkov, Philip Guston, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman and others were just a "repetition of the past", the exploitation of ideas put forward thirty years earlier by Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Piet Mondrian. This "over-hyped" art reminded him of the grandiose statues of the Roman Empire, which were admired exactly until they discovered their striking resemblance to the "archaic" sculptures created several centuries earlier in the small state of Greece.

And his ward Jean Fautrier, looking at the canvases of abstract expressionists, asked himself how an artist can preserve the integrity of his "I", sacrificing himself entirely to fashion. While American expressionism was gaining popularity, no one paid attention to his works. Even when Fautrier donated one of his paintings to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris, the museum refused to accept it on the grounds that "it's not a painting." Then Sami Tariqa thought about the fact that, perhaps, those who tell the truth ahead of time, it is most difficult to be heard.

In 1959, Fautrier was invited to the Biennale in Venice - to the great displeasure of Gildo Caputo (Gildo Caputo), then president of the French Trade Union of Art Dealers. He wanted Alfred Manessier to represent France at the Biennale, but union members preferred the Franco-German artist Hans Hartung to him. With the last Fotrier, he shared the Grand Prix. The jury wanted to give the majority of votes to Hartung, but Sami Tariq managed to convince many of its members (in particular, those who came from Poland) that it is better to support a poor artist who does not even have a gallery owner than to vote for a “capitalist nominee”.

Once Sami Tarika tried to persuade the millionaire Gunther Sachs (Gunter Sachs) to support the money of another famous artist, Yves Klein (Yves Klein). Zaks agreed, but over dinner Tarika told him about Klein's performance called "Zones of Intangible Painterly Sensibility", in which he exchanged empty spaces in the city for gold, that is, in fact, he sold "nothing". The millionaire got angry: "How do you want me to buy nothing?.. That's it, I'm not involved in this anymore." Not everyone can understand the difference between a gesture in art and money spent “into the void”.

With the exception of Fautrier, Klein, and a few others, most contemporary artists have unconsciously expropriated elements of the styles of their predecessors. Even such a master as Pablo Picasso was inspired by the work of other artists and borrowed a lot from them. We can say that Picasso was the most important plagiarist in the history of painting - he did not invent anything of his own, even Cubism was founded by Georges Braque. And at the origins of this style was Paul Cezanne. Nevertheless, Picasso's commitment to borrowing does not detract from his genius, and the Spanish-French artist is rightfully considered the greatest painter of the 20th century.

Many artists absorbed the ideas and style of others, which made their work more attractive to major collectors. Why didn't Alfred Manessier, who was lauded in 1959, achieve the same fame as Serge Polyakov and Nicolas de Stael? Yes, simply because the latter were much more "hyped" on the market. All art lovers know Bernard Buffet, but no one remembers those whose works in the mid-1940s were very similar to those of Buffet. In the late 1950s, many dealers mocked Fautrier and Klein, who a little later became much more revered artists than those whose works they sold in their galleries. Fautrier called such artists "post-Cubists", and considered himself the creator of "genuine" painting.

Borrowing is not exactly copying or plagiarism, but a demonstration (most often unconscious) of some kind of influence. When we look at a painting by one artist, we often catch ourselves thinking that it resembles the work of someone else. You can make an experiment: go to a museum, stand at a distance of ten meters from the picture and try to guess the author. At this distance, Sébastien Bourdon can be confused with Nicolas Poussin, Antoine Watteau with Nicolas Lancret, Johan Barthold Jongkind with Eugène Boudin, Paul Gauguin ( Paul Gauguin) - with Paul Serusier (Paul Sérusier), Henri-Edmond Cross (Henri-Edmond Cross) - with Paul Signac (Paul Signac). Before inspiring Lancret and Jean-Baptiste Pater (Jean-Baptiste Pater), Poussin borrowed a lot from Claude Gillot (Claude Gillot). John Constable owes a lot to Claude Gelée, Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot is indebted to Constable, Eugene Boudin was inspired by Corot's painting, and Claude Monet was inspired by Boudin. And the already mentioned Picasso, before becoming the father of cubism, went through a passion for academicism, and later when creating sculptures he was inspired by the work of Julio Gonzalez (Julio González).

In general, art is based on borrowing. They are necessary for its evolution. When new currents of art emerge, artists are constantly borrowing ideas from each other and from their predecessors. Some of them are lucky - they find a dealer with a good marketing sense. Of course, some will consider them deceivers (like Fautrier of the abstract expressionists), but this will not prevent their ascent to Olympus. This may seem unfair to many, but success in the art world depends mostly on luck. Calling the same Serge Polyakov a plagiarist would be at least disrespectful, but one cannot deny the fact that he, like many other famous artists, subconsciously "stole" from his colleagues.

Is it possible to call plagiarism a trend?.. For example, Fauvism became the heir of divisionism: the work begun by Georges Seurat (Georges Seurat) was continued by André Derain and Maurice de Vlaminck, and Georges Braque, Henri Matisse, Henri Manguin (Henri Manguin), Othon Friesz, Kees van Dongen, Jean Puy and others. The same with cubism: the initiators were Braque and Picasso, “picked up” by Juan Gris, Henri Hayden and Louis Marcoussis, and their ideas were developed by abstract artists. The principles proclaimed by the initiators of various movements (cubism, suprematism, constructivism, futurism, surrealism, abstractionism, musicalism and many others) were based on conscious and unconscious borrowings. But their work, of course, cannot be called fakes. Forgers - that's who the real art-terrorists. Any expert will tell you this.

Very often scammers fool experts. Auction houses do not always conduct a thorough examination of the canvas or paints, dealers, if desired, forge certificates of authenticity and come up with a convincing pedigree of the painting. As a result, not only novice buyers are deceived, but also experts, art historians and even relatives of artists. As a rule, the counterfeiters themselves talented artists, whose paintings did not cause any excitement either at auction, or in galleries, or even at vernissages.

"Modigliani" by Elmira de Hori

Books are written about Elmira de Hori and films are made. During his life, he created thousands of fakes of the most famous and dear artists from Impressionists to Modernists. To convince of the true origin of the paintings, de Hory bought old catalogs with a painting by the desired artist, then carefully cut it out, drew his "Matisse" or "Picasso", photographed the picture and inserted the illustration back into the catalog. In this case, the buyer had no doubt that the original was in front of him.

The hoax came to light when, in the 1960s, Texas oil tycoon Algur Meadows bought a large collection of paintings—Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse, and others—from an art dealer, Fernand Legros, who collaborated with de Hory. After Meadows sued, de Hori chose to remain in Spain. There he continued to draw, but already signed his name. In the 1980s, after the death of the artist, large auction houses - Sotheby's and Christie's began to sell his work under his own name - the price started from a few hundred pounds and reached several thousand. However, in the early 1990s, experts noticed that the quality of the work was not always equally good, and they suspected that someone was also forging de Hory himself. Bidding of the artist's works decided to stop.

Fake Giacometti sculptures

Alberto Giacometti - famous sculptor, painter and graphic artist, one of the greatest masters of the 20th century. And his work was forged by the Dutch artist Robert Dreissen, one of the most famous forgers. Like most of his "colleagues", creative destiny Dreissen turned out badly - he simply was not needed by anyone!

He made his first fakes in the 80s. Then Dreissen met with the major authorities of the black art market. Among his first customers, for example, was Michael Van Ryne, one of the most successful dealers in the illegal art market.

In the late 90s, Dreissen began to copy the style of Giacometti. The sculptor created few works in his life, traces of some were lost. Therefore, a story was invented that Giacometti's brother, Diego, made copies of the sculptures at night and hid them in the pantry. Copies sold around the world for millions of euros until Dreissen's intermediary was arrested and the forger himself fled to Thailand. He succeeded! Not everyone is so lucky!

Dreissen himself, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, said that he had no regrets, and that people who are willing to pay tens of thousands of euros for a real Giacometti deserve to be deceived. The most expensive work Alberto Giacometti, by the way, was sold at Sotheby's in 2010 for $104 million.

"Christ at Emmaus" by Jan Vermeer

The Dutch artist Han van Meegeren, born at the end of the 19th century, became famous for his work on fakes in the style of Jan Vermeer. The painting “Christ at Emmaus” brought him wealth. Meegeren, who worked as an art dealer, sold his work in 1937 under the guise of a Vermeer canvas.

After this deal, the artist bought a house in Nice, where he painted several more paintings in the style of Vermeer, one of which - "Christ and the Sinner" - then sold to Hitler's ally Hermann Goering. After the end of World War II, the police brought the painting home to Meegeren so that the art dealer could help get the work back. Meegeren refused to say from whom he "bought" Vermeer, for which he was accused of treason. The artist faced a life sentence. In court, Meegeren admitted that he painted fakes, but they did not believe him, even when he was indignant: “Yes, how could you imagine that I sold the real Vermeer to Goering! I sold him a fake!”, because at one time critics unanimously recognized the authorship of Vermeer. To prove his skill, Meegeren painted another "Vermeer" and was sentenced to one year in prison.

"Odalisque", Boris Kustodiev

The sale of the Odalisque painting, auctioned at Christie's in 2005 as a work by Boris Kustodiev, called into question the reputation of this auction house (together with Sotheby's, it accounts for the majority of all auction sales on the world market).

The painting was bought by Viktor Vekselberg for $2.9 million (a record price for Kustodiev). The auction house, according to all the rules, gave the buyer a guarantee for 5 years. However, some time after the purchase, specialists from the Aurora Fine Art Foundation (whose main owner is Vekselberg) said they doubted the authenticity of the painting. Leading Russian experts said that the author of the painting was not Kustodiev, but another artist who painted in the style of a Russian artist, while copying elements of his other paintings.

Usually auction houses try to resolve such situations quickly and without publicity, but this dispute was resolved in the Supreme Court of London. After two years of hearings, the court allowed Vekselberg to terminate the deal and return the money.

"Landscape with a stream", Ivan Shishkin

In 2004, the auction house Sotheby's put up for auction, which took place as part of the "Russian Week", Shishkin's painting "Landscape with a stream" with an estimate of 700 thousand pounds ($1.1 million). However, shortly before the auction, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article in which it showed that the landscape is very similar to a painting by the little-known Dutch artist Marius Kukkoek. The paintings differed only in that there are people in the Dutchman's painting, but they are not in the Shishkin landscape, although the artist's signature was in the corner of the painting.

Sotheby’s assured that Shishkin’s signature was verified for authenticity, and the similarity of the paintings can be explained by the fact that it was written at a time when the Russian artist was influenced by the Düsseldorf school of painting.

The Sotheby's estimate was 140 times higher than the one at which the Bukowskis auction house in Stockholm exhibited a painting by Kukkuk a year earlier. In a Guardian article, one of the employees of the house said that the painting was sold for $ 64,000, which surprised her and her colleagues a lot.

"Forest", Max Ernst

German Wolfgang Beltracci drew the first forgery in 1965 when he was 14 years old. It was the Picasso of the "blue period". However, his main “specialization” was German artists, among whom the most common were works made under the expressionist Heinrich Campendonk. On them, Beltrachchi and his wife Helen earned the first capital, and then switched to more “expensive” names - Fernand Léger, Georges Braque and Max Ernst. The couple came up with a story that Helen Beltracci inherited a collection of paintings by these artists from her grandfather, to whom the paintings, in turn, were sold almost for nothing by the famous Jewish collector Alfred Flechtheim (shortly after that, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and Flechtheim fled to France) .

In the early 2000s, Beltracci painted "Ernst", the authenticity of which was not doubted even by Vernes Spies, the former director of the Pompidou Center in Paris, who is considered one of the main experts on Max Ernst. And the artist's widow, seeing the work "Forest", said that this is the best that Ernst has ever created. As a result, the "Forest" was sold to a Swiss company for $2.3 million, and after some time the painting ended up with the famous surrealist collector, French publisher Daniel Filipacci, who paid $7 million for it.

After that, luck began to change Beltrachchi. One of the oldest auction houses - the German Lempertz - sold the Campedonk painting to the Maltese Foundation, which doubted the authenticity of the work and began to conduct an examination. As a result, deceit has surfaced. The court sentenced Wolfgang Beltracci to 6 years in prison, and his wife to 4.

Lilac Tablecloth, Marc Chagall

One of the most daring schemes to sell fakes belongs to an American art dealer Iranian origin Eli Sahayu. He sold both the original and a fake written from the original. At the same time, a fake, as a rule, was accompanied by a certificate that the art dealer received when buying the original.

For example, Marc Chagall's "Lilac Tablecloth", Sahay bought in 1990 at Christie's for $ 312,000. He then sold a copy of this work to a Japanese collector for more than $500,000, and resold the original at the same Christie's eight years later for $626,000.

The FBI drew attention to Sahai's activities after the two main auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's simultaneously put up for auction two identical paintings - "Vase with Lilies" by Paul Gauguin. The forgery was intended to be sold by an unsuspecting Japanese collector who had recently acquired the painting from Sahai. And Sahay himself decided to sell the real Gauguin through a competing organization.

Eli Sahay sold most of the fakes in Asia, while the originals went under the hammers of auction houses in London or New York. Japanese collectors themselves were not always able to distinguish the real Chagall from a fake, and it made sense to invite an expert from Europe when a painting with a price tag of a million dollars was at stake, and Sahay did not trade in such expensive paintings.

"Tugboat and Barge in Samoa" by Paul Signac

After the discovery of fake paintings, they are not always destroyed. In the West, there is a practice of transferring such paintings to art or history universities in order to educate students on the example of successful or unsuccessful fakes. IN Lately exhibitions of fakes organized by such universities are becoming more and more popular. One of the most popular was held in Ohio in 2012. It showed "Picasso", "Signac", "Carren" by Mark Lundy, who painted at least 60 fakes in his life.

Despite the fact that the FBI revealed Lundy's activities back in 2008, no charges were brought against him, since he did not sell his paintings, but donated them to museums. But strictly speaking, the museums (and there were at least 30 of them) suffered financial damage - first of all, now spending money on checking the works that Lundy brought them as a gift.

Often posing as a fictitious name and acting on behalf of a religious community, Landi gave a fake painting, allegedly in memory of a relative who was related to the museum or its directorate. One day he visited the director of the Hilliard University Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, and presented him with a painting by the American artist Charles Curran. The expert, checking the picture, found that the oil was painted not on canvas, but on a printed reproduction of the picture. Due to the fact that the expert community is a close circle of people who know each other well, it soon became clear that shortly before the puncture with the Curren, Mark Lundy donated the Fields of Signac to the Oklahoma Museum (the original of the work hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg). Moreover, at the same time he presented the same "Signac" to a museum in Georgia. Everywhere, pixels of a printed reproduction showed through under the oil.

"Degas" by Tom Keating

The British Tom Keating, like many other artists who painted fakes, did not intend to make a living in such an unsightly way. However, the artist by the name of Keating did not want to buy. The first forgery he painted while working as a restorer was a work in the style of the British artist Frank Moss Bennett. Keating's partner took the painting, without asking the artist's permission, to a nearby gallery, where it was accidentally discovered by Keating himself on his way to work.

He himself considered himself a follower of Edgar Degas. He said that famous artist was the teacher of his early teacher's teacher. Then, however, Keating claimed that El Greco woke up in him. In total, during his life he painted about two thousand paintings, which are now sold at auctions under the name of Keating. In the 1980s, when the artist's fraud was discovered, no one was interested in them, but ten years later, Tom Keating's paintings were sold for thousands of pounds and, according to experts, will only rise in price in the future.

Well-known auction houses do not always conduct an examination of canvas and paints on famous paintings. This is used by talented scammers who come up with a pedigree of paintings and thereby deceive experts and even relatives of artists. I suggest you take a look at the most famous fakes of the world's works of art that scammers got away with.

Landscape with a Stream by Ivan Shishkin Purchase price: $1.1 million 1 million). However, shortly before the auction, the British newspaper The Guardian published an article in which it showed that the landscape is very similar to a painting by the little-known Dutch artist Marius Kukkoek. The paintings differed only in that there are people in the Dutchman's painting, but they are not in the Shishkin landscape, although the artist's signature was in the corner of the painting. Sotheby’s assured that Shishkin’s signature was verified for authenticity, and the similarity of the paintings can be explained by the fact that it was written at a time when the Russian artist was influenced by the Düsseldorf school of painting. The Sotheby's estimate was 140 times higher than the one at which the Bukowskis auction house in Stockholm exhibited a painting by Kukkuk a year earlier. In a Guardian article, one of the employees of the house said that the painting was sold for $ 64,000, which surprised her and her colleagues a lot.

In mid-September, the trial of the art dealer Glafira Rosales was completed in the United States, who managed to sell 60 fake art objects worth $ 30 million under the guise of originals. Now Rosales is waiting for 20 years in prison, but for several years - from 1994 to 2009 - her fraud went unnoticed. The paintings were purchased by major New York galleries. Purchase price: $17 million

Forgery of Giacometti sculptures Alberto Giacometti is the most famous sculptor, painter and graphic artist, one of the greatest masters of the 20th century. And his work was forged by the Dutch artist Robert Dreissen, one of the most famous forgers. Like most of his "colleagues", Dreissen's creative fate was bad - he simply did not need anyone! He made his first fakes in the 80s. Then Dreissen met with the major authorities of the black art market. Among his first customers, for example, was Michael Van Ryne, one of the most successful dealers in the illegal art market. In the late 90s, Dreissen began to copy the style of Giacometti. The sculptor created few works in his life, traces of some were lost. Therefore, a story was invented that Giacometti's brother, Diego, made copies of the sculptures at night and hid them in the pantry. Copies sold around the world for millions of euros until Dreissen's intermediary was arrested and the forger himself fled to Thailand. He succeeded! Not everyone is so lucky! Dreissen himself, in an interview with the German magazine Der Spiegel, said that he had no regrets, and that people who are willing to pay tens of thousands of euros for a real Giacometti deserve to be deceived. The most expensive work by Alberto Giacometti, by the way, was sold at Sotheby's in 2010 for $104 million. The specialist shows a supposedly unknown sculpture by Giacometti.

Christ at Emmaus by Jan Vermeer Purchase price: $6 million Han van Meegeren, a Dutch artist born in the late 19th century, became famous for his work on fakes in the style of Jan Vermeer. The painting “Christ at Emmaus” brought him wealth. Meegeren, who worked as an art dealer, sold his work in 1937 under the guise of a Vermeer canvas. After this deal, the artist bought a house in Nice, where he painted several more paintings in the style of Vermeer, one of which - "Christ and the Sinner" - then sold to Hitler's ally Hermann Goering. After the end of World War II, the police brought the painting home to Meegeren so that the art dealer could help get the work back. Meegeren refused to say from whom he "bought" Vermeer, for which he was accused of treason. The artist faced a life sentence. In court, Meegeren admitted that he painted fakes, but they did not believe him, even when he was indignant: “Yes, how could you imagine that I sold the real Vermeer to Goering! I sold him a fake!”, because at one time critics unanimously recognized the authorship of Vermeer. To prove his skill, Meegeren painted another "Vermeer" and was sentenced to one year in prison.

Odalisque by Boris Kustodiev Purchase price: $6 million The sale of Odalisque, auctioned at Christie's in 2005 as a work by Boris Kustodiev, called into question the reputation of this auction house (together with Sotheby's, it accounts for the majority of all auction sales on the world market ). The painting was bought by Viktor Vekselberg for $2.9 million (a record price for Kustodiev). The auction house, according to all the rules, gave the buyer a guarantee for 5 years. However, some time after the purchase, specialists from the Aurora Fine Art Foundation (whose main owner is Vekselberg) said they doubted the authenticity of the painting. Leading Russian experts said that the author of the painting was not Kustodiev, but another artist who painted in the style of a Russian artist, while copying elements of his other paintings. Usually auction houses try to resolve such situations quickly and without publicity, but this dispute was resolved in the Supreme Court of London. After two years of hearings, the court allowed Vekselberg to terminate the deal and return the money.

Forest by Max Ernst Purchase price: $7 million German Wolfgang Beltracci drew the first forgery in 1965 when he was 14 years old. It was the Picasso of the "blue period". However, his main “specialization” was German artists, among whom the most common were works made under the expressionist Heinrich Campendonk. On them, Beltrachchi and his wife Helen earned the first capital, and then switched to more “expensive” names - Fernand Leger, Georges Braque and Max Ernst. The couple came up with a story that Helen Beltracci inherited a collection of paintings by these artists from her grandfather, to whom the paintings, in turn, were sold almost for nothing by the famous Jewish collector Alfred Flechtheim (shortly after that, the Nazis came to power in Germany, and Flechtheim fled to France) . In the early 2000s, Beltracci painted "Ernst", the authenticity of which was not doubted even by Vernes Spies, the former director of the Pompidou Center in Paris, who is considered one of the main experts on Max Ernst. And the artist's widow, seeing the work "Forest", said that this is the best that Ernst has ever created. As a result, the "Forest" was sold to a Swiss company for $2.3 million, and after some time, the painting ended up with a well-known collector of surrealists - the French publisher Daniel Filipacci, who paid $7 million for it. After that, luck began to change Beltracci. One of the oldest auction houses - the German Lempertz - sold the Campedonk painting to the Maltese Foundation, which doubted the authenticity of the work and began to conduct an examination. As a result, deceit has surfaced. The court sentenced Wolfgang Beltracci to 6 years in prison and his wife to 4.

"Lilac Tablecloth", Marc Chagall Purchase price: $500,000 One of the most daring schemes for the sale of fakes belongs to the American art dealer of Iranian origin, Eli Sahay. He sold both the original and a fake written from the original. At the same time, a fake, as a rule, was accompanied by a certificate that the art dealer received when buying the original. For example, Marc Chagall's "Lilac Tablecloth", Sahay bought in 1990 at Christie's for $ 312,000. He then sold a copy of this work to a Japanese collector for more than $500,000, and resold the original at the same Christie's eight years later for $626,000. The FBI drew attention to Sahai's activities after in 2000 the two main auction houses Christie's and Sotheby's simultaneously put up for auction two identical paintings - "Vase with Lilies" by Paul Gauguin. The forgery was intended to be sold by an unsuspecting Japanese collector who had recently acquired the painting from Sahai. And Sahay himself decided to sell the real Gauguin through a competing organization. Eli Sahay sold most of the fakes in Asia, while the originals went under the hammers of auction houses in London or New York. Japanese collectors themselves were not always able to distinguish the real Chagall from a fake, and it made sense to invite an expert from Europe when a painting with a price tag of a million dollars was at stake, and Sahay did not trade in such expensive paintings.

"Tugboat and barge in Samoa" by Paul Signac After the discovery of forgery paintings are not always destroyed. In the West, there is a practice of transferring such paintings to art or history universities in order to educate students on the example of successful or unsuccessful fakes. Recently, exhibitions of fakes organized by such universities have become more and more popular. One of the most popular was held in Ohio in 2012. It showed "Picasso", "Signac", "Carren" by Mark Lundy, who painted at least 60 fakes in his life. Despite the fact that the FBI revealed Lundy's activities back in 2008, no charges were brought against him, since he did not sell his paintings, but donated them to museums. But strictly speaking, the museums (and there were at least 30 of them) suffered financial damage - first of all, spending money now on checking the works that Lundy brought them as a gift. Often posing as a fictitious name and acting on behalf of a religious community, Landi gave a fake painting, allegedly in memory of a relative who was related to the museum or its directorate. One day he visited the director of the Hilliard University Museum in Lafayette, Louisiana, and presented him with a painting by the American artist Charles Curran. The expert, checking the picture, found that the oil was painted not on canvas, but on a printed reproduction of the picture. Due to the fact that the expert community is a close circle of people who know each other well, it soon became clear that shortly before the puncture with the Curren, Mark Lundy donated the Fields of Signac to the Oklahoma Museum (the original of the work hangs in the Hermitage in St. Petersburg). Moreover, at the same time he presented the same "Signac" to a museum in Georgia. Everywhere, pixels of a printed reproduction showed through under the oil.

"Modigliani" by Elmira de Hori About Elmira de Hori write books and make movies. During his life, he created thousands of fakes of the most famous and expensive artists - from the Impressionists to the Modernists. To convince of the true origin of the paintings, de Hory bought old catalogs with a painting by the desired artist, then carefully cut it out, drew his "Matisse" or "Picasso", photographed the picture and inserted the illustration back into the catalog. In this case, the buyer had no doubt that the original was in front of him. The hoax came to light when, in the 1960s, Texas oil tycoon Algur Meadows bought a large collection of paintings - Modigliani, Picasso, Matisse and others - from an art dealer, Fernand Legros, who collaborated with de Hory. After Meadows sued, de Hori chose to remain in Spain. There he continued to draw, but already signed his name. In the 1980s, after the death of the artist, large auction houses - Sotheby's and Christie's began to sell his work under his own name - the price started from a few hundred pounds and reached several thousand. However, in the early 1990s, experts noticed that the quality of the work was not always equally good, and they suspected that someone was also forging de Hory himself. Bidding of the artist's works decided to stop.

"Degas" by Tom Keating Briton Tom Keating, like many other artists who painted fakes, was not going to make a living in such an unsightly way. However, the artist by the name of Keating did not want to buy. He painted the first forgery while working as a restorer - it was a work in the style of the British artist Frank Moss Bennett. Keating's partner took the painting, without asking the artist's permission, to a nearby gallery, where it was accidentally discovered by Keating himself on his way to work. He himself considered himself a follower of Edgar Degas. He said that the famous artist was the teacher of his early teacher's teacher. Then, however, Keating claimed that El Greco woke up in him. In total, during his life he painted about two thousand paintings, which are now sold at auctions under the name of Keating. In the 1980s, when the artist's fraud was discovered, no one was interested in them, but ten years later, Tom Keating's paintings were sold for thousands of pounds and, according to experts, will only rise in price in the future.