Wolfgang Beltracchi — the forger undone by one tube of pre-mixed paint

Across roughly four decades ending in 2010, the German painter Wolfgang Beltracchi — born Wolfgang Fischer in Höxter in 1951 — manufactured “newly discovered” modernist paintings that the art market accepted as autograph works by Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, André Derain, Max Pechstein, Kees van Dongen and Fernand Léger. He did not copy known pictures. He painted the works these artists might plausibly have made and lost, then wrapped each one in a fabricated history so persuasive that auction houses, dealers and catalogue authorities competed to handle them. At his 2011 trial in Cologne he admitted to 14 specific forgeries; he has claimed to have faked some 300 works by more than 50 artists, and police identified dozens of suspect pictures still circulating.

The deception’s engine was provenance, not paint. Beltracchi and his wife Helene invented two collections — the “Sammlung Werner Jägers,” tied to Helene’s grandfather, and the “Sammlung Knops” — and claimed the pictures had passed through the celebrated Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim before the war. To document a chain that never existed, Helene posed as her own grandmother in deliberately aged sepia photographs, shot on pre-war paper, that purported to show the paintings hanging in a 1920s collector’s home. A label reading “Sammlung Flechtheim” did the rest. The art world, presented with a documented origin and a stylistically convincing object, stopped asking the harder question of whether either was real.

The pictures were undone not by connoisseurship but by chemistry. In 2008 a forensic analysis of Rotes Bild mit Pferden (Red Picture with Horses), a “1914” Campendonk that had sold through the Cologne auctioneer Lempertz in 2006 to the Maltese company Trasteco for €2.88 million, found titanium white in the paint — a pigment not commercially available in 1914. Beltracchi later admitted the slip was an accident of haste: for that one canvas he had used a ready-made tube rather than mixing his own lead- and zinc-white blend, and the tube was contaminated with the modern pigment. The single anachronistic compound unravelled the chain.

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi were arrested in Freiburg on 27 August 2010. The trial opened at the Cologne Regional Court in 2011, and on 27 October 2011 Wolfgang was convicted and sentenced to six years; Helene received four years, and two accomplices were also convicted. Prosecutors proved damages of roughly €16 million across the charged works, though the true total is far larger. The case stands as the most consequential demonstration that, in the modern market, a forged document can be more dangerous than a forged brushstroke.

John Myatt & John Drewe — the forgers who faked the archive, not just the art

Between roughly 1986 and 1994, the painter John Myatt and his partner John Drewe ran what investigators and the press came to call the biggest art fraud of the twentieth century — not because Myatt’s paintings were exceptional, but because Drewe attacked the thing that authenticates a painting rather than the painting itself. Myatt, a Staffordshire art teacher who had advertised honest “genuine fakes” in Private Eye, produced some 200 pictures in the manner of modern masters including Alberto Giacometti, Ben Nicholson, Graham Sutherland, Nicolas de Staël, Jean Dubuffet and Roger Bissière. Drewe, born John Cockett, sold them through Christie’s, Sotheby’s and Phillips and through dealers in London, Paris and New York, realising an estimated £1.8 million.

What set the scheme apart was Drewe’s assault on the documentary record. A painting’s value rests on its provenance — the paper trail proving who made it and who has owned it — and Drewe manufactured that trail at its source. Posing as a scholar and donor, he secured access to the archives of the Tate Gallery, the Victoria and Albert Museum’s National Art Library and the Institute of Contemporary Arts, where he inserted forged catalogues, faked exhibition records and doctored photographs that “proved” Myatt’s inventions had a recorded history. He corrupted the very reference works that experts consult to verify authenticity, so that a sceptic who did the responsible thing and checked the archive would find Drewe’s forgery waiting there to reassure them.

The fraud unravelled through human relationships rather than connoisseurship. Mary Lisa Palmer of the Giacometti Association in Paris distrusted the works submitted to her — guided by the look of the pictures rather than their impeccable paperwork — and pressed her doubts. Decisively, Drewe’s estranged former partner, Batsheva Goudsmid, turned over to police a cache of documents revealing the operation. Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad built the case, and in a trial at Southwark Crown Court that ran from 1998 into 1999, both men were convicted. On 13 February 1999 Drewe received six years for conspiracy to defraud and Myatt one year; Myatt served four months and Drewe about two years.

The case remains a landmark because of what it permanently damaged. Roughly 60 of Myatt’s fakes were recovered, but well over a hundred are believed still to be circulating, and Drewe’s forged insertions polluted institutional archives so thoroughly that curators could not always be certain which records were genuine. By targeting provenance itself, the pair did lasting harm not only to the buyers they defrauded but to the trustworthiness of the documentary record on which the whole field depends.