The Faking of the Russian Avant-Garde

July 1, 2009 ARTnews The Faking of the Russian Avant-Garde With invented provenances, unreliable Nevertheless, the Office Central de lutte contre le certiﬁcates of authenticity, and trafic des Biens Culturels—the Central Office for “rediscovered” works by artists who Combatting Traffic in Cultural Goods—seized the are lost to history, forgers are ﬂooding paintings, which remain in police custody. A po- galleries and auction houses with Russian lice spokesperson said that an investigation was in progress. avant-garde fakes. A six-month ARTnews investigation reveals that inauthentic This wasn’t the first time a museum found itself works now outnumber authentic ones. embarrassed by allegedly fake Russian avant-garde pictures. Last year the Bunkamura Museum of Art n exhibition of 192 Russian avant-garde pain- in Tokyo removed five works attributed to Chagall, tings was shut down abruptly in March, three Kandinsky, and Ivan Puni from an exhibition lent Adays before its scheduled closing, when a well- by the Moscow Museum of Modern Art, although known art expert claimed that 190 of the works the Moscow museum insisted they were genuine. were fake. The exhibition, in the Château Museum in Tours, France, was devoted to Aleksandra Eks- A six-month ARTnews investigation and interviews ter, a major figure of the avant-garde. A native of with scholars, dealers, and other sources in the Uni- Ukraine, Ekster (or Exter) settled in France in 1924 ted States, Russia, Germany, France, and Spain re- and lived there until her death, in 1949. veals that the number of Russian avant-garde fakes on the market is so high that they far outnumber The whistle-blower was Andrei Nakov, who was the authentic works. “There are more fakes than himself at the center of a scandal in the 1980s, when genuine pictures,” said Alla Rosenfeld, curator of he was accused of certifying more than 1,000 ques- the Norton Dodge Collection of Soviet Nonconfor- tionable pastels and drawings by another Russian mist Art at Rutgers University from 1992 to 2006 avant-garde luminary, Mikhail Larionov. (Nakov and former vice president of the Russian art de- sued the Geneva Tribune for its coverage of a trave- partment at Sotheby’s New York. It’s impossible to -russian-avant-garde/ ling exhibition he organized of works attributed to put a number on them, said Natalia Kournikova of Larionov and won the case when the court found Kournikova Gallery in Moscow, but “we can say that he did not knowingly promote fakes.) that almost every artist whose prices have risen has become the victim of fake makers.” The organizer of the Ekster show—and the owner of 130 of the paintings—was another well-known Peter Aven, president of Alfa-Bank in Moscow and expert, the Paris dealer Jean Chauvelin. He told the owner of one of the world’s best collections of Rus- French press he had bought the paintings in Russia sian avant-garde art, called the quantity of fakes 30 years ago. Chauvelin was not able to furnish the “colossal.” It affects the market, said Rosenfeld, authorities with authentication certificates for the “because people are becoming reluctant to acquire works, but there was no need for them, he said, Russian works.” The situation has gotten worse since because “l’expert, c’est moi.” 1996, when ARTnews published its first article about http://www.artnews.com/2009/07/01/the-faking-of-the Page 1 July 1, 2009 The Faking of the Russian Avant-Garde Russian avant-garde fakes, according to Aleksan- Boris Kustodiev, and Nadezhda Udaltsova—from a dra Shatskikh, one of the world’s leading scholars member of the Italian Communist Party during the on the Russian avant-garde. “Russian buyers have ’60s and early ’70s. The party member, according entered the market, and the new demand has pro- to the catalogue, bought Altman’s canvas from a voked a wave of fakes that is many times greater Soviet functionary in 1938, when the Soviet Union than the production of forgeries in the first half fo was convulsed by Stalin’s bloody purges, and foreign the 1990s,” she said. Communists—officials of the Communist Internatio- nal, or Comintern—lived in fear for their lives. All Fake icons and “fauxbergé” trinkets have bedeviled foreigners in Moscow were under close surveillance; the art market for generations, but the escalating it would have been quite a feat to buy a forbidden demand for Russian art in the last two decades has “formalist” painting, experts said. led to more ingenious abuses. For a while, “Russi- fied” pictures—minor 19th-century European lands- The only information the auction house had about capes or portraits doctored to look Russian—flooded Baron Ciancio Villardita was that he died in the ’90s. galleries and antique dealerships in Moscow and Was he the same Baron Ciancio Villardita who is made their way to the West, appearing even at major mentioned in the deposition of Antonino Calderone, auctions. But it has been Russian modernism—art an underboss of the Sicilian Cosa Nostra who fled to from the first three decades of the 20th century— France in 1983 and cooperated with the authorities? that has attracted the most Western collectors and According to Calderone, Ciancio Villardita was a consequently the most forgeries. phony aristocrat who served as secretary for a member of the Italian parliament, collecting money from Hundreds of works have appeared in recent years Sicilian mafiosi for the Christian Democratic Party. at auction houses and in galleries all over Europe, from Munich to Madrid. These works have very Another group of seven works by important artists sketchy provenances in which certain assertions are offered in the same sale came from the collection repeated again and again: the works are said to have of Józef Kecsmár and Janos Kecsmár of Budapest, come from hitherto unknown private collections or according to the catalogue. Budapest is a small city to have been smuggled to Israel by immigrants in where people in the art world are very aware of the ’70s or to have been deaccessioned by provincial one another’s activities, but several members of museums in the former Soviet republics—although Hungarian art circles—including Tamás Kieselbach, this practice was strictly forbidden—or to have been a leading art dealer and owner of the Kieselbach -russian-avant-garde/ confiscated and hidden for a half century by the auction house—told ARTnews they had never heard former KGB (the secret police), although experts of a Kecsmár collection. say there is not a single documented case of avant- garde works emerging from KGB vaults. A large number of Russian 19th-century and avant- garde works that have turned up in European The Nagel auction house in Stuttgart, Germany, for auction houses have been certified by Russian art example, at its Russian sale of April 26, 2007, offered historians or institutions. After the collapse of the six paintings from the collection of the late Baron Soviet Union, the major Russian state museums and Ciancio Villardita—a collection unknown to experts conservation institutes—including the Tretyakov in Russian art. According to the auction catalogue, Gallery and the Grabar Restoration Center—went the baron acquired the paintings—by Natan Alt- into the business of issuing certificates of authen- man, David Burliuk, Natalia Goncharova, Ivan Kliun, ticity. http://www.artnews.com/2009/07/01/the-faking-of-the Page 2 July 1, 2009 The Faking of the Russian Avant-Garde In 2004, however, a landscape advertised as a mas- Another device, Shatskikh said, is to reproduce terpiece by the famous Ivan Shishkin (1832–98) was questionable artworks in academic books. “This put up for sale at Sotheby’s London with an estimate practice is connected to the laundering of fakes in of £700,000 ($1.28 million), only to be unmasked as exhibitions. The dubious works appear in exhibi- the work of the Dutch painter Marinus Koekkoek. tion catalogues prepared by serious museums, and The canvas had been purchased at Bukowskis auc- sometimes find their way to the covers.” tion house in Stockholm a year before for $56,000, slightly repainted, given Shishkin’s signature, and Considering the number of fakes and the sparseness then certified by the Tretyakov Gallery’s department of documentation, experts say, buyers should be of expertise. It was withdrawn the day before the cautious. Aven said he buys only works with “a 100 auction. percent provenance. When sellers say they can’t disclose the provenance of a work, I refuse to even In 2005 two dealers in Moscow, Tatiana and Igor discuss it.” Unless a work has an “ironclad prove- Preobrazhensky, were arrested for selling Russi- nance or was reproduced and exhibited during the fied pictures (they have since been convicted and lifetime of the artist,” Aven won’t touch it. sentenced to prison), and it became public that hundreds of such pictures had been sold and that the Rosenfeld endorses that kind of caution. A good Tretyakov Gallery, the Grabar Restoration Center, provenance, she said, means that a work can be and other institutions had issued certificates for traced back to the artist or the artist’s family. It was a number of them. An internal Tretyakov inves- “published in an old catalogue—new catalogues are tigation established that 212 Russified paintings not really proof—and there is documentary evi- had been examined by the museum’s department dence, for example, a photo of the artist with the of expertise, which had recognized 116 of them as work in the background. But the combination of all fraudulent and mistakenly certified 96 as genuine.

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