German Forgers Face Prison for Scam Worth More Than $22 Million

An art forger and his three accomplices, who together made more than 16 million euros ($22 million) by selling oil paintings they falsely attributed to famous artists, today face sentencing in a Cologne court.

Wolfgang Beltracchi, 60, confessed to painting 14 works that he sold as masterpieces by Max Ernst, Max Pechstein, Heinrich Campendonk, Andre Derain, Fernand Leger and Kees van Dongen. His wife, Helene Beltracchi, her sister and a fourth associate confessed to bringing the works to the art market.

Dealers and collectors say confidence in the German art market has been shaken by the forgery scandal, described as the biggest ever in Germany, as art historians, museums and auction houses were duped by the scam.

“The whole thing is quite terrible,” said Christoph Graf Douglas, a Frankfurt-based independent art dealer and consultant to collectors. “It has completely undermined confidence in the market. Not only were criminals at work, there was also some shoddy research. People have bought the idea that experts can detect forgeries, and this shows that is not the case.”

Among the forgers’ victims was the U.S. actor Steve Martin, according to a May report in Spiegel magazine. Martin paid 700,000 euros for a painting falsely attributed to Heinrich Campendonk, called “Landscape With Horses,” from Galerie Cazeau- Beraudiere in Paris in 2004, according to Spiegel.

It was then sold by Christie’s in 2006 for 500,000 euros to a Swiss businesswoman, the magazine said. Christie’s spokesman Matthew Paton declined to comment on the sale.

‘Highly Skilled’

The Cologne auction house Kunsthaus Lempertz said in January that it had sold five of the forgers’ works. The authenticity of all of them “was confirmed by leading experts and some of them were subsequently shown in a number of museums.”

“My colleagues and I, like the whole art market, were deceived by the highly skilled and professional operations of the forgers,” Lempertz chief executive Henrik Hanstein wrote in a letter to the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung in July.

The group not only produced and sold the paintings, it also invented an entire provenance for them, claiming the art came from either the “Jaegers Collection” or the “Wilhelm Knops Collection,” according to the Cologne court.

They said Werner Jaegers was Helene Beltracchi’s grandfather, while Knops was the grandfather of another associate, named as Otto S.-K. in court documents.

“People should have asked: Who is Jaegers?” said Douglas, a former managing director of Sotheby’s in Germany. “When did he live? Do we have a photo? How can there be a collector no one has heard of?”

In return for the confessions, prosecutors agreed to request prison sentences of no longer than six years for Beltracchi, a maximum of four years for his wife, five years for Otto S.-K. and a maximum suspended sentence of two years for the wife’s sister, Jeanette S., who is only implicated in three cases, according to the Cologne regional court.

The Beltracchi couple agreed to pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.12 million) to the court.

Christian Rode, Beltracchi’s lawyer, said in a final statement that his client wasn’t motivated by profit alone. The master forger, who has unruly gray locks and once lived in a houseboat, took great pride in his work, he said.

He felt a close connection with the artists whose oeuvres he sought to “complete,” calling his paintings the works that the artists should themselves have produced, but never got around to, Rode said. Beltracchi told the court that his pictures were sometimes almost “too good” for the artist, because he had the benefit of hindsight and knew how the artist and the history of art developed.

Rode said the trial exposed many of the shadier aspects of the art market.

“We have heard a lot about experts driven by interests, who don’t only provide expertise but also buy, mediate and receive commission,” he said in his concluding statement. “We have heard about duty-free entrepots in Geneva and payments from Swiss accounts to Swiss accounts.”

As many as 41 more paintings not included in the trial because of statutes of limitations may also be forgeries by Beltracchi. The scandal has spawned a number of civil cases against dealers and auction houses, as well as the criminal trial.

The forgers were only caught out when one buyer became suspicious and sent his picture to be examined by scientists. They discovered a paint color that had not existed at the time the work was supposed to have been produced.

“We want to know the whole truth,” said Douglas. “How many paintings did they forge? How many more are still on the market? The only way to combat the lack of confidence is with some detailed work.”