Displaying items by tag: Fake

Dutch police have arrested a man suspected of trying to sell a fake Vincent van Gogh painting with a multimillion-euro price tag.

The 56-year-old, whose identity was not released – in line with Dutch privacy law – was arrested on suspicion of fraud for attempting to sell what he claimed was a study for the Dutch master’s painting The Harvest.

A painting by Henri Matisse stolen more than a decade ago in Caracas and later recovered in an FBI sting is on display again in the Venezuelan capital.

The "Odalisque in Red Pants," worth around $3 million, was exhibited Tuesday for the first time in more than a decade at the Museum of Contemporary Art.

It had been replaced with a fake sometime between 1999 and 2002 and it was only in 2003 that Venezuelan authorities realized the original had been stolen.

An East Hampton man stands accused this week of selling over 60 forged paintings, which he claimed to be by Jackson Pollock, to private collectors and on eBay, netting him nearly $1.9 million.

A special agent of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, in seeking a warrant for the arrest of John D. Re, 54, said he had engaged in the scheme since March 2005 and at least until this past January. According to the complaint by the agent, Meredith Savona of the bureau’s art theft and art fraud division, Mr. Re falsely told collectors he had come across a trove of Pollock paintings in 1999, when he was hired to clean out the basement of an East Hampton woman, Barbara Schulte, three years after the death of her husband, George Schulte, a woodworker and antiques restorer.

A painting that was “targeted for removal” from the collection of the Carnegie Museum of Art in Pittsburgh won a last-minute reprieve after a technical examination determined that it was not a “modern fake”, but a 16th-century Florentine portrait that was significantly “tarted up” in the 19th century.

“I was convinced it was a total modern fake,” says Lulu Lippincott, the institution’s curator of fine arts, referring to what was purportedly a portrait of Eleanor of Toledo by the Italian Mannerist Bronzino. “One look at the picture and I thought, ‘you’ve got to be kidding—this is not a Bronzino’,” she says. Convinced that the work was not the Old Master it claimed to be, Lippincott sent the picture to the conservation studio with a note asking Ellen Baxter, the museum’s chief conservator, to confirm that it was a fake.

Texas-based appraiser of Asian art pleaded guilty in U.S. federal court Tuesday to taking part in a conspiracy to smuggle illegal rhinoceros horns and elephant ivory to China.
 
Ning Qiu could spend more than two years in prison and be fined $150,000 when he is sentenced at a later date.
 
Authorities say Qiu admitted to helping the boss of the scheme obtain rhino horns and ivory, where they were smuggled to Hong Kong and used to make fake antiques.
 

Mars and Venus was well-known to Nicolas Poussin scholars. But for more than a century, the oil on canvas was considered either a fake or a poor attempt by the French painter’s studio to imitate the style of the classicist master. It barely left the Louvre’s stock room.

Now new research led by Pierre Rosenberg, the director of the Louvre from 1994 to 2001, proves that Mars and Venus is indeed the real thing­–a discovery which makes it the 40^th Poussin in the institution’s collection. The Figaro reports that under the piece’s darkened varnish, the conservation team in charge of a recent analysis discovered that the top of the canvas had been cut off, and the removed strips used to enlarge the piece horizontally.

A painting, which Spanish tax authorities claimed was Van Gogh’s Cypress, Sky and Country (1889), is in fact a terrible fake according to Alfred Weidinger, vice director of Vienna’s Belvedere. The painting was discovered during a raid of safe deposit boxes in Madrid. Speaking to Austrian daily, Die Presse, Weidinger says, “It is one of the worst fakes or, better yet, copies, that I have ever seen. An amateur must have done it based on a calendar shot of the original.”

According to Weidinger, that original from Van Gogh’s Cypress series was indeed painted in 1889 but hangs in New York’s Metropolitan Museum. He says that he spoke with an expert from the Van Gogh museum in Amsterdam who was similarly shocked at just how bad the painting appears to be.

Miami pastor was sentenced Monday to six months in jail for peddling bogus examples of some of British artist Damien Hirst's signature paintings.

Kevin Sutherland had faced a possible seven years in prison in the attempted grand larceny case, which accused him of knowingly trying to sell five fake Hirsts for $185,000 to an undercover detective. Sutherland, who plans to appeal, said he was just an art-world tyro who got confusing signals about the pieces' authenticity.

Las Vegas billionaire Frank Fertitta III is suing a respected Swiss curator accused of standing behind the authenticity of a Mark Rothko painting that turned out to be a fake. Feritta acquired “Untitled (Orange, Red and Blue)” from New York’s disgraced Knoedler gallery in 2008. He paid $7.2 million for the canvas.

Oliver Wick, a Swiss Rotko expert and specialist in American paintings, received $300,000 for the sale. According to court documents, Wick “was aware of substantial evidence that the painting was a forgery” and “conducted no independent research into the authenticity of this fake Rotko.” The painting had been exhibited at the Fondation Beyeler museum in Basel, Switzerland, where Wick was a curator.

Knoedler, which closed in 2011, has been accused by multiple clients of selling forged paintings. The forgeries, which were presented as authentic works by Rothko, Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Franz Kline, and Willem de Kooning, had been painted by a Queens-based Chinese artist and sold to Knoedler by Glafira Rosales, a Long Island art dealer. Rosales pleaded guilty to nine charges, including wire fraud, tax fraud, and money laundering, last September. During her 15-year scheme, Rosales swindled unsuspecting customers out of over $80 million.