Portrait of an Unknown Woman (Gabriel Allon #22) (117)

On the other side of the English Channel, two other forgers were simultaneously wreaking havoc on the art world—and making millions in the process. One was Guy Ribes, a gifted painter who could produce a convincing “Chagall” or “Picasso” in a matter of minutes. According to French police and prosecutors, Ribes and a network of crooked dealers likely introduced more than a thousand forged paintings into the art market, most of which remain in circulation. Ribes’s German counterpart, Wolfgang Beltracchi, was similarly prolific, sometimes producing as many as ten canvases a month. It was Beltracchi’s wife, Helene—not my fictitious Fran?oise Vionnet—who effortlessly sold a forged “Georges Valmier” to a prominent European auction house after only a brief examination.

Within a few short years, the Beltracchis were selling forgeries through all the major auction houses, all purportedly from the same hitherto unknown collection. In the process, they became fabulously rich. They traveled the world aboard an eighty-foot sailboat, cared for by a crew of five. Their real estate portfolio included a $7 million villa in the German city of Freiburg and a sprawling estate, Domaine des Rivettes, in the French wine country of Languedoc. Among their many victims was the actor and art collector Steve Martin, who purchased a fake Heinrich Campendonk for $860,000 through Galerie Cazeau-Béraudière of Paris in 2004.

One might have assumed that Knoedler & Company, the oldest commercial art gallery in New York, would have been resistant to the virus spreading through the European markets. But in 1995, when an unknown art dealer named Glafira Rosales appeared at the gallery with a “Rothko” wrapped in cardboard, Knoedler president Ann Freedman apparently saw no reason to be suspicious. In the decade that followed, Rosales sold or consigned nearly forty Abstract Expressionist works to Knoedler & Company, including canvases said to have been painted by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, Franz Kline, Robert Motherwell, and Willem de Kooning.

As it turned out, Glafira Rosales was the front woman for an international forgery network that included her Spanish boyfriend, José Carlos Berganti?os Diáz, and his brother. The forger was a Chinese immigrant named Pei-Shen Qian, who worked out of his garage in Queens. According to prosecutors, Berganti?os Diáz discovered Qian selling copies on a street in Lower Manhattan, and recruited him. Qian was paid about $9,000 for each forgery, a tiny fraction of what they fetched at Knoedler. Besieged by lawsuits, the storied gallery closed its doors in November 2011.

With all due respect to the Abstract Expressionists, whom I revere, it is one thing to forge a Motherwell or a Rothko, quite another to execute a convincing Lucas Cranach the Elder. For that reason alone, a French judge sent shockwaves through the art world in March 2016, when she ordered the seizure of Venus with a Veil, the star attraction of a successful exhibition at the Caumont Centre d’Art in the southern French city of Aix-en-Provence. An exhaustive 213-page scientific analysis of the painting—the crown jewel of the enormous collection controlled by the prince of Liechtenstein—would later conclude that it could not have come from Cranach’s workshop. Among the many red flags cited in the report was the appearance of the craquelure, which was said to be “inconsistent with normal aging.” Representatives of His Serene Highness took issue with the findings and demanded the painting’s immediate return. At the time of this writing, Venus was listed on the official website for the Princely Collections and on display in the Garden Palace in Vienna.

But it was the identity of the painting’s previous owner—the French collector-turned-dealer Giuliano Ruffini—that so unnerved the wider art world. Several previously unknown works had recently emerged from Ruffini’s inventory, including Portrait of a Man, purportedly by the Dutch Golden Age painter Frans Hals. Experts at the Louvre examined the painting in 2008 and declared it un trésor national that should never be allowed to leave French soil. Their counterparts at the Mauritshuis in The Hague were similarly rapturous, with one senior curator calling the painting “a very important addition to Hals’s oeuvre.” No one seemed overly concerned by the thinness of the provenance. The canvas, said the experts, spoke for itself.

For reasons never made clear, the Louvre chose not to acquire the painting, and in 2010 it was purchased by a London art dealer and an art investor for a reported $3 million. Just one year later, the pair sold the portrait to a prominent American collector for more than three times what they had paid for it. The prominent collector, after learning that Venus had been seized by the French, wisely subjected his $10 million “Frans Hals” to scientific testing and was told, in no uncertain terms, that it was a fake. Sotheby’s quickly agreed to return the prominent American collector’s money and sought restitution from the London dealer and the art investor. At which point the lawsuits began to fly.

As many as twenty-five suspect Old Master canvases, with an estimated market value of some $255 million, have emerged from the same collection—including David with the Head of Goliath, purportedly by Orazio Gentileschi, which was displayed at the National Gallery in London. It was not the first time the esteemed museum had exhibited a misattributed or fraudulent work. In 2010, the gallery aired its curatorial dirty laundry in a six-room exhibition called “Fakes, Mistakes, and Discoveries.” Room 5 featured An Allegory. Acquired by the museum in 1874, it was thought to be the work of the Early Renaissance Florentine painter Sandro Botticelli. In truth, it was a pastiche executed by a later follower. More recently, a Swiss art research company utilizing a pioneering form of artificial intelligence determined that Samson and Delilah, one of the National Gallery’s most prized paintings, was almost certainly not the work of Sir Peter Paul Rubens.