By Elisabetta Povoledo
Milan: On show in a historic palazzo in the central Italian city of Pisa this week are about 450 works by some headline-grabbing names: Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol and others. Alongside them are paint tubes, paintbrushes and cans of spray paint, reflecting the versatility of their creators.
The catch: they are all fakes.
The works are among more than 2100 pieces seized by Italy’s specialised art theft squad over the past year in an effort to break up a Europe-wide network of forgers and dealers accused of selling counterfeit art to unsuspecting buyers.
A police photograph displays some of the forged works in Pisa. An art historian working with investigators said Banksy works were easier to falsify than those by other artists.Credit: Arma dei Carabinieri via The New York Times
The operation was among the biggest busts of counterfeit art in the past 15 years, Lorenzo Galizia, who heads the police art theft squad in Rome, said in a telephone interview. Angela Teresa Camelio, the Pisa prosecutor overseeing the case, valued the seized works at about €250 million ($407 million).
Many of the works were attributed to Banksy, the elusive UK street artist. Galizia said an entire “Banksy exhibition” in the central Italian town of Cortona was shut down after officers determined that all the pieces were fake.
“There was nothing real there,” Galizia said. “It was absurd.”
The seized works include paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures. Some 38 people have been placed under investigation on suspicion of conspiracy to deal in illegal goods and of the forgery and sale of illegal artworks, Italian officials said.
A photograph released by Italy’s Culture Ministry showing fake artworks in Rome after being seized by the police. Credit: Italian Culture Ministry via The New York Times
The case has involved suspects in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, Camelio said, and further developments could broaden the scope of the investigation.
The police named the case Operation Caryatid after a sketch, purportedly by Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani, that was in the first lot of about 200 works seized from a Pisa businessperson in March 2023, a confiscation which led to the investigation of the Europe-wide ring.
The operation was co-ordinated by the Italian desk of the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Co-operation, or Eurojust. The art police zeroed in on forgers mostly working in Italy and, in the case of Banksy, in Spain.
They tracked down fake works in auction houses throughout Italy, Eurojust said, and found others on auction house websites. The investigation also involves dealers who may have acted as go-betweens.
Because the case is still under way, officials said, no formal charges have yet been brought.
Some had probably acted “in good faith,” Galizia said, while others appeared to be complicit in the fraud.
Italian officials noted in a news release that one Pisa auction house had peddled works it claimed were by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian for about €4000 each, even though pieces by such artists “normally sell for millions of euros at international auctions”.
Fake works billed as Picassos include paintings and sculptures.Credit: Arma dei Carabinieri via The New York Times
The seized artworks will either be destroyed or used for “didactic purposes”, Galizia said.
The pieces on display this week are being exhibited in a riverside palazzo that houses Pisa’s state archives. Arranged by artist, the works include copies of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, oil paintings by Mondrian and prints by Warhol.
In a way, said Jaleh Bahrabadi, the state archives’ director, it was fitting that a place entrusted with preserving history’s primary sources should showcase fake art, putting something authentic alongside something spurious.
“It’s incredible but beautiful,” she said.
A table in the centre of a room lined with Banksy works reveals the tricks of the forgers’ trade: tubes of paint, spray cans and a Banksy rubber stamp used to “authenticate” the works, one of around 50 such stamps investigators confiscated. A display case features dozens of fake “certificates of authenticity.”
Many of the seized Banksy works were stamped Dismaland – the dystopian theme park that the artist opened in 2015 in his UK hometown of Bristol.
A seized forgery of an Amadeo Modigliani sketch called Caryatid, which lent its title to the police’s anti-fraud operation. Credit: (Italian Culture Ministry via The New York Times
“If they had that stamp, they were automatically false,” said Stefano Antonelli, an art historian who was tasked by the police with verifying hundreds of Banksy works that turned out to be fakes.
Many were sold for a fraction of the price that originals would get on the art market, he said, and several were not copies but Banksy “interpretations”.
Such fakes are common, as Pest Control Office, which represents Banksy, warns on its website. It offers advice to anyone looking for pieces credited to the artist: “Always remain sceptical.”
This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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