Italy. Canvases of Pablo Picasso, Giacomo Balla, Bernard Buffet, Francis Picabia, Kees Van Dongen or Rembrandt gathered in the same place at the gates of Rome. It is however neither the room of a museum nor the living room of a collector but a clandestine workshop for making false tables of masters. It was discovered by the Comando Carabinieri per Tutela del Patrimonio Culturarale (TPC, Carabinier command for the protection of cultural heritage), a unit of the Italian gendarmerie responsible for the repression of works of art. A survey coordinated by the Rome prosecutor’s office had been opened to monitor online sales sites in particular Catawiki and Ebay.
Hundreds of paintings with the dubious origins of painters essentially active in the 19th and 20th centuries aroused suspicions of the police who ended up going back to a restaurateur whose workshop was in the north of the eternal city. Sixty -eleven paintings were discovered there, some finished, others about to be. The restaurateur was doubled with a perfectly organized professional fork. He had all the material necessary for his traffic: hundreds of paint tubes, different sizes and quality brushes, stencils and various and varied canvases. To this were added false stamps and stamps to dispersed collections or galleries which are no longer active on the art market. All this paraphernalia was supplemented by documents proving the false signatures of artists as well as fallacious sales declarations and shipping labels. But his ingenuity did not only exercise in the material reproduction of the works. “The auction catalogs were copied by replacing the artist’s original work with images of the false work created”, explained the carabiniers of the TPC. To complete his work, the suspect even had a typewriter and computer equipment used to reproduce or falsify the certificates of authenticity of fraudulent works.
Investigators are now looking to establish how long the scam lasted and what was the amount of the profits it has generated.
This is a new success for the Comando Carabinieri per Tutela del Patrimonio Culturarale which dismantled, last November, a vast European counterfeit network which involved nearly forty suspects, some of which were in close relations with several houses of sale at Italian auction. Just over 2,000 false works had been seized. The riflemen rely in their work on a workshop created in 2017 within the Roma Tre University to detect counterfeit art works, give their opinion on authenticity and study new counterfeit techniques. More than a thousand works have passed before their attention.
