False Gods 'Ancient' Forgeries Fool Art Markets
The packed auction room at Sotheby's in New York was filled with feverish anticipation when, on June 7, 2007, assistants wearing white gloves rolled a delicate bronze statue about a meter (39 inches) tall into the room. According to the auction catalog, the bronze sculpture, titled "Artemis and the Stag," was a depiction of the Roman goddess of the hunt.
The sculpture was of a young girl with shining eyes, the folds of her knee-length robe draped suggestively over her body. A spokesman for the auction house raved about the sculpture, calling it "among the most beautiful works of art surviving from antiquity." The masterpiece promptly set off a vigorous bidding war.
A man from the sheikdom of Qatar offered the first bid, and an unknown man wearing a suit promptly countered with a higher bid. After that the bidding went up in $100,000 (€69,000) increments with each wave of a hand. When the duel stalled at $12 million, a new bidder seated at the rear of the room suddenly joined the fray.
The auctioneer's hammer finally came down with a bang at $25.5 million ($28.6 million, including the Sotheby's fee). The sculpture went to Giuseppe Eskenazi, a 68-year-old London art dealer, who promptly had the valuable piece flown to mainland Europe for his unidentified client.
It was the highest price every paid for a Roman sculpture. Even Sotheby's called the sale "absolutely astonishing."
But the new owner, rumored to be a Russian, could soon be disappointed. In a report SPIEGEL has obtained, Stefan Lehmann, an archeologist from the eastern German city of Halle, raises doubts about the piece. He is troubled by the "unexpressive face and seemingly perfect condition" of the sculpture. At first glance, writes Lehmann, the sculpture reminds him of a "classical work from the period around 1800."
Josef Floren, the German author of a handbook titled "The Greek Sculpture," is also skeptical. The "box-shaped base" on which the goddess is standing seems "modern." Floren is also perplexed by the clothing the young woman is wearing. "Something resembling a shawl or a veil is draped across her shoulders. No one in Rome walked around like that."
Could comments like these spell the beginning of a major scandal in the art world?
A museum in Hamburg was surprised to learn last December that the Chinese terracotta warriors on display in its "Power of Death" exhibition were fakes.
Foto: REUTERSThe suspicions about the bronze are not unfounded. Experts have noticed an increase in counterfeit art for some time. The forgers skillfully solder together hollow bronze sculptures, shape classical faces and imitate Hellenistic casting techniques. Acids are used to create the patinas.
In early 2005, Robin Symes, a major London art dealer, was sentenced to seven months in prison for an offence unrelated to art forgery. Symes, who had himself chauffeured around in a Rolls Royce, followed the jet set around the world, typically spending February in the Swiss ski resort of Gstaad, March in the Bahamas, a few days in the spring at a beauty clinic in Montreux and the summer in Greece.
When he wasn't hanging out with the jet set, Symes ran a successful antiquities business. At the time of his arrest, he owned 33 warehouses filled with treasures worth an estimated €180 million. His storehouses were also considered one of the main venues for forged art.
Prison sentences were also handed down to Briton Shaun Greenhalgh, 46, and his gang of forgers last November. The group had produced a fake statue of an Egyptian princess and claimed that it was from Amarna, the royal seat of the Pharaoh Akhenaten.
But the arrests have not put an end to the wave of forgeries of recent years.
Art forgers' favorite subjects are sculptures from the golden age of antiquity. The statues of perfectly shaped athletes once lined the athletic buildings and temples of the Greeks and Romans, whose sculptors worked mainly in marble and bronze. Most of these pieces were eventually destroyed or melted down.
But the modern art market demands a constant influx of new product. Brokers and hedge fund managers deal in Egyptian and Hellenistic antiquities as if they were bales of tobacco on a commodities exchange.
For years, it was only Impressionist paintings that were achieving record prices, but prices for antiquities have entered the same rarefied range more recently, as wealthy Chinese and Russian oil and gas millionaires enter the market. And in 2002 oil billionaire Sheikh Saud al-Thani of Qatar bought a naked Roman Venus at auction in Christie's of London for more than €12 million.
The interest in antiquities has spread across an unprecedented geographic range, says Edward Dolman, the director of Christie's, which now has offices in Shanghai, Beijing and Mumbai.
The last auction of the winter season at Sotheby's, on Dec. 5, 2007, marked the current high point of the speculative boom. The auction house was offering a 5,000-year-old limestone lioness, all of eight centimeters (three inches) tall, which had been excavated near Baghdad. The piece sold for $57.2 million.
At these prices, forgers can plan well in advance. According to Christoph Leon, an art dealer in Basel, Switzerland, it takes at least "a million euros in advance financing" to create a replica of a life-sized bronze sculpture.
Forgers concoct elaborate accounts of the origins of these fake Aphrodites and Apollos to boost their credibility when launching them into the marketplace. "Two studios in southern Europe" are especially active, says one insider, "one in Italy and the other in Spain."
Art forgers have little trouble selling their artfully crafted fakes. The naïve and poorly educated nouveau riche globalization has helped produce, people who see the world of esthetics purely as an investment or status symbol, are easily fooled.
Surprisingly, true art lovers haven't fared much better. In the course of his life Elie Borowski (1913 to 2003), a multimillionaire and expert on Semitic cultures, amassed an extraordinary private collection of antique glass objects, cylinder seals and Roman sculptures, which he left to the Bible Lands Museum in Jerusalem.
All too often, unfortunately, the astute collector was taken for a ride. According to Josef Floren, the German expert on Greek sculpture, "every other statuette in the Borowski collection is a forgery."
Even government-run museums are not immune to fraud. In 1979, for example, a gilded statue of Hercules was offered to the Antikensammlung ("Antique Collection") in Kassel. Excited museum officials traveled to Switzerland to view the sculpture in a bank vault in Zurich. It depicted the demigod wearing a lion's skin and carrying a cudgel on his shoulder.
Museums Sometimes Suppress Doubts
The museum executives, fascinated by the piece, quickly snapped it up. It was a mistake, but it took the museum 25 years to finally admit, in 2003, that it had been swindled.
Such disastrous decisions by government-appointed curators are attributable in part to the amount of pressure they face. They need sensational art -- Mayan torture devices or squatting mummies from the Andes -- to boost ticket sales, and they are sometimes too quick to suppress doubts as to the provenance of their finds.
This can lead to scandals like the one that recently unfolded at Hamburg's Museum of Ethnography. By mid-December, the museum's exhibition of Chinese terracotta warriors -- supposedly a world-class event -- had already attracted 10,000 visitors. But the warriors turned out to be fakes, freshly baked clay figures worth little more than flowerpots.
Visitors to the Bode Museum, which is part of the Berlin's Museum Island, are also being fooled -- deliberately, at that. A wax bust titled "Flora," about 75 centimeters (30 inches) tall, is on display at the museum. When the Bode, formerly the Kaiser Friedrich Museum, was reopened last year, "Flora" was prominently displayed in its lecture hall in room 220.
Museum guides describe the bust of a smiling, bare-breasted woman as a great mystery. Her origins are linked, in "mysterious" ways, to a genius of the Renaissance. "The thrilling question that remains unanswered to this day," they tell visitors, "is whether she can be attributed to Leonardo da Vinci."
But this is complete nonsense, because the "Flora" case was cleared up long ago. It was one of the most bizarre swindles ever to shake the art business.
In 1909, Wilhelm Bode, the museum's director at the time, traveled undercover to England to acquire the wax bust from a shady dealer for 185,000 gold marks. Enchanted with the piece, he returned to Berlin, where he touted it as a second Mona Lisa.
But for Bode's counterparts in London, his claims were nothing short of amusing. They promptly presented three sworn affidavits proving that Richard Lucas, a porcelain embosser, produced the bust in his studio in 1846. Tests showed that it was made of cetaceum, a wax obtained from the head of the sperm whale. In Leondardo's day, cetaceum was twice as costly as gold.
Bode had been deceived. And yet he chose to ignore the evidence. When the public eventually learned of the affair, the Kaiser chose to protect Bode, thereby smothering all doubts. Even in 1966, when the cracked work was exhibited at the newly opened sculpture collection in Berlin-Dahlem, it was described as an "original creation" by da Vinci, and one of "perfect, classical clarity and harmony" at that.
The real story was finally exposed in 1986, when chemical analyses revealed that the bust contained synthetic stearin, a substance that was produced in the 19th century. But even this news failed to topple "Flora." Today, the panel next to the bust describes it as being "both attributed to Leonardo da Vinci or one of his apprentices and viewed as a forgery of the 19th century."
There seems to be a general effort to cover up and even deny the problem of forgeries. Christoph Leon, the Basel art dealer, calls it a "dangerous development," and says that the forgery business is only growing and that more and more fake art is finding its way into government-run museums. "But they all deny the problem, especially when they have become victims of the forgery mafia themselves."
Is a dark shroud descending on the world of classical beauty? Are more and more fakes made to look old showing up in the company of the cold marble of real Laocoöns and Aphrodites, so that no one even notices the difference anymore?
When examining the authenticity of sculptures, art restorers nowadays use endoscopes to penetrate into the hollow metal figures, inspect soldered joints and X-ray base plates. But art forgers also read the professional journals. "The relationship between classical archeology and the natural sciences, on the one hand, and the forgery workshops, on the other, is not unlike the proverbial race between the tortoise and the hare," complains Lehmann. "Our scientific innovations are immediately made public and read by the forgers, who then apply them to their fraudulent activities."
In the case of stone sculptures, it has become nearly impossible to distinguish between originals and fakes. The forgers use the same types of toothed chisels and scrapers that were used 2,000 years ago, and they obtain marble from quarries that were already in use in antiquity. This has led to intense disputes.
An especially bitter controversy has erupted over the "Kouros," a supposedly 2,500-year-old statue of an archaic Greek boy owned by the Getty Museum in Malibu. According to a study commissioned by the museum, the stone sculpture exhibits weathering that could only be the result of thousands of years of exposure. However, the Getty does give some credence to the doubters, as it has included a wall panel next to the sculpture which reads "circa 530 B.C. or modern forgery."
But the issues get even more complicated. Given the high prices in the current art market, even well known experts are sometimes tempted by the sweet smell of cash. Art appraisers charge a fee of between 3 and 5 percent of a sculpture's appraised value. A few well-placed sentences can translate into a fee of half a million euros.
Some appraisers give in to the temptation and are quick to set aside possible doubts as to authenticity. Two Swiss university professors are currently being investigated on suspicions of having deliberately issued false certificates. But no one is willing to name any names.
The events that took place some time ago at the Winckelmann Museum in Stendal, a town in eastern Germany, are no less troubling. The museum caused a sensation when it exhibited a previously unknown bronze bust of Alexander the Great. Suddenly the entire professional art world was looking to Stendal with astonishment.
And with good reason. Hardly any reliable likenesses of the Greek military commander (who marched with his army all the way to India and died in Babylon in 323 B.C.) exist. Suddenly it seemed as if this military genius had been resurrected in metallic form. But, critics asked, why did this supposedly sensational find show up in a museum in a small city in eastern Germany, of all places? The bust would be worth at least $10 million on the market.
The exhibition was organized by Max Kunze, 63, who was the director of the Pergamon Museum in Berlin in the days of the former East Germany -- the most prestigious museum position in the country. After German reunification, Kunze resigned his position at the Pergamon.
Although the bust, which was on loan to the Winckelmann Museum, remained in Stendal for only seven weeks, an elaborate brochure was prepared in German and in English. In the brochure, Kunze praised the impressive, shimmering green bust and even suggested that it may have been the work of the renowned ancient Greek sculptor Lysippus.
But art experts find this assessment shocking. "The piece is absolutely not from antiquity," says Leon. Greek sculpture expert Floren also believes that the mysterious Alexander is "undoubtedly a forgery."
When contacted by SPIEGEL last week, Kunze admitted that he purchased the metal bust from Robin Symes, the shady dealer who, until his conviction in 2005, was at the helm of a global antiquities empire.
The former East German museum director and the British art dealer have known each other for a long time. Back in 1999, Kunze wrote brief appraisals of four supposedly Hellenistic bronze portraits, which Symes was trying to sell to a wealthy client in New York. Kunze, however, insists: "I did not receive a fee for the appraisals."
"Not one of those busts was real," says expert Leon. "They were all made in a Spanish workshop that produces pseudo-antiques with a surprising degree of skill."
Some experts suspect that the Stendal deal was fixed. "The exhibition and the positive appraisal provided the Alexander bust with a touch of authenticity. Something that has already been exhibited in Europe without causing offence is easy to sell in the United States," says one insider.
Expert Lehmann puts it this way: "Stendal served as a laundering operation."
Kunze rejects these kinds of accusations and insists that the Alexander bust is Roman after all. Two other "well known colleagues," according to Kunze, agree with his assessment. Unfortunately, he adds, the controversial bust has somehow "gone missing." What a shame.
Kunze does admit, however, that he has no further plans to stage any similar exhibitions of sculpture from antiquity. The issue is too controversial, he says. "Because a museum runs the risk of being abused by art dealers, such exhibitions will no longer take place in Stendal."
The Stendal experience is not uncommon, revealing, as it does, the malleability of truth in the art world. Whether an appraiser intentionally reaches incorrect conclusions (or, to put it indelicately, lies) or is simply a little off-base when it comes to appraising an artwork is a distinction that can hardly hold up in court. As a result, caution is advised.
Or, as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe once said: "Art is long, life short; judgment is difficult."
Translated from the German by Christopher Sultan
