Wolfgang Beltracchi went out antiquing with a list of very particular items in mind. Searching diligently through the goods at a local flea market, he soon found just what he was looking for: a vintage 1920s camera and a few rolls of old film to go along with it. He also picked up some enlargers and trays to develop the film. Beltracchi had a bit more difficulty finding 80-year-old paper from the prewar era, but eventually he succeeded there too. With his photographic wares in hand, he headed home and studied the items, intent on creating authentic-looking period pictures.
Beltracchi’s wife, Helene, a slim woman with strong features and graying light-brown hair, was excited by her creative husband’s find and a willing and eager subject for his foray into period photography. Donning what she described as “the kind of blouse that grandmothers used to wear”1 and a strand of pearls, she pulled her long hair back, adopted the somewhat dour expression of her grandmother Josefine Jägers, and sat up straight at a simple two-chair table upon which rested a cup of tea and a small bouquet of flowers. Wolfgang snapped a few photos of her, careful to include the paintings that hung behind her on the wall—works attributed to masters of surrealism, including Max Ernst and Fernand Léger. These paintings, and many others, were part of a large collection of art that was said to be long absent from the waiting eyes of art lovers everywhere, and that would soon be unleashed to the world from the “Jägers Collection.”
Wolfgang developed the black-and-white photographs of Helene-as-Josefine and closely examined the results. That they were slightly out of focus only added to the impression that they were taken in a bygone era. The finished product lacked but one feature, which he quickly and masterfully improvised by taking scissors and crimping the edges. The couple, who proudly described themselves as hippies, looked at their finished product, quite pleased with their results. But this wasn’t some fun little project for a scrapbook, or a simple form of cosplay between the pair. Instead, the Beltracchis had created something more cunning, and even devious. They had created provenance.
Provenance is proof of the ownership history of a work of art. It is invaluable in establishing authenticity and, in turn, plays a vital role—perhaps the vital role—in determining value. While ironclad scientific proof of authenticity can often be extremely difficult to establish, solid provenance can make or break the sale of a painting. Because Helene had taken to selling valuable artwork that she claimed her grandfather—Josefine’s husband—had left her, the Beltracchis were well aware of the need to prove that the paintings were what they purported them to be. Helene—the salesperson of the pair—had no sales records or receipts for the paintings, no decades-old titles to the works left behind by her family. Nothing aside from Helene’s story of her grandfather and, of course, the obvious skilled handiwork and creativity displayed by each artist in the treasure trove of Impressionist paintings she had for sale. And, thus, the need to produce a record of ownership—like a historic family photograph—became important. After all, the story behind each and every artwork in the world is different, and the art world can be a very murky place, costly to enter and often subject to intrigue.
There are a large number of missing paintings in the world. Some have simply been misplaced by cash-strapped museums unable to retain a skilled registrar on staff to manage the many paintings bequeathed to them by generous art lovers. Others have been destroyed, perhaps by an unfortunate fire or some other accident. Some are in the possession of anonymous collectors who do not wish to make public the value of their irreplaceable works, or have obtained the art under less-than-ethical circumstances. Still others have been stolen and simply disappeared, the thieves unable or unwilling to return them to their rightful owners, even in cases where “no questions asked” and rewards are offered.
Other perilous conditions for cultural property include wars and political upheavals. And while national crises can mean jeopardy for collections both public and private, the evils of the Nazis during World War II marked a particularly vulnerable time for the world’s great art and antiquities. From widespread looting, to collectors hiding their fine art, to the bombing of buildings and churches holding untold beauty, the scale of the disruption to the world’s art is difficult to comprehend, never mind measure. With a large portion of the Second World War fought in European nations rich in masterworks, it’s no surprise that an enormous number of paintings were put at risk under a variety of circumstances, including the wicked looting of art conducted by Hitler’s Sonderauftrag Linz (Linz Special Commission) in an effort to meet his vision for the world’s greatest museum—the Führermuseum—in his Austrian hometown. The Third Reich also implemented a program to rid the world of what it described as Entartete Kunst, or “degenerate art.” This term was used to describe the work of the Modernists of the era, including such notables as Paul Klee, Marc Chagall, and Wassily Kandinsky. Such was the Nazi contempt for Modernism that the party curated an exhibition of the so-called degenerate art featuring 650 works, each accompanied by a label describing for the viewer exactly what was wrong with coexisting with such deviant works. Never mind the fact that one of National Socialism’s leading figures, chief propagandist Joseph Goebbels (who himself utilized a perverse form of bigoted Impressionism in an effort to pollute the national mood), had expressed approval for some pieces in the degenerate art show; this paradoxical exhibition was meant to show the people what the party believed they should no longer see. As the art writer James Gardner writes, “How ironic, however, that in their desire to purge the nation of this Expressionist threat, the Nazis set out to destroy what was, in fact, the first truly original form of German art . . . to have emerged in nearly five centuries, since the time of Dürer and the elder Cranach.”2
The Nazi effort to purge its burgeoning yet doomed empire of degenerate art resulted in the confiscation of thousands of works, with a relatively small but unknown number of them being destroyed. It was against this historical backdrop that the breathtaking collection of Werner Jägers was introduced to the world by his granddaughter, Helene Beltracchi.
According to Helene, Jägers was a frequent and faithful customer of Alfred Flechtheim, a renowned Berlin art gallery owner. Flechtheim enjoyed enormous success dealing in works by the biggest names in the art of his day, including Van Gogh, Picasso, Matisse, and Cézanne, as well as representing important up-and-comers in Germany such as Paul Klee and George Grosz. So great was Flechtheim’s influence in the art world in his time that today a commemorative plaque marks the spot of his Berlin apartment. After a first gallery collapsed while he fought for Germany in World War I, Flechtheim reestablished a gallery in Düsseldorf in 1919 and opened another in Berlin in 1921.3 By then, Flechtheim was a leader in the art scene in Germany, living as extravagantly as the clients he served. As was the case with virtually all Jewish businesses, though, the rise of Hitler meant the demise of Flechtheim’s galleries and collection, and his road from celebrity art dealer to exile was, of course, paved by the Nazis. Within just six months of their rise to power, Flechtheim was broke and living in France, his life reduced to one of intense panic and loss. His friend Thea Sternheim would write, “What horrifies me the most is the senseless fear that has taken hold of Flechtheim. In a completely empty restaurant, he looks left and right, even during the most harmless conversations, to make sure that no one is listening to us.”4
It’s hard to blame Flechtheim for his paranoia. His impressive and important collection of art was gone, with most of it auctioned off by his requisite Aryan partner. To make matters worse, no documentation survived the sale of his property. And when he died suddenly in 1937 after contracting an infection, Flechtheim left no estate behind. Even his widow’s art collection was lost to the Gestapo after she committed suicide rather than be deported to Minsk in 1941.5
Now, decades later, some of the art that had been dealt by the great but tragic Flechtheim was emerging from darkness, as Helene Beltracchi began to offer for sale the paintings her beloved grandfather Werner Jägers had bought from him. But despite the fact that Flechtheim’s story was well known among a wide array of European art dealers, some still demanded provenance from Helene, backing her into a corner to come up with some sort of proof that her family had owned the Modernist paintings she was selling. Thus, for the Beltracchis, the falsified photographs that she and her husband produced were a necessary evil. It was clearly fraud, but millions of dollars were at stake, and the staged pictures seemed a rather harmless crime considering the fortune at stake.
Additional efforts were made to prove the authenticity of the paintings in Helene’s Jägers Collection. For instance, the Beltracchis paid esteemed art historian Werner Spies a huge sum—rumored at over half a million dollars—to appraise seven of their works attributed to Max Ernst.6 Spies’s stamp of approval on the paintings would make their authenticity ironclad; the influential historian was not just well schooled and experienced, but had also been friendly with Ernst himself.7 Spies’s conclusion: all seven were unquestionably painted by the late surrealist Ernst. Spies’s fee was money well spent: the certificates of authenticity the expert provided proved to be a boon for the Beltracchis, allowing them to sell at least five of the Ernsts from the Jägers Collection, including La Forêt (2), which was purchased from the pair for $2.3 million and ultimately sold for $7 million.8
Helene’s first sale was much more modest. In the early 1990s, she approached one of Europe’s leading auction houses, Lempertz, with a painting she said was by Georges Valmier, a French painter whose styles evolved from Impressionism to Cubism and finally to Abstractionism. Almost immediately, the appraiser sent by Lempertz was ready to make a deal, and Helene settled on a final price of 20,000 deutschmarks (about $15,000). Years later, the painting would sell for $1 million.9 Though it would be a few more years before she would present the Jägers Collection to the world, Helene was intoxicated by the thrill of selling her Valmier to Lempertz. As she would later tell Vanity Fair, “The first time, it was like being in a movie. It was like it had nothing to do with me. It was another person—an art dealer, whom I was playing.”10
If she saw herself as an actress, she had found herself a dream role. And Helene rose to the occasion. She offered a painting called Mädchen mit Schwan (Girl with Swan) to Christie’s, and when they raised the topic of provenance, Helene smoothly explained the story of her grandfather Werner’s collection; to bolster the provenance, she pointed to a label that was affixed to the reverse of the painting that read “Sammlung Flechtheim” (Flechtheim Collection), and beneath it, “Heinrich Campendonk.” This was more than enough to convince the esteemed auction house’s expert, Dr. Andrea Firmenich, who authenticated the work. Christie’s proceeded to include Mädchen mit Schwan in its October 1995 auction of German and Austrian art, featuring it in its catalog and writing in the lot notes section: “This large colourful work is typical of Campendonk’s style between 1917 and 1919 when Flechtheim was his dealer.” It goes on: “The composition of a nude in a landscape with animals, a recurrent theme in Campendonk’s work, stands as a symbol of purity—both of Man’s unity in his natural state with Nature and of his original innocence in Paradise.” The lot notes conclude “Dr. Andrea Firmenich has kindly confirmed the authenticity of this work.” The catalog lists the provenance of the painting as “Alfred Flechtheim, Dusseldorf” and “Werner Jaegers, Cologne” and states that the painting was exhibited in Düsseldorf at the Galerie Flechtheim in 1920. At the October 11, 1995, auction, held on King Street in London, the painting, lot number 158, sold within its estimated range at a price of $106,178.11
Works by Heinrich Campendonk figured prominently in the Jägers Collection. While the German Expressionist’s paintings regularly fetch prices in the six figures and more, he struggled with financial woes early in his career, falling out of favor with his parents, who had urged him to follow a more profitable path as a clothing designer. Fortunately, the break Campendonk needed soon came: in 1911, he caught the eye of none other than Alfred Flechtheim, who convinced him to move to Bavaria. Flechtheim provided him with a monthly stipend that brought stability to his life and allowed him to live in Sindelsdorf, near the homes of Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc. This new setting and community had a positive impact on Campendonk’s career, influencing his work and elevating his place among the famous German Expressionists.12 So it’s certainly no surprise that a number of his masterpieces would end up in the hands of Flechtheim and, in turn, Werner Jägers.
Helene had other Campendonks for sale, one of which would eventually be purchased by legendary comedic actor Steve Martin. Aside from his success on the big screen, Martin is a passionate art collector and the author of a highly successful art-based novel, 2011’s An Object of Beauty. The book showcases the comic’s incisive observations of the world of fine art dealing in Manhattan, telling the story of a young art broker grappling with the moral issues of her chosen line of work; it also dabbles in art crime. At the center of the story is the world’s most valuable stolen painting: Johannes Vermeer’s The Concert, stolen in 1990 from Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. In 2004, the fine art–loving comedian paid $860,000 to Cazeau-Beraudiere, a Paris gallery, to add Campendonk’s Landschaft mit Pferden (Landscape with Horses) to his private art collection, which already included works by Picasso, Francis Bacon, Lucien Freud, and Edward Hopper.
The Campendonk painting from the Jägers Collection that made the most significant splash in the art world was undoubtedly Rotes Bild mit Pferden (Red Picture with Horses). Presented to Lempertz for auction by Helene’s sister Jeanette on behalf of the Jägers family, the painting was offered at auction on November 29, 2006, at its modern arts auction. Lempertz described the painting in its catalog as having been completed in 1914 and featuring “an incomplete vertical composition of a profile, half-length female nude with yellow mask and rooster” on back. The Lempertz lot notes went on to describe a woodcut label affixed to the reverse from the Flechtheim Collection: the same Sammlung Flechtheim label seen on the back of Mädchen mit Schwan. This one included the handwritten inscription in ink, “Heinrich Campendonk/Seeshaupt/Rotes Bild mit Pferden.” There were also stickers from the Sturm Gallery in Berlin and the Emil Richter Gallery in Dresden.
Based on the labels and the Jägers family’s backstory, Lempertz described the provenance of Rotes Bild mit Pferden as “Alfred Flechtheim; private collection, France, purchased from Flechtheim ca. 1930, since then in family possession.” Again, Dr. Andrea Firmenich’s work—this time in terms of her published study on Campendonk—was cited. Clearly, Jeanette, like her sister Helene, had done well in establishing the provenance of key pieces of her inheritance. And it paid dividends: Lempertz, which had listed an estimated price of 800,000 to 1.2 million euros for the painting, sold it at a “World Record Price” of 2.9 million euros to Trasteco Ltd. of Malta.13
Trasteco had no intention of taking chances with its huge investment. After speaking with Modern Art experts in Geneva from Artvera’s Gallery, the buyers decided to contact Lempertz seeking paperwork to establish solid provenance. Lempertz replied that they had authenticated the painting by speaking directly with none other than Heinrich Campendonk’s own son. Unsatisfied with this as the only testament as to the painting’s authenticity, Trasteco decided to contact an expert on Campendonk and looked no further than the painting’s lot notes. Dr. Andrea Firmenich had written her doctoral thesis on Campendonk and authenticated Mädchen mit Schwan for Christie’s. And while she had raved about that painting’s “intense, shining, expressive colorfulness,”14 something about Rotes Bild mit Pferden didn’t quite sit right with her. So she turned to science for answers and submitted the painting to the Doerner Institute in Munich, where results of their testing left chemists skeptical about the authenticity of the painting. They stopped short, however, of an outright condemnation.
With questions still unanswered, another technical analysis was commissioned through Friederike Grafin von Bruhle, who was working on behalf of the buyers.15 This time, the paintings were submitted to Dr. Nicholas Eastaugh. Dr. Eastaugh’s credentials for such work were impeccable. Before studying art conservation and art history at the esteemed Courtauld Institute of Art in London, he was trained as a physicist. Perhaps most significant to the task at hand, Eastaugh had a world-class background in the study of pigments. He cofounded the Pigmentum Project, a program dedicated to using a combination of science and art history to study pigments, and had been called upon by a number of museums, galleries, auction houses, and collectors to analyze works.16
Eastaugh’s results were definitive and startling: Rotes Bild mit Pferden could not be the work of Heinrich Campendonk. The testing confirmed the presence of a pigment—titanium dioxide white—used in the painting that was not available in 1914, when the painting was supposed to have been completed. Even the unfinished sketch on the back of the painting and described in the lot notes was a forgery, containing another period-inappropriate pigment, phthalocyanine green. “It was a normal job,” Eastaugh said. “It came in for analysis, I did my job, I wrote a report. The report came to the conclusion that it couldn’t possibly be what it was representing itself to be. So, to that end, the report was essentially saying that this painting’s a fake.”17
Still curious about the “Sammlung Flechtheim” labels, Firmenich had another idea: she reached out to modern art expert Ralph Jentsch in October 2008 to get his assessment of the sticker on the back of the painting. Jentsch was also a wise choice. As the managing director of the estate of Modernist painter George Grosz, Jentsch was well schooled in the subject of Flechtheim, from whose gallery Grosz paintings were confiscated by the Nazis. He knew well the appearance of the Flechtheim Gallery labels. Jentsch took a close look at the garish caricature of Flechtheim on the label on the reverse of Rotes Bild mit Pferden and his reaction was immediate: he burst out in laughter.18
Jentsch had no doubt that the label was a fake. Alfred Flechtheim was a man of impeccable taste and elegance. He’d never have used a label with such an image. Moreover, Jentsch knew that the labels the art dealer did use bore no image of him whatsoever. “There is no way he would have permitted such a silly portrait,” Jentsch said.19 Firmenich asked Jentsch what he knew of the art collector Werner Jägers, who was said to have purchased a large collection of paintings from Flechtheim. Jentsch had never heard of him. Everything about the painting was faked. Yes, industrialist Werner Jägers did live in Cologne at the time of Alfred Flechtheim, but if the two had ever truly crossed paths, Jägers would have been but 16 years old and hardly in a position to amass a world-class collection of paintings. And though Jägers was, in fact, the grandfather of Helene, virtually everything else about her story was fiction. Far from an associate of Flechtheim, Jägers was a member of the Nazi Party with no known serious art collection.20 Furthermore, the art she offered for sale was not part of an old family inheritance, accumulated in a home belonging to the Jägers dynasty near Cologne in the Eifel Mountains. Rather, the entire collection was being created on the spot by her husband, Wolfgang Beltracchi. The attribution to Campendonk, the sketch on the reverse, and even the labels were all the creation of this master Modernist who also happened to be a master forger.
That Wolfgang Beltracchi is a skilled artist is beyond dispute. Now in his early 60s, he is an intriguing figure.21 With his shoulder-length graying hair and matching Vandyke beard, he looks every bit the master painter. Though a criminal, the man who is perhaps the world’s greatest living forger seems an almost endearing figure. He’s full of wit and playfulness and has an almost impish attitude toward the years he spent creating frauds for an untold number of willing dupes all too eager to hand over a fortune for what he created in the name of another.
The young Wolfgang, whose surname was Fischer before he adopted the name of his wife, took up painting in his preteen years. The son of a man he described as a church painter and restorer, he tells of watching his father copy the works of the Old Masters and vividly recalls pointing out his father’s mistakes and questioning his process. He describes himself as a sort of prodigy who displayed signs of talent so striking that his father stopped painting for two years after seeing his son’s first effort, completed in just an afternoon. Later, when he was admitted as a highly gifted student at the school of applied arts in Aachen, he again stunned older artists with his mastery of his medium, even prompting one instructor to accuse him of turning in work that couldn’t have been his own. He was ultimately expelled from school at the age of 17 while he was working at—of all places—a strip club for supplying his fellow students with less than appropriate reading material, but he took it in stride. “I wasn’t overly interested in going to university. I spent most of my time in a café on Südstrasse. I liked sitting in that coffeehouse.” Seeking another way to support himself, he turned to the thing he could do best: painting.22
Wolfgang produced a variety of works for money, and also began his career as a forger, producing paintings for sale at flea markets, with some frauds among them. He traveled Europe, creating paintings in downtown areas and finding that he could make a decent income selling his works. His oeuvre at this point consisted of “the unpainted works of Old Masters at first, and later Art Nouveau and the Expressionists.”23 It was a harbinger of a career to come.
In the 1980s, Wolfgang gave the working world a try, co-owning an art gallery. Predictably, he found a day job unfulfilling and fraught with the sort of pressure to which he was unaccustomed. “I had to sit in an office, which wasn’t for me,” he said. “Suddenly I had a guy breathing down my neck who was mainly interested in making a lot of money fast.”24 So he returned to producing highly profitable forgeries, earning so much money that he soon bought an 80-foot sailboat he named Voodoo Child and hired a crew to man it. A few years later, when the money stopped flooding in due to a drop in the art market, he turned to a film project. And that’s when he met his future partner in crime, Helene.
On the first day he met her in 1992, Wolfgang told Vanity Fair, he decided that he would marry Helene and have a family with her. By the second, he had introduced her to the world of art forgery. “So you’re an art counterfeiter?” she asked. “Exactly. That’s my work. That’s my métier,” he replied.25 With the art market on the rebound, Wolfgang knew there was more money to be made. Impressed that she took the news of his vocation in stride, he asked Helene to join him in his fraud. Apparently taken by the challenge and excitement of selling fakes, the working-class girl jumped at the chance. They married in February 1993 and had a child within a year. It was around this time that Helene sold the phony Valmier to Lempertz, and a legend in illicit art was born.
Wolfgang worked hard at the art of forgery, taking great pride not only in his skill but in his historical accuracy. He went so far as to research important books on the topic of pigments, like Max Doerner’s The Materials of the Artist and Their Use in Painting, and returned to flea markets again and again to find historical artists’ supply catalogs.26 He hunted down his materials with an eye for detail, an effort he described as more difficult than executing the actual painting. “What was really complicated was finding old canvases and frames. Sometimes they could be had for €30 and sometimes for €5,000. Some of them were really beautiful paintings, and I still have them in my head today. If I couldn’t get the old paint off, I incorporated details of the old image into the new one.”27
Wolfgang’s painting was equal parts remarkable hand skill, stunning imagination, and astonishing boldness. And while he said that the pictures could be completed in as little as two or three hours, the finished products were impressive forgeries. He fooled not only some of the most esteemed and reputable auction houses, museums, experts, and buyers in the world, but even surviving family members of the artists. Max Ernst’s expert and friend, Werner Spies, wasn’t alone in falling victim to Wolfgang; Ernst’s widow did as well. According to Helene, when Dorothea Tanning saw Wolfgang’s La Forêt (2), she called it the most beautiful picture Ernst ever painted.28 And of course, Campendonk’s son had authenticated Rotes Bild mit Pferden.
Perhaps the key to his success was his technique of researching an artist to the extent that he could stand before the canvas and, as he described it, essentially channel him. According to Wolfgang, this was not, as some have described, merely method acting. Rather, his works were the result of the forger taking brush in hand and imagining what the artist might have—but never did—paint. His dedication to becoming the artist he was “channeling” was such that he claimed, “If the artist was left-handed, then I painted with my left hand.”29 As he told Spiegel Online International, “Every philharmonic orchestra merely interprets the composer. My goal was to create new music by that composer. In doing so, I wanted to find the painter’s creative center and become familiar with it, so that I could see through his eyes how his paintings came about and, of course, see the new picture I was painting through his eyes—before I even painted it.”30 Such was the extent of this vision that Wolfgang claims he never employed underdrawings or preparatory sketches on canvases before applying paint.31
Fortunately for the art world, the ingenuity of Wolfgang Beltracchi more than met its match in the expertise of Eastaugh and, later, his colleague Jilleen Nadolny. Eastaugh’s thorough, science-based examination of Wolfgang’s works not only exposed Rotes Bild mit Pferden as a fraud, but also cast the artist in the same light as his paintings: he was not exactly what he purported to be. For instance, when they subjected his works to infrared reflectography, the pair found that Wolfgang did, in fact, use full underdrawings in a number of his works.32
By 1995 he already had the police on his heels when a number of forgeries—including a Campendonk—were linked to art dealers from Aachen and were painted by a certain Wolfgang Fischer from Krefeld. But thanks to the statute of limitations, he couldn’t be prosecuted.33 Soon thereafter, the couple and their first child, a daughter, took the fortune they had amassed, sold their Viersen, Germany, home for more than a half-million dollars, bought a motor home, and headed for the south of France, where they purchased and renovated a lavish estate known as Domaine des Rivettes. They spent their money and entertained lavishly, enjoying the company of friends and hanging what visitors believed to be a bevy of masterpieces on the walls. All the while, the Beltracchis continued to capitalize on their fictitious collection. They sold an unknown amount—at the very least many dozens—of paintings, including Bateaux à Collioure, attributed to Fauvist Andre Derain, for $2 million. Another forged Derain, Matisse Peignant à Collioure, sold for the equivalent of more than $6 million.34 Meanwhile, a former partner of Wolfgang’s, Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, was also enjoying successful sales of Beltracchi’s paintings, creating a provenance story similar to Helene’s: his grandfather, Johann Wilhelm Kops, had also tucked away important paintings and they were now back on the market. Life was good for the Beltracchis. That is, until Eastaugh applied his expertise to the Trasteco painting.
It is ironic that Wolfgang was undone by the forged Campendonk Rotes Bild mit Pferden, a painting in which he took great pride. Interviewed about it by Paraic O’Brien of the United Kingdom’s Channel 4 News, he said, “I love my paintings, all of them. And my best Campendonk was the Campendonk they [caught] me with. That was the Campendonk with the red horses. That was the most expensive Campendonk ever sold. Nearly 3 million Euros.” Reminded by O’Brien that it wasn’t truly a Campendonk, Wolfgang replied, “Yeah, yeah, it was not a Campendonk. It was from me, yeah, yeah, sure. It was the best one.” O’Brien, seeking to parse Wolfgang’s words, asked, “Do you mean the best one of yours?” The artist clarified: “The best Campendonk.” Taken aback, O’Brien asked, “Is that what you think? You think that your Campendonk was the best Campendonk?” Wolfgang said, “Yeah, that’s a little bit difficult. It was sold as the best Campendonk that was ever sold.” O’Brien, refusing to let Wolfgang off the hook, pushed him for a definitive answer. “But was it the best Campendonk?” To this the master forger replied, “Yeah. Sure.”35 And his claims were hard to argue, given the record price the painting garnered.
The rave reviews and millions of dollars Rotes Bild mit Pferden earned, however, could not overcome scientific analysis. Wolfgang’s biggest mistake—using titanium dioxide white—caused his undoing. Incredibly, the tube of paint that he used on the painting did not mention that it contained this post-Campendonk pigment in the list of ingredients on the label. Like the painting and artist, it was not exactly what it was purported to be. Armed with both scientific and expert analysis debunking the authenticity of Rotes Bild mit Pferden, Firmenich delivered the bad news to Trasteco. They immediately took action, hiring a Berlin lawyer to sue Lempertz to annul the sale. The lawyer also filed a criminal complaint over the sale of the painting, naming Helene’s sister in the complaint. The German authorities then began listening in on her phone calls, and subsequently became aware of the scheme and the people behind it.
Meanwhile, Ralph Jentsch set about identifying other paintings featuring the faux Flechtheim label, and he quickly identified 15 paintings with the phony stickers. The elaborate Beltracchi scheme was now suddenly and quickly falling apart. Eastaugh and Nadolny set about examining another six works that were brought to them at Art Access & Research in London. All the paintings analyzed by the pair contained one or more pigments that were inconsistent with their alleged dates of creation.
On the evening of August 27, 2010, as part of the biggest operation that the German art fraud unit ever conducted, Wolfgang and Helene were arrested while on their way to dinner in Freiberg. Though theirs were not violent crimes, the pair was separated and placed in solitary confinement. Life for the bon vivant Beltracchis had now taken a hard turn. Helene was diagnosed with breast cancer and the pair rarely saw each other or their children. Wolfgang spent his 14 months of pretrial detention with what he described as “real criminals: murderers, child molesters, people convicted of manslaughter.”36 And the news of their wide-ranging frauds set the art world on its head. Paintings whose provenance included the Jägers Collection popped up across Europe and the United States. Steve Martin’s name emerged in the press as having once been the duped owner of a forged Campendonk, Landschaft mit Pferden. Martin told the New York Times, “The fakers were quite clever in that they gave it a long provenance and they faked labels, and it came out of a collection that mingled legitimate pictures with faked pictures.” While he was not exactly correct—the Jägers Collection did not, in fact, contain authentic works—Martin was realistic about the problem of forgeries in the art world, adding that this was not the first time he had been tricked by a forger: “Each time you become more and more cautious.”37 Even the renowned Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York was found to have displayed a Beltracchi on its walls. Werner Spies, the Ernst expert who incorrectly identified Beltracchis as Ernsts, contemplated suicide.38 He would later be sued by one of the buyers who claimed they purchased an Ernst based on his authentication. The negative attention and liability has had a chilling effect on authenticators around the world, who have become fearful of making mistakes like Spies and suffering the same fate.
As experts examined works determined to be Wolfgang’s forgeries, some other tell-tale signs of his work were uncovered. For instance, Eastaugh and Nadolny found that the works contained an “obviously fake patina . . . visible only as scattered deposits, not a coherent layer”; anomalies concerning the paintings’ “stretcher/strainer bars, and the various stamps and labels applied to them”; inconsistencies in the age of the nails used on the canvases and stretchers; a “disjuncture . . . between paint and ground due to the processing of the priming of the old canvas”; and “a range of physical anomalies related to the removal of the paint from an old canvas.”39 So while the forgeries were very convincing to so-called experts, they were no match for scientific analysis.
These findings, however, were made only because of the problems detected with pigments during the initial examination of the painting Rotes Bild mit Pferden. It’s very difficult to know if these other inconsistencies would ever have emerged had Wolfgang not been done in by titanium dioxide white. As Eastaugh would later write, “The toughest call though is the first one, which perhaps goes some way towards explaining why it took so long to recognize the first Beltracchi fake and so little time to identify many more.”40 Eastaugh has also stated that “it is also rare to see a whole group together, so an individual anomaly may not be read as significant. There were though plenty of other material use anomalies that would probably have been picked up sooner or later.”41 In other words, in the opinion of a renowned expert on the matter, it was likely only a matter of time before the Jägers Collection would have been exposed.
The trial of the Beltracchis was held in Room 7 of the Cologne District Court before Judge William Kremer. At the outset, it appeared the trial would last for more than a month, with 168 witnesses scheduled to appear over 40 court sessions. But after just 9 days, a deal was struck: Wolfgang, Helene, her sister, and Schulte-Kellinghaus would receive shorter sentences than the prosecutors originally sought in return for full confessions from all. The German courts decided it was not in the best interests of the public to spend a lot of money prosecuting the forgery ring, much to the chagrin of the German police involved in the investigation. On October 27, 2011, Judge Kremer declared all four guilty and sentenced Wolfgang to six years in prison. Helene, who was frail but in recovery from her breast cancer, received a four-year sentence. Though the trial was short, Wolfgang’s charming personality was on full display in the courtroom, and the press ate it up. “The media—and this I find upsetting—has not been critical. Huge amounts of taxpayers’ money has been wasted bringing this criminal to justice,” said Dr. Nadolny. “He confused the record on some artists, defrauded people and abused trust.”42 Nevertheless, he sat at the defendant’s table eating candies and smiling at onlookers, and both he and Helene appeared comfortable and unafraid, affectionate with each other and even making jokes. At the conclusion of the proceedings, Wolfgang declared himself appreciative of the “fairness and good spirit” of the trial and “that everyone smiled so often.”43
Not everyone was taken with the merry fraudsters, though. One onlooker, an auctioneer who had handled a Beltracchi, said, “I wish they’d applied sharia law at his trial.”44 “This was a man who . . . made his money from stealing,” art dealer Michael Haas told a German news outlet. “Yet in the press and even in the courtroom, this is treated as something comedic. That’s just too much.”45
The sentences handed down by the court were based on just 14 of Wolfgang’s forgeries, which sold for nearly $22 million. This limited number was presented to the court for two reasons. First, many of Wolfgang’s frauds were perpetrated outside of the statute of limitations. According to Spiegel, “Old criminal police investigations in Berlin suggest that Beltracchi had passed on at least 15 forgeries by the 1980s.”46 Second, it wasn’t until after the charges and trial that more of his paintings came to light. Ultimately, German police would release a growing list of forgeries that reached 60 by 2014, and art historians believe there may be as many as 300 Beltracchi forgeries in circulation.47
Wolfgang has said that he has created works by about 50 artists. And he has the ego to match his obvious charm. In fact, his hubris may have been the essential part of his success. After all, taking on the challenge of not just copying but dreaming up works by history’s most successful artists takes confidence. James Martin, a conservator and scientist who has examined hundreds of paintings, says of his forgeries, “His fakes are among the best fakes I’ve seen in my career. Very convincing. Very well done.”48 In numerous interviews, Wolfgang has claimed that there is no artist, except for Bellini, whose works he could not forge. Whether all this is true or not is open to some skepticism. When told of this claim, Eastaugh replied, “I supposed he could try copying any artist; whether it would pass any form of scrutiny is another matter.” Nadolny was more direct. “It’s easy to claim after the fact. He’s never passed off a successful Rembrandt or a Titian . . . I think most likely, he’s just bragging. He stuck to a very specific type of art work—expressionists and modern.”49 In any event, copying the Old Masters was not for him. “He knew his limits and did his homework: he stuck to a very specific type of art work—lesser known expressionist and modern painters, those that have not been subject to much technical study, which were easier to obtain ‘authentication’ for than say a Van Gogh or a Monet.”50
The Beltracchis served their sentences in a sort of home confinement called “open prison,” in which Wolfgang could spend the day with Helene, painting and working on projects such as an autobiography titled Self Portrait and a German-language documentary. The courts have ordered him to pay half of his income to recompense damages. And the paintings he produces nowadays are signed “Beltracchi” (and can earn as much as $46,000).51 He has also launched “The Beltracchi Project,” in which he paints over pictures taken by photographer Manfred Esser. But his own creations cannot compare to the paintings he completed by emulating the great Modernists. What people want are his forgeries. Even the owner of the $7 million Max Ernst forgery decided to keep it, calling it one of the best Ernst paintings he’s ever seen.52
A final nagging question remains concerning Wolfgang Beltracchi, and that involves his motivation. Both he and his wife have said on a number of occasions that their enormous scam was not motivated strictly by money. But when asked why he didn’t merely paint his imagining of a Campendonk over his own signature, he is frank and honest: “Because then I don’t get 600,000 euros from the painting.”53 And there can be no doubt that he and Helene loved the lavish living that the fortune they amassed afforded them. But at the same time, it is also clear that Wolfgang enjoyed the game, the challenge of showing up those who are celebrated as art experts. “I am too good for them. That’s their problem. And the problem is they think they can look at the painting and say ‘that’s this or that.’ And therefore I have shown them a mirror, you know.”54
But Wolfgang was not, in fact, too good for Eastaugh. As he and Nadolny showed, Wolfgang’s success was as much the result of authenticators and buyers who wanted to believe they had found a masterpiece as it was a matter of his artistic acumen and criminal cunning. Had those who were so willing to pay astronomical amounts for new finds been just as eager to seek authentication from technical experts, Wolfgang never would have been able to earn the vast sums of money he and Helene so happily spent living the high life. According to Eastaugh and Nadolny, “The technical means employed by Beltracchi were . . . conventional from a forger’s standpoint.” Wolfgang was merely a “talented copyist” whose only “vaguely unique” approach was his “willingness to engage with the problems of historical materials, a skill which he honed towards the end of his career.”55 Nadolny says, “Rather than allowing him to recreate a Max Ernst for the fiftieth time, why didn’t anyone ever say ‘OK then, make us a Da Vinci’? Now that would be interesting to see.”56 What truly set him apart were the willing dupes who enthusiastically parted with millions of dollars based on the myth of the Jägers Collection, forgetful of the ancient admonition caveat emptor.