Fakes on Museum Walls: Genoa and Ghent
When a museum gives a work a second life
A museum exhibition does more than put a painting on a wall. It gives the painting context, visibility and an institutional setting.
A label assigns an artist. A catalogue records an attribution. A curator places a work alongside established names. Visitors encounter it inside an institution they already trust. Other professionals may later encounter the same work through exhibition catalogues, press reports or references to its exhibition history.
That process can strengthen confidence in a work even when nobody intends to deceive anyone.
The danger starts when documentation repeats earlier claims instead of testing them independently.
Two European cases illustrate that problem.
In Genoa, prosecutors seized 21 works from a 2017 Modigliani exhibition at Palazzo Ducale after specialists questioned their authenticity. More than 100,000 people had visited the show. In Ghent, the Museum of Fine Arts exhibited 24 works from the Toporovsky collection that the collection attributed to major Russian avant-garde artists. Specialists publicly challenged those attributions soon after the exhibition opened.
The two cases followed different legal paths. Yet they raise a closely related question:
What happens when institutional documentation supports an attribution while the object itself raises another question?
Genoa: The catalogue said yes
The Modigliani exhibition at Genoa’s Palazzo Ducale opened in 2017. Carlo Pepi, an Italian collector and Modigliani specialist, questioned the authenticity of works in the show. Paris-based art historian Marc Restellini also raised concerns. Their objections prompted Italian authorities to investigate the paintings.
The exhibition organisers defended the works by pointing to their documentary history, earlier exhibitions and catalogues. Palazzo Ducale also said that it had trusted the exhibition’s experienced partners and scientific curator.
That defence illustrates an important problem. Previous exhibition history can look like independent confirmation when each new reference simply repeats an earlier attribution.
In July 2017, Italian authorities seized 21 works. The seizure forced Palazzo Ducale to close the exhibition three days early. Art historian Isabella Quattrocchi examined the works for the authorities and reported that 20 of the 21 works under investigation showed signs of forgery, including problems with style and pigment composition.
But that expert assessment did not determine criminal responsibility.
In June 2023, a Genoa court found eight of the 21 seized works false but acquitted the defendants. The court did not establish that the people involved in the exhibition knowingly presented false works.
Following the acquittals, prosecutors filed an appeal seeking convictions in June 2026. The judicial process remains ongoing, and no public record confirms a final judgment yet.
That distinction matters.
An expert assesses an object. A court determines legal responsibility. Those processes can inform one another, but they do not answer the same question.
The problem with “it has been exhibited before”
Genoa also exposes a wider difficulty in the authentication of Modigliani.
Researchers have produced several competing catalogues raisonnés for the artist. Scholars have long debated which works belong in those catalogues, and no single catalogue has achieved universal authority.
That makes documentary history important. It also makes circular reasoning especially dangerous.
Consider the chain.
- A collector owns a painting.
- A curator accepts its attribution.
- Another exhibition includes it.
- A catalogue records it.
- A later curator consults that catalogue and notes the previous exhibition.
- The work gains another reference in its exhibition history.
The chain grows longer. But length does not automatically create independence.
None of those steps necessarily provides new evidence about when, where or by whom someone created the painting. Yet repeated references can make the object look increasingly established.
That does not mean that every museum loan or catalogue entry deliberately launders provenance. It means that institutional repetition can launder credibility: a claim can acquire the appearance of independent validation simply because respected institutions have repeated it.
The distinction matters because provenance and authentication answer different questions.
Provenance records a work’s documented history. Authentication asks whether the attributed artist actually made the work.
A previous exhibition can strengthen the first record without resolving the second question.
Ghent: When the paper trail became part of the problem
The Ghent case followed a different route.
On 20 October 2017, the Museum of Fine Arts in Ghent opened Russian Modernism 1910–30. The exhibition presented 24 works attributed to major Russian avant-garde artists including Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich, Natalia Goncharova, Vladimir Tatlin and others. The Dieleghem Foundation, founded by Igor and Olga Toporovsky, supplied the works.
On 15 January 2018, ten dealers, curators and art historians publicly challenged the collection. They questioned the works’ lack of exhibition history, serious scholarly publication and traceable sales records.
The museum then proposed an expert commission.
When the commission met on 19 February, lawyers representing museum director Catherine de Zegher and the city of Ghent insisted that scientific examination should come first and that the foundation should establish “reasonable doubts” about the works’ authenticity before the commission began its assessment.
Commission chairman Thomas Leysen called those conditions a “de facto veto”, and the commission halted its work. The city cancelled the loan the following day and returned the works to their owners.
The controversy did not end there.
Belgian investigators later examined the collection and its documentation. In 2026, the Belgian prosecutor’s office concluded that scientific testing showed that the 24 works did not come from the artists to whom the collection attributed them. Investigators used pigment analysis and carbon dating.
That conclusion represents the prosecution’s position, not a final judicial finding.
The legal case moved forward in May 2026. A Ghent court referred Igor and Olga Toporovsky to the correctional court over allegations that included art forgery, document forgery, fraud and tax fraud. The same decision placed former museum director Catherine de Zegher outside further prosecution at that stage. The decision remained open to appeal.
The criminal case against the Toporovskys remains open, with no public record yet confirming a final judgment.
Again, the distinction matters: investigators can reach a conclusion about the objects while a court still has to determine criminal responsibility.
The museum effect
Put Genoa and Ghent side by side and a pattern emerges.
In Genoa, organisers pointed to previous exhibitions, catalogues and professional references. In Ghent, the Toporovsky collection entered a major museum through a long-term loan and gained the visibility and institutional context that museum display provides.
In both cases, institutional display gave additional credibility to attributions that later faced serious scrutiny.
That credibility can affect how future curators, collectors, dealers and researchers encounter a work. It can also influence how the market perceives the work.
But provenance and authentication remain different things.
Provenance asks where an object has been. Authentication asks who actually made it.
A documented chain of ownership or exhibition can strengthen confidence in an object’s history. It cannot, by itself, prove authorship.
Likewise, an exhibition history can show where a work travelled without proving that the attributed artist created it.
The absence of convincing provenance does not prove that a work is fake. It does, however, give researchers a legitimate reason to investigate further rather than treat documentation as a substitute for examination.
The strongest assessment combines independent documentary research with close examination of the object, specialist knowledge, comparison with authenticated works and, where appropriate, scientific analysis of materials.
That is why the two cases matter beyond the specific paintings.
The problem does not begin when a museum deliberately endorses a fake. It can begin much earlier, when a chain of references starts to look like evidence even though nobody in the chain has independently tested the original claim.
Why the story still matters
The Genoa and Ghent cases do not prove that museums cannot authenticate art. They show why institutional history should never substitute for authentication.
A catalogue can record an attribution. An exhibition can repeat it. A respected institution can give that attribution additional authority.
But none of those steps, by itself, establishes an object’s authorship.
That is the thread running through both cases:
The paperwork failed, not the eye.
Specialists raised questions about the works themselves. In Genoa, concerns about style and materials helped trigger the investigation. In Ghent, specialists questioned the works before scientific testing later supported the prosecution’s conclusion about their authorship.
The lesson does not require us to choose between the eye and the paperwork.
It requires us to understand what each can — and cannot — prove.
Paperwork can document a history of ownership, exhibition and attribution. It cannot turn repetition into independent evidence.
An exhibition can increase an object’s visibility and credibility. It cannot manufacture authenticity.
A catalogue can preserve a claim. It cannot transform that claim into proof.
An exhibition history can tell us where a work travelled without answering the most important question of all:
Who actually made it?
When that question remains unanswered, the documentation may look complete.
The picture may still tell another story.