Journal
Notes on art forgery, provenance and authentication.
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The Gurlitt Trove: When Art History Loses Its Paper Trail
A 2012 tax investigation uncovered an estate of about 1,600 artworks linked to Hitler's dealer Hildebrand Gurlitt. Years later, researchers had confirmed 14 as Nazi-looted art, while roughly 1,000 still had unresolved histories.
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Peter Doig: The Painter Who Had to Prove He Didn’t Paint It
A $100 painting sparked a multimillion-dollar lawsuit when Peter Doig denied creating it. The case exposed the risks of mistaken attribution, weak provenance, and claims that outlast the available evidence.
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Why the Warhol Board and Basquiat Committee Shut Down
The Warhol board spent $7 million defending a single rejection. Within a few years, the committees for Warhol, Basquiat, Haring and Lichtenstein had all stepped back — and collectors were left to weigh the evidence themselves.
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Fakes on Museum Walls: Genoa and Ghent
Prosecutors seized 21 works from a Modigliani show in Genoa, and a Ghent museum returned 24 works it had shown as Russian avant-garde masterpieces. Both cases show how much credibility museum display can give a disputed attribution.
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Giuliano Ruffini: When the Paper Trail Failed the Picture
A supposed Frans Hals sold for more than $10 million before science found modern pigments in its paint — and exposed how little anyone knew about where it, and a string of other Old Masters, had come from.
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Wolfgang Beltracchi: The Forger Who Invented a Collection
He didn't copy existing paintings — he invented new ones by dead artists, then built an entire fictional family collection, complete with a staged photograph, to explain where they came from.
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The Bolton Forgers: A Family Business Built in a Garden Shed
No dealers, no galleries, no accomplices outside the family. Just a working-class household in Greater Manchester that fooled Christie's, the British Museum, and a sitting American president.
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John Myatt, John Drewe, and the Forgery of Provenance Itself
The paintings were good, not great. What made this the most damaging art fraud of the 20th century was a con man who forged the paper trail inside the Tate's own archives.
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Mark Landis: The Forger Who Never Broke the Law
For nearly three decades he handed fake Picassos and Disney sketches to museum staff for free, dressed as a Jesuit priest in mourning. No sale ever took place — so no crime ever did either.
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How a 165-Year-Old Gallery Sold $80 Million in Fake Pollocks
Knoedler & Company survived the Civil War, two World Wars, and the Great Depression. It didn't survive a decade of selling Abstract Expressionist forgeries out of a garage in Queens.
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Eric Hebborn: The Forger Who Wrote the Manual
He fooled the British Museum, the Met, and dozens of Old Master dealers for two decades, was never once prosecuted, and then published a step-by-step handbook on how he did it.
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Elmyr de Hory and the Business of Being Believed
A Hungarian émigré sold well over a thousand fake Matisses, Modiglianis, and Renoirs to museums and dealers on five continents — by mastering the market, not just the brush.
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The Forger Who Fooled Göring: Han van Meegeren
A failed Dutch painter forged six 'lost' Vermeers, sold one to Hermann Göring, and then had to prove his own guilt in court to avoid a death sentence for treason.