Two solid Pablo Picasso prints have been recovered after being bought at a Stuttgart public sale home, with two others seized earlier than supply, the Baden-Württemberg State Legal Police Workplace (LKA) stated final week (4 August). Authorities suspect an Italian nationwide, believed to be an expert artwork restorer, of “advertising and marketing” expertly produced forgeries of works from Picasso’s Suite Vollard sequence—a set of 100 etchings created within the Thirties—over a number of years.
The Baden-Württemberg police stated in a press release that the suspect consigned 4 solid Suite Vollard works to an public sale home. The title of the home has been withheld “out of respect for its extremely cooperative angle and with a view to a trusting future collaboration”, a police spokesperson tells The Artwork Newspaper. One of many works that was bought was recovered from Rhineland area, the opposite stays in Austria, they add.
The recoveries have been a part of “Minotauro bis”, a world investigation led by Italian police into fakes in the marketplace. The operation started in 2022 and has led to the seizure of 104 pretend up to date artistic endeavors, in accordance with the Carabinieri, in addition to the freezing of 5 financial institution accounts and the seizing of two automobiles value a complete of €300,000.
On 3 July this yr, taking part officers from Rome’s Cultural Heritage Safety Unit dismantled a laboratory in Tuscolano, Rome the place counterfeit works by Picasso, Edvard Munch, and Paul Klee have been allegedly produced, bought as originals, and shipped worldwide, particularly to the USA.
Investigators say the forgers used a fancy forging technique involving faked watermarks and scanned photographs of genuine works. The scans have been then become printing matrices (moulds) and the paper was bathed in espresso or tea to make it look aged. Cast signatures have been additionally added.
Portuguese police additionally seized a pretend Picasso at an public sale home in Portugal final yr, as a part of the investigation. In February one other clandestine artwork forgery studio, in northern Rome, was raided. There, investigators seized 71 counterfeit works attributed to Picasso, Paul-Émile Pissarro, Jean Cocteau, Dora Maar, Rembrandt, and others, together with counterfeit stamps, solid certificates, and unfinished work.
The State Legal Police Workplaces of Baden-Württemberg and Berlin stated it labored with the Picasso Museum Münster to evaluate the solid Vollard prints, seven of which have been seized to this point. All of them have been confirmed as pretend and linked to “the suspect and his associates”. The Picasso Museum Münster was approached for remark.
One of many solid Vollard items was bought by the Kunsthandlung Steuer gallery in Worms, Rhineland-Palatinate, the spokesperson says, which later handed it over to investigators. “While you purchase one thing at an public sale home, you possibly can usually assume it is real,” Johannes Steuer, who runs the gallery together with his household, advised the Wormser Zeitung newspaper final month.
The Steuer Kunsthandlung advised The Artwork Newspaper that the public sale happened in 2022. The gallery declined to substantiate the value it paid for the prints, nonetheless they’ve beforehand bought for tens of hundreds; in 2017, an entire suite of 100 Vollard prints bought for $4,815,000 at Christie’s.
“The operation made it attainable to take away works from the market which, if they’d not been recognized and blocked in time, would have fetched figures similar to the originals,” the Carabinieri assertion says. Kunsthandlung Steuer was reimbursed by the public sale home, a consultant for the gallery confirmed, including that “the public sale home was very cooperative”.
Italian authorities have “carried out measures” in opposition to the suspect, in accordance with the German police assertion, nonetheless no additional particulars have been launched at the moment.
The German felony proceedings have been integrated into the Rome investigation via judicial cooperation, supported by Eurojust and a number of European international locations. Authorities say worldwide collaboration has been key to halting additional gross sales and defending potential patrons from high-value fraud.
