Real or fake?

Deutsche Welle spoke with Cologne art historian Susanna Parschat to find out if it's more than just money that motivates art forgers.

Deutsche Welle: Ms Parschat, forging artworks is a very lucrative business. We saw that once again in the recent case in Cologne, in which four people are charged with earning millions of euros from forgeries. But is there anything besides the financial aspect that drives this boom in fake art?

Susanna Parschat: I think forgers primarily want to make money, even if they argue that they're motivated by something else. The best example of that may be Han van Meegeren, who forged pictures by Vermeer in the 1930s. And people in the Netherlands embraced these paintings because they were supposedly the first sacred works by Vermeer. Later, Han van Meegeren would always say that he had wanted to fess up to the whole forgery business from the very beginning, but just couldn't afford it. He invested a lot in producing the pictures, like using paints made from lapis lazuli, for instance.

How is it possible that even experts can easily be misled?

The reason is that art forgers mostly know what's hot at the moment - what is in great demand. And when one of those treasured paintings finally surfaces, people don't examine it as closely as they normally would because they're so excited.

This occurred with the sacred Vermeer paintings. Another example is the Jägers collection, which is up for discussion at the moment. People certainly always wanted to know where the pictures of the Flechtheim Collection ended up. (Eds: Alfred Flechtheim was a prominent contemporary art collector in pre-war Germany. Because he was Jewish, much of his collection went missing under the Nazi regime.)

Those are things that make people blind.

So forgers observe the market, detect gaps and try to fill them?

Yes, I think so. The English art forger Eric Hebborner has written a user guide for art forgers. When you start to think like experts, you can easily betray them.

But some forgeries do not remain undetected. What impact do these discoveries have on the museums or auction halls?

In the majority of cases, it's a great disaster. Kunsthaus Lempertz in Cologne has had a lot of problems with the alleged Jägers collection and the circulated paintings. In the museums, the paintings often just disappear into the depots or you don't talk about them anymore.

But there's been one major exception: In London last summer, there was an exhibition in the National Gallery. There, they documented their own mistakes - for example pictures that had been bought as genuine Renaissance paintings and turned out to be forgeries. The National Gallery also explained how they managed to unmask them. It became clear that the cooperation between restorers, scientists and art historians is always imperative.

Can you say that sometimes even the museums are involved when there are forgeries in an exhibition?

It's very difficult to prove that. But then, there's Wilhelm von Bode - the great Berlin art historian and museum curator. Around the start of the 20th century, he bought a wax bust reputedly created by Leonardo da Vinci. Even though doubts about its authenticity were expressed from the very start, he stuck to the notion that it was a da Vinci bust.

The story made headlines for months, but he still insisted on his version.

Otherwise, the paintings are enthusiastically exhibited in the museums and no one pays attention when someone voices their suspicions about them.

Which artists are often forged? Are there particular ways certain artists worked that make it easier to forge?

There are, for example, the paintings by Dali, who signed blank sheets. Of course it isn't very difficult to forge them. Picasso has been and still is forged very often simply because he painted and drew so much. I think we lost track of that due to the sheer volume.

A counter example is Paul Klee. He kept very specific records of each of his paintings and drawings in a work catalog. You just have to take one look in this catalog to know if something is a forgery or not.

But who actually are these forgers who can copy world-famous artists in a way that it's difficult to distinguish between the original and the fake? That calls for enormous competence.

Most of the time, the competence isn't all that great because the next generation discovers that these are forgeries. But in the moment when they are created, people are just blind to their inauthenticity.

A good example is an academy professor in Siena named Umberto Giunti. He painted a Botticelli Madonna, which then sold to a buyer in England. It remains in Cardiff Institute until this day - a very renowned academic institute.

It wasn't until 30 years later that the forgery was detected. It just wasn't clear who had done the forgery. Now, when you compare the original Botticelli with the fake Madonna, you can see the emptiness of her eyes and how the forger was completely inept as compared to Botticelli. But people didn't notice that back then.

Interview: Gudrun Stegen / ef

Editor: Louisa Schaefer / Kate Bowen