Smuggling and provenance

Another area of art fraud motivated by the demands of the art market involves the smuggling of works of art out of countries, especially from developing countries, where the value of the work may be poorly understood. Though smuggling is in itself a crime, art fraud may also occur when the smugglers minimize the value of the art to guardians of cultural patrimony or to customs officials. Goods thus transported are often offered elsewhere for high prices. There are sanctions against museums that buy artworks obtained in that manner, but governments of the originating country have little recourse when the objects disappear into private collections.

An important strategy for combating that type of art fraud is research into the history of ownership of the work (called provenance) and the mention of the work in archival records. Genuine works of art appear in historical records and are owned by individuals, and one way to determine the authenticity of a work is to establish that kind of history. Marks of ownership, such as owners’ stamps, may be found on the object itself, or dates signifying change in ownership may be written on the object. Needless to say, historical marks on a work can also be forged, so provenance research alone is not sufficient to determine authenticity.

Prosecution and embarrassment

Art frauds can also be difficult to prosecute because museum curators or collectors must admit to having been duped. Rarely do museums acknowledge that works of art they own may be inauthentic. When they do, it is often because they have no choice. The Boymans-van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam, Netherlands, was forced to acknowledge that its “Vermeer” Supper at Emmaus was actually a forgery painted in the 1930s by van Meegeren, but the museum admitted that only after the forger himself, in the context of another investigation, had revealed his involvement. The work’s original collector, D.G. van Beuningen, continued to believe (despite van Meegeren’s claim) that the work was by Vermeer.

One of the more-complicated examples is that of the Getty kouros, an allegedly 6th-century-bce male sculpted figure owned by the J. Paul Getty Museum in Los Angeles that has long been suspected of being a modern forgery. The Getty paid a very high price for what it believed may have been the last remaining such figure on the art market only to find that the sculpture had stylistic irregularities that suggested that it could not be authentic. At the same time, scientific tests have not demonstrated that it is of modern origin, and some scholars have argued that stylistic anomalies do not prove that it is a fake. The Getty Villa exhibited the work in its galleries with a label that read: “about 530 bc or modern forgery.” However, the kouros was removed from view when the museum completed a yearlong renovation in 2018, with the director stating that the sculpture was fake.

Victims and resources

The victims of art fraud are the artists who own the works, collectors who are defrauded through purchase of forged works, and museums that may use public or donated money to buy fraudulent works of art or works with a falsified provenance. Countries that lose valuable works of art to the international art market under false pretenses are also subject to art fraud.

The Art Loss Register (ALR), founded in 1991, grew out of the International Foundation for Art Research (IFAR: founded 1969), a not-for-profit organization that initiated and maintained (until 1997) an international database of stolen works of art, antiques, and collectables. After 1998 ALR assumed maintenance, although IFAR retains ownership, and the two organizations work closely together.

Interpol also tracks art smuggling. City police forces may have units that investigate cases of art fraud on the local level. But the first, and in many cases only, line of defense against art fraud is the dealers who offer the works for sale and the museums and collectors who must make every effort to determine the authenticity and legality of the works before purchase.