News Item: 00006

23rd Nov 2006

Police stage exhibition of art fakes

Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk

An exhibition at the V&A museum in London this week features dozens of works of art that would be worth a total of £10m - if they weren't all fakes, as reported by The Guardian in an article by Mark Oliver published on their website. Hidden away from the public in a private room, the exhibition of forged works from past and current criminal cases has been staged by the Metropolitan police for art industry experts.

The Met's arts and antiques unit wants to raise awareness of the increasingly sophisticated techniques used by forgers and the ways in which the police are tackling them. Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, the head of the unit, yesterday said art forgers were "becoming more and more prolific". Police fear faked artworks could be funding international terrorism, and Det Sgt Rapley said they were increasingly being used as an underworld currency with which to acquire guns, drugs and counterfeit goods.

As the second largest art market in the world, London is a magnet for forgers, and police believe some of the profits made flow back into criminal networks in the Middle East. Some funds could even be helping fund the insurgency in Iraq. Since the March 2003 invasion of the country, there has been a flow of highly dubious ancient artefacts and art pieces onto art markets.

Det Sgt Rapley said some of these were worthless fakes, but could end up being sold for more than £2,000: "We know for a fact that there is a terrorism link," Detective Constable Ian Lawson added. "Archaeological stuff is being exported by the tonne from Middle Eastern countries. If the money goes back into criminality, some will inevitably end up in the hands of terrorists."

Julian Radcliffe, the chairman of the international Art Loss Register, which is sponsoring the V&A exhibition, said faked artworks and antiques were believed to be involved in deals worth between £100m and £200m a year in the UK. He said more than 180,000 stolen and faked artworks from around the world were on the register. The Met have their own database of stolen and faked art, which is not currently public but could become so next year.

Faking works by Picasso, Lowry, Nicholas de Stael and Ben Nicholson is currently favoured by some forgers because they are easier to counterfeit than works by artists such as Rubens or Rembrandt, Det Sgt Rapley said. He said there were so many fakes in circulation that buyers should initially "presume it is wrong and then be convinced", adding that the arts and antiques unit had also found the works of living artists were beginning to be counterfeited. "Some artists I have talked to were actually complimented to learn their work had been forged," he said. "But forgeries can cause huge damage to people's lives - for instance, someone might invest in an artwork for their pension. "Attitudes need to change. A dealer might be suspicious about a work and not buy it, but then also fail to alert us - so someone else then buys it."

One area of the exhibition contains more than a dozen artworks linked to an ongoing investigation into a single criminal network. The network allegedly targets art institutions with multiple fakes including bogus stone carvings that can fetch up to £600,000. Police said poor communications among an institution's departments often enabled gangs to make repeat approaches with forgeries. Criminal networks were also increasingly using the internet to make contact with artists who could be coaxed into turning their hand to forgeries, Mr Radcliffe said.

The latest techniques used by police to detect forgeries include sophisticated analysis of the pigment in paint. In a recent case, prosecutors relied on this kind of evidence to convict the forger Robert Thwaites, who earned hundreds of thousands of pounds before being jailed for two years this September. Thwaites, of Leek, Staffordshire, forged fairy paintings that he passed off as the work of the Victorian painter John Anster Fitzgerald, who died in 1906. Although Thwaites tried to use Victorian era paint, pigment from a paint that did not become available until 1914 was found in one of the bogus paintings.

Criminals trying to create a false provenance for forged works by inserting forged documents such as exhibition catalogues into archives remained a big problem, Det Sgt Rapley explained. The V&A exhibition includes fakes created by John Myatt. In 1998, he was jailed along with the art collector John Drewe, who went to incredible lengths to create provenance for the forgeries by putting false documents into the V&A and Tate archives, using old typewriters and paper to make them appear authentic. Mr Myatt, who served four months, is now doing a roaring legitimate trade selling "genuine fakes" of great artworks to order - and Det Sgt Rapley said "good luck" to him.

The detective said he could find some beauty in the faked works, and would not necessarily want the UK to follow the practice of countries such as Belgium, where forgeries are destroyed. In the UK, an owner is allowed to keep a forgery involved in a prosecution if they wish, although they are given an official letter warning them not to sell it illegitimately. "You would not believe how many fake Picassos come into my office," Det Sgt Rapley said. "Many of them come from Turkey, probably because of the heroin trade. Gangs fool other criminals - you might say so what, but if one says they have a Picasso worth £1m, that can purchase a lot of drugs. We are also seeing lots of forged works sent out to China to buy tonnes of counterfeited goods like luxury watches, which are brought here."

Among the police initiatives to deal with the problem is a drive to recruit special constables to work for the Arts and Antiques unit, which has only four full-time staff. The first special constable recruits are expected to begin working for the unit by around February. Media photographers at the exhibition faced a curious dilemma, as a police spokeswoman explained. "You can't take photographs of many of the forgeries, because technically their copyright belongs to the criminal," she said.