Russian Faux Art

German museum bares all

The Russian avant-garde, a movement that revolutionized Russian art, but whose relationship with the Bolshevik revolution frayed over time, has tickled the imaginations of art lovers for decades. Avant-garde art never seems to go out of fashion.

It is also a favorite of counterfeiters: Stalin’s quashing of the movement, other political shifts in the Soviet Union, war, and finally perestroika made it somewhat easier to hide fake paintings’ dodgy provenance, while the market value of works by Malevich and Kandinsky, as well as less prominent artists, makes them some of the most sought-after names in the world.

But in 2017 one scandal too many shook the art world: a prominent Belgian museum opened an exhibit with works that art historians and experts designated as blatant fakes being passed off as genuine by a collector named Igor Toporovski. The show caused an unprecedented storm in normally placid and prim art circles. A group of respected avant-garde specialists even wrote an open letter, asking that the paintings be taken down. Several months after the opening, the museum finally obliged.

Three years later, it appears as if museums have more than learned their lesson about being cautious when dealing with the Russian avant-garde.

In fact, The Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, which has one of the world’s most prominent collections of modern art, is turning a negative into a positive: breaking art world taboos by launching a major new exhibition on fakes it has unearthed within its own walls.

Ludwig is currently investigating each of the 100 Russian avant-garde paintings in its collection (in all, the museum owns 600 Russian avant-garde works) and is letting visitors take a look at its investigative process and preliminary findings. An international team of experts is currently halfway through examining Ludwig’s paintings.

“For various reasons, works of questionable authorship have continually found their way into private and institutional collections,” the museum said, in an unprecedented admission accompanying the exhibit’s opening (it runs through January 3).

Meanwhile, Belgian authorities have shown they are not taking counterfeit art lightly. Both Igor Toporovski and his wife Olga, the duo behind the loan of two dozen forgeries to the Museum of Fine Arts Ghent that started the furor, were arrested earlier this year. And the museum’s director was summarily sacked.