On this week’s art crime blotter: a mural of rainbows accused of containing “emblems of homosexuality” in Riyadh, a librarian confesses he stole 143 paintings and replaced them with his own forgeries, and a museum director gets shot in Moscow.
Forgeries
Posted inNews
Crimes of the Art
On this week’s art crime blotter: Jonathan Meese acquitted in Nazi salute dispute, Picasso works disappear in transit, and Charles Saatchi sues Saatchi Art for Saatchi name.
Posted inNews
London Museum Plants Fake in Its Collection
A new project in London asks: Why do we prize authenticity so highly if a forgery can be visually equivalent to an authentic artwork?
Posted inIn Brief
Spain Arrests Three Alleged Art Forgers
Three suspected members of an art forgery ring were arrested in the Spanish cities of Zaragoza and Tarragona, El Pais reported.
Posted inArt
A New Documentary for the Forger Who Infiltrated America’s Art Museums
For three decades, Mark Landis quietly infiltrated art museums across the United States with donated forgeries, works he carefully copied himself from the whole of art history.
Posted inArt
FBI-Seized Forgeries Get a Gallery Retrospective
In what might be the first-ever exhibition of artworks co-curated by an intelligence agency, a show has been mounted at Fordham University’s Center Gallery to showcase some of the finer specimens of forged art seized by the FBI’s Art Crimes team.
Posted inOpinion
Steve Martin Victim to German Art Forgery Ring
In a twist strangely echoed by the actor’s recent art-world novel An Object of Beauty, Der Spiegel reports that Steve Martin is the victim of a German art forgery ring. Martin purchased what he thought was Heinrich Campendonk’s “Landscape With Horses” (1915) for $850,000. Turns out, the painting was from an art collections devised by a group of German swindlers caught in 2010, the newspaper writes.
