Beltracchi and the Titanium White

New pictures, not copies, which is why the eye had nothing to compare

Wolfgang Beltracchi, born Wolfgang Fischer in Hoexter in 1951, worked the opposite way to a copyist. He produced paintings that had never existed, in the manner of artists whose catalogues had gaps, and presented them as works that had been out of sight for decades. Estimates of the total output run as high as three hundred pictures across several dozen artists. Those figures come from journalism and from his own claims; they have never been tested in a courtroom.

The artists chosen were mostly early twentieth-century Germans and French moderns with disrupted archives: Heinrich Campendonk, Max Ernst, Fernand Leger, Max Pechstein, Andre Derain, Kees van Dongen, Johannes Molzahn, Georges Valmier. Several had oeuvres damaged by the Nazi campaign against modern art, by wartime destruction and by dispersal. In such a corpus a previously unknown canvas is not an anomaly. It is what a scholar expects to find eventually.

The material preparation was ordinary and effective: period stretchers and canvases acquired at flea markets and small auctions, so that the support, the tacks and the ageing of the reverse were genuine even where the image was not. What this achieves is subtle. It removes from the examiner the easy physical objection, and it leaves only two lines of enquiry open, connoisseurship and documentation. Beltracchi attacked both.

He was good enough at the first that specialists who had spent careers on these artists accepted the pictures. He was better at the second, and that is where the case is instructive.

The provenance was the product

Two private collections were invented. The first was attributed to Werner Jaegers, described as a Cologne businessman, who was in fact the grandfather of Helene Beltracchi. The second was attributed to Johann Wilhelm Knops, a master tailor of Krefeld, who was the grandfather of the accomplice Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus. Both men had existed. Neither had owned the paintings.

The story attached to them was chosen with care. The works were said to have been acquired from the Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim at low prices in 1933, shortly before Flechtheim fled Germany, and then kept out of sight. This is the most powerful provenance narrative available to a forger of German modernism. It explains the absence of exhibition history, the absence of photographs and the absence of any trace in the trade, because absence is exactly what the period produced.

The documentation was then manufactured as physical objects. Adhesive labels bearing a caricature of Flechtheim and the words for the Flechtheim collection were made and stained with tea and coffee to build a patina, then applied to the backs of frames and stretchers. A black and white photograph was staged on pre-war photographic paper using an old roll-film camera: Helene Beltracchi in period dress and pearls, posed as her own grandmother Josefine Jaegers, in a room hung with the forgeries. The photograph does not prove ownership. It does something more useful, which is to convert an assertion into an image that a specialist can examine and feel he has verified.

An invented collection with a period label and a period photograph behaves, in a catalogue entry, exactly like a real one. That is the whole trick, and it is not a painting trick.

Scholarship was recruited, and the courts had to decide what a scholar owes

The pictures acquired academic endorsement. Werner Spies, the leading authority on Max Ernst, director of the Centre Georges Pompidou from 1997 to 2000 and compiler of the Ernst catalogue raisonne, issued certificates for five Ernst works that were in fact by Beltracchi, among them La Foret (2) and Tremblement de Terre.

The resulting litigation defined the exposure of the expert. On 24 May 2013 a court at Nanterre ordered Spies to pay 652,883 euros to a collector who had bought Tremblement de Terre in 2004 on the strength of his authentication. The Court of Appeal of Versailles later overturned that ruling, reasoning that an opinion expressed outside a particular transaction does not carry the liability of an expert engaged for a sale, and that the compilers of catalogues raisonnes cannot be required to commission destructive scientific testing on every work submitted to them. Spies was not criminally charged.

That appellate reasoning is the most consequential thing the Beltracchi affair produced. It draws a line between the scholar who publishes an opinion and the appraiser who is paid to advise a buyer, and it declines to make catalogue compilation an insurance product. Anyone relying on a certificate should read the Versailles position carefully, because it describes precisely how little a certificate is warranting.

La Foret (2), presented as a work of 1927, moved through the trade at rising prices, and was resold to the collector Daniel Filipacchi for a figure reported at seven million US dollars. The reported sums in this chain are drawn from press accounts and are not consistently identified as gross or net of commission, so they should be treated as indicative rather than as recorded consideration.

One white, in a sketch on the back

In 2006 a painting presented as Heinrich Campendonk's Rotes Bild mit Pferden, dated 1914, was sold at Lempertz in Cologne and acquired by Trasteco Ltd, a Malta-registered company. The price is reported as 2.88 million euros, sometimes as 2.8 million. Published accounts do not consistently state whether the figure is the hammer price or the total including buyer's premium, and the distinction has never been clarified in the reporting; it should be taken from the auction house's own record.

Two years later the buyer commissioned technical analysis. Nicholas Eastaugh, working in London, found titanium white in the paint. Titanium dioxide white was not a commercially available artists' pigment in 1914, and its presence in a work of that date is not a matter of interpretation. The Art Newspaper's account of Eastaugh's own lecture on the case adds the detail that matters most: Beltracchi screened his materials for titanium white, and the pigment that betrayed him turned up in a painted sketch on the reverse of the work, outside the area he had checked.

His explanation, repeated in interviews, is that he used a tube sold as zinc white which contained a small percentage of titanium dioxide that the manufacturer had not declared. Whether or not that account is accurate, it describes the real vulnerability. A forger can control his own recipe. He cannot control the composition of a commercial product, and he cannot screen every square centimetre of every surface including the ones nobody was meant to look at.

Reported earnings from the scheme vary widely. Prosecutors put the profit at around 16 million euros; press estimates of total sales run to 45 million US dollars and of profit to 22 million. These figures are not reconciled with one another and none should be quoted as established.

A negotiated ending, and what it left unmeasured

Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi were arrested on 27 August 2010; Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus followed on 1 December 2010. The trial opened at the Cologne Regional Court on 1 September 2011 and ended on 27 October 2011 in an agreed disposition between the parties.

The agreement covered fourteen paintings: three given to Campendonk, two to Derain, one to van Dongen, five to Max Ernst, one to Leger and two to Pechstein. Wolfgang Beltracchi received six years, Helene Beltracchi four, Schulte-Kellinghaus five, and Helene's sister Jeanette Spurzem a suspended term reported as twenty-one months in one account and as one year with nine months suspended in another. Helene was released in February 2013 and Wolfgang on 9 January 2015, having served a little over three years, much of it under an open regime with daily work release.

The negotiated ending has a cost that collectors still carry. Fourteen works were adjudicated. If the wider estimates are anywhere near right, the great majority of the output was never identified, never tested and never entered in any register. Those pictures are in circulation with intact-looking documentation, and some of them carry a Flechtheim label and a photograph.

Museums and auction houses have since had to treat the Jaegers and Knops provenances as red flags in themselves, which is a strange position for the trade to be in: an invented collection has become a searchable warning term. Meanwhile Beltracchi has continued to paint and exhibit under his own name, which is lawful and which sits oddly beside the unresolved question of how many unattributed works remain on museum walls.