Half the Art Market May Be Fake. Nine Artists Top the List

By Daniel Okafor

Some experts estimate that around half of the secondary art market consists of forgeries and misattributions. That figure opens a recent survey of art trickery, which names nine of the most faked and forged artists in history.

The number is hard to verify, naturally. Nobody audits the fakes. But the pattern holds: forgery persists, and the names at the top of the list stay remarkably stable.

What counts as a fake?

The source draws a useful distinction. A faked artwork is generally a copy of an existing work. A forgery is different: it imitates an artist's style to create a new work. Then the definitions wobble. What happens when an artist copies his or her own work? What if the forged artist, like a noted appropriator, built a career on borrowing images from others?

Trickery gets tricky. It always has.

Who are the famous forgers?

Two names dominate the modern canon of the counterfeit:

• Han van Meegeren, who made bogus Vermeers
• Wolfgang Beltracchi, responsible for hundreds of phony works

Here's the twist: some of these inauthentic works are now prized for their novelty and their tales of exposure. A scandal, properly aged, becomes a selling point.

The traffic runs both ways. Artworks initially written off as forgeries can later be identified as genuine through scientific analysis.

What happened at the Met?

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns a 1624 portrait of Spain's King Philip IV. In the 1970s, the museum deemed it the work of an assistant to Diego Velázquez. In 2010, it reauthenticated the painting fully to the Spanish Baroque painter. The reversal came after scientific analysis, following varnish removal.

A king, demoted for four decades, restored to his author. Museums, the case shows, are not impervious to these phenomena.

How do experts decide?

When in doubt, experts lean on what the source calls the three-legged stool of art authentication:

• stylistic scrutiny (close reading of how a work is painted or made)
• provenance (the documented history of ownership)
• scientific analysis

The Velázquez reattribution rested on the third leg. Most verdicts, one suspects, rest on all three wobbling together.

Didn't science solve this?

Not according to George Savage. In his 1963 book Forgeries, Fakes, and Reproductions, Savage wrote: "the collector may take heart from the fact that at no time during the history of the art-market has forgery been so difficult as it is now, or more likely to be detected, and the forger's task is becoming continually more difficult."

Sixty years on, that reads as optimism. Forgers, the source notes, don't appear to have stopped in the decades since. Detection improves; so does imitation. The stool gets sturdier, and the forger gets better at leaning on it.

The survey's closing list of nine most-faked artists promises a who's-who of the forged. If even half the market's attribution problems are real, that list will keep needing updates.