An art scandal and its aftermath: Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm expose the truth!
The latest on the forger: A documentary crime novel filled with juicy facts reveals the full truth.
Just barely after it had started, Europe’s most sensational art forgery trial came to an end with a mitigated sentence. For 25 years, the unsuccessful painter Wolfgang Beltracchi and his accomplices passed off paintings they’d made themselves as lost works of great modern painters (Max Ernst, Georges Braque, Fernand Léger, etc.) and sold them for millions. Art dealers, museums, collectors and experts from across the continent fell into their trap, some of them quite willingly, as they were earning plenty of money from Beltracchi’s paintings.
At best, the trial revealed the tip of the iceberg of the gullibility, carelessness and greed that pervade the industry. One hundred seventy witnesses were never called to testify and thousands of pages of painstaking detective work went unheeded.
In a book that reads like a crime novel, the Koldehoff/Timm author duo reveals what went by the board during the trial. The book reconstructs the coup carried out by this band of forgers – a brilliant and highly entertaining criminal feat of considerable audacity. And the authors shed light on an art industry that is divided between honorable dealers and pure profiteers and in desperate need of a code of conduct given that dozens of forged paintings are still in circulation.
