One of his forgeries hung in a show at the Met. Steve Martin bought
another of his fake paintings. Still others have sold at auction for
multi-million-dollar prices. So how did a self-described German hippie
pull off one of the biggest, most lucrative cons in art-world history?
And how did he get nailed?
By FEDERICO GAMBARINI/EPA/LANDOV; by Simon Vogel/picture alliance /dpa (painting).
Wolfgang Beltracchi in court in Cologne last fall. Inset: Red Picture with Horses,
a painting supposedly by German Expressionist Heinrich Campendonk,
forged by Beltracchi; it sold at auction for $3.6 million in 2006.obody
in Freiburg could remember a party quite like it. The date was
September 22, 2007, and Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi, affluent
newcomers to this lively university town near Germany’s Black Forest,
had invited friends and neighbors to celebrate a milestone. Workers had
just put the finishing touches on their $7 million villa, after 19
months of extensive renovations. Lanterns lit up the cobblestone walkway
to the hillside house, a five-level minimalist structure with a glass
and Siberian-larch-wood façade, steel beams, pastel-colored tile floors,
and contemporary paintings and sculptures filling every room. The staff
of Freiburg’s luxurious Colombi Hotel—where the Beltracchis had lodged
in a $700-a-night penthouse suite when they were in town during the
remodeling—had prepared the ample food and drink, including magnums of
fine champagne. The Beltracchis had even flown in a celebrated
four-member flamenco band from Granada to dance and sing for their 100
guests.Spanish ballads floated across gardens and courtyards to
the glass pool house. Inside it, the party-goers ogled a large painting
by the French Cubist Fernand Léger. Others admired art installations
throughout the villa, including Baghdad Table, an intricate
stylized aluminum model of the Iraqi capital by the Israeli industrial
designer Ezri Tarazi. From the terraces, they took in the lights of the
medieval city far below. Wolfgang, a long-haired, 56-year-old Albrecht
Dürer look-alike, and Helene, an ingénue-like woman of 49 with
waist-length brown hair cut into girlish bangs, had spared no expense to
announce their arrival on Freiburg’s scene. “Everybody was blown away,”
remembers Michel Torres, who had hired the flamenco dancers on the
Beltracchis’ behalf and who had befriended the couple during the years
that they lived in southern France. “It was unforgettable.”
Yet
mingling with admiration for the Beltracchis’ style and taste was a
feeling of unease. None of the architects, lawyers, university
professors, and other Freiburg residents knew the first thing about
where their hosts had come from, nor how they had amassed their wealth.
“One [German] woman asked me, ‘Who is this guy? Is he a rock star?’”
recalls Magali Richard-Malbos, another of the Beltracchis’ French
friends. “And I said, ‘No, no. He’s an artist, a collector.’”
Strictly
speaking, that was true. It would be another three years before the
truth about what kind of artist Beltracchi is came out.
‘The
big question every reader will want to know is, how and why does a
person become an art forger?” Wolfgang Beltracchi tells me. His question
is just a tad modest: Beltracchi, in fact, masterminded one of the most
audacious and lucrative art frauds in postwar European history. For
decades, this self-taught painter, who had once scratched out a living
in Amsterdam, Morocco, and other spots along the hippie trail, had
passed off his own paintings as newly discovered masterpieces by Max
Ernst, André Derain, Max Pechstein, Georges Braque, and other
Expressionists and Surrealists from the early 20th century. Helene
Beltracchi, along with two accomplices—including her sister—had sold the
paintings for six and seven figures through auction houses in Germany
and France, including Sotheby’s and Christie’s. One phony Max Ernst had
hung for months in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in
New York City. Steve Martin purchased a fake Heinrich Campendonk through
the Paris gallery Cazeau-Béraudière for $860,000 in 2004; the French
magazine-publishing mogul Daniel Filipacchi paid $7 million for a phony
Max Ernst, titled The Forest (2), in 2006. For the 14 fakes that
the Beltracchis were eventually charged with selling, their estimated
take was around €16 million, or $22 million. Their total haul over the
years must have been far more.
By Joshua Hammer.
Beltracchi working on a fake Max Ernst earlier this year in the German town of Bergisch Gladbasch.
I was meeting with the couple last winter in the dining room of
their lawyer’s house in Sürth, an affluent suburb of Cologne. Large
windows looked over a snow-dappled garden and, just beyond, the Rhine
River, clogged on this bright and frigid February morning with chunks of
ice. After complicated negotiations, they had agreed to tell me their
story.
Beltracchi, who was wearing jeans and a pale-blue fleece,
still appeared every bit the hippie rogue. His shoulder-length blond
hair, thinning on top, along with his blond mustache and graying goatee,
made him look something like a swashbuckler out of The Three Musketeers,
with a touch of Mephistopheles. For 61, he seemed surprisingly
youthful, an appearance enhanced by the upper- and lower-eyelid lifts he
had received in a clinic in southern France six years ago. Helene, clad
in a blue knit turtleneck sweater, her thick tresses cascading to her
waist, had clearly done her best to retain her girlish appeal. She
looked at her husband adoringly, as he began to explain what drew him
into a life of crime.
“Obviously one has to invest a lot of time
to achieve success by painting one’s own works,” he told me, displaying a
healthy amount of what the Germans call Selbstgefälligkeit, or self-satisfaction. “I was always a guy who wanted to be out and about . . . For me, life is on the outside, not the inside.”...MUCH MORE
