The Titanium White Fake - Kunsthaus Lempertz (Neumarkt 3)

À propos de ce lieu

On the southeast corner of the Neumarkt, Cologne's largest square and a marketplace since 1076, stands Kunsthaus Lempertz, an auction house whose roots go back to 1802 and which calls itself the oldest family owned art auction house in the world. In November 2006 it sold Red Picture with Horses, supposedly a lost 1914 work by the Blue Rider painter Heinrich Campendonk, for a record hammer price of 2.4 million euros; with fees, the Maltese company Trasteco paid almost 2.9 million. The provenance was a fairy tale: the collection of Werner Jägers, Helene Beltracchi's grandfather, who was said to have bought from the Jewish dealer Alfred Flechtheim, 'proven' by faded photos for which Helene had posed as her own grandmother. The painter was her husband, Wolfgang Beltracchi, and a single tube of ready mixed white paint undid him: it contained titanium white, a pigment no painter used in 1914. Arrested in 2010 and sentenced in Cologne in 2011 to six years in prison, he later claimed some 300 fakes over four decades, in what is often called the biggest art forgery scandal of postwar Germany. Fifteen years on, he is still fighting in court to get the fake back.

À retenir

• 2.4 million euros — Record hammer price for the fake Campendonk 'Red Picture with Horses' at Lempertz in November 2006; with fees the buyer paid almost 2.9 million.
• 6 years in prison — Wolfgang Beltracchi's sentence from the Cologne Regional Court on 27 October 2011; Helene got four years and accomplice Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus five.
• 300 forgeries — The number of fakes Beltracchi later claimed to have painted over 40 years, although only 14 paintings were part of his trial.

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