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Note: The previous entry on Kandinsky Fakes is here.
Another beginning:
As a curator of
Lenbachhaus in
Munich, with one of
the largest and most
comprehensive
collections of
Kandinsky's
works, I was more
and more invaded by
Russians coming to
show me fake
"Kandinskys".
Those men were
Russian speakers,
and evidently,
because Russian is
also one of my
languages, mine
became the favorite
address. They came
with their fakes
wrapped in newspaper
in plastic bags,
telling the most
persuasive stories
about the origins of
the works. Museum
people don't have
the right to give
expert opinions, and
I never did, either
at that time or
since. I always sent
those agents on to
Nina Kandinsky's
"Kandinsky
Society" at the
Centre Pompidou in
Paris, which alone
had the right to
judge authenticity.
I'm sure those
men never dared to
risk asking the
Society's judgement.
And sometimes I
heard from some
other museum or
gallery that the
Russians had shown
up there as well.
This is a fake Kandinsky.
Note the signature in the lower right
.
So of course I have no pictures of them, only one which was sent
to me much later when I was already living in Belgium: in a large,
heavy, hard carton of 15 x 18 inches, a picture with a nice shiny
surface, with a supposedly authentic signature in the lower right
corner: "K 17." This fake deserved no answer, and I was never
asked to send it back. And since the Kandinsky Society was
dissolved in 2014, this picture, which of course does not
correspond to anything in the comprehensive oeuvre-catalog of
Kandinsky's works, not among his oils or his watercolors, it
simply stayed with me. Well hidden, so I don't get angry seeing it!
Over the years, I got faster and faster at getting rid of those
Russian-speaking visitors, because I learned to distinguish quite
quickly the authentic works from the fakes, even fakes rather well
done. As mentioned before, my mentor, Museum director Hans
Konrad Roethel of Lenbachhaus Munich, was a great expert, who
had once even gone to visit a forger in an Italian prison. I was
present when Roethel explained things to colleagues or to George
Costakis in Moscow—Costakis's important collection included
works by Kandinsky; Roethel also explained things when we
visited Kandinsky's works in the storage rooms of three Russian
State Museums. To identify fakes, it has also been of great
importance to me to have spent years visiting Museums and
exhibitions all over Europe and the U.S., often sitting in front of a
painting for such a long time that the guards became suspicious.
So I suggest to all art lovers: concentrate on known originals, it's
worth it. Drawings illustrated in black and white will generally be
all right, but color illustrations will often be deceptive. It is
interesting to see what paintings are kept in private collections:
their authenticity will be less sure than works you see in Museum
catalogs.
This painting was certified and appears in Valery Turchin's Kandinsky in Russia. It was confiscated as a fake in 2011
by the Italian police.
I remember a story of prominent art historian Valery Turchin: his
opulent two-volume publication of 2003 [Engl. 2005 – ed.], Kandinsky in Russia, had a lot of new and very interesting
material. But the Kandinsky Society worked to hinder its
publication, suspecting rightly that among his illustrations there
were some important fakes from the Moscow years. Turchin and
the Society might have agreed that some would be removed from
the book before going to press. In any case, Turchin did not
care—he said he could create his own Society … So I was curious
enough to buy Turchin's first volume immediately, and I found in
there two huge oil paintings, dated 1917, in private collections,
and as usual, with much longer commentary about them than he
wrote for authentic works. They are not found in the official
Oeuvre catalog, and are very, very probably fakes.
* * *
To be continued…
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