Painting Swap
You might think that someone working in a museum would be the most invested in protecting artwork and ensuring its safety. Think again.
The Deutsches Museum
Our story opens at The Deutsches Museum in Munich, Germany where a man got a job there as a technician in May 2016. By the way, just a fun fact, the Deutsches Museum is the world’s largest museum of science and technology with about 125,000 objects on display and it welcomes 1.5 million visitors annually. Along with technology objects it also houses beautiful and historically significant art. I will mention though, because it is primarily a technology and science museum, a lot of the art pieces are in storage and aren’t often on display.
Anyways, back to the story. This man (his identity hasn’t been revealed due to strict privacy laws in Germany) was working at the museum since 2016, surrounded by these beautiful, expensive pieces of art every day. One day the in-house appraiser was going around doing research and found something very particular, The Fairytale of the Frog King by Franz von Stuck that he had in front of him didn’t look anything like the image of the painting in the museum catalogue. From there an investigation was launched.
Eventually it was discovered that this painting in the museum was a pretty poor forgery. From there the museum started going through all the paintings they had in storage and discovered three more forged works. The museum spokeswoman said “in the end, it was pretty easy to recognize as a forgery” (Schiffman, 2023). If that was the case though, how did it go unnoticed for so long?
Pretty quickly after these findings the museum employee confessed to a truly insane scheme that he had been getting away with for years. He had been stealing paintings from the museum’s storage facility, replacing them with fakes, and then selling the real ones through auction houses, lying about their provenance. First he did it with The Fairytale of the Frog King by von Stuck. He took the original painting to Ketterer Kunst auction house where he told them it was a family heirloom he was looking to sell. It did sell for €70,000.
Emboldened that his plan had worked and that no one had noticed or missed the original painting, the man tried again and again. He swapped out both Franz von Defregger’s Zwei Mädchen beim Holzsammeln im Gebirge (Two Girls Gathering Wood in the Mountains) and Eduard von Grützner’s Die Weinprüfung (Tasting the Wine) for fakes and sold them as well for an additional €11,490.50. Following these sales he tried his luck again, this time stealing another von Defregger, titled Dirndl, but it didn’t sell. In total, after the auction house fees were taken out, the thief made about €60,600.
What was he using this money for, I hear you asking. Well first he used it to pay off some debts but then once he realized that this was a pretty easy and seemingly foolproof way to make money he started using it to fund a flashy, luxurious lifestyle, buying a new apartment, expensive watches, and even a Rolls Royce. Apparently, during his confession though he said “he acted without thinking and he could no longer explain his behaviour today” (Lawson-Tancred, 2023).
The man was subsequently arrested and a trial was held in 2023 where he, the auction house, and the museum itself were questioned. The Ketterer Kunst auction house said “we have, of course, fulfilled our duty of care in full and have researched the works mentioned extensively. We regret that the works were stolen from the museum with such high criminal energy. We cooperated closely with the LKA (Bavarian State Criminal Police Office) at an early stage and handed over all documents to solve this case” (Lawson-Tancred, 2023). They are currently trying to get the paintings back from the people who purchased them at auction to repatriate them to the museum. As for the museum itself, they acknowledged that the vulnerability of their collection, especially the collection in storage, to theft and are going to be better protecting their pieces in the future.
The defendant was handed a suspended sentence of one year and nine months and was ordered to pay back €60,000 to the Deutsches Museum. So the paintings will hopefully be coming home soon.
Works Cited
Lawson-Tancred, Jo. “A German Museum Employee has been Caught ‘Shamelessly’ Swapping Original Paintings for Fakes to Fund his Lavish Lifestyle”. ArtNet. 2023. https://news.artnet.com/art-world-archives/german-museum-employee-swapped-paintings-fakes-2367937
Schiffman, Rebecca. “Museum Employee Stole Paintings and Replaced them with Forgeries”. Art & Object. 2023. https://www.artandobject.com/news/museum-employee-stole-paintings-and-replaced-them-forgeries
Ulea, Anca. “ICYMI: German Museum Worker Swapped Paintings with Fakes to Fund Lavish Lifestyle”. Euro News. 2023. https://www.euronews.com/culture/2023/10/08/icymi-german-museum-worker-swapped-paintings-with-fakes-to-fund-lavish-lifestyle