Wolfgang Beltracchi
How did a hippie who was drifting around aimlessly pull off what some call the biggest, most lucrative scam in the art world? And how did he finally get caught? Let’s explore it together and find out.
Wolfgang Beltracchi
Born Wolfgang Fischer on February 4, 1951 in Höxter, Germany, our main character grew up in Geilenkirchen, Germany. His father was an art restorer and muralist so he had art in his life from a very early age.
At the age of 14, Beltracchi was already an accomplished painter in his own right. He painted a good imitation of a Picasso painting in a single day, apparently shocking his father. Three years later he enrolled in art school in Aachen but he wasn’t really interested in school and ended up skipping most of his classes. From the 1960s onward is what Beltracchi calls his “hippie period”. He grew his hair long, smoked weed and dropped LSD, he rode around on a motorcycle, he lived on a beach in Morocco for a year and a half, he lived in a commune in Spain and drifted around Barcelona, Paris, and London all while surviving by buying and selling paintings at antique markets. At this point he wasn’t forging anything, more like flipping existing paintings.
He did have some success as a painting in his own right early on in his career but by his own admission “he was more drawn to the outlaw life” (Hammer, 2012).
The Outlaw Life
One day, during this period of wandering, Baltracchi bought a pair of winter landscape paintings for $250 apiece. He had noticed that paintings featuring ice skaters sold for way more than paintings that didn’t, so he carefully added a pair of skaters to the paintings and resold them for a big profit. He claims that this wasn’t his first forgery, but it was an important step down the path he would eventually take. Soon, he started buying antique frames and painting ice skating scenes from scratch, passing them off as pieces from the 18th century.
In 1981, he tried holding down a legit job, he started an art dealing firm with a friend but he soon realized he hated sitting behind a desk and not being on the creation side of the art world. He was later squeezed out of the business by his business partner and had to dramatically increase the price of his forged paintings as a result of cash-flow problems.
He quickly moved on from old master forgeries to imitations of French and German 20th century painters like expressionists Johannes Molzhan and Heinrich Campendonk because it was easier to find pigments and frames from the periods they were active. Beltracchi sold as many as a dozen forged Molzhan paintings, bringing in around $45,000. One of the paintings was even purchased by the artist’s widow. At the time that Beltracchi was forging Campendonk’s work, there was a scholar in Bonn assembling a comprehensive catalogue of Campendonk’s work. Five or six of the forgeries actually ended up making it into the final catalogue.
Beltracchi met his wife Helene Beltracchi (he ended up taking her last name) in 1992 when he was taking a break from art forging to sail around the world and make a documentary about pirates. That project fell through and the two got married in 1993 and had their daughter that same year. Shortly after their marriage, Helene became an accomplice to the forgery work. She was his new go-between from him to the auction houses and other sellers. The first painting they sold together was an imitation of cubist painter Georges Valmier. They sold it for 20,000 deutschmarks but later watched it sell at auction in New York for over $1 million. They knew they had a big opportunity on their hands and the art market was heating up.
Helene, for her part, found this very exciting. “”The first time, it was like being in a movie, it was like it had nothing to do with me. It was another person—an art dealer, whom I was playing.” She couldn’t believe how easy it had been to dupe the auction house. “Normally, a person would think that these experts would study the painting and look for proof of its provenance. [The authenticator] asked two or three questions. She was gone in 10 minutes”” (Hammer, 2012).
They got bolder and bolder. In 1996, Helene introduced to the art world the collection she had “inherited from her grandfather”. She made up a history about the collection and even posed as her “grandmother” in front of some of the paintings (the photo was printed on time-accurate paper) to convince prospective buyers of their provenance. One of the most prominent paintings in the collection was Girl with Swan, passed off as being by Campendonk. It went to auction at Christie’s where a Campendonk expert praised the artist’s use of colour and personally authenticated the piece. The painting ultimately sold for over $100,000.
In 1995, the couple’s criminal antics threatened to catch up with them. The buyer of a couple of “Molzahn” paintings had determined that they were counterfeits. They were supposedly painted in the 1920s but they all contained a pigment that didn’t exist until 1957. Police suspected that Beltracchi and his business partner in the art dealing business were behind this but since the five year statute of limitations had expired they could only call the two in as witnesses and the investigation focused on the Berlin art dealer who handled the sales of these two paintings. In mid-1996 the business partner was brought in for questioning and Beltracchi disappeared.
He claims that it was unrelated but they up and sold their house and bought a Winnebago van and abruptly left the country with no warning. A real coincidence. The Beltracchi family ended up settling in France, purchasing a huge villa and living a lavish life supported by selling a forged painting or two a month. By this time, Beltracchi’s forgeries were selling for high six-figure numbers, Steve Martin paid $860,000 in 2004 for a fake Camperdonk called Landscape with Horses and later sold it at a loss through Christie’s 18 months after buying it. The whole time he had it, and even when he sold it, he never knew that it was fake.
Helene and Beltracchi got bolder and bolder, encouraged by how many art experts were confirming their works as authentic. Werner Spies, the leading expert on Max Ernst, even came out to their house one time to see an “Ernst” painting. Once he saw the fake, titled Forest (2), he was overcome with excitement and said there was no doubt that the painting was authentic. Spies soon put Beltracchi in touch with a Swiss art dealer who sold Forest (2) for $2.3 million. It was then sold to a Paris gallery for $7 million in 2006 where the widow of Ernst saw the painting and said it was the most beautiful work her late husband had created. “Helene and Wolfgang were amazed by the gullibility of those they had duped, “We’re still laughing about it.” (Hammer, 2012). Disgusting.
The Downfall
In 2006 Helene’s sister brought another counterfeit Camperdonk to the art dealer they were working with, titled Red Picture with Horses. A company called Trasteco Inc. purchased the painting for $3.6 million at auction. Unexpectedly after the sale, Trasteco demanded a certificate of authenticity and this was the beginning of the end for the Baltrecchis. Usually they would forge this certificate but their art dealer allegedly said they would take care of it this time, they didn’t, and Trasteco got very suspicious when a certificate couldn’t be produced for this painting. In 2008 they hired art expert Andrea Firmenich to examine the painting, she worked with modern art expert Ralph Jentsch on this project.
Right away, when they looked at the Flechtheim Collection label on the back of the painting (a forged label alleging that this painting came from the collection of a prominent Jewish art dealer and collector who had fled to Paris after the start of the second world war) they knew it was fake. Jentsch said that Flechthiem was a serious man and he would never have added such a silly painting to his collection. In addition, they had submitted the label for chemical testing and it came back as using a pigment called titanium white which wasn’t available in 1914, when the painting was said to have been created.
Trasteco immediately launched a civil suit against the art dealer who sold them the painting without confirming with enough certainty that this was a legitimate Camperdonk. It was ruled that they had to return all the money that had been originally paid for the painting.
Within two weeks Jentsch had located 15 more paintings with fraudulent Flechtheim labels. People were confused and shocked and outraged. It was around this time, January 2010, that the Berlin art fraud division started to receive tips about a fraud group in Germany making paintings with fake Flechtheim labels. The first two people on the police’s radar were Helene Beltracchi and her sister who had been the one to take Red Picture with Horses to the art dealer in the first place, and soon they had their sights set on the whole Beltracchi family as the prime suspects.
On the morning of August 25, 2010 the art fraud unit carried out the biggest operation in their history. They simultaneously raided Helene’s sister’s house and tried to raid the Beltracchi villa in France but the government didn’t authorize the mission. Instead they listened in on a conversation between Beltracchi and his son, Manuel, “sounding calm, Beltracchi told his son to destroy two computers filled with evidence. “We were conducting video surveillance, and we watched the son—one half hour before we raided the house—go out the door with two computers under his arm,” Allonge says. Young Beltracchi stashed the computers at a friend’s home, where they were recovered by the police” (Hammer, 2012). On August 27 the Beltracchi’s returned to Germany and around 7:30 when they were on their way to dinner they were surrounded by police cars and finally apprehended.
Their trial started on September 1, 2011 in the Cologne Regional Court and by October 27 the judge announced that the two sides had reached a deal and the proceedings were terminated. In exchange for admitting to 14 forgeries (even though he definitely created way more, to date the Berlin police have uncovered 58) Wolfgang received 6 years and Helene 4 years in jail. Providing they maintained jobs they only had to sleep at the jail, they got to leave every day to go to work. A punishment many thought was way too light for the magnitude of crime that they committed.
Their behaviour since then has been nothing short of icky, they’re clearly very proud of themselves for this deception and they have been shopping around to write an autobiography plus a movie was made in 2014 about the Beltracchi’s life and crimes. I was hesitant to even write about them here but it’s too big of a case to skip.
The saddest thing here are all the art experts who got duped by the forged paintings, with one even considering suicide after the news broke that the Max Ernst that he authenticated was fake. This kind of thing isn’t just duping rich collectors it has real ramifications on everyone surrounding the works not the mention the artists themselves and their legacies. This is not something to idolize.
Works Cited
Hammer, Joshua. “The Greatest Fake-Art Scam in History?” Vanity Fair. 2012. https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2012/10/wolfgang-beltracchi-helene-art-scam
Holland, Oscar. “The Husband and Wife Forgers who Fooled the Art Market - And Made Millions”. CNN, 2023. https://www.cnn.com/style/article/wolfgang-helen-beltracchi-forgers/index.html