Fear of Fakes Effects Russian Market

MOSCOW—Russia's booming art market is facing a snag as a fear of fraudulent artworks floods the market, reports Bloomberg.

The source of the worry is The Catalog of Fraudulent Art Works, now in its fourth volume. The tome lists about 800 works, most still in private collections, that were wrongly authenticated by such respected institutions as the State Tretyakov Gallery.

"Sales in Moscow of 19th-century Russian art have fallen because of the hysteria over fakes,'' said Georgy Putnikov, vice president of the Confederation of Art and Antique Dealers, which also claimed that the catalog and its sponsors are "destabilizing the market" and "destroying consumer confidence."

Volumes two and four list works weeded out by experts at the State Russian Museum in St. Petersburg before they were resold. Volumes one and three are more controversial, listing 19th century Western European paintings that were doctored to look like Russian artworks from the same period, then were authenticated by experts at the Tretyakov. These 300 works, mostly in private hands, were compiled by one of those experts, Vladimir Petrov, who admitted in 2005 to the practice and called on his colleagues to do the same.

A fifth volume, showing 150 fakes, will appear later this year, after which new findings will be posted online.

"This whole affair is the crime of the century in the art world," said coauthor Vladimir Roschin, who published the book with Rossvyaz Okhrankultura, a state watchdog agency for culture and the media. "These volumes contain only a small number of the fakes out there."