The international art world has watched in awe as the burgeoning class of billionaire collectors in Russia has fueled demand and boosted prices for works from that country. These avid buyers also seem to have inadvertently driven up supply—but not as they might have wished. “The problem of fakes has reached enormous proportions,” says Alexander Tikhonov, author of the first Russian-language guide to the art market, Russian Art in the West. And, he adds, “there’s no mechanism for dealing with it.”

That’s changing. The government national heritage and media watchdog Rossvya­zokhran­kultura, under Viktor Petrakov, its head of cultural preservation, has partnered with the publisher Vladimir Roschin to produce the Cata­logue of Fraudulent Art­works, a project apparently sparked by the foisting of a fake on the former Rus­sian president Vladimir Putin. Roschin claims that hundreds, if not thousands, of works are at issue, most of which are in private collections in Russia.

Four volumes of the catalogue, each displaying 150 counterfeit objects, have already been published, and the fifth will be available later this year. After that, any newly discovered fakes will be posted on the Web at www.rsoc.ru. Meanwhile, says Rossvyazo­­kh­rankultura’s deputy head, Anatoly Vilkov, new legislation will make it easier to prosecute dealers for selling counterfeits, although details have yet to be released.

In the current heated market for Russian art, says Roschin, fakes can sell for between $100,000 and $3 million. Many of the fraudulent works are authentic 19th-century paintings by minor Western artists that have been doctored to look Russian, thus making them more appealing to the new collectors. Forgers comb European salesrooms for cheap but passable canvases to transform. “Buy an old Dutch painting, add a birch tree, take a cow off, and you have a Shishkin and a 1,000 percent profit,” jokes the Guggenheim’s Europe-based consultant, Nic Iljine.

Ivan Shishkin, Ivan Aiva­zovsky and other 19th-century landscape and seascape painters are currently the most forged, but the problem also exists for contemp­orary and early 20th-century avant-garde artists, especially Nat­alia Goncha­rova. Heritage Auction Galleries, in Dallas, withdrew Rabbi with Hen, supposedly painted by her in 1910, from its first sale of Russian art this past June because “we didn’t have time to examine it properly,” says Douglass Brown, the firm’s consignment director for Rus­sian art, adding, “We turned away many pictures, almost all brought to us by people who had no idea. There was a wide range—Aivazovsky, 19th-century landscapes, avant-garde.”

The most famous 19th-century forgery is Landscape with Brook. The painting started life as Landscape with Figures and Cattle by the Dutch artist Marinus Koekkoek, under whose name it sold in May 2003 at Bukowskis, in Stockholm, for 540,000 Swedish kronor ($66,000). A year later, the picture resurfaced at Sotheby’s London with the new title, scenic changes, Shishkin’s signature, a certificate of authenticity from Moscow’s premier art museum, the Tretyakov Gallery, and an estimate of £550,000 to £700,000 ($978,000–1.2 million). It was withdrawn after Moscow’s Grabar Art Conservation Center identified it as counterfeit. Sotheby’s claims it checked the signature under ultraviolet light, but with forging techniques constantly evolving, such methods are no longer foolproof.

Many fraudulent works, like the “Shishkin,” have been “authenticated” by ex­perts at the Tretyakov. The institution has admitted 96 wrong attributions, but the real number is doubtless far greater: Starting in the early 1990s, it was common knowledge among market insiders that some Tretyakov staff members were certifying works for payoffs of $1,000 and up. In October 2006 state museums were banned from issuing authentications, but many of their ex­perts still offer them privately.

In addition to the Tretyakov, just two such institutions had certified Russian paintings: the Grabar Center and the Russian Museum, in St. Petersburg. To fill the void caused by the 2006 ban, two rival bodies, one state run and one private, want to create new authenticators. Rossvya­zokhrankultura has granted licenses to 400 spec­ialists, a move some fear is a recipe for further corruption, and this past April the Inter­national Confed­eration of Antique & Art Dealers (ICA&AD)—a domestic concern, despite its name—appointed 12 experts from its membership of 50, 5 of them in the field of 20th-century art, to certify works. “It is not for a state body to interfere in the market,” says the organization’s president, Vasily Bychkov.

But as forgers become more sophisticated, rooting out fakes is becoming increas­ingly difficult. “It’s a sort of arms race,” says Richard Ellis, a former head of Scotland Yard’s art and antiques squad.

Earlier this year, Elena Basner, a former curator at the Russian Museum, patented a detection method that involves searching for the isotopes that nuclear explosions release into the atmosphere and thus, she contends, are unavoidably present in the pigment- binding oils of all paintings executed since such explosions began, in 1945. Basner plans to use her technique to test Russian avant-garde paintings, which the KGB started forging in the late 1960s, when they wised up to the potential financial rewards, according to the Paris-based collector Pierre Moos. Since the USSR was a closed country, it was impossible for foreign buyers to confirm provenance, and because the security agency had access to the stores where old paint, paper and canvas were kept, its copies evaded scientific analysis, says Moos, who adds that the KGB’s handiwork initially reached the West via Germany, courtesy of a Cologne dealer who was reportedly the mistress of one of its agents.

The avant-garde artists most often imitated include Piotr Konchalovsky, Con­stan­tine Korovin, Aristarkh Lentulov, Philip Maliavin and Ilya Mashkov, along with the Suprematists Kasimir Malevich and El Lissitzky. In fact, two Lissitzky paintings shown at a Russian Museum exhibition in 2001 turned out to be fakes. An evermore potent magnet for forgers is the female painter Zinaida Serebriakova, whose 1929 Reclining Nude posted an artist record £1.1 million ($2.1 million) at Sotheby’s London this past June. Catherine Boncenne, a descendant of Serebriakova, says the market is now awash with fakes bearing her name.

Not even contemporary art is immune to counterfeits. Living artists are rarely affected, but works by the Nonconformists, who sprang to fame in the 1970s and command continually climbing prices, are often forged. The most common targets are those who are deceased, such as Dmitry Krasnopevtsev, Timur Novikov, Evgeny Rukhin and Vasily Sitnikov. Semyon Mikhailovsky, vice rector of the Fine Arts Academy in Novikov’s native St. Petersburg, says that the artist’s hallmark banners from the 1980s–’90s tended to be rough-and-ready, but these days they “often appear very nicely done.”

Because copying is a time-honored part of the academic system of teaching art that flourishes in Russia to this day, “pupils could do very good fakes,” notes Mikhail­ovsky. “The price is high, so for them it’s tempting. If a student is prepared to be Repin,” he says, referring to the realist painter Ilya Repin (1844–1930), “and millions think he’s Repin, then it’s not bad work.”

Although the bulk of fakes are sold in Moscow, several Western European galleries and auction houses are accomplices, witting or not. One of the biggest forgery scandals occurred in the early 1990s, when the now-defunct Paris auctioneer Arcole sold thousands of “Soviet Impres­­sion­ist” landscapes. It sub­se­quently transpired that the paintings had been churned out by a group of Eastern Euro­pean art students held under lock and key in the suburbs of the French capital. More recently, in August 2006, a Monaco-based firm called Russie Art staged a sale of 160 Russian paintings in Monte Carlo and promptly disappeared without a trace; no auction results were ever published.

Market experts are quick to point out that Rus­sian art is not the only category to suffer from fakes, and the Moscow dealer and ICA&AD expert Natalia Kurnikova warns that not all the items in the Catalogue of Fraudulent Artworks warrant suspicion. She claims to have spotted a painting by Ivan Pokhitonov, for instance, that is “definitely authentic.”

Catherine MacDougall, of MacDougall’s auctions in London, echoes Kurnikova’s caution. “To pub­lish a picture and say, ‘Be­ware, this could be a fake!’ is not the way to go about things,” she says. “In the West, you’d be sued.” MacDougall had no qualms about including Tretyakov certifications in the catalogue for her firm’s June sale of Russian paintings.

Does the catalogue nevertheless serve a purpose? Yes, she states, given the “chaotic” situation in Russia involving fakes. Kurnikova demurs somewhat. “It’s a very young market,” she points out, “and gradually becoming more civilized.”

Roschin asserts that this civilizing process has been advanced by his catalogue, which has already prompted collectors to return more than 50 paintings to dealers. “I believe these publications will help clear the air and restore confidence,” the publisher says.

"Russian Roulette" originally appeared in the September 2008 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's September 2008 Table of Contents.