PARIS— One of the world's largest art forgery scandals ended in a Cologne courtroom yesterday, when ringleader Wolfgang Beltracchi was sentenced to six years in prison for counterfeiting paintings that sold for more than €16 million ($22 million), tricking prominent museums, top auction houses, and collectors, including the actor Steve Martin.

Beltracchi's wife, Helene, received a four-year sentence, while accomplice Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus was handed a five-year sentence for bringing the works to market. The last accused, Jeanette Spurzem, Helene Beltracchi's sister, was let off with a suspended sentence of one year and nine months. The Beltracchis will also pay 980,000 Swiss francs ($1.1 million) to the court.

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The relatively light sentences followed plea deals struck between prosecutors and the four defendants in return for confessions during a trial that was as colorful as the forged artworks themselves. The criminals had faced up to nine years in prison. 

Wolfgang Beltracchi admitted creating 14 paintings resembling lost works by Max Ernst, Kees van Dongen, Fernand Léger, Max Pechstein, and Heinrich Campendonk. A work purportedly by that last artist became his undoing: sold by Cologne's Lempertz auction house in 2006 to Maltese company Trasteco for €2.9 million, "Red Picture With Horses" raised suspicions, and subsequent testing showed the presence of a color that had not been invented in 1914, the year in which the work was supposed to have been painted.   

Lempertz was left stumped by the forgery. The work was listed in Campendonk's catalogue raisonné and had been confirmed by the Doerner Institut in Munich, as well as by the artist's son. The Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris had even requested to have the painting on loan. As the forgery unraveled, the house discovered that it had sold a total of five forged works. It has compensated most of the buyers, though two chose to take legal action against the house. "The last 11 months have not been the most comfortable of my career," Lempertz director Henrik S. Hanstein told Art+Auction magazine while discussing the case in July.   

Steve Martin was reportedly among the Beltracchis' most prominent victims. The actor and art collector spent €700,000 on Campendonk's "Landscape With Horses" at Paris gallery Cazeau-Béraudière in 2004, then resold it through Christie's in 2006, where a Swiss businesswoman bought the work for €500,000. German industrialist Reinhold Würth and Hannover’s Sprengel Museum were also duped. French collector Daniel Filipacchi may have held the most expensive forgery, Ernst's "La Forêt 2," bought for some €4.9 million in 2006 after being shown at the Max Ernst Museum in Brühl and the Biennale des Antiquaires in Paris. Geneva-based agent Marc Blondeau, meanwhile, was a key witness against the Beltracchis.   

Both Christie's and Sotheby's sold a number of the Beltracchis' forged paintings. Christie's moved the alleged fake Campendonk "Girl With Swan" for £67,500 in 1995, and "La Horde," a purported Ernst painting from the Jägers collection, to a German collector in 2006 for around £3.5 million pounds. In a statement emailed to ARTINFO, Christie's said that "as one of many parties affected by this highly unusual case, we note the decision of the German courts. This criminal case is now closed; we have no further comment." 

The hardest hit by the rampant fraud may be Werner Spies, a renowned art historian and expert on Ernst's Surrealist works who was duped into confirming several forged paintings, including one which appeared in the artist's 2005 retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art. As the Beltracchis were arrested, Spies told Der Spiegel that "if the pieces are forgeries, they can only be described as the work of a brilliant forger." He is now embroiled in a French court case with a company called Monte Carlo Art S.A., which had bought a purported Ernst from Cazeau-Béraudière for € £1.1 million in 2004.   

Sotheby's, meanwhile, hammered the painting "Tremblement de Terre" (1925) for $1,14 million in November 2009 — only to cancel the sale and reimburse the buyer after the Beltracchi affair came to light. The house then took action against the Monaco firm.

"The forgers were very clever," said Daniel von Schacky, a director for contemporary art at Villa Grisebach, which does not appear to have been a victim of the Beltracchis. "I think any auction house would say that 'if a Max Ernst painting has a certificate from Werner Spies, who are we to question that?' Once you've convinced Werner Spies, you're home free." The couple "identified pictures that obviously existed, but had been lost — and any researcher would like to make a rediscovery," von Schacky added.

Wolfgang Beltracchi is believed to have forged at least 49 works, some of which are still being tested. "Forty-seven were confirmed by leading experts," noted Hanstein. The foursome invented fake provenance to convince their victims, posing as heirs to the collections of "Werner Jaegers" or "Wilhelm Knops." On some works they placed fake stickers positing that the work had been with Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, underpinning the story that the collections had been hidden away from the Nazis and had only recently come to light.

The months-long trial delivered abundant theatrics and sometimes surreal revelations. Wolfgang Beltracchi boasted of his artistic prowess, in which he took a certain pride that his lawyer, in closing statements, positioned as evidence that his client was not motivated by money alone. He and his wife did, however, flash their riches, buying and restoring lavish villas in Freiburg and the South of France.

At one point, Wolfgang Beltracchi suggested that his works were better than those of the painters he copied, since he had the benefit of hindsight on their entire œuvre. He recounted how his father, an art restorer, taught him to copy Rembrandt and other Old Masters. He revealed a life of pot smoking, Harley Davidson-riding, and LSD experimentation. Throughout the trial, the Beltracchis turned the courtroom into their pulpit, joking and seeming at ease, even tender with one another — building a certain sympathy among the trial's followers. In his final words to the court, Beltracchi declared himself thankful for the "fairness and good spirit" of the trial, and "that everyone smiled so often." According to Der Spiegel, he has taken to painting portraits of his prison guards.

Some were unamused by Wolfgang Beltracchi's theatrics. "This was a man who, instead of developing his own ideas and acting as an artist, made his money from stealing," dealer Michael Haas told Deutsche Welle. "Yet in the press and even in the courtroom, this is treated as something comedic. That’s just too much."

Auction house experts have been wary of overstating the impact of the Beltracchi case on their business, despite the estimated €34 million damage to the market. Still, Hanstein conceded that "we can't know how many potential clients have made a circle around Lempertz." But, he added, "there are so many important dealers involved in this — the best addresses all over the world."