‘We got a kick out of it’: art forgers reveal secrets of paintings that fooled experts

theguardian.com:

Their forgeries of 20th-century masters such as Max Ernst and Fernand Léger duped the art world into parting with millions of pounds – until a modern pigment gave them away.

Now, after serving lengthy prison sentences, Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Helene have told the story behind the hundreds of paintings that tricked even the artists’ families.

In interviews with Jeannette Fischer, a Zurich-based psychoanalyst and author, the couple described their motivation for fooling what they believed was a “fraudulent” art world.

Wolfgang said he had never forged pictures with compositions that would unnerve the onlooker. “I have to create something beautiful … I want to make people happy,” he said.

He described forgery as “almost incidental”: “We enjoyed selling the paintings. We got a kick out of it. We got rich,” he said. “I got to paint, and we enjoyed doing the research too. Forgery was a way of combining all these things. And I got to sit around the pool for days, reading and daydreaming and sleeping.”

Helene added: “The more successful we were in selling the pictures, the higher we set the bar and the more extra stories we came up with, because we were really enjoying this game. Sometimes we laid trails so elaborate that nobody would ever have discovered them.”

She recalled approaching an auction-house expert with a forged painting by Georges Valmier, the French artist and early cubist. “I was pretty nervous. What if she rejected [it]? We made up a story to explain the provenance of the picture. I was amazed at how easy the whole thing was. My heart was in my mouth – but I got a kick out of it, too. The painting was put up for auction as ‘the most important work of the period of synthetic cubism’.”

Such was their success