Who Is Faking the Great Paintings of Russia?

Rush to Buy 19th-Century Landscapes Brings Forgers Out of Woodwork

MOSCOW -- Valeri Uszhin, a wealthy car dealer, wanted an art collection. "About two years ago, I felt that I had money," he said. "I decided to buy paintings, Russian art."

Uszhin began to collect at quite a clip, a new canvas every couple of weeks. Then in March last year he paid a St. Petersburg art dealer $145,000 for a painting listed as "Summer Day," by Alexander Kiselev, a 19th-century master of Russian landscapes. By the time he hung it in his Moscow apartment, the walls were covered with a seemingly sterling collection -- 30 pieces of 19th-century art bought for a total of close to $5 million.

But within months there was a sobering development: Art experts using scientific analysis determined that the work that Uszhin thought was "Summer Day" was in fact a heavily altered 1883 painting by the Danish artist Janus la Cour, "A Forest Road Leading to a Peasant's House." The investigators established that 14 months before Uszhin bought it, someone else had paid $2,000 for it at an auction in Copenhagen.

The revamped la Cour, now stored in a police basement, is at the center of one of the most lucrative and technically sophisticated international art scams to surface in recent years. Fueled by the country's burgeoning wealth and the desire for prestigious assets with patriotic cachet, Russia's upper class has driven the market for Russian art to unprecedented heights. The frenzy has also attracted some very skilled and knowledgeable crooks.

Vladimir Petrov, a curator at the state-run Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow, says he believes forgers have snapped up at least 120 paintings by minor 19th-century West European landscape artists at auction houses in Denmark, Germany, Switzerland, Sweden, Finland and the Netherlands, paying $1,000 to $20,000 apiece for them. After retouching, the works have been resold here for between $125,000 and $1 million as the work of major Russian artists of the same period.

"Pieces that had a lot in common with Russian painters were chosen," said Petrov, who acknowledges having validated 20 fakes before his suspicions were aroused by the sheer volume of previously unrecorded art flooding into the marketplace over the last three years. "It seems like there are several groups with highly skilled professionals working on this. They were experts in Russian art. They added a few Russian details or removed a few Western details or sometimes just changed the signature. They were so close in everything. Remarkable."

The la Cour painting, for instance, depicts a stand of trees along a dirt road. Thick undergrowth dotted with blue flowers and dandelions extends from the trees to the edge of the road. In the near distance, beneath a cloudy sky, is a single-story farmhouse.

When it reached Uszhin, much of the original painting remained identifiable. But to Russify the scene, the trees had been made leafier. The farmhouse was wiped out, disappearing behind new foliage and new sky.

The road was shortened and narrowed. In the foreground, a tiny pool of water was added and some Russian-style houses appeared in the distance. Kiselev's signature was forged in the lower left-hand corner.

"We certainly consider Janus la Cour to be part of Danish culture, and as such it is deeply problematic that somebody destroys his paintings -- regardless of the modest price in this incident," said Sebastian Hauge Lerche, the director of Bruun Rasmussen Auctioneers in Copenhagen, which sold the la Cour.

In this way, forgers have also come up with supposed works by other sought-after artists such as Ivan Shishkin, Vasily Polenov, Feodor Vasiliyev and Vladimir Orlovsky. Half of Uszhin's collection proved to be the work of little-known West Europeans.

Using auction catalogues, Petrov, an expert on 19th-century Russian art, has compiled a binder of before and after images of paintings as they were sold in Western Europe and what they became in Moscow. The stooped 56-year-old is investigating another 100 suspicious paintings sold in Russia but has not yet identified what he believes to be the Western originals.