Tom Sack

Thomas "Tom" Sack (born March 30, 1982 in Dresden ) is a German art dealer and lawyer who gained notoriety as an art forger and fraudster after not only making conventional forgeries of works by well-known painters, but also integrating fictitious artists into the art market , Manipulated entries in auction price databases and thus sold self-painted pictures for inflated prices.

Entrepreneurial activity

Early 2000s business bag in Berlin-Zehlendorf , the company kunstkommission.de that the Commission trade had with art and antiques on the Internet to the object. As part of his business appearance, he also posed as an art historian and gallery owner of allegedly newly discovered artists. In addition, until the end of 2005 he was the owner of a company TS-Kunsthandel eK based in Rudolstadt and the trade in art objects of all kinds in the commercial register. In 2006 he founded an English limited company called Invenit , about which nothing is known. The company is listed as dissolved in the English commercial register.

Sack has a degree in law and today works as a lawyer in the Rinteln district of Schaumburg-Rosenthal in his own law firm. In addition, he continues to operate a commercial art trade under the company name Sack Echte Kunst .

Art scandal and judicial convictions

Investigations

After Sack had unwittingly offered a stolen painting by a Flemish painter from the 17th century for sale in 2005, his premises were searched by the investigation team around René Allonge from the LKA Berlin, which specializes in art crime . The investigation was initially only carried out on suspicion of receiving stolen goods . In addition to the image sought, a stamp with the inscription Nachlass EL Kirchner was found by chance , a replica of the so-called Basel estate stamp , with which the drawing estate of the German Expressionist Ernst Ludwig Kirchner from the Kunstmuseum Basel was marked. The investigation was then expanded and a search was again carried out in 2006. Additional evidence was found indicating Sacks' extensive activity as a forger and fraudster.

Despite the ongoing investigations, Sack moved his place of business to Rinteln in 2006 , where he bought a larger house and changed the name of his company to Kunsthaus Schaumburg and later to Sack Echte Kunst . In 2008, the now responsible public prosecutor in Bückeburg initiated further investigations against him, and further searches were carried out. A large number of works of art and business documents available for sale were confiscated.

Overall, the investigation into the Sack case lasted about five years.

Fictional artists, manipulated auction results and false promises

The investigative authorities charged that Sack not only forged works of art by famous painters, but also invented several artists, including their biographies , and manipulated entries in auction price databases. For example, for a work by the artist Cara Gano , who was allegedly represented by Sack and who was born in Paris in 1971 and who is said to have studied art in Madrid, there was a completely unrealistic auction result of 41,700 euros for a meaningless acrylic painting with the title 20 × 100 cm Untitled in the Artprice database , which Sack expressly emphasized to potential buyers as an indication of high international demand for the painter's works. As a result, hundreds of collectors paid completely excessive prices for Cara Gano images for years. The actually worthless pictures were actually made by Sack and his partner Isabell S. themselves using the cheapest materials and stamped Atelier Cara Gano - Original on the back. Sack also had the term Cara Gano registered with the German Patent and Trademark Office as a word mark for watches and jewelry and paintings . With effect from December 19, 2014, he had the trademark deleted by means of a waiver.

So-called “notarized repurchase obligations” were an additional scam to drive up prices. With these documents, the buyers were promised the opportunity to sell the pictures back to the Kunstkommission company after a few years for amounts of up to 50,000 euros. This was on the condition that certain price entries had not been made in the art market databases via the artist Cara Gano by a certain date, which in turn should enable buyers to sell the pictures at a high profit. Since these registrations were made by Sack himself, the buyback options were in fact worthless.

Stamp Nachlass Ernst Cuno on the back of a drawing

In another case he allegedly bought the estate of an artist named Ernst Cuno (1901–1986) when a household was liquidated, but actually painted these pictures himself or stamped worthless drawings from study portfolios with a self-made estate stamp.

Another Sack invention is the artist Joe Kapingo , who was allegedly born in 1938 . A painting with the title Face , signed by J. Kapingo , was auctioned in a Leipzig art auction house in 2006 for 3,150 euros. As in the Cara Gano case, this auction result was also bogus in order to give the pictures of the newly invented painter a first “price-sensitive house number”. After that, the pictures were sold on eBay and classic auction houses. In the Kapingo case alone, there are said to have been more than 80 victims.

A painter Hans Spiegel with the dates of his life 1911–1999 is also a creation of Sack and should not be confused with the actually existing Hans Spiegel (1894–1966) . Images from the alleged estate of Spiegel, who died in 1999, marked with an invented estate stamp, were sold through various eBay sales agents. The likelihood of confusion among the audience was obviously intentional.

According to the indictment, Sack is said to have earned around one million euros with his scam.

Trials and sentencing

In 2009, the public prosecutor's offices in Berlin and Bückeburg independently brought charges of fraud and forgery of documents. The Berlin indictment dealt with classic art forgeries, the Bückeburg indictment also involved the complex of fictitious artists with 201 charges. First of all, the main hearing at the Tiergarten District Court opened in autumn 2010 as an extended court of lay judges . The judges considered it proven that Sack had forged drawings by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner , Paul Cézanne , Carl Spitzweg and Gustav Klimt and sold them fraudulently on the Internet. After six days of trial, the court sentenced him to a suspended prison sentence of two years in nine cases for commercial fraud involving commercial falsification, and emphasized in its verdict that the offenses tried were most likely just the tip of an iceberg. Well-known experts were active as experts in the process, such as Spitzweg expert Jens Christian Jensen , Sigrid Achenbach (former curator of the Berlin Kupferstichkabinett ), Martin Fritsch (former director of the Käthe Kollwitz Museum ) and Katrin Stoll (director of the Munich auction house Neumeister ).

The Berlin judgment resulted in the 1st major criminal chamber of the Bückeburg Regional Court in early 2011 to discontinue the proceedings for the invented artists for reasons of opportunity , but refused Sack compensation for financial disadvantages resulting from the investigative measures. Sack had stated that he had become insolvent due to the confiscation of his goods and computers, but also due to the damage to his reputation. He was finally given back all the objects that had been confiscated by the Bückeburg public prosecutor. In the Bückeburg trial, the art historian Nils Büttner from the State Academy of Fine Arts in Stuttgart acted as an expert witness for the court.

Sack successfully appealed against the verdict of the Tiergarten district court. The district court of Berlin reduced the sentence by judgment of July 11, 2011 to one year imprisonment on probation. The public prosecutor's office appealed against this. Thereupon Sack also appealed. The 3rd Criminal Senate of the Berlin Court of Appeal finally confirmed the judgment of the Regional Court with a ruling of March 15, 2012. The criminal proceedings were thus legally concluded after almost seven years.

Prohibited notices of court hearings and portrait of the prosecutor

During the ongoing investigation, Sack tried to defend himself publicly against the allegations by allegedly posting exonerating documents such as a video of a search and documents from the investigation files on the Internet, such as search warrants or the indictment from the Bückeburg public prosecutor's office. For these publications he was fined in several separate criminal cases, and a veritable judicial farce developed. Sack was of the opinion that the relevant criminal provision of Section 353d No. 3 StGB ( prohibited notifications about court hearings ) could not be applied against him as a suspect, since the norm was precisely aimed at protecting him from public prejudice in the press, but he deliberately waived this . In fact, there had been differences of opinion in jurisprudence and literature on the interpretation of the criminal provision. In response to Sack's constitutional complaint , the Federal Constitutional Court finally ruled on June 27, 2014 that the accused could also be a 'perpetrator of the criminal law'.

As a further protest action, Sack painted an oil painting with the title Public Prosecutor L. with an investigation file and offered this as the only and last item for 10,000 euros in his Internet shop. The painting shows the likeness of a certain public prosecutor who had large quantities of works of art confiscated in 2008 and in fact caused Sack's business to be closed. The public prosecutor also had this painting confiscated because he believed that he recognized a violation of the Art Copyright Act , which regulates the right to one's own picture . Another criminal case was initiated against Sack, which went through three instances and ended in 2010 with a judgment by the Higher Regional Court in Celle . The criminal senate decided that the public prosecutor's personal rights would have to withdraw in the specific individual case in favor of artistic freedom . Sack then received the painting back.

Others

Sack appeared in the 2009 documentary broadcast by the broadcasters Arte and 3sat Great Masters - Leichte Beute? to speak. He justified his approach by stating that there were no real victims in his case, as the buyers had taken a speculative risk. It is possible to earn a lot of money with the works he has sold by reselling, but the risk taken can also be realized in the same way. This referred to two dubious paintings, supposedly works by Max Liebermann and Kees van Dongen , which Sack had sold to art collectors for 19,000 euros. In fact, real works of art by these two painters would be worth many times that amount of money.

In an interview with the broadcaster RTL , Sack said that he had not given any binding assurances in his offers, but only made personal assessments of the authorship of the works of art. The judiciary pretends to have expressly guaranteed authenticity.

One collector who feels deceived by Sack is the German journalist Markus Günther . Günther bought an oil sketch signed with Max Liebermann from Sack for 7,051 euros, which was later exposed as a “clumsy forgery” by Liebermann expert Matthias Eberle .

Tom Sack's works are now referred to as such in trade.

literature

• Susanna Partsch : Tatort Kunst , CH Beck, Munich 2010, p. 166 f., ISBN 978-3-406-60621-2 .
• Saskia Hufnagel: Art Fraud in Germany: Lessons Learned or the Fast Falling into Oblivion? In: Cultural Property Crime - An Overview and Analysis of Contemporary Perspectives and Trends , Brill, Leiden / Boston 2014, p. 111 ff., ISBN 978-90-04-28053-3 .
• Saskia Hufnagel, Duncan Chappell (Ed.): The Palgrave Handbook on Art Crime , Palgrave Macmillan, London 2019, p. 331, ISBN 978-1-137-54404-9 .

Web links

Commons : Tom Sack  - collection of images, videos and audio files

• Sack of real art
• A painting by "Joe Kapingo" in an art auction on May 23, 2015 (offered as "pseudonym Tom Sack")

Individual evidence

1. ↑ lot-tissimo.com
2. ^ International Directory of Arts. KG Saur, Munich 2007, 31st edition, part 3, ISBN 978-3-598-23113-1 .
3. ↑ hotfrog.de
4. ↑ kunstkommission.de ( Memento from March 1, 2006 in the Internet Archive )
5. ↑ moneyhouse.de
6. ↑ directors.findthecompany.co.uk ( Memento of the original from December 22, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The archive link was automatically inserted and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. 
7. ^ Lawyer Thomas Sack, Rinteln , accessed on May 4, 2020.
8. ↑ Sack Echte Kunst , accessed on May 4, 2020.
9. ^ Court report of November 30, 2010 , accessed on October 21, 2015.
10. ^ Newsgroups post , accessed October 21, 2015.
11. ↑ Questionable house search in front of the camera - artist couple defends themselves against the judiciary. In: Zeit Online . April 17, 2008, accessed January 26, 2019 . 
12. ↑ caragano.com ( Memento of May 14, 2007 in the Internet Archive )
13. ^ Painter accused of fraud. In: image . June 2, 2009, accessed October 21, 2015 . 
14. ↑ The painter and his public prosecutor. In: The daily newspaper . February 16, 2010, accessed October 21, 2015 . 
15. ↑ Information on the "Cara Gano" trademark  in the register of the German Patent and Trademark Office (DPMA)
16. ↑ As before (procedural data, item 3)
17. ↑ Art is full of envious people. In: New Westphalian . February 16, 2010, accessed on October 15, 2015 (only beginning of article, full article subject to charge at Genios). 
18. ↑ Joe Kapingo - a fake artist , lecture by Prof. Nils Büttner at the conference Falsification, Plagiarism and Copy: Artistic Practices in the Middle Ages and Early Modern Times (Schwabenakademie Irsee, March 15-17, 2013), hsozkult.de accessed on 21. October 2015.
19. ↑ artsalesindex.artinfo.com
20. ↑ Guest article by Adelheid Straten in The Fake Blog , Museum Aktuell , blog.museum-aktuell.de, accessed on October 22, 2015.
21. ↑ Tom Sack: Art fraud in 200 cases? In: Schaumburger Nachrichten. May 29, 2009.
22. ↑ Court report of November 30, 2010, berlinkriminell.de accessed on October 21, 2015.
23. ↑ Tom Sack: acquittal within one's reach. In: Schaumburger Nachrichten . January 26, 2011, accessed October 21, 2015 . 
24. ↑ Court report of July 12, 2011, berlinkriminell.de accessed on October 13, 2019.
25. ↑ Court report of July 12, 2011 (supplement at the bottom), berlinkriminell.de accessed on October 15, 2019.
26. ↑ Order of the Court of Appeal of March 15, 2012, Az. (3) 121 Ss 497/11 (27/12).
27. ^ Artists versus justice - what does this man want? In: Schaumburg-Lippische Landes-Zeitung . February 11, 2010, accessed October 21, 2015 . 
28. ^ Decision of the Federal Constitutional Court of June 27, 2014, bundesverfassungsgericht.de accessed on October 21, 2015.
29. ↑ Quoting remains prohibited , article in the taz of July 16, 2014, taz.de accessed on October 22, 2015.
30. ↑ A portrait for the investigating public prosecutor , commentary on the verdict on Rechtslupe.de, rechtslupe.de accessed on October 26, 2015.
31. ↑ Court report of 2 November 2010 berlinkriminell.de the end, accessed October 21, 2015.
32. ↑ Markus Günther: How I bought a fake picture. In: Augsburger Allgemeine . September 16, 2010, accessed October 26, 2015 . 
33. ↑ 7,000 euros for a Max Liebermann. In: Westfalenpost . November 30, 2011, accessed October 26, 2015 . 
34. ↑ Entry at MutualArt , accessed on October 16, 2019.
35. ↑ eBay auction on September 30, 2019 , accessed October 16, 2019.