Wolfgang Beltracchi

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Wolfgang Beltracchi (* 4 February 1951 as Wolfgang Fischer in Hoexter ) is a German painter and former art forger . He was sentenced to six years in prison on October 27, 2011 in one of the largest art forgery trials since the end of World War II for professional gang fraud. Investigators assume a fraud profit between 20 and 50 million euros.

Life

The former Beltracchi house in Freiburg-Herdern

Beltracchi was born in Höxter in North Rhine-Westphalia in 1951 as the child of a church painter, restorer and teacher. The family soon moved to Geilenkirchen , where he was expelled from high school at the age of 17. He later gave up attending art school and, according to his own account, began a wandering life through shared apartments and communes with "Sex, Drugs & Rock 'n' Roll". Beltracchi traveled through Europe and North Africa, occasionally selling his own painting and finally settling on a farm in Viersen . In 1992 he met Helene Beltracchi, married her in 1993 and took her name. In 1995 they left Germany with their children and lived in southern France near Montpellier until their arrest in 2010 . In 2005 the Beltracchis bought a house in Freiburg-Herdern , where they were arrested on August 27, 2010. The Beltracchis have lived in Meggen in Lucerne on Lake Lucerne since their stay in prison . In 2017, Wolfgang Beltracchi was voted one of the six most important contemporary German artists by the art travel magazine Cultur Trip.

Art forgeries

Beltracchi had painted pictures in the style of well-known painters such as Heinrich Campendonk , Max Ernst and Max Pechstein , Fernand Léger , André Derain and others for years . By adopting the artistic signature of the painters, he succeeded in deceiving recognized experts and suggesting authentic works in the imitations. The first pictures were taken from photos of lost originals, later creations were added in which parts of various well-known pictures were painted and put together to form new pictures. As a painting surface he used pictures by unknown artists, which he painted over. The moldings of the frames were decorated with imitation stickers from renowned galleries of the past, when glue was used, as it turned out later, superglue. According to the stickers, many a picture would have gone through all the well-known galleries of that time. The alleged sticker of the gallery owner Alfred Flechtheim was previously unknown and different from the one that Flechtheim actually used. After the first doubts arose, Beltracchi added forged old photos of arrangements that also showed a sculpture that his wife had bought. Among those photos was one of his wife posing as her own grandmother, and several fake pictures (believed to have been theirs) on the wall. This made it possible to obtain the necessary expertise for the pictures from recognized experts.

From a legal point of view, the affixing of false signatures, stamps, stickers, etc. to works of art is a forgery of documents if the intention is to later market the works as genuine or to have them marketed by others. Selling works of art with the intent that it is counterfeit can be fraud .

Beltracchi was transferred in 2010 by the London art analysis company "Art Analysis & Research" , where counterfeit art is exposed using the most modern methods. In one of his forged works - red picture with horses - modern titanium white could be detected there, which did not yet exist at the specified time of the creation of the pictures by Heinrich Campendonk. Contrary to his usual approach, Beltracchi used a ready-made tube of zinc white that contained traces of titanium white to mix the colors himself. The unmasking of Beltracchi sparked uncertainty on the art market.

After his early release, Beltracchi works as an artist with his own handwriting.

Distribution of counterfeits

Beltracchi and his wife, together with Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus and an accomplice, smuggled the pictures into the international art market as works by the artists concerned and achieved prices of up to single-digit million amounts per picture. According to his own information, he never sold directly to museums or collectors, but to auction houses to which he showed expertise . The counterfeits reached primarily Japan, France, the United States and Great Britain. In the case of fraudulent transactions, Beltracchi pretended, among other things, that the pictures came from a “ Werner Jägers Collection ” (Werner Jägers was Helene Beltracchi's grandfather) or a fake “Wilhelm Knops Collection”. Among other things, from the property of the art dealer Alfred Flechtheim, according to the false story of the counterfeiters, lost paintings by dearly traded artists are said to have found their way into Werner Jäger's collection.

Auction houses and gallery owners have ignored emerging doubts and failed to conduct further research.

The prosecution estimated the gang's profits at 16 million euros. In addition to his house in Freiburg, Beltracchi also owned one in Mèze , southern France.

Condemnation

Wolfgang Beltracchi was sentenced to six years in prison on October 27, 2011 by the Cologne Regional Court for professional gang fraud. Helene Beltracchi received a four-year prison sentence, Schulte-Kellinghaus five years. The convicts were granted open execution . The Beltracchis had already been in custody for 14 months at this point.

Wolfgang Beltracchi has to pay two million euros in damages out of his fortune to the Maltese company of the Israeli entrepreneur Vadim Shulman "Trasteco Limited", which he had damaged and which bought an alleged Campendonk painting at the Lempertz auction house . In this context, the auction house Lempertz had already repaid EUR 800,000 commission fees to the company.

On January 9, 2015, Wolfgang Beltracchi was released early from prison and the remainder of the sentence was suspended.

Number of forgeries and whereabouts

The Beltracchi case ended after nine days of the trial; only the forgery of 14 paintings was negotiated. The total number of fake images is unclear; no charges were brought against any possible sponsor. To ensure that the counterfeit paintings that have already been discovered do not reappear in the art trade after a few years, the Federal Association of German Art Auctioneers (BDK), together with the Berlin State Criminal Police Office, put a list of 53 known forgeries on the Internet. On the BDK website, under the heading “ Database of Critical Works ”, there is a “Catalog of the identified works of the so-called Jäger Collection”.

It can be assumed that there is a far greater number of counterfeits that are still in circulation. The art historian Werner Spies , who is himself involved in the forgery scandal, assumes 100 to 200 forged works. Beltracchi himself explained on the talk show 3 after 9 on January 31, 2014 that he had falsified around 300 pictures over a period of 40 years. Of these, around 200 to 230 are still in circulation as undetected forgeries. In the show Markus Lanz on February 19, 2015, he mentioned these numbers again. The documentation Beltracchi - The Art of Forgery also mentions around 300 pictures and drawings, with Beltracchi remarking that he could have painted as many as 2000 pictures and the market would have picked it up.

Exhibitions

Solo exhibitions

  • 2014: The counterfeiter of the century. Christine Brügger Gallery, Bern
  • 2015: FREEDOM. art room9, Munich / Germany
  • 2015: In the dark of the woods. Kurt Mühlenhaupt Museum , Bergsdorf
  • 2016: Nabocov . Christine Brügger Gallery, Bern
  • 2016: Free Method Painting. art room9, temporarily Basel (although the gallery art room 9 says that the term “Free Method Painting” is “by Wolfgang Beltracchi and the gallery owner Curtis Briggs (gallery art room9) based on the teaching of the art of acting according to Lee Strasberg 'Method Acting' ", it was essentially already used by the Heidelberg art historian Henry Keazor in 2014, when he wrote in a blog post on March 3, 2014 regarding a comparison of Beltracchi with a fictional character by Wolfgang Hildesheimer:" Also in this one Guiscard shows remarkable parallels to Beltracchi, who claims to put himself in the position of the artist who is to be falsified, this (as one might say based on Lee Strasberg's famous acting technique :) "method painting" ... " - Keazor used the term “Method Painting” again in relation to Beltracchi in his 2015 book “Deceptively Real”, p. 241; even the performance Beltra cchis on the occasion of the exhibition opening at Art Basel, where he presented himself as an "original" together with "copies" or "forgeries" by means of doubles, has a concrete model in two films by journalist Eberhard Reuss from 2015 and 2016 that Keazor reproduced and " Original ”and“ Copies ”also made arguments about which of them was the“ original ”- in line with the T-shirt“ I am (not) the real Beltracchi ”worn by Beltracchi during the performance).
  • 2017: Ballets Russes , Gallery Lilian Andrée, Riehen
  • 2018: Kairos. The right moment , Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana, Venice
  • 2018/2019: Kairos. The right moment , Barlach Halle K, Hamburg
  • 2019: Cairos. The right moment , Bank Austria-Kunstforum Wien, Vienna
  • 2019: Pictures from Cairos. The right moment, Esterházy Lockenhaus Palace, Burgenland
  • 2019: Cairos. The right moment , mSE Kunsthalle , Unterammergau

Group exhibitions

  • 1978: Great art exhibition. House of Art, Munich / Germany (June 17th to September 24th)
  • 2015: Mona , Galerie Kornfeld68 Projects. Berlin / Germany (September 12th to November 28th)

Art projects

  • Art on ice. With sets by Wolfgang Beltracchi
  • Kairos. The right moment

Film projects

In May 2012, WDR broadcast the documentary The Great Bluff. How to cash in with art by Anke Rebbert. The documentation should the fake coup of the century demystify and highlight the mechanisms of the art market.

The producers Ulrich Lenze and Ulrich Limmer were planning a comedy film about the Beltracchi case, which should have been released in 2013. Ulrich Limmer, author of the satire Schtonk! , would have written the script. However, the project was rejected by Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi without giving reasons.

The director and author Arne Birkenstock , son of Beltracchi's defender Reinhard Birkenstock , shot the documentary Beltracchi - The Art of Forgery in 2012 . The film project was funded by the Film- und Medienstiftung NRW and the federal government. The film started on March 6, 2014. The film won the 2014 German Film Prize in the Best Documentary Film category. The Association of German Film Critics nominated film in 2015 for the price of the German Film Critics Award for Best Documentary.

In 2014 the five-part documentary series Der Meisterfälscher was produced by 3sat . In each of the five parts, one person was portrayed by Wolfgang Beltracchi, Harald Schmidt in the style of Otto Dix , Daniel Kehlmann in the style of Giorgio de Chirico , Gloria von Thurn und Taxis in the style of Lucas Cranach the Elder , art student and daughter Franziska Beltracchi in the style by Sandro Botticelli and Christoph Waltz in the style of Max Beckmann . In January 2015, the documentary series was nominated for the Grimme Prize . In September 2015, this TV series was named the best European format by the EBU's Eurovision Creative Forum .

In 2015, the second season of the documentary series Der Meisterfälscher, produced by 3sat , was created with the title Der Meisterfälscher Returns. In the five parts of the second season, one person was portrayed two and four times by Wolfgang Beltracchi: Niccel and Emil Steinberger in the style of Joaquín Sorolla , Katarina Witt in the style of Tamara de Lempicka , Hape Kerkeling in the style of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec , Annette Dasch in the style of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Otto Waalkes in the style of Anthonis van Dyck . In 2016 the third season of the documentary series Der Meisterfälscher with the title Der Meisterfälscher enters its third round at 3sat . The guests of this round are the presenter Barbara Schöneberger , painted in the style of Gustav Klimt , the mountaineer Reinhold Messner in the style of Ferdinand Hodler , football player Mario Gómez in the style of Vincent van Gogh , the actress Marie Bäumer in the style of Pablo Picasso , and with the Author and presenter Ina Müller in the style of Henri Matisse meets art with cabaret and brush with beer.

literature

Web links

Commons : Wolfgang Beltracchi  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ a b c d Nobody wants it ( memento from September 23, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) art - the art magazine, September 22, 2011
  2. ↑ a b Art forger has to be imprisoned for six years . In: Spiegel Online from October 27, 2011
  3. ↑ Oh, how beautiful Panama is , by Stefan Koldehoff and Tobias Timm. In: Die Zeit , No. 44 of October 25, 2012, p. 60 (online)
  4. ^ Freiburg: Forger autobiography: This is how Wolfgang Beltracchi lived in Freiburg. In: badische-zeitung.de. Retrieved January 22, 2014 .
  5. ↑ https://www.srf.ch/sendung/persoenlich/der-kunstfaelscher-beltracchi-und-seine-komplizin
  6. ↑ https://suedbadisches-medienhaus.de/wolfgang-beltracchi-unter-den-wichtsten-deutschen-kuenstlern/
  7. ↑ Stefan Koldehoff, Tobias Timm: Who knows these pictures? , ZEIT Online, November 21, 2011
  8. ↑ Wolfgang Beltracchi. Great art in a new way . Handelsblatt online, accessed on May 22, 2015
  9. ^ Alfred Flechtheim - The Jäger Collection
  10. ↑ Stefan Koldehoff , Tobias Timm : False pictures, real money . Galiani, Berlin 2012, ISBN 978-3-86971-057-0 .
  11. ↑ Alexander Menden: Art market. Hunt for counterfeiters. A visit to "Art Analysis & Research" , Süddeutsche Zeitung on June 9, 2018
  12. ↑ Counterfeit scandal: the titanium white betrays the forger - art - FAZ
  13. ↑ Wolfgang Beltracchi: Portrait of the brilliant art forger - web.de
  14. ↑ Art forger Beltracchi: Oh, how beautiful Panama is. There is still great uncertainty on the art market , zeit.de from October 25, 2012
  15. ↑ Burkhard Müller: Beltracchi , in: Merkur - German Journal for European Thinking , March 2015, p. 16.
  16. ↑ By Peter Dittmar: Art purchases: The invisible market. Art purchases often take place in secret. This promotes illegal business , zeit.de of September 7, 2017
  17. ↑ René Scheu: «In today's art, beauty is the real scandal» | NZZ . In: Neue Zürcher Zeitung . ( nzz.ch [accessed on August 17, 2018]).
  18. ↑ Iris Radisch, Adam Soboczynski: "We enjoyed the luxury." , Interview with the Beltracchi couple zeit.de, January 23, 2014, accessed on February 25, 2014
  19. ↑ Ralph Gerstenberg: The abysses of the art market , Deutschlandradio , September 30, 2012, accessed on December 12, 2012
  20. ↑ Art forger is already planning his new life . In: Express of September 27, 2011
  21. ↑ Niklas Maak: Correcting Fate , faz.net, accessed on October 11, 2012
  22. ↑ Inclusion with angels , buecher.de, accessed on February 17, 2018
  23. ^ "Temple Law Review" ( Memento of December 8, 2015 in the Internet Archive ) of December 12, 2013
  24. ↑ Art forger Beltracchi has to pay himself In: Spiegel Online , December 11, 2012
  25. ↑ BDK publishes all identified works of the Freiburg art forger Wolfgang Beltracchi ( memento from September 19, 2016 in the Internet Archive )
  26. ^ "Wisch und Weg" In: Der Tagesspiegel Online, December 6, 2011
  27. ↑ stern, No. 8, February 16, 2012: Gruner + Jahr AG & CO KG printing and publishing house. P. 136
  28. ↑ NDR Talk 3nach9 with Helene and Wolfgang Beltracchi
  29. ↑ Der Ehrliche Fälscher , Berner Zeitung online, accessed on May 3, 2015
  30. ↑ u. a. Euromaxx. Life and Culture in Europe ( Memento of June 4, 2016 in the Internet Archive ), first broadcast May 12, 2015 | 22:30 - 23:00 UTC, accessed on May 20, 2015
  31. ^ Der Gestaltenwandler: Wolfgang Beltracchi presents “Free Method Painting” , kunst-in-bildern.de, accessed on May 20, 2016
  32. ↑ [1] , art-room9.de, accessed on June 28, 2016
  33. ↑ [2] , arthistoricum.net, accessed on June 28, 2016
  34. ↑ [3] , last accessed on June 28, 2016
  35. ↑ The hippie and the expressionists . Spiegel Online, accessed June 4, 2016
  36. ^ Great Art Exhibition Munich 1978. House of Art June 17 - September 24, 1978. Official catalog.
  37. ↑ Mona | Gallery Kornfeld | Artsy accessed June 4, 2016
  38. ↑ https://www.telezueri.ch/zuerinews/art-on-ice-premiere-im-rahmen-der-kunst-133413499
  39. ↑ CAIROS. The right moment. In: ZOTT Artspace. Retrieved December 23, 2019 .
  40. ↑ The Great Bluff ( Memento from July 2, 2012 in the Internet Archive ), wdr.de from May 25, 2012
  41. ↑ Beltracchi als Komödie ( Memento of January 16, 2014 in the Internet Archive ), chilli-freiburg.de, accessed on February 16, 2015
  42. ↑ Beltracchi - The Art of Forgery , fruitmarket.de forwarded by arnebirkenstock.de, accessed on October 11, 2015
  43. ↑ “Der Meisterfälscher” awarded as the best format ( memento from September 19, 2015 in the Internet Archive ), persoenlich.com, September 16, 2015, accessed on September 22, 2015
  44. ↑ 3sat: The master forger returns! ( Memento from January 20, 2018 in the Internet Archive )
  45. ↑ 3sat: The master forger enters the third round ( Memento from September 9, 2017 in the Internet Archive )
personal data
SURNAME Beltracchi, Wolfgang
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Fischer, Wolfgang (birth name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German painter and convicted criminal
DATE OF BIRTH 4th February 1951
PLACE OF BIRTH Höxter