A unique collection of art went on display at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London yesterday — all of it fake.
More than 100 forged paintings and sculptures seized by the capital’s Metropolitan Police are on show for the first time, including fake antiquities and works attributed to Giacometti and contemporary British artist Banksy.
If they were real, the collection would be worth more than £4 million (US$6.5 million), organizers said.
Many of the items come from the workshop of the most diverse art forger ever known. Shaun Greenhalgh was jailed for four years and eight months in 2007, but not before he produced an astonishing array of fakes in multiple disciplines.
One of his most notorious works is the Amarna Princess, which was bought by a museum in Bolton, northern England, for £400,000. It thought it was a rare piece from the era of the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaten.
The forger also imitated paintings by the English painter L.S. Lowry, as well as Roman vessels and medieval jewelry.
“Greenhalgh was probably the most diverse art forger that we have never heard of,” said Detective Sergeant Vernon Rapley, head of the Metropolitan Police’s Art and Antiques Unit, which has put on the exhibition.
“He created objects of so many different styles and from so many periods that he was not really detected,” Rapley said, noting that he worked for 17 years without being caught.
The forgers featured in the exhibition often certificates of authenticity signed by experts to help sell their works, some of which are on display alongside the items themselves.
Others, such as brothers Robert and Brian Thwaites, even went so far as to stick bits of newspaper from the Victorian era behind fake paintings attributed to an artist of that period, John Anster Fitzgerald.
The “Metropolitan Police Service’s Investigation of Fakes and Forgeries” runs until Feb. 7.
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