On show in a historic palazzo in the central Italian city of Pisa this week are about 450 works arranged by some headline-grabbing names: Gustav Klimt, Salvador Dalí, Andy Warhol, and others. Alongside them are paint tubes, paintbrushes and cans of spray paint that reflect the versatility of the works’ creators.
The catch: The pieces are all fakes.
The works are among the more than 2,100 pieces seized by Italy’s specialized art theft squad over the past year in an effort to break up a Europe-wide network of art forgers and dealers accused of selling counterfeit pieces to unsuspecting buyers.
The operation was among the biggest busts of counterfeit art in the last 15 years, Lorenzo Galizia, who heads the carabinieri art theft squad in Rome, said in a telephone interview. Angela Teresa Camelio, the Pisa prosecutor overseeing the case, put the potential market value of the seized works at about 250 million euro, or $265 million.
Many of the works were attributed to the artist Banksy, the elusive street artist. Captain Galizia said that an entire “Banksy” exhibition in the central Italian town of Cortona was shut down after his officers determined that all of the pieces were fake.
“There was nothing real there,” Captain Galizia said. “It was absurd.”
The seized pieces include paintings, drawings, prints and sculptures, and 38 people have been placed under investigation on suspicion of conspiracy to deal in illegal goods, and of the forgery and sale of illegal artworks, according to Italian officials, who announced the dismantling of the counterfeit network this week.
The case has involved suspects in Belgium, France, Italy and Spain, Ms. Camelio said, and further developments could broaden the scope of the investigation.
The carabinieri named the case “Operation Caryatid” after a sketch, purportedly by the Italian artist Amadeo Modigliani, that was in the first lot of about 200 works seized from a Pisa businessman in March 2023, a confiscation that led to the investigation into the Europe-wide ring.
The operation was coordinated at the European level by the Italian desk of the European Union Agency for Criminal Justice Cooperation, better known as Eurojust. The art police zeroed in on forgers mostly working in Italy and, in the case of Banksy, in Spain.
They tracked down fake works in auction houses throughout Italy, according to Eurojust, and found others on auction house websites. The investigation also involves dealers who may have acted as go-betweens.
Because the case is still underway, officials said, no formal charges have yet been brought, and prosecutors did not release the names of the people under investigation or the auction houses involved.
Some had probably acted “in good faith,” Captain Galizia said, while others appeared to be complicit in the fraud.
Italian officials noted in a news release that one auction house in Pisa had peddled works that it claimed were by Wassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian for about €4,000 each, even though works by such artists “normally sell for millions of euro at international auction.”
The seized artworks will either be destroyed or used for “didactic purposes,” Captain Galizia said.
The pieces on display this week are being exhibited in a riverside palazzo that houses Pisa’s state archives. Arranged by artist, the works include copies of sculptures by Alberto Giacometti, oil paintings by Mondrian and prints by Warhol.
In a way, said Jaleh Bahrabadi, the state archives’ director, it was fitting that a place entrusted with preserving history’s primary sources should showcase fake art, putting something authentic alongside something spurious.
“It’s incredible, but beautiful,” she said.
A table in the center of a room lined with “Banksy” works reveals the tricks of the forgers’ trade: tubes of paint, spray cans and a Banksy rubber-stamp used to “authenticate” the works, one of around 50 such stamps investigators confiscated. A display case features dozens of fake “certificates of authenticity.”
Many of the seized Banksy works were stamped “Dismaland,” the dystopian theme park that the artist opened in 2015 near Bristol, England, his hometown.
“If they had that stamp, they were automatically false,” said Stefano Antonelli, an art historian who was tasked by the carabinieri with verifying hundreds of “Banksy” works that turned out to be fakes.
The artist never created works stamped “Dismaland,” said Mr. Antonelli, who founded the Rome-based Banksy Study Center and Archive Foundation,
Nonetheless, he said, many pieces sold.
Mr. Antonelli said he believed this was the biggest operation of Banksy fakes ever uncovered in Italy.
“There are really a lot of works,” he said, in part because Banksy’s pieces are easier to falsify than those of other artists.
Many were sold for a fraction of the price that originals would get on the art market, he said, and several were not copies at all, but “interpretations” of Banksys.
Such fakes are common, as Pest Control Office, which represents Banksy, warns on its website. It offers a piece of advice to anyone looking to pieces credited to the artist: “Always remain skeptical.”
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