Art

The Greatest Fake-Art Scam in History?

One of his forgeries hung in a show at the Met. Steve Martin bought another of his fake paintings. Still others have sold at auction for multi-million-dollar prices. So how did a self-described German hippie pull off one of the biggest, most lucrative cons in art-world history? And how did he get nailed?
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Nobody in Freiburg could remember a party quite like it. The date was September 22, 2007, and Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi, affluent newcomers to this lively university town near Germany’s Black Forest, had invited friends and neighbors to celebrate a milestone. Workers had just put the finishing touches on their $7 million villa, after 19 months of extensive renovations. Lanterns lit up the cobblestone walkway to the hillside house, a five-level minimalist structure with a glass and Siberian-larch-wood façade, steel beams, pastel-colored tile floors, and contemporary paintings and sculptures filling every room. The staff of Freiburg’s luxurious Colombi Hotel—where the Beltracchis had lodged in a $700-a-night penthouse suite when they were in town during the remodeling—had prepared the ample food and drink, including magnums of fine champagne. The Beltracchis had even flown in a celebrated four-member flamenco band from Granada to dance and sing for their 100 guests.

Spanish ballads floated across gardens and courtyards to the glass pool house. Inside it, the party-goers ogled a large painting by the French Cubist Fernand Léger. Others admired art installations throughout the villa, including Baghdad Table, an intricate stylized aluminum model of the Iraqi capital by the Israeli industrial designer Ezri Tarazi. From the terraces, they took in the lights of the medieval city far below. Wolfgang, a long-haired, 56-year-old Albrecht Dürer look-alike, and Helene, an ingénue-like woman of 49 with waist-length brown hair cut into girlish bangs, had spared no expense to announce their arrival on Freiburg’s scene. “Everybody was blown away,” remembers Michel Torres, who had hired the flamenco dancers on the Beltracchis’ behalf and who had befriended the couple during the years that they lived in southern France. “It was unforgettable.”

Yet mingling with admiration for the Beltracchis’ style and taste was a feeling of unease. None of the architects, lawyers, university professors, and other Freiburg residents knew the first thing about where their hosts had come from, nor how they had amassed their wealth. “One [German] woman asked me, ‘Who is this guy? Is he a rock star?’” recalls Magali Richard-Malbos, another of the Beltracchis’ French friends. “And I said, ‘No, no. He’s an artist, a collector.’”

Strictly speaking, that was true. It would be another three years before the truth about what kind of artist Beltracchi is came out.

‘The big question every reader will want to know is, how and why does a person become an art forger?” Wolfgang Beltracchi tells me. His question is just a tad modest: Beltracchi, in fact, masterminded one of the most audacious and lucrative art frauds in postwar European history. For decades, this self-taught painter, who had once scratched out a living in Amsterdam, Morocco, and other spots along the hippie trail, had passed off his own paintings as newly discovered masterpieces by Max Ernst, André Derain, Max Pechstein, Georges Braque, and other Expressionists and Surrealists from the early 20th century. Helene Beltracchi, along with two accomplices—including her sister—had sold the paintings for six and seven figures through auction houses in Germany and France, including Sotheby’s and Christie’s. One phony Max Ernst had hung for months in a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Steve Martin purchased a fake Heinrich Campendonk through the Paris gallery Cazeau-Béraudière for $860,000 in 2004; the French magazine-publishing mogul Daniel Filipacchi paid $7 million for a phony Max Ernst, titled The Forest (2), in 2006. For the 14 fakes that the Beltracchis were eventually charged with selling, their estimated take was around €16 million, or $22 million. Their total haul over the years must have been far more.

Beltracchi working on a fake Max Ernst earlier this year in the German town of Bergisch Gladbasch., By Joshua Hammer.

I was meeting with the couple last winter in the dining room of their lawyer’s house in Sürth, an affluent suburb of Cologne. Large windows looked over a snow-dappled garden and, just beyond, the Rhine River, clogged on this bright and frigid February morning with chunks of ice. After complicated negotiations, they had agreed to tell me their story.

Beltracchi, who was wearing jeans and a pale-blue fleece, still appeared every bit the hippie rogue. His shoulder-length blond hair, thinning on top, along with his blond mustache and graying goatee, made him look something like a swashbuckler out of The Three Musketeers, with a touch of Mephistopheles. For 61, he seemed surprisingly youthful, an appearance enhanced by the upper- and lower-eyelid lifts he had received in a clinic in southern France six years ago. Helene, clad in a blue knit turtleneck sweater, her thick tresses cascading to her waist, had clearly done her best to retain her girlish appeal. She looked at her husband adoringly, as he began to explain what drew him into a life of crime.

“Obviously one has to invest a lot of time to achieve success by painting one’s own works,” he told me, displaying a healthy amount of what the Germans call Selbstgefälligkeit, or self-satisfaction. “I was always a guy who wanted to be out and about . . . For me, life is on the outside, not the inside.”

Beltracchi, whose original name was Wolfgang Fischer, was born in 1951 in Höxter, a village in Westphalia, in west-central Germany. His father was a house painter and a restorer of churches who supplemented his income by producing cheap copies of Rembrandts, Picassos, and Cézannes. Beltracchi inherited his dad’s skill with a brush, and took it to a new level: at 14 he astonished his father, he says, by painting a passable Picasso in a single day—“a mother and child from the Blue Period”—and adding original flourishes. Three years later, he enrolled in an art academy in Aachen, but ended up skipping most of his classes. It was the late 1960s, “the hippie time,” Beltracchi says. He grew his hair long, purchased a Harley-Davidson, and smoked hashish and dropped L.S.D. with U.S. soldiers stationed at a nearby NATO base on their way home from Vietnam. “Many of them had gone a little bit crazy from the war,” Beltracchi recalls. “Some of them became my friends.”

During the 1970s and early 80s, young Wolfgang Fischer led a nomadic life—like Peter Fonda in Easy Rider, Helene says. He spent a year and a half on a beach in Morocco, and lived in a commune in Spain. He drifted around Barcelona, London, and Paris, buying and selling paintings at antique markets. He lived on a houseboat in Amsterdam, where he put on psychedelic light shows at the Paradiso nightclub. He enjoyed some early success as a painter in his own right, contributing three works to a prestigious art exhibition in Munich in 1978. But, by his own admission, he was more drawn to the outlaw life. One day during his wanderings, he bought a pair of winter landscapes by an unknown 18th-century Dutch painter for $250 apiece. Fischer had noticed that tableaus from the period which depicted ice skaters sold for five times the price of those without ice skaters. In his atelier, he carefully painted a pair of skaters into the scenes and resold the canvases for a considerable profit. Thirty years ago, fakes were even harder to detect than they are now, he tells me. “They weren’t the first ones I made, but they were an important step.” Soon he was purchasing old wooden frames and painting ice-skating scenes from scratch, passing them off as the works of old masters.

In 1981, Fischer made a stab at holding a conventional job. With a Düsseldorf real-estate salesman, he formed an art-dealing firm, Kürten & Fischer Fine Arts GmbH. “I had to sit around in an office, and I realized very quickly that I hated it,” Beltracchi says. He was soon squeezed out of the business on the grounds of negligence by his partner and, faced with money problems, he ratcheted up the pace of his forgeries.

He had moved from old masters to early-20th-century French and German artists, partly because it was easier to find pigments and frames from that period. The forgeries came in “waves,” he says, depending on his need for cash. “Sometimes I’d paint 10 works in a month, and then go for six months without doing any.” Among his specialties were paintings by the German Expressionist Johannes Molzahn, who had fled the Nazis and taken refuge in the U.S. in 1938; Fischer sold as many as a dozen purported Molzahns, which fetched up to $45,000. (One was even bought by the artist’s widow.) He says he insinuated three fake paintings, by three different artists, into a single auction held by art dealer Jean-Louis Picard in Paris in 1991.

In the mid-1980s, Fischer also began painting phony works supposedly by Heinrich Campendonk, another German Expressionist from the Lower Rhine. Condemned by the Nazis as a “degenerate artist,” he had fled into exile in the Netherlands shortly after their rise to power. During this period, Andrea Firmenich, a young German art scholar in Bonn, was assembling a comprehensive catalogue of Campendonk’s art with the assistance of Campendonk’s son; Beltracchi says “five or six” of his own forgeries ended up in Firmenich’s catalogue raisonné. “This was really brilliant,” says Ralph Jentsch, a modern-art expert who would later play a critical role in exposing the Beltracchis’ fraud. “It shows the criminal potential of this guy. . . . It also shows how careless [Firmenich] was.” For her part, Firmenich counters that Campendonk’s output was unusually vast (more than 1,200 works), that two other authorities consulted on the catalogue, and that “no expert is immune from mistakes.” She declines to go into further detail. “The damage to my person is so big that I am not able to say anything ‘official,’” she wrote to me in an e-mail. “The damage for the experts of art is so enormous, and the public understanding of Beltracchi as a hero so absurd, that I hope you can understand my opinion.”

It was also during this time, hanging out in an artists’ café, that Fischer made the acquaintance of Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, whom he liked to introduce as Count Otto. Lacking expertise in art, says Beltracchi, but eager to be involved in the art world, Schulte-Kellinghaus would soon be enlisted as a front man in the painter’s escalating scheme.

Helene Beltracchi was not impressed by Wolfgang Fischer the first time they met. It was in February 1992, and Helene—a sometime antique dealer who had grown up in Bergisch-Gladbach, near Cologne—was living with her longtime boyfriend and working for a Cologne film-production company. Fischer, at the time, was sharing a large house he’d purchased and restored in nearby Viersen with his ex-girlfriend and their four-year-old son. The bottom had dropped out of the art market during the Gulf War of 1990–91, and Fischer had put his art-forgery career on hold. He was then writing and shooting a self-financed documentary about pirates, which he had hoped to sell to European television. With money earned from his forgeries, Fischer had purchased an 80-foot sailboat and hired a five-man crew. He was preparing to sail around the world, from Majorca to Madagascar to South America, following the careers of historical and contemporary buccaneers, from Sir Francis Drake to the pirates of the South China Sea.

Helene’s boss was a backer of the project, and one day Wolfgang showed up at the production house to cut some initial footage. Helene first met him in an editing trailer. “I thought the guy was a real bigmouth, a lunatic,” she says. But during a weeklong seminar on 16-millimeter film production organized by Fischer, “I saw that he was an absolute perfectionist, intelligent, educated, and a totally open, social human being,” she says. Fischer was smitten by the attractive, girlish 34-year-old: “The first time I saw Helene, I said to myself, I’m going to marry this woman and have children with her,” he tells me. At the end of the seminar, she broke up with her partner and moved in with Fischer. Around the same time, the pirate documentary collapsed in rancor, leaving both the boat and crew stranded in Majorca. (Helene says Fischer gave away the boat, at a loss of at least $100,000, and paid off the crew.) In February 1993 they married, and Wolfgang took Helene Beltracchi’s last name. Their daughter, Franziska, was born nine months later.

Helene Beltracchi tells me that she discovered the truth about Wolfgang’s secret career “the first or second day” of their relationship. They were at his home in Viersen, and she noticed the paintings of a number of famous 20th-century artists hanging on the walls. “I asked him, ‘Are these all actually real?’ . . . . And he said, ‘They’re all mine . . . I made them.’ I said, ‘So you’re an art counterfeiter?’ And he said, ‘Exactly. That’s my work. That’s my métier.’”

Shortly after the revelation, Wolfgang asked Helene to become his accomplice. It was 1992, and after three years of art-market stagnation, prices were rising again, fueled by an influx of money from Japan. Wolfgang had decided to sell some fakes, and—having fallen out “over business matters” with his former partner Schulte-Kellinghaus—he needed a new go-between. “My husband said to me, ‘Do you want to do something?’” Helene recalls. “I thought, Wow. Let me think about it. I knew what it was, that it was illegal.” But she said yes. Soon afterward, she notified Lempertz, a high-end auction house in Cologne, that she had a painting for sale by the early-20th-century French Cubist Georges Valmier. “It was hanging on the wall [in Viersen], and they sent their expert,” Helene remembers. “She looked for a few minutes, said it was wonderful, and then asked ‘How much do you want for it?’” They settled on 20,000 deutsch marks. It was a modest amount, but as the art market heated up, the Beltracchis watched the pseudo-Valmier’s value soar; a few years later it sold at auction in New York for $1 million.

Helene found her foray to the dark side exciting, and craved more. “The first time, it was like being in a movie,” she says. “It was like it had nothing to do with me. It was another person—an art dealer, whom I was playing.” She couldn’t believe how easy it had been to dupe the auction house. “Normally, a person would think that these experts would study the painting and look for proof of its provenance. [The authenticator] asked two or three questions. She was gone in 10 minutes.” (An attorney for Lempertz disputes Helene’s version of events, but confirms that the auction house did indeed sell the painting.

Three years later, Helene introduced the art world to the “collection” she claimed to have inherited from her recently deceased industrialist grandfather, Werner Jägers, who had been born in Belgium but made his fortune in Cologne. Jägers was indeed Helene’s maternal grandfather; he had abandoned her grandmother after World War II, Helene says, and she had only a single brief encounter with him, shortly before his death in 1992 at age 80. The story she told gallery owners and collectors was that one of Jägers’s friends in the 1920s and 30s had been a well-known Jewish art dealer and collector named Alfred Flechtheim. In 1933, months after Adolf Hitler came to power, Flechtheim fled into exile in Paris, and the Nazis seized his galleries in Düsseldorf and Berlin. But just before this, according to Helene, Flechtheim sold many works at bargain-basement prices to Jägers, who hid them in his country home in the Eifel mountains, near Cologne, safe from Nazi plundering.

In fact, though Jägers and Flechtheim were prewar neighbors in Cologne, their paths almost certainly never crossed; Jägers was 34 years younger than Flechtheim and would have been just out of his teens when he allegedly amassed his art collection; moreover, according to Helene, he was a member of the Nazi Party in the 1930s and was thus unlikely to have been an admirer of “degenerate” art and good friends with a Jewish art dealer. But those details were never questioned by art-world experts. Helene says that she came up with the fake history on the spot after a Christie’s expert asked her to explain the provenance of Girl with Swan, purportedly by Heinrich Campendonk. “I hadn’t planned anything,” she insists. But the Jägers story “made sense. My grandfather had his business in Cologne. Flechtheim had a gallery in Cologne. My grandfather lived in Krefeld, and so did the artist. So I could easily say they were all connected.” To lend her account credibility, Wolfgang staged a black-and-white photograph of Helene impersonating her grandmother, Josefine Jägers. Wearing a black dress and a strand of pearls, “Josefine” posed in front of several paintings from the “Jägers collection.” The photo was slightly out of focus, and printed on prewar developing paper.

Helene Beltracchi, posing as her grandmother, in a pseudo-antique photo staged to lend credibility to the fictional provenances of Wolfgang Beltracchi's forgeries. Hanging on the wall at left is a fake Fernand Léger; at far right is a phony Max Ernst., From Polizei/dapd/ddp images/AP.

Girl with Swan featured prominently in a Christie’s auction of German and Austrian art in October 1995. In the catalogue, Campendonk expert Andrea Firmenich praised the artist’s use of color and Christie’s notified its customers that Firmenich had confirmed the work’s authenticity. To bolster his hoax, Wolfgang Beltracchi had pasted on the back of the frame, for the first time, a label from the “Sammlung Flechtheim”—the Flechtheim Collection. The label displayed a caricature of Alfred Flechtheim, the Jewish collector who had supposedly provided Jägers with so many paintings. Christie’s dutifully identified in its auction catalogue the provenance of Girl with Swan as “Alfred Flechtheim, Düsseldorf; Werner Jägers, Cologne.” It was sold for £67,500—at the time, more than $100,000. “This was a highly unusal case,” Christie’s responded when asked about this incident and the Beltracchi case more broadly, adding “We have taken all appropriate steps to resolve this matter.”

In 1995, the past threatened to catch up to Wolfgang Beltracchi. As subsequently reported in the German newsmagazine Der Spiegel, a scientific investigation initiated in Munich by the buyer of a purported Molzahn called Erigone und Maira had determined that that painting, and two others, were counterfeit; one, called Linear Color Composition, supposedly painted in the early 1920s, contained a pigment invented only in 1957. Police suspected that Beltracchi and Schulte-Kellinghaus had been involved in selling those fraudulent works. Because the five-year statute of limitations had run out, however, they could summon them only as material witnesses in an investigation that focused instead on the Berlin art dealer who had handled the sales of the bogus Molzahns. In mid-1996, the police brought Schulte-Kellinghaus in for questioning, and began looking for Beltracchi.

That July, the Beltracchis abruptly sold their house in Viersen for $1.7 million, purchased a Winnebago, repainted the interior pink and turquoise, and headed for Spain, then the South of France. Years later, Wolfgang claimed he’d made the move because he and Helene’s then two-year-old daughter, Franziska, was ailing and needed a change of air. “We weren’t running away,” he tells me, although conveniently, they informed hardly anyone of their final destination. A neighbor in Viersen told the police only that they had gone “to travel around the world.” As far as the German police were concerned, Beltracchi had vanished.

The Beltracchis parked their Winnebago at a campground in Marseillan, beside the Bay of Thau, famed for its oyster beds, and quickly drew around them a circle of artists, writers, and other creative types. Michel Torres, a teacher in Marseillan, met Wolfgang for the first time at the local school. “He showed up in an enormous camping car, and he said, ‘My son doesn’t speak a word of French. Can you help him out?’” Torres recalls. “I knew all the painters in the area, and I started introducing him around.” Two years later, Beltracchi purchased a dilapidated 1858 farmhouse and hired Pierre Malbos, a carpenter, blacksmith, and furniture restorer, to make doors and windows. Malbos was entranced by Wolfgang’s roguish charm. “He had a hat and a flowery shirt and long flowing blond hair. . . . He told me stories about smoking dope, riding around on a Harley, hanging out with the U.S. troops,” Malbos says. “He struck me as a person who had always lived . . . on the borderline.”

The Beltracchis clearly had a lot of money, though they remained vague about its origins. They spent much of their time browsing in local galleries and antique shops, landscaping their garden, and entertaining in restaurants or on the terrace of their villa. “I think his attitude was, I don’t want to work too hard, but I want to be rich,” says Malbos. “They knew how to live well, and they were generous. . . . We would take weekend trips to Barcelona, visit museums, buy antique furniture.” Michel Torres sometimes joined the family on vacations—including a stay in an 18-room rented villa with an Olympic-size swimming pool, nestled on the slopes of a jungle-covered mountain overlooking the sea, on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe. The Beltracchis remained there for six months, says Torres, sailing, scuba diving, and sunning themselves on the beach.

What he paints when he’s not forging: The Fall of the Angels, an original work by Wolfgang Beltracchi., By Joshua Hammer.

Their French estate, Domaine des Rivettes, became the Beltracchis’ passion. On a windswept February afternoon, Torres took me around the property, in the heart of the wine country of Languedoc. We wandered through neatly planted rows of cypress trees, vineyards, and olive groves—and stopped to admire a sculpture garden and a pond filled with Japanese koi. “When they moved in here, this was all a swamp, a big mess,” Torres said. Beltracchi had installed a small mausoleum on the property because, he told his friend Pierre, “I want to be buried here.” We entered the main house through a cobblestone courtyard and walked into the couple’s sunlit master bedroom, tiled with pink and beige Burgundian sandstone. Nothing had been disturbed since the Beltracchis’ last visit, in the summer of 2010, with German translations of Patricia Highsmith, a Led Zeppelin CD, and DVDs of Ice Age and Ocean’s 13 strewn across nightstands beside a four-poster bed. On the walls hung large, colorful canvases by a local artist named André Cervera, whom Beltracchi had helped promote. Two flights up was Beltracchi’s atelier, where he painted his forgeries. “I never saw him do any of them,” Torres insisted. The wood-beamed studio was dominated by a work in progress, signed by Beltracchi himself: The Fall of the Angels, reminiscent of bad underground comic-book art, which depicted a blood-soaked seraph plummeting to Earth, against a sea of tortured faces. “It’s an enormous project; it took him two years to do this,” Torres told me, gazing with admiration. I found the painting almost impossible to look at.

The Beltracchis lived like country squires at the Domaine des Rivettes. The art market was booming, and Wolfgang needed to sell only two or three forgeries a year to support the couple’s extravagant lifestyle (though sometimes, in a burst of activity, he would dash off five paintings in a week). Beltracchi would typically spend a couple of hours on a painting, he told me; sometimes “two days,” if it was a large canvas. Then Helene, her sister, Jeanette Spurzem, or Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, who had rejoined his old friend, would deliver the paintings to Christie’s, Sotheby’s, Lempertz, and other houses for the spring and fall auctions.

Wolfgang, says his wife, had an almost “autistic” sense of how to imitate an artist’s technique. But he also, she insists, prepared himself. “He reads about the artist, travels to where he lived, steeps himself in the literature. He’s like an actor.” Wolfgang explains: “You have to know about the artist’s past, present, and future. You have to know how the painter moved and how much time it took him to complete a work.” However, it seems that Beltracchi sometimes employed a simpler method. Aya Soika, a Berlin-based specialist in the German Expressionist Max Pechstein, says that Beltracchi used a projector to cast images of Pechstein watercolors and ink drawings onto canvas, then traced larger copies, using oil paint. (Beltracchi disputes her claim.) “He altered the size, but the proportions were exactly the same,” says Soika, who examined two fake Pechsteins, Seine Bridge with Freight Barges and Reclining Nude with Cat.

By the early 2000s, Beltracchi’s fakes were selling at auction to collectors for the high six figures, sometimes more. Steve Martin paid $860,000 in 2004 for a counterfeit Campendonk called Landscape with Horses, then sold it through Christie’s 18 months later at a $240,000 loss, still unaware that he’d been in possession of a fake. In 2007, a French gallery sold Portrait of a Woman with Hat, a semi-nude allegedly by the Dutch Fauvist painter Kees van Dongen, to a wealthy Dutch collector, Willem Cordia, for $3.8 million. Other forgeries wound up in the hands of galleries, museums, and private collectors in places as far flung as Tokyo and Montevideo, Uruguay. In addition to imitating the works of second-tier Expressionists and Cubists such as Louis Marcoussis, Oskar Moll, and Moïse Kisling, Beltracchi embarked on a more dangerous business: forging the works of great artists such as Fernand Léger, Georges Braque, and Max Ernst. While they would command higher prices, these paintings also ran the risk of inviting closer scrutiny. Beltracchi says he was especially drawn to Ernst, because “physically, he resembled my father.”

Despite the higher stakes, or perhaps because of them, art experts eagerly jumped on the bandwagon. Indeed, the Beltracchis often prophylactically secured statements of authenticity from leading authorities to quell potential doubts before offering the paintings to auction houses and galleries. Werner Spies, now 75, the former director of the modern-art museum at the Pompidou Center in Paris and the world’s leading Max Ernst authority, made a pilgrimage to Domaine des Rivettes in early 2004 to inspect The Forest (2). The large canvas depicted a sun of concentric circles of red, blue, white, and yellow, rising over a coppice of cypress trees. Beltracchi had painted the large work in two days, employing the same method that Ernst often used: rubbing a spatula over blocks of rough wood, seashells, and other found objects that he had placed beneath the painted canvas. With Wolfgang making himself scarce—he never revealed himself to potential buyers or experts, he says—Helene escorted Spies into the couple’s bedroom. The phony Ernst hung on the wall behind the bed. “Spies came in, took one look, and was overcome with excitement,” Helene says. He declared that there was no doubt The Forest (2) was authentic.

Spies—who did not return e-mails or phone calls asking for comment—quickly put Helene in touch with a Swiss art dealer, who triumphantly sold Max Ernst’s long-lost The Forest (2) to a company called Salomon Trading, for about €1.8 million, or $2.3 million. The painting passed to a Paris gallery, Cazeau-Béraudière, which sold it in 2006 to Daniel Filipacchi for $7 million. “The widow of Max Ernst [Dorothea Tanning, who died this past January] saw the painting and said that it was the most beautiful picture that Max Ernst had ever painted,” Helene gloats today. She and Wolfgang were amazed by the gullibility of those they had duped, says Helene. “We’re still laughing about it.”

Several months after the Beltracchis’ housewarming party in Freiburg, something unexpected happened, a small glitch that would have bigger ramifications. In November 2006, Helene Beltracchi’s sister had brought Lempertz another fake Campendonk that Wolfgang had dashed off in Marseillan. A Malta-based company, Trasteco Ltd., purchased Red Picture with Horses at Lempertz’s auction for €2.8 million ($3.6 million at that time)—the highest price ever paid for a work by the Netherlands-based German Expressionist. Trasteco wired the money to Lempertz, which took its cut, then passed the balance to the Beltracchis. Then, unexpectedly, Trasteco demanded that Lempertz provide a certificate of authenticity. It didn’t exist. “Normally, we would get the expertise done ourselves, but in this case Lempertz had promised to do it, and they didn’t. They were not serious people,” says Helene, indignantly. (It’s an odd judgment coming from a career criminal who spent the better part of 20 years cheating everyone she came across. “Simply outrageous!” says a lawyer for Lempertz, countering that the firm had made no such promise to Helene Beltracchi, and had indeed conducted its own due diligence before the auction.) Unsatisfied with the response from Lempertz, Trasteco hired Andrea Firmenich to examine the painting. Firmenich, says modern-art expert Ralph Jentsch, had previously authenticated a number of Campendonks which he now believes were painted by Beltracchi. This time, however, she went to unusual lengths to ascertain the painting’s provenance.

In October 2008, Jentsch was asked to examine the “Flechtheim Collection” label affixed to the back of Red Picture with Horses. Jentsch knew instantly that the label was a phony. He had seen the gallery’s genuine labels. Furthermore, he says, “Flechtheim was a connoisseur, a collector, a man of taste. There is no way he would have permitted such a silly portrait.” Jentsch’s judgment confirmed what Firmenich had learned after submitting the painting for chemical analysis. In a Munich laboratory, chemists determined that the work contained a pigment, titanium white, that did not exist in 1914. Immediately, Trasteco launched a civil suit against Lempertz, demanding its €2.8 million back. (A Cologne court ruled in late September that Lempertz, which had already returned €800,000 to Trasteco, had judged the painting to be a Campendonk “without sufficient basis,” and must now pay back the other €2 million.)

Today Beltracchi says that he always went to great lengths to ensure the pigments he used were not anachronistic, but that “it was impossible” not to slip up sometimes. “We were shocked,” says Wolfgang, who learned about the lawsuit through Lempertz’s managing director, Henrik Hanstein. “We thought, The game is over.

“Yes, yes, certainly,” interjects Helene. “It was finished.”

“Then came the domino effect,” says Wolfgang.

Within two weeks Jentsch located 15 more paintings with fraudulent Flechtheim labels. One was The Forest (2), by Max Ernst, prominently displayed in the Manhattan apartment of publishing magnate Filipacchi. Reached by phone in Paris, Filipacchi, who owns many Max Ernsts, told me that he “couldn’t believe it at first,” when he learned the truth about The Forest (2) from a newspaper article about the emerging fraud. “I loved this painting. It was one of the best Max Ernsts that I have seen, and since Werner Spies provided a certificate [of authenticity] and said it was good, I was very surprised.” The two men had several conversations after the fraud was revealed. “It was very embarrassing for him, very serious, and I couldn’t believe that he was wrong,” Filipacchi added. He placed the fake Ernst in storage in New York, and was tempted, he said, to drop the matter. “But the German police called me, and they said that I should sue these people who sold the painting to me, that if I don’t sue I will look like an accomplice.” The Paris gallery Cazeau-Béraudière offered to settle the suit by giving Filipacchi an authentic Max Ernst from 1928 and two paintings by the Romanian Surrealist Victor Brauner, but Filipacchi has rejected the offer.

The Berlin Landeskriminalamt’s art-fraud division occupies the fourth floor of a stark, modern office building next to the mothballed Tempelhof Airport, constructed by the Nazi regime in the 1930s and famous as the site of the 1948 Berlin Airlift. It is the largest of three police units in all of Germany that specialize in art fraud—the others are in Munich and Stuttgart—and is often brought in to investigate cases that fall outside of its statewide jurisdiction. In January 2010, as Trasteco’s suit against Lempertz was just beginning, René Allonge, the division’s chief inspector, then 36, and his eight colleagues began receiving clues that hinted at a major fraud going on across Europe. The first hint came when a Paris-based expert in the French Cubist Jean Metzinger phoned with a tip: she had heard about a “group in Germany” that was selling paintings tagged with suspicious labels from the Flechtheim collection. She also gave the police a name that was already in their files from the 1990s: Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus. In March, Ralph Jentsch told the police about his own investigation into the Flechtheim labels. Two months later, the Berlin attorney representing Trasteco, Friederike von Brühl, filed a criminal complaint over the sale of the suspect Red Picture with Horses, and named Jeannette Spurzem, Helene’s sister, who had delivered the work to Lempertz.

“We had all the pieces of a puzzle, but nobody had put them together,” Allonge says. But the 15-year veteran of the art-fraud department suspected that they were on to “something big.” Allonge identified “five or six” fakes bearing “Flechtheim Collection” labels, and added a new suspect to the list: Helene Beltracchi, whom gallery owners had identified as the seller of several of the suspicious works. Wolfgang Beltracchi, who had remained in the shadows throughout the scheme, was not yet on the art-fraud division’s radar. But in late August, the police began tapping the telephones of Spurzem, Schulte-Kellinghaus, and the Beltracchi home in the South of France. And they tracked down and interviewed members of the family of Werner Jägers, the late Cologne industrialist and supposed source of dozens of fine works of art. All agreed that he had never known Alfred Flechtheim and that there had never been a Jägers Collection.

On the morning of August 25, 2010, in the biggest operation that Berlin’s art-fraud division has ever conducted, police teams swept across Germany. One unit raided the home of Spurzem in Cologne, uncovering an important new lead: a last will and testament that, for the first time, alerted police to Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi’s villa in Freiburg. Another team tried to arrange a simultaneous raid on the Beltracchis’ Domaine des Rivettes in Marseillan, but, says Allonge, “the French court was on vacation,” and nobody could authorize a search. Also on that day, Allonge and a colleague, acting on a tip, rushed to the Kunstmuseum Ahlen, north of Düsseldorf, and seized a purported painting by Fernand Léger, bearing the Flechtheim label, that was about to be sold to a private collector for $6.2 million.

The same day, hours after the raid on Spurzem’s house, investigators eavesdropped on a conversation between Wolfgang Beltracchi in Marseillan and his son, Manuel, then 22, at the villa in Freiburg. Sounding calm, Beltracchi told his son to destroy two computers filled with evidence. “We were conducting video surveillance, and we watched the son—one half hour before we raided the house—go out the door with two computers under his arm,” Allonge says. Young Beltracchi stashed the computers at a friend’s home, where they were recovered by the police. Manuel later provided police with a confession concerning his attempt to conceal evidence, and the charges against him were dropped.

On August 27, the Beltracchis returned to Freiburg from southern France, planning, they say, to turn themselves in. “We have children. We couldn’t flee,” Helene says. “We wanted to tell the truth.” They claim that the police ignored a phoned-in offer to surrender. At 7:30 p.m. on August 27, 2010, they were on their way to dinner in central Freiburg with Manuel and Franziska, when five vanloads of police surrounded their car. Lights flashed, say the Beltracchis, police dogs snarled, and agents brandishing automatic weapons ordered the occupants to step outside. “They told me to stand by the car and put my hands up,” says Franziska, who was 16 at the time and says she knew nothing about her parents’ criminal activities. “It was like Miami Vice—real American style,” says Wolfgang. “They left us standing out in the pouring rain. I got completely wet,” Helene complains. Looking dazed and frightened, Wolfgang and Helene were arrested and taken away in a police van, leaving Manuel and Franziska to drive the car home alone. “We went back to the house and called a lawyer,” she says. “I had no idea what this was about [until] I saw the news on television and read it in the newspapers.”

The Beltracchis were indicted in Freiburg, then transported to Cologne’s regional prison. There, they were separated and held without bail in solitary cells for 23 hours a day. After four months, they say, they were permitted a single half-hour visit every two weeks. Helene, who had been diagnosed with breast cancer, “suffered greatly” in prison, says the couple’s French friend Magali Richard-Malbos. Wolfgang kept himself busy drawing portraits of fellow inmates and their guards.

Allonge, meanwhile, seized paintings and compiled scientific proof of the fraud. The “Flechtheim Collection” labels, he found, had been artificially aged with coffee and tea. The wooden frame on which one of the supposed Pechstein canvases had been stretched and nailed came from the same tree as that of a fake Léger, a fake Derain, and a fake Campendonk. (The Beltracchis insist to this day that the police analysis was wrong; the frames, they say, were purchased in two separate flea markets in France.) Beltracchi “excelled at artificially aging his works—the frames, the nails, the color,” says Allonge. “In the end, though, science caught up with him.”

The Beltracchis’ trial began on September 1, 2011, in a ground-floor chamber at the Cologne Regional Court. From the start, says Michael Sontheimer, a correspondent from Der Spiegel who covered the case for two years, the proceedings were a “farce.” Much of the media portrayed the couple as fun-loving hipsters and admirable renegades, whose only crime had been hoodwinking the wealthy and famous. Helene, frail after her successful cancer treatment, and Wolfgang played to the crowd, embracing one another lovingly at the start of each day’s proceeding. The prosecution’s case was weakened by the lack of evidence proving Wolfgang Beltracchi had painted the fakes. On October 27, the judge announced that the sides had reached a deal, and terminated the proceedings, dismissing almost 200 prosecution witnesses and outraging police investigators. In a long, ramblingly theatrical, confession, Beltracchi described his youthful indulgences in “drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” attacked the “greed” and “arrogance” of the art market, and admitted that the deception had been “great fun.” In our interview after the trial, he gleefully confessed to dashing off many of his multi-million-dollar forgeries in “three or four hours, and sometimes even faster.”

“It was an incredibly vain performance,” says Sontheimer. “The guy is a total egomaniac.” In return for admitting in court to having forged 14 paintings, Wolfgang and Helene received jail terms of just six and four years, respectively, with time off for good behavior. Providing they remain gainfully employed, they will be confined to prison only at night. It was a light punishment for a crime of this magnitude. The Beltracchis smiled and embraced after receiving their sentences, and thanked the court. Schulte-Kellinghaus received a five-year sentence with the same nights-only incarceration deal that the Beltracchis had; Spurzem was given 21 months, suspended. “What they did was criminal—it’s a fact,” says the Beltracchis’ daughter, Franziska. “But I think they didn’t really hurt anybody. They took money for pictures that people wanted. Maybe now they’re not worth anything, but they still got the picture. I don’t think it’s fair that they went to jail.”

Allonge, irate, boycotted the sentencing. Today, the investigator is circumspect about his feelings. “A German court judged these people, and I’m not at liberty to comment,” he notes. “All I can say is that I don’t find it good when someone walks out of the courtroom so sure of victory. There are similar criminals who faced much more severe punishment, who have to spend a lot longer time in jail. I don’t think this leaves a good impression.”

The deal also left a number of intriguing and potentially embarrassing questions unanswered. How many works did Beltracchi actually counterfeit? What happened to those fakes that haven’t yet been located? To date, Berlin police have identified 58 suspected Beltracchi forgeries and say the total number he produced could be double that. Beltracchi admitted to me that he produced “hundreds” of phony paintings during a criminal career spanning four decades; he recently told Der Spiegel that he had painted the works of “more than 50” different artists, but he declines to give an exact number of artworks.

Today, critics are divided about how good a fraudster Beltracchi was. Daniel Filipacchi says he remains impressed by Beltracchi’s talent. “He’s a genius. The Forest (2) is very, very well done, and the other ‘Max Ernsts’ that I’ve seen are all amazing paintings.” Werner Spies agrees: “They can only be described as the work of a brilliant forger.” But Aya Soika thinks Beltracchi’s greatest talent is as a self-promoter. She notes that his use of a projector suggests that at least some of his work was the result of meticulous duplication rather than artistic creativity. Ralph Jentsch dismisses the bulk of Beltracchi’s forgeries as “rubbish” and “crude fakes.” Scoffing at Beltracchi’s self-portrayal as a brilliant role player who inhabited the minds of great artists, Jentsch says Beltracchi approached painting like “someone decorating a Christmas tree. Add some lights here, some balls there. An artist doesn’t work like that.” So how did so many art experts fall for Beltracchi’s rubbish for so long? Jentsch traces the failure to sloppiness, laziness, and in some cases, a powerful desire to believe. The Beltracchis cleverly exploited the blindness and gullibility that pervades the high-stakes world of art, where connoisseurship and provenance can get lost in the frenzy of excitement over a new find. They also took advantage of the particular circumstances in Germany, where the Nazi past can perversely be used as a sort of shortcut to legitimacy—tapping, as well, into deep reservoirs of German guilt and loss. The Beltracchis, Jentsch says, were “very clever . . . from a psychological standpoint. They thought, How can we make people believe our story?” And, he concludes, “they carried it off brilliantly.”

The saddest case, Jentsch thinks, is that of Werner Spies, who certified seven fake Max Ernsts and who now reportedly faces a civil suit in France from the buyer of the phony Ernst painting Tremblement de Terre, which Sotheby’s eventually auctioned for $1.1 million. Sotheby’s declined to comment on any aspect of the Beltracchi case. “Spies was tricked in a very bad way,” says Jentsch. The expert was evidently entranced by Helene’s dramatic tale of Jägers’s “rescue” of masterworks from the hands of the Nazis, including dozens of Max Ernst works thought to have vanished in the early days of Hitler’s regime. “When Spies saw those paintings, with the Flechtheim label, he told me, ‘I was so happy, I truly believed that these were part of the lost Ernst paintings of 1933.’ Once you’re on the wrong steamer, it takes time to wake up and realize your mistake.”

In an interview with the German weekly magazine Stern, Spies admitted that he had briefly considered killing himself after the scandal broke. “How could I bear the knowledge that I was taken in?” he said. “The loss of my reputation! It made me think that I should say good-bye to this world.” Allonge doesn’t have much sympathy for Spies. The Ernst expert, he points out, earned a tidy sum for handing out certificates of authenticity for the Beltracchis’ bogus works. From the Beltracchis alone, his authentications earned him $500,000. In addition, art dealers paid him hefty commissions, as a percentage of the sales price.

In his fourth-floor office at the Berlin Landeskriminalamt, Allonge removed the bubble wrap from one of the two Beltracchi forgeries that the police have held as evidence, the semi-nude Portrait of a Woman with Hat, supposedly by Kees van Dongen. He turned over the painting and showed me half a dozen counterfeit stickers from the “Flechtheim Collection” and from other prewar German galleries. Stripped of its frame and laid out on an evidence table, the work—which fetched millions of dollars at auction—seemed surprisingly pedestrian, a cheap knockoff that might be found at a street-side stall along the Seine. “Beltracchi had a good life for what he has achieved,” the investigator told me, clearly disgusted by the German media’s portrayals of the forger as a Robin Hood and a rogue genius. “He had no professional degree, he earned millions, he traveled the world—always at somebody else’s expense. It wasn’t his money. I would have found it good if he had donated a part of his money for a worthy cause. But he never did that.”

Much—if not all—of that money is now in danger of disappearing. The police seized just over $1 million from a Swiss bank account, and last spring the Beltracchis declared bankruptcy. A court-appointed administrator seized their remaining assets. Their homes in Freiburg and Marseillan will probably be auctioned off. The money will be used to settle at least four civil suits against them, including one filed by Lempertz last year in connection with the Campendonk fake Red Picture with Horses. Despite reports in Der Spiegel and other German media outlets that they had stashed millions in Andorra, the couple insists that the police “seized everything.” Yet they’re being philosophical. “It’s not so bad. It’s only money,” Helene told me. “We’ve got really great kids, and Wolfgang has so much talent.”

The Beltracchis had agreed to talk to me as part of an effort, overseen by their attorney, Reinhard Birkenstock, to turn their notoriety into a marketable commodity. Laughing, joking over plates of spaghetti and apple cake served up by Birkenstock’s chain-smoking wife, they were apparently enjoying their last months of freedom before reporting to prison in March 2012. They were shopping around an autobiography and planning a trip to their villa in Marseillan, to begin shooting what Wolfgang described as a “semi-documentary” about their lives. They were reveling in the attention of the European media, some of which celebrated the pair as iconoclasts who had carried out a long deception with panache.

Wolfgang had already begun to re-invent himself in the hope of building a new career. He’d recently launched a Web site that introduced the “Beltracchi Project”: a for-profit collaboration between Wolfgang and a friend, photographer Manfred Esser. The pair had begun producing “large-format prints, in both black-and-white and color, of the artist Wolfgang Beltracchi, painted over to make each image unique.” The paintings draw upon Beltracchi’s “dramatic experiences” at his trial and in prison. One already completed work, displayed on the site, was a huge portrait of Beltracchi, superimposed over a new version of The Horde, a phony Max Ernst that had been sold to the German billionaire Reinhold Würth, in the late 2000s, for more than $4 million. Beltracchi sold the new mixed-media piece to a German collector shortly after our first encounter for $12,500.

In mid-July, I caught up with the Beltracchis again at a huge loft in Bergisch Gladbach, the town where Helene Beltracchi had grown up. They were midway through filming a documentary project, provisionally called Beltracchi: The Art of Forgery. When I entered the studio, Wolfgang stood poised before a large canvas, putting the finishing touches on another version of The Horde. As he dabbed blue paint from an artist’s palette onto the work, a cameraman recorded his every brushstroke. At Beltracchi’s feet was what the forger called his “Max Ernst box”—a carton filled with wood, seashells, sponges, ropes, and other materials that Beltracchi uses to mimic the artist’s spatula-against-found-object technique. Standing to one side was the director Arne Birkenstock, the son of the Beltracchis’ attorney, an established documentarian who has made films on subjects ranging from Sri Lankan elephants to tango dancing. Birkenstock told me that, though the Beltracchis had agreed to give their full cooperation to the project, they would not have the right of final cut. The only promise Birkenstock had made, he said, was that “if Wolfgang mentions fakes that are not known of, and we find out that it could get him in trouble, we won’t reveal that.”

The Beltracchis were five months into their jail sentence, and had few complaints about the conditions. Both had been assigned to live in “open prisons”—the equivalent of halfway houses in the United States, without bars, guns, or guards—and were working at Esser’s photo studio five days a week, often until nine p.m. They also had 80 hours of “free time” each month, 21 free weekend nights a year, and extra days off at Christmas and Easter. They had rented an apartment in Cologne to use during their vacation time. “This system of imprisonment doesn’t exist anywhere but here in Germany,” Wolfgang said with a grin, over a lunch of Wiener schnitzel and french fries at a restaurant in an old villa down the road from the loft. Prison officials did, however, insist on strict adherence to the schedule: if the couple reports back late three times in a single month, Wolfgang said, “they will throw us immediately into the closed prison—without any chance to appeal.”

Because he and Helene are first-time offenders, they can expect to see their sentences reduced by one-third. Taking into consideration time served before their trial, the Beltracchis will probably be finished with prison in two more years. “It goes fast,” Wolfgang says. The couple were already making plans for their post-incarceration life. “When we get out of jail,” Helene said with a smile, “we’ll go to the South of France—or maybe the Caribbean. We’ll be gone the same day.”