With the transformation of the art market and the ever-rising prices of artworks, the globalization of trade, the development of the Internet and the appearance of international on-line sales networks, the counterfeiting of artworks has become nothing less than an industry, just like the counterfeiting of brands.
Every year, several billion euros are spent in this illicit traffic on a worldwide scale, and this at the expense of collectors and for the benefit of trans-national organized crime. It is urgent that the public be alerted to the growing dangers threatening the cultural heritage. The programme embarked upon by the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation since 2003 has helped to dismantle international counterfeiting networks, and heighten a general awareness of the stakes in the struggle against counterfeiting and forgery.
THE SENKE CASE
The admission of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation as a civil party in the proceedings of the Regional Court of Stuttgart against Mr. Lothar Senke, the principal accused in the scandal involving numerous fake Giacometti sculptures, made it possible to obtain a verdict of counterfeiting artworks and not only of fraud. He was sentenced to a 9-year prison term.
This was the most important forgery case involving Giacometti works, concerning some 1,020 bronzes and plasters seized by the German police, while a large number of forged and counterfeit works had already been sold on the market. The forger was found guilty of 38 of the 50 criminal acts of which he was accused, including infringement of Alberto Giacometti’s intellectual property rights on a large scale.
The Senke scandal started in 1993 after Annette Giacometti’s death. The sculptor’s widow had vigorously, and for almost 27 years, defended her husband’s moral right (he died in 1966). But after 1993, the protection of Alberto Giacometti’s oeuvre was no longer actively pursued, and this for a whole decade—i.e. until the creation, in 2003, of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, which nowadays defends his work.
Making the most of that situation, Lothar Senke started out by marketing ugly “unique” bronze replicas; he then grew bolder and offered numbered editions of fake sculptures, and even plasters imitating the original plasters.
The German police seized various Giacometti fakes in 2001, and Véronique Wiesinger, Chief Curator of the French Ministry of Culture and future Director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation, was designated in 2002 by the French Ministry of Culture to act as an expert in court.
Lothar Senke’s activities quickly assumed considerable proportions, and so effectively that in 2007 the Mannheim Kunsthalle celebrated its 100th anniversary with a show in which the six Giacometti works on view were in fact fakes.
The forger was finally arrested by the German police in August 2009 in Frankfurt, while he was trying to sell five of his fake bronzes to an under-cover police officer, whom he had taken to be an art lover.
His accomplice, the art dealer Herbert Schulte, had rented a 200 sq.m. warehouse in Mainz, where the police discovered an impressive collection of some 1,020 fakes of Alberto Giacometti sculptures, crudely produced from photographs.
To fool his victims, Senke claimed to be an aristocrat, and posed as the Imperial Count of Waldstein, a title which never existed; he also claimed to have befriended Alberto’s brother, Diego, who had given him those sculptures. His crude fakes, usually made in Thailand, were accompanied by false certificates of authenticity, and signed either by the “Reichsgraf Von Waldstein” (Senke himself) or by James Lord, Alberto Giacometti’s controversial biographer.
We know today that Senke, Schulte and their partners in crime managed to sell more than 200 sculptures over the 7-year period prior to their arrest, earning profits estimated at more than €8,000,000.
On 30 June 2011, the Stuttgart court ordered the destruction of the bulk of the counterfeit sculptures. Sadly, because of German law, the fakes which belonged to swindled owners will be returned to them, and there is every reason to fear that they will one day reappear on the market.