Alberto Giacometti’s œuvre was very successful commercially, and was already often forged during his lifetime. When the artist died in 1966, his widow Annette noticed that more and more fakes and forgeries were circulating on the market, and undertook the task of drawing up an exhaustive list of her husband’s authentic oeuvre (mainly paintings, sculptures, drawings) and of removing forgeries from the market. Today, the Foundation, as heir to Annette Giacometti, is carrying on this mission to preserve the work and inform the public. The database available on the website helps to identify certain counterfeit versions of Alberto Giacometti’s sculptures.

The speculative bubble in the art market is attracting more and more forgers and counterfeiters. Counterfeiting affects edition artworks in particular (prints, sculptures, furniture, decorative arts). Because Giacometti is the most highly priced sculptor in the world, forged sculptures definitely offer the greatest margin of profit. In February 2010, an authentic “Walking Man” was sold for €74,000,000, thus becoming the most expensive sculpture ever auctioned.

Fake and counterfeit sculptures, fraudulently attributed to Alberto Giacometti, are nowadays being produced in several countries—in particular in Thailand, the United States and Eastern Europe. From 2000 on, the Germany-based network of a man pretending to be Reichsgraf von Waldstein, which was broken up in 2009, sold off hundreds of fakes all over Europe—the Netherlands, Switzerland, Austria, France, Italy. Sculptures sold with his certificates are all fakes.

Some original sculptures are often forged. For example:

[PDF] Walking Woman II, 1932-1936