Italian officials said they had dismantled a Europe-wide network of forgers and dealers selling works purported to be by A-list artists, mostly through auction houses.
On show in a historic palazzo in the central Italian city of Pisa this week are about 450 works 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.
