Italian police have dismantled a Europe-wide forgery network suspected of producing sophisticated replicas of works by some of the world’s most famous artists, including Banksy, Pablo Picasso, Andy Warhol and Gustav Klimt.
Thirty-eight people had been placed under investigation in Italy, Spain, France and Belgium on suspicion of conspiracy to handle stolen goods, forgery and illegal sale of artworks, Italy’s art police and Pisa’s prosecutor’s office said in a joint statement on Monday.
The investigation began last year when Italy’s art police seized 200 counterfeit pieces from the collection of a businessman in the Tuscan city of Pisa that included a copy of a drawing by the Italian painter Amedeo Modigliani.
That discovery led investigators to uncover six forgery workshops, including two in Tuscany, one in Venice and three elsewhere in Europe. The suspects mostly produced copies of works by Warhol and Banksy before making agreements with various Italian auction houses.
They even organised two Banksy exhibitions with a published catalogue in prestigious locations in Mestre, near Venice, and Cortona in Tuscany.
In total, more than 2,100 fake works with a potential market value of about €200m (£165m) have been seized.
“The activity carried out made it possible to shed light on a transnational system of forgers interconnected with compliant auction houses,” said Teresa Angela Camelio, Pisa’s chief prosecutor.
Camelio said experts from the Banksy archive who had assisted with the investigation considered Monday’s operation to be “the biggest act of protection of Banksy’s work”.
Pest Control Office, the official body that represents the artist, did not immediately respond to a request for comment. On its website, it says forgery is common and urges people who want to buy any Banksy pieces to watch out for “expensive fakes”.
Camelio said that if police had not uncovered the network, the artworks could have been sold at prices “close to the artists’ original works”, an eventuality that would “certainly have significantly changed the auction market”.
Other allegedly forged artists included giants of 19th- and 20th-century art such as Claude Monet, Vincent van Gogh, Salvador Dalí, Henry Moore, Joan Miró, Giorgio de Chirico, Marc Chagall, Francis Bacon, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian.
Works by the Italian modernist Modigliani are especially vulnerable to counterfeits. In a separate case, a drawing attributed to the artist, which was about to be sold for €300,000, was seized by Venice authorities earlier this year after the city’s cultural protection unit revealed it to be a fake.
In 2017, police closed down a Modigliani exhibition in Genoa after an expert concluded at least 20 of the 21 paintings on display were fake.
In 1984, three marble heads fished out of a canal in Livorno were hailed as long lost masterpieces by the artist, before it was discovered they were sculpted by three students as a prank.
