French museum discovers half its art is fake
elne — Over decades, the small museum of Elne in southern France built up a collection of works by local painter Etienne Terrus, mostly oil and watercolours of the region’s distinctive landscapes and buildings.
But what was once a source of pride has turned to embarrassment after 60 per cent were found to be fakes, providing a lesson about the dangers of buying art without expert skills and the ubiquity of counterfeit canvases.
“Etienne Terrus was Elne’s great painter. He was part of the community, he was our painter,” lamented Mayor Yves Barniol on Friday as he reopened the museum and its exhibition of Terrus paintings — minus the forgeries. Terrus (1857-1922) was born and died in Elne near the city of Perpignan where he painted the sun-baked Mediterranean coastline as well as the misty foothills of the Pyrenees mountains and local red-tiled homes.
The Terrus Museum in Elne began collecting his work in the 1990s and went on a spending splurge over the last five years, acquiring 80 new canvases often thanks to local fund-raising drives.
Devastated locals who helped with the effort now regret being so naive, having handed over tens of thousands of euros to local art dealers and private collectors.
Out of 140 works owned by the museum, 82 were judged to be fakes by a panel of experts, causing an estimated loss to the town of €160,000 ($200,000).
But art-testing expert Yan Walther says fake art being exhibited publicly is a problem worldwide and the case of Elne, though extreme, is not unique.
“The fact that there are fakes and misattributed works in museum collections is something absolutely clear and nobody with an understanding of the field has any illusions about this,” Walther said. “There are misattributed works in the Louvre (in Paris) in the National Gallery (in London), all museums in the world, but it is not in a proportion like 60 per cent,” he added.
The fraud in Elne was discovered by local art historian Eric Forcada who said he had seen the problems immediately, with some of the paintings crude counterfeits.
Prior to the scandal, paintings by Terrus could fetch up to €15,000 ($18,200) and drawings and watercolours would sell for up to 2,000 euros, he said. —