Amuseum puts its fakes on show

Museums don’t usually advertise fakes in their collections. But the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, is exposing them to public scrutiny in a taboo- breaking new exhibition.

The paintings on show in “Russian Avant- Garde at the Museum Ludwig: Original and Fake” are all ostensibly by artists from that radical movement of the early 20th century. Yet displayed alongside bona fide works by renowned artists like Kazimir Malevich, Alexander Rodchenko and Natalia Goncharova are paintings whose previous attributions museum researchers now reject.

A tide of fakes has polluted this corner of the art market for decades, and the exhibition sheds new light on the pitfalls of buying, selling and collecting Russian avant- garde art.

The museum, founded by an endowment from the chocolate mag nate Peter Ludwig int he 1970s, is known for holding one of the largest collections of Russian avantgarde art in Western Europe. Ludwig and his wife, Irene, were avid collectors of the style, and when she died in 2010, she left themuseum a bequest of about 600 Russian avant- garde works.

Those included 100 paintings, and researchers at the museum have since been analyzing them. Of the 49 paintings investigated so far, 22 were falsely attributed, the researchers say, though they avoid describing them as “forgeries”: From a legal perspective, the word implies an intent to deceive that cannot be proven just by examining the work.

The show runs through Jan. 3.