Pei-Shen Qian is a Chinese artist accused of being part of a R349 million art swindle, and is still at large. On Monday a US court document listed the methods Qian’s network is alleged to have used to fool collectors and experts. The New York Times is calling it a “forgers manual.”

So what exactly do you need for a successful forgery?

1 A convincing back story

A forger named Wolfgang Beltracchi and his wife Helene have been described as ‘the Bonnie and Clyde of the art world’. They claimed Helene had inherited the collection from her grandfather, and that he had hidden it from the Nazis. They even staged a photo in which Helene posed in costume as her grandmother, with the forgeries  on the wall behind her. The picture was taken with an old box camera and developed on pre-war photographic paper.

2 The right materials

This is as simple as ageing supporting documentation with tea bags. Flea markets appear vital to the successful forger: they use them to source canvases and other materials from the right periods.

3 Careful choice of paint

The indictment alleges that Qian was provided with “old paint that was created in the era in which the Fake Works would have been created if they were authentic works”. The Beltracchis also sent paints to labs to check they were available at the time the artist had painted.

4 Ageing well

Mess up your work! Heat it, cool it, and exposing it to the elements outdoors. The Beltracchis sped up the ageing process in their own home-made oven.

5 Attention to detail

Among Qian’s belongings, the indictment lists “auction catalogues containing works by famous American abstract expressionist artists… and other materials, such as an envelope of old nails marked ‘Mark Rothko’, all to aid Qian in creating the Fake Works”.

6 Borrowed expertise

Beltracchi told The Sunday Times: “Selling fake paintings is dead easy. If they get a certificate from experts, the dealers will not ask too many questions, while the experts, who are mostly incorruptible, simply fail to detect my fakes because they are too good.”

7 Being original

Beltracchi claimed never to have copied a painting, instead pinpointing gaps in an artist’s body of work and creating a missing painting that could have existed in an approach that has been called “method acting on canvas”. One of his Max Ernsts appeared in New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, while another sold for $7m – when its owner discovered it was a fake, he decided to keep it anyway, saying it was one of the best Ernsts he’d ever seen.

[Source : The Beeb]