Art forgeries

A visitor at the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam examines the painting "Christ and Disciples of Emmaus" by the noted art forger Han van Meegeren. The museum staged an exhibit titled "Van Meegeren's Fake Vermeers," showcasing the forger's works in the style of the Dutch master.

Van Meegeren (1889-1947) was one of history's most notorious art forgers. He was arrested for having sold a Vermeer to Hermann Goering during World War II, though actually the Vermeer was a fake he'd created. (Punk'd Nazi!) However, after the war Van Meegeren faced charges of being a Nazi collaborator, and while in prison had to prove he'd forged the painting by creating another Vermeer.

At left: Vermeer's "Woman in Blue Reading a Letter" (1666-1664).

Right: "Woman Reading Music" by Han van Meegeren, 1935-1936.

A fraudulent relief sculpture, allegedly from the 8th-6th century BC, by art forger Shaun Greenhalgh is displayed at an exhibition of recovered forged art at the Victoria & Albert Museum in west London, January 22, 2010. Greenhalgh, along with his parents and brothers, operated what was referred to as "the garden shed gang" in Bolton, England, creating numerous fake art objects and antiquities.

A clerk holds an original "netsuke" (right) made of boxwood and its fake (left) at a gallery in Tokyo. "Netsuke" -- miniature sculptures made of ivory, boxwood or animal horn that Japanese men have traditionally worn to decorate their kimono belts -- have become a target of counterfeit artists in Hong Kong and China.

This example of medieval Iranian pottery decorated with a horseman appeared to date from the end of the 12th century, and was considered a fine example of lustre ware, in which metallic pigments are laid onto the surface of the glaze. However, when the pottery was recently cleaned it was discovered the plate's overpainting masked that it was made up of many shards, or fragments, of more than one 12th century pottery piece that do not join together. Such reconfigurations of genuine pottery are common given the rarity of unbroken pottery found at archeological sites.

Mark Landis was a noted forger who produced hundreds of paintings in the style of Bourgereau (left), Picasso, Watteau, Charles Courtney Curran, and even Walt Disney, which he then donated to museums and galleries -- sometimes disguised as a Jesuit priest. At right, the same painting under an ultraviolet light reveals the fakery.

The Hungarian forger Elmyr de Hory sold works purportedly created by Modigliani (left), Picasso, Chagall, Toulouse-Lautrec, Dufy, Matisse, Degas and Renoir. He claimed the paintings has been acquired by his family after World War II.

His story was told in the 1969 book "Fake!" by Clifford Irving, who himself was later revealed to have penned a fake autobiography of the tycoon Howard Hughes.

In May 2012 William Mumford, a Littlehampton, England chef at a neighborhood pub, was sentenced to prison for two years for art fraud, having painted up to a thousand forged artworks mimicking such artists as Sayed Haider Raza, Francis Newton Souza, Jilali Gharbaoui, Sadanand Bakre, Maqbool Fida Husain, Kyffin Williams, and John Tunnard.

His co-conspirators helped create false provenances and sold the works on eBay and to galleries and collectors. Detectives located 40 of his paintings which were sold -- some for as much as 30,000 pounds -- but there are potentially hundreds more fake paintings believed to be in circulation.

Left: One of Mumford's paintings purporting to be one by Sadanand Bakre.

"These paintings, listed as 'unknown,' came with elaborate false provenance that drew buyers into bidding for the items," said Detective Constable Michelle Roycroft. "This, together with William Mumford's execution of the paintings and the attention to detail -- using forged gallery stamps and genuine Victorian paper to make labels -- fooled hundreds of people both in the U.K. and worldwide with victims in France, U.S.A. and Canada. We would urge people to exercise extreme caution when purchasing any work of art from online auction sites and always remember - 'If it looks too good to be true, it probably is.'"

Prolific art forger Ken Perenyi, pictured in 1989 with his rendition of an animal scene by 19th century Dutch painter Melchior d'Hondecoeter.

Over the course of three decades Perenyi painted thousands of works in the style of European and American painters such as Charles Bird King, Martin Johnson Heade, Gilbert Stuart and James E. Buttersworth. Often he would show up at an art dealer with a work in tow, blithely ignorant of the artist, and leave it up to the dealer to determine he had found a previously unknown Thomas Whitcombe or John Nost Sartorious.

Ken Perenyi working on sculpture restoration at his Florida studio in 1978.

After studying art in New Jersey, Perenyi and his friends were inspired by the experience of the forger Han van Meegeren. Studying a book of his life and his forgery techniques, Perenyi began copying Dutch masters, and found uncritical buyers.

One of Perenyi's biggest sellers were his paintings in the style of 19th century maritime artist James E. Buttersworth.

Perenyi took pains to acquire contemporaneous paintings of little value so that he could strip the paint and use the authentic period canvases and frames. He resurfaced the canvas with gesso, then produced a new image on the genuine period material.

Perenyi aged the artwork through a baking process, to produce the characteristic cracking of the paint.

Ken Perenyi's version of a Thomas Whitcombe.

This Charles Brooking sea battle was actually painted by Ken Perenyi, 232 years after the English artist died.

A help to Perenyi's forgery schemes was the tendency of some artists to reproduce copies of their own work. Robert John Curtis (1816-1877) had painted the Seminole leader Osceola, then offered copies of his original painting for sale.

Perenyi made a copy of the Curtis portrait, which he brought to a Washington, D.C., auction house. It later sold on consignment for $86,250.

A sample of the catalogs featuring paintings actually created by Ken Perenyi, though attributed to countless other artists.

Hummingbirds by Perenyi, after Martin Johnson Heade's "Gems of Brazil." Perenyi had read a biography of the artist who traveled to South America in 1863, and noticed that several of Heade's works had been "discovered in England." So why not a couple more?

In 1992 he brought his forgery to an appraiser at Christie's, claiming to be a tourist who purchased it for two pounds at a "boot sale," but unsure what it was. The auction house declared it was a Heade.

Christie's put the "Heade" painting, dubbed "Ruby Throats With Apple Blossoms," on the auction block, where it sold for $96,000.

Ken Perenyi's c. 1978 rendition of a still life by American artist John F. Peto (1854-1907).

A Perenyi after William A. Walker (1839-1921), who often painted scenes of black sharecroppers.

A Ken Perenyi after James Seymour.

Although Perenyi had some close calls in FBI investigations of art fraud, he could never be traced to any conspiracy to sell phony artwork . . . that is, until a woman to whom he had gifted a fake Buttersworth took the painting on consignment to a U.K. auction house. It was advertised on the postcard at left, and soon discovered to be an exact duplicate of another (fake!) Buttersworth that had recently sold.

But Perenyi had time on his side -- the statute of limitations ran out before an FBI investigation into his activities could be completed. And today he continues to sell his "reproductions" (now explicitly advertised as such).

Ken Perenyi's version of a Gilbert Stuart.

For more info:
"Caveat Emptor: The Secret Life of an American Art Forger" by Ken Perenyi (Pegasus Books)
kenperenyi.com

By CBSNews.com senior editor David Morgan