Italian Police Seize Nearly 500 Fake Francis Bacon Artworks About To Be Valued
Image via ID 186377858 © Anna Podekova | Dreamstime.com
Recently, nearly 500 counterfeit Francis Bacon artworks were confiscated by the Italian police, along with other personal items adding up to €3 million (US$3.5 million).
Five out of seven suspects being investigated have been charged with conspiracy to authenticate and trade forged works of art, as well as fraud and money laundering, the police’s statement said.
The lead suspect in the operation, known to be an art collector from Bologna, had previously been implicated in an investigation surrounding two fake Picassos and other Bacon works in 2018.
The Italian police explained that confiscating the 485 works was a “preventive” measure, aimed to stop the counterfeit works from being traded.
According to ARTNews, the police said the suspects had planned to authenticate the fake art pieces “through prestigious national and international exhibitions, catalogs, websites, foundations, and companies under foreign law, so as to increase their ‘quotation’ and then resell them.”
This isn’t the first time fake Francis Bacon artworks have surfaced in the art market. In 2016, a London gallery exhibited a series of the famed artists’ works, which were on loan from the Bologna-based collector Cristiano Lovatelli Ravarino. However, experts have posited that the pieces on show could’ve been fakes.
Ravarino, who was an ex-partner of Bacon, said the artist had gifted the works to him, though historians and the author of Bacon’s catalog, Martin Harrison, doubt the collection is authentic.
[via ARTNews, cover image via ID 186377858 © Anna Podekova | Dreamstime.com]
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