Collectors hunt down forgeries as Arab art market flourishes
As Middle Eastern art experiences an international boom, Lebanese collector Basel Dalloul is leading a drive to expose forgeries and follow more stringent standards for authentication.
For as long as art has commanded high prices, it has attracted forgers. In 1945, Dutch artist Han van Meegeren was arrested and charged with selling a painting by Johannes Vermeer to Nazi leader Hermann Goring. Fearing a death sentence, he shocked the art world when he admitted that the painting was a forgery, one of more than a dozen he had produced over several decades.
The ingenious forger is thought to have tricked buyers out of the equivalent of more than $30 million. In today’s globalized art market, such astronomical sums regularly change hands — sometimes for a single work — and forgeries remain a lucrative source of income for unscrupulous artists and dealers. As prices for work by Arab artists have risen over the past decade, forgers have taken notice.
Having uncovered several forgeries in his own collection, Lebanese-American art collector Basel Dalloul, managing director of the Dalloul Art Foundation, is on a mission to promote more stringent controls across the regional art market, which is still relatively young and facing issues like forgery — both of artwork and of certificates of authenticity — for the first time.
“In Europe there is 600 or 700 years of experience of dealing with that,” he told Al-Monitor. “Here in this region, we’re on a very sharp learning curve.” Added to the lack of experience is the problem of regional conflicts, which have left archives and records — particularly in Iraq and Syria — damaged, destroyed or missing.
