An art museum in the south of France recently made headlines when an art historian discovered that a whopping 60% of its collection is fake.
A museum dedicated to Étienne Terrus, one of the forerunners of the fauvist movement was established in his hometown Elne, near the French border with Spain. When an independent art historian Eric Forcada was hired to rearrange the collection for the reopening of the museum, he quickly discovered that a large part of the collection couldn’t have been made by the French painter. “On one painting, the ink signature was wiped away when I passed my white glove over it”, Eric Forcada stated for the Guardian. Also, the cotton on the canvas didn’t match the one used by Étienne Terrus and certain buildings depicted on the artworks were built long after his death. Subsequently, a panel of experts was summoned to examine the collection and they quickly determined that 82 works out of 140 were forgeries.
The southern ramparts of the town of Elne (1890) by Étienne Terrus. Source
The fact that many museum visitors were tricked into viewing the artworks later deemed a fake, was described as a “catastrophe” by the…
