Giacometti mystery continues

A German court case involving some 1,200 fake Alberto Giacometti sculptures has ended in stiff sentences for the two main culprits. In July, Lothar Wilfried Senke, 60, who marketed the fakes by posing as a German count, was sentenced to nine years in prison after being convicted of dozens of counts of fraud, falsification of documents, and copyright and brand infringement. Herbert Schulte, 62, a Mainz, Germany, art dealer who, prosecutors contend, masterminded the fraud, had previously been sentenced to seven years and four months in prison. Senke’s lawyer is appealing the conviction; Schulte didn’t appeal. In February 2010, three other defendants, including Schulte’s wife, were fined and sentenced to two years of probation. A trio of dealers had been convicted in an earlier trial, including Schulte, who has spent the last two years in prison. German police continue to turn up new information about the fraud (see “The Mystery of the Giacometti Fakes: More than 1000 fake sculptures by Alberto and Diego Giacometti were seized by police” in ARTnews, vol. 109, n° 11, décembre 2010,.98-102). The original indictment involved 831 bronzes and 131 plaster molds, as well as 21 pieces of fake furniture attributed to Alberto’s brother Diego. By the time of the trial, investigators had recovered an additional 150 sculptures that had been sold to German dealers and collectors, including 52 owned by the billionaire banker Wolfgang Schuppli. Since then, police have recovered about 70 more sculptures and molds sold by the culprits.

Mirja Feldmann, the Stuttgart prosecutor who tried the case, says she isn’t certain that production of the fakes has stopped. Investigators now believe the bronzes were mainly made at a small foundry in the Netherlands. The foundry closed down, but police believe the owner is living outside Bangkok, Thailand, which may make prosecuting him difficult. The widely varying quality of the phony sculptures may also be an indication that some of them were produced at other foundries that could still be in operation. Véronique Wiesinger, director of the Alberto and Annette Giacometti Foundation in Paris, worries that some of the recovered fakes will end up back in circulation. The vast majority will be destroyed, Feldmann says, but under German law some of the sculptures that were sold to dealers and collectors may have to be returned to their owners. Reselling them probably would be a crime, even if they are identified as fakes, but to avoid that possibility prosecutors are trying to convince owners to waive their rights to the sculptures or accept having foundry marks and Giacometti’s signature effaced from them. An interesting wrinkle in the case is the involvement of Walter F. Maibaum, who testified for the prosecution. It turns out that Maibaum was the New York art dealer to whom Senke tried to sell 300 fake Giacometti bronzes and 100 plasters for €50 million. Maibaum has been the subject of widespread coverage in ARTnews and other publications because of his involvement in exhibiting and selling Degas sculptures cast from 74 previously unknown plasters said to have been discovered in 2004 in a storeroom at a foundry outside Paris. The sculptures are controversial because many scholars doubt that the plasters were made during Degas’s lifetime, as Maibaum and his associates contend.

Maibaum confirmed in e-mailed responses to questions from ARTnews that he was approached in 2008 by an agent for Senke. Maibaum says “many factors” made him suspicious, including the large number of works in the supposed collection being offered for sale and the fact that “the relationships, positions, configurations, and structural elements were not consistent with the works of Alberto Giacometti.” For instance, in a version of Walking Man I, the 1961 bronze that sold for $104.3 million (including fees) at a 2010 Sotheby’s auction, “the figure was leaning too far forward in an unbalanced position,” he says. The fraudsters appeared “frustrated” when he turned down their offer, Maibaum recalls. Maibaum didn’t alert law enforcement officials, but says he did tell Christian Klemm, curator of the Alberto Giacometti Foundation in Zurich, about the suspicious sculptures. (Klemm says he doesn’t recall the conversation.) Gilles Perrault, a Paris-based art authority who served as an expert witness for the prosecution, believes that the Stuttgart case will encourage stricter enforcement of European laws against art fraud. “Judges will realize they can hand out big sentences,” he says, “and prosecutors will be more inclined to bring cases to trial.”