Wolfgang Beltracchi (born Wolfgang Fischer on 4 February 1951) is a German art forger and visual artist who has admitted to forging hundreds of paintings in an international art scam netting millions of euros. Beltracchi, together with his wife Helene, sold forgeries of alleged works by famous artists, including Max Ernst, Heinrich Campendonk, Fernand Léger, and Kees van Dongen. Though he was found guilty for forging 14 works of art that sold for a combined $45m (£28.6m), he claims to have faked "about 50" artists. The total estimated profits Beltracchi made from his forgeries surpasses $100m.
In 2011, after a 40-day trial, Beltracchi was found guilty and sentenced to six years in a German prison. His wife, Helene, was given a four-year sentence, and both were ordered to pay millions in restitution. Beltracchi was freed on 9 January 2015, having served just over three years in prison.
Biography
Wolfgang Fischer was born 4 February 1951 in Höxter, Germany and grew up in Geilenkirchen, Germany. His father was an art restorer and muralist.
According to his own statements, Beltracchi first copied a Pablo Picasso painting when he was 14 years old. He was expelled from secondary school when he was 17 and later went to art school in Aachen. As a young man, he used drugs such a LSD and opium and started doing art forgeries "a little." He travelled through Europe and lived in Amsterdam and Morocco.
He also lived in Mallorca, Spain and France.
In the 1980s, Beltracchi ran an art gallery for a short time with a business partner. The two had a falling out, with the partner accusing Beltracchi of stealing paintings from his house, an accusation Beltracchi vehemently denies.
Fischer met Helene Beltracchi in 1992 and, after marrying in 1993, adopted her surname.
Beltracchi designed the artwork to The Fall of a Rebel Angel, the eighth studio album from German musical project Enigma. Since his release from prison, Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi have been living and working as artists on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland.
Forgeries
Beltracchi did not copy existing and well known paintings, but painted his own paintings imitating the style of the artists in question. He made up the titles and motives, or claimed that a painting of his was a lost work that was only known by its title in old documents or catalogs.
He and his wife also established a false provenance for the works, claiming that Helene Beltracchi's grandfather—the wealthy industrialist Werner Jäger—had been friends with the German-Jewish art dealer Alfred Flechtheim in the 1920s. They claimed that Flechtheim sold a cache works to Jägers before going into exile during the Second World War. Many of the paintings that Wolfgang Beltracchi sold (forged by him) allegedly came from this collection.
There were several important holes in this story. For one, Jägers had been a member of the Nazi Party in the 1930s, making it unlikely that he would have befriended a Jewish dealer. But the story held enough weight for the Beltracchis to use it for many years.
When the credibility of the story was questioned, the Beltracchis delivered proof that the paintings had been in the family since the 1920s. They delivered old family photographs with Helene Beltracchi's grandmother in a room with the paintings in question in the background. Actually, the old looking photographs had been produced by Wolfgang Beltracchi himself; the woman on the photographs being Helene Beltracchi, dressed up as her own grandmother. They also created fake labels proclaiming that the paintings were from the “Sammlung Flechtheim”—the Flechtheim Collection.
Finally he was caught after having sold a work 'by' Heinrich Campendonk via Kunsthaus Lempertz. The painting was then sold to a company in Malta for €2.88 million. Beltracchi had used a paint tube produced in the Netherlands. The paint contained titanium white (which was not specified on the label), a pigment that had not been in use in Campendonk's times. As Beltracchi remembered, because he had not mixed his own paint this one time, the forgery was uncovered.
Arrest and trial
Wolfgang and Helene Beltracchi were arrested on 27 August 2010 in Freiburg. Their accomplice Otto Schulte-Kellinghaus, who helped place several of the forgeries in the market, was arrested on 1 December 2010.