![]() ![]() ![]() The “foolish” dealer who had sold these fakes “ratted” Tetro out, and he was arrested and put on trial in 1989. In fact, he had an “exclusive agreement” with a gallery “a block down the street”. But when Yamagata went to look, he realised the works weren’t his. In 1988, the Japanese artist Hiro Yamagata was “walking down the street in Beverly Hills” when he saw his paintings in the window of a gallery. Despite this, he tells me he was “not a good business man”: “each and every one” of the art dealers who were selling his fakes “made much more money” than he did.īut there was a twist in Tetro’s success story. In 1980s Los Angeles, Tetro had such conspicuous displays of wealth – he bought a Rolls Royce after an uptick in sales following the death of Chagall it sat next to his Ferrari and Lamborghini – that everyone in the city thought he was a drug dealer. If the art wasn’t real, its proceeds certainly were. Once the pieces entered the art market, they weren’t discovered as forgeries: instead, they have been “sold and resold and resold and became … real painting over the last 33 years”, argues Tetro. He is proud of this “unique” relationship with the dealers: “other art forgers, they did it themselves and sold it themselves”. In his first trial, he claimed that thought he was painting emulations and hadn’t known his work would be sold as real, but now he is forthcoming about the fact he knew he was creating fakes. He initially sold directly to dealers – feigning a murky provenance about how the works belonged to a dead grandfather – before some dealers started asking him to create works for them. They knew that he could produce good forgeries (complete with accurate signatures, stamps, and patinas of age) and saw no problem in selling on his works. He was unbelievably prolific: he painted gouaches by Picasso, printed lithographs by Joan Miró and Dalí, and drew sketches by Chagall. “It was very difficult, with a lot of waste”, but he tells me proudly that he and his printer did “figure out a way of doing it”. By working with an old-school printer on a “one colour mealy press”, he was able to eradicate the tell-tale half tone dots that normally give a faked print away to any dealer who checked it over with a high-magnification jeweller’s loupe. He capitalised on the 1970s vogue for Lincoln in Dalivision – a limited edition colour lithograph by Salvador Dalí – and printed them by the dozen. Voilà: Tetro had found a way to make money.įrom 1972 to 1988 Tetro created scores of works. It wasn’t until he read Clifford Irving’s book Fake! about Elmyr de Hory – the master Hungarian forger – that Tetro lighted upon his career path: he created a Modigliani drawing that was based on a 1920s oil painting of a nude, and sold it to an unsuspecting, small-scale dealer. They wanted “bold, abstract paintings” they could buy cheaply “to match their sofa, their drapes”. Faking art hadn’t always been his plan: he tried to sell his reproductions of Rembrandts and Caravaggios, but no buyers were interested. There’s a fairy-tale element to his story: after a childhood in the small, rundown city of Fulton, New York – “not a nice city” – Tetro travelled to Los Angeles in the early 1970s, and made his name, and his fortune, through painting highly-skilled forgeries. His works have featured in exhibitions and auction houses across the globe (he tells me that one of his paintings was even “on the cover” of a catalogue for a major Salvador Dalí retrospective) and, at his trial in 1989, the LA District Attorney pronounced him “the single largest forger of art works in America”. In a career which lasted almost two decades before he was caught in 1988 – and which is the subject of his new memoir, Con/Artist – Tetro was an expert forger of works by old masters like Rembrandt and Caravaggio, alongside countless pieces by 20 th century artists including Marc Chagall, Henri Matisse, and Salvador Dalí. It would be bragging” – but many of his works are almost certainly still in unsuspecting museums. He won’t name any specific forgeries which are still in the art world masquerading as real – “it would just open up a can of worms. ![]() “All of my paintings are out there, and people still think they’re real”, the world-famous art forger Tony Tetro tells me when asked if he had seen any of his own works hanging in British galleries during a recent trip to London.
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