Forgeries of Malevich and Kandinsky arrested in France

The case involves dealers who were already convicted several years ago of falsifying Russian avant-garde

More than a hundred works attributed to the brushes of Wassily Kandinsky, Kazimir Malevich and Natalia Goncharova were arrested in Paris. The owner, a businessman of Palestinian origin, Usman Khatib, values ​​them at more than €100 million.

As it turned out, he purchased these and hundreds of other “works” from the Israeli art dealer Itzhak Zarug in 2015. Three years later, a German court found him guilty of selling counterfeits of Russian avant-garde art and sentenced him to two years and eight months in prison, his partner Moez ben Hazaz to three years.

Did collector Usman Khatib know that he was buying a “pig in a poke”? At the very least I should have guessed. The fact is that art dealers Yitzhak Zarug and Moez ben Hazaz came under suspicion long before the verdict was passed. The hearing of the high-profile case began back in 2013, two years before Usman Khatib bought half of the Zaruga collection. We are talking about more than 800 works that are attributed to Russian avant-garde artists.

It is known that art dealers with a dubious reputation have a total of 1.8 thousand works at their disposal; they remain in their gallery. And from there they continued to disperse to different meetings, despite the accusations and the long-running case that was heard in Wiesbaden. Some of the fakes ended up in Paris.

Last year, Frankfurt’s Higher Regional Court ruled to allow bailiffs to confiscate Khatib’s collection. It was on this basis that a search was carried out in Paris, as a result of which the works were confiscated. However, some of them managed to get to auctions.

This story is probably just an episode in the case of Zarug and Hazaz, which suggests several things. Firstly, about the ever-increasing interest in the Russian avant-garde. Despite the dubiousness of the deal, Khatib agreed to it. Moreover, he firmly believes in the authenticity of the works he bought, or at least claims so. Be that as it may, the Palestinian, apparently, paid a round sum for the works, intending to sell them for even more. And he is not alone.

Secondly, the half-forgotten scandal with fakes from the collection of Zaroug and Hazaz reminds us that the European art market is overflowing with fakes, and even a court decision does not help to clear it. This is far from the only story about fakes of the Russian avant-garde. Suffice it to recall the story in Ghent, where hundreds of dubious works were discovered that Igor Toporovsky passed off as masterpieces of artists of the early twentieth century. Soon he will also be judged, but it is not a fact that the “works” from his collection were not distributed throughout Europe.

For reference: Natalya Goncharova is a descendant of Pushkin’s wife (the artist’s grandfather Mikhail Goncharov was the nephew of the poet’s wife), a famous avant-garde artist of the early twentieth century.