The term Russian avant-garde
used in this film refers to works by artists from territories which are now
part of Ukraine, Russia and Belarus. Since the Russian invasion
of Ukraine, the terms Ukrainian or Soviet avant-garde are also used to refer
to works from this period. When you talk about Russian
art in the West today, art lovers think of two things - icon painting and Russian avant-garde. One of the problems of studying Russian avant-garde is that there are so many forgeries. There are significantly more fakes
than genuine items. Why do people create and sell forgeries? The answer is simple: to make money. And what amounts are we talking about? Millions of dollars. The problem is not just that Russian
avant-garde forgeries are being sold for millions of dollars, but that these
forgeries are turning up in museums, in exhibitions, and in art books. The value lies not in the painting itself,
paradoxically enough, but in the story that accompanies it. And the story of Leonid Zaks and his
collection is a story that needs to be told. I am grateful that my
father never really knew the extent of how he was duped. My name is James Butterwick,
and I am an art dealer. I specialise in Russian avant-garde art. I studied Russian at Bristol University. During that time we were sent
to the Soviet Union for six months, where I became fascinated with Russian art. I lost my heart not only to art
but to everything. My name is Konstantin Akinsha. I am an
art historian, curator, and journalist. I've been researching the Russian
avant-garde for a long time. Why is this movement so important?
It was a form of radical modernism which rejected all the standards and
foundations of the pre-existing art. In the early years of Soviet power,
avant-garde became more or less the official art movement of the new Russia. Long live the Socialist Revolution! The first museums of modern art
were set up. The state purchased thousands of works from Russian
avant-garde artists. But this celebration didn't last long. By the early 1930s Stalin had embraced
socialist realism. Avant-garde art was deemed
incomprehensible to working people and was removed from museum walls. Works by Malevich, Lissitzky, and Kandinsky
were consigned to storage, where they gathered dust for many years.
The artists themselves, were dismissed as "formalists", and had to keep quiet or face the very real danger
of political repression. By the mid-1930s avant-garde art was
banned and then it was just forgotten. And rediscovered only after war. In 1957, the West discovered [avant-garde
master Kazimir] Malevich after [Amsterdam’s] Stedelijk Museum
acquired some of his works. Gradually, this led to the emergence
of a new artistic trend. Demand began, but there was
very little supply. Diplomats travelling between the Soviet
Union and the West started bringing out paintings by avant-garde artists in their suitcases. Of course these paintings did not have a traceable history. "The painting was hidden
from the KGB all these years. We will show it to you exclusively. But please, don't tell anyone about it,
it's just for you. That's why the price is so special -
one million dollars." Instead of telling them to get lost,
people started buying. In 1996 my colleagues and I published
a story in the ARTNews magazine called "Fake: the betrayal of the Russian avant-garde." The fallout was massive: some auction houses even fired the heads
of their Russian art departments. But this didn't solve the problem. In the late 1990s, there was another
new wave of forgeries. You can say that a wave of forgeries has
flooded the whole world. My name is Andrey Vassiliev, I'm a retired psychiatrist and long-time
collector of paintings and drawings. I wrote a book about one particular painting, which was hailed as an outstanding
work by Malevich. It was exhibited in London, Amsterdam,
and elsewhere. It was put on sale for 22 million euros... It ended with me proving with absolute
mathematical precision that the work had been painted by an artist called Dzhagupova. It was sold in Leningrad for 14 roubles
and 40 kopecks. When this book was published, I realised
that I had developed a taste for this. I became really invested in doing all this. And that in my old age, I'd like to catch
somebody in the act. That's when I remembered the Leonid Zaks collection
of Russian avant-garde art and I started doing some research. I first heard about the Zaks collection from
Konstantin Akinsha and Andrey Vassiliev. From the very beginning, the story
seemed hard to believe. We wanted to understand how paintings of such dubious origin could be sold as genuine works. And how did they end up on the walls
of museums all around the world? Have you heard of the Zaks collection before? I think it's a very complicated story. I can only say that the paintings in the collection
attributed to Ivan Kliun’s paintings are, in my opinion, things of very dubious
quality and very dubious authorship. The oil paintings from this collection that
I know about are very dubious. The Zaks collection consists of 200 paintings by various Russian avant-garde artists, including Popova, Kliun, Puni, Lissitzky,
Chashnik, and others. Where is it located? In various places,
including several museums. One painting from the Zaks collection unexpectedly appears in a scene
from Christopher Nolan's “Oppenheimer”. A few months later, the same painting
turned up in another film, “The Wonderful Story of
Henry Sugar” by Wes Anderson. I'm looking at a painting from the collection
of the Minneapolis Institute of Art that is supposed to be Ivan Kliun,
it’s called The Clockmaker. I have serious doubts that Kliun was
the author of this work. He produced very few paintings in his
Cubo-Futuristic period, to which The Clockmaker should belong. We know all of them, there aren't
more than a dozen of them, in art museums across Russia. There is not a single title in the records
that could theoretically be associated with the Clockmaker. A picture like this must have been mentioned
in his notes at least once. But we don't see this. I'm Beatrice Gimpel, and I'm Swiss, and I'm partly
French through marriage, but I've lived here in London,
in the UK for 49 years, 49 very happy years. How did I meet Beatrice? She had a work from the Zaks collection. My parents, especially my father, were very interested in paintings
and sculpture, and from the mid-late sixties, early seventies on,
he bought extensively anything he liked and he did a lot of his homework,
inviting, talking to artists. So there was no doubt that what he bought
was always first class. And after he died, when we had
the first inheritance meetings, when one of the experts said that
a whole range of paintings were dubious, we were absolutely shocked and
we didn't believe it to start with. In an interview he gave
to the Kyiv magazine Antikvar, Leonid Zaks said he'd been very lucky because he met a Swiss gallerist called
Susanne Orlando, and through her, he had sold most of his art collection.
I should say that the Orlando gallery has long attracted the attention of those
tracking Russian avant-garde fakes. Many of the Russian artworks sold by this
gallery have raised significant doubts. When my father was blind after 2005, my mother had already started
suffering from vascular dementia. She continued buying mostly
from a gallery in Zurich. Suzanne Orlando, Orlando Gallery. And she was very proud of her ability
to discern what was good. She thought that Suzanne Hollander
was her friend and would sell her genuine, authentic art
that would hold its value. And when we then informed her
that this indeed was not the case and they were very dubious
and they had no value, she was very upset with us
because due to her illness she considered we were
destroying her life's work. She did not want to know
about any investigation. And it was only,
as I said, after she died that we really had free hands
to try and find out more. Do you think that they were duped on purpose? I think some people, yes. And some people no. I think probably a very good answer. This is always the problem is
how do you show intent? That is one of the difficulties, is to actually prove
that someone intended to defraud. James, I know you're the expert
of all these paintings that present such problems to me, among
which are Lissitzky paintings where I would really like
your opinion about this. I'll go and see them
with the greatest pleasure. It was the emergence of a painting
attributed to Lissitzky, with provenance connected to Mr. Zaks,
that inspired me and my colleagues - James Butterwick and Andrei Vassiliev -
to delve into this issue. So I'm currently sitting on Flight 317 London to Zurich to
go and look at the paintings which were willed to Béatrice by her parents. And my role really is to just see if the doubts
that Beatrice had are in any way justified. Tell me about the Lissitzky, how you acquired it, and what sort of emotions
it brings forth in you. So this was my grandfather, who
aquired it more than 20 years ago, and I've been fortunate enough that
the family lets me have it. And it's I mean, at the end of the day,
just a beautiful piece. I think the most important thing is that during my grandfather's life,
he believed it was a real, an original that he'd bought. And that's that's the most important thing
at the end of the day. Everybody would love it to be authentic,
but it doesn't take away from the style which does replicate Lissitzky’s. But it doesn't change your feeling, were this information to become known,
this wouldn't change your feelings regarding how you view the picture
and what emotions it gives to you? No, because the reaction between a person
and a painting is an emotional engagement you have with with those shapes,
those forms, those colors. Let's take Lissitzky. The world's leading expert
is Tatiana Goriatcheva. I know a Lissitzky when I see one. She is the world's leading expert.
And if I have a Lissitzky, I will consult with Tasha [Goriatcheva]. For me, the works of Lissitzky
are such elegant, chilly, and well-balanced art. There are never any mistakes in them. And here. Lines. They aren't entirely
accurate, they aren't straight. Here, the rectangle - unfortunately -
is not painted clearly. And here, this line is somehow blurred. Lissitzky chose an integrative model
between suprematism and constructivism. He called it his Proun - Project For
The Affirmation of The New. It was very important for him to get
his works to the West to show them there. For him, going to Germany meant integrating into the Western European
artistic process. Getting acquainted with Western artists.
Participating in various exhibitions. And exhibitions were also an opportunity
to sell his works. In 1924, Lissitzky had a solo exhibition in Berlin. It had many works from his new project,
Prouns, on display. For this exhibition, he compiled a list of 98 works. It is a handwritten list which is preserved
in the archives. Sometimes it specifies the technique.
But it is a list he made for himself, not a comprehensive museum record. He mentioned, for example,
'A New Project grey and yellow.' It's unclear what he was referring to.
But others are very easily identifiable. To some, Lissitzky even attached tiny sketches. In 1937, the Nazis held their infamous
exhibition of 'degenerate art'. Afterwards they destroyed some works and
put others up for auction. Becаuse Lissitzky was
a Jew and a Bolshevik, his works were valued at just four dollars. Many works were simply lost during the war and the bombing of Hannover and Dresden. As many as 80 works by Lissitzky may have vanished. It's a shame that these artists were initially
doomed to misunderstanding, then to oblivion and repression,
and finally - to this robbery. In other words, there was never a time
when they existed on their own, per se, as an aesthetic, intellectual, and philosophical phenomenon.
They were always under attack. Amazing discoveries of lost
paintings aren’t always fiction. Many lost masters have been found in attics,
old country houses and the dusty storerooms
of provincial museums. But what are we going to do with
the Lissitzky painting owned by Beatrice? The most important thing is
to understand the provenance. The evaluation of any work of art rests on three pillars. One pillar is provenance,
the history of the work's existence. The second pillar is the opinion of an art
expert who can visually determine if there are any inconsistencies
that raise doubts. And the third pillar is technical analysis. [PROVENANCE] Where did these works come from?
Who bought them? In which collections were they found?
Many years have passed. We are looking from a distance
of more than half a century. How did these works end up in the Zaks
collection? The story of Leonid Zaks
has a foundational document. This document is a root from which a tree
of unimaginable proportions has grown, bearing numerous fruits.
Perhaps now it will rot and crumble. That root is an article by Mikhail German
in the New Art World magazine. The article is entirely devoted
to the Zaks collection, and it’s filled with value judgments. I was interested only in objective facts that
could be verified using archival documents and news reports. Consequently, my method consisted
of studying, step by step, the claims made by the late Mikhail German. Unfortunately, he has now passed away. Leonid Zaks, an Israeli citizen, allegedly
inherited this collection from his American uncle in the 1990s.
The collection was developed in three stages. Once upon a time in
the city of Ekaterinoslav, which is now called Dnipro, there lived
a simple cobbler named Zalman Zaks. He had some kind of a shop where he worked with leather,
apparently producing shoes, bags and suitcases. But on top of all that,
for some unclear reasons, he developed a passion
for avant-garde art. This, in itself, is strange. Not many cobblers in the Russian Empire
collected avant-garde art. According to Zaks, his grandfather was
inspired and developed an interest in radical modernism visiting French and
Belgian banks in the city of Ekaterinoslav. Well, here's the thing, there was no such bank. It's not recorded anywhere in the annals
of Russian banking history. Allegedly the grandfather also met
a prominent businessman of Greek origin called Lambrakis, who adorned his
commercial premises, cafes and restaurants with works
by avant-garde artists. A Greek called Lambrakis had indeed
lived in Ekaterinoslav. He sold fizzy drinks out of a basement shop. He was also known for having a wife who
looked exactly like him, and a cat. Leonid Zaks made an important disclaimer.
Describing his grandfather's collection, he noted that unfortunately,
no documents confirming the origin
of the collection survived. So that’s the supposed story of how
the collection began. Zalman Zaks had three children. One of them, Moses Zaks, left to fight
in World War Two and disappeared. The second son, Isaac, showed
no interest in avant-garde art, and he so he fades from our story. That just leaves the daughter Anna,
or Nehama. According to Leonid Zaks,
she was a doctor, and crucially, between 1944 and 1945 she worked as a medic in the Belarusian
countryside around the towns of Lepiel, Ushachy and Chashniki, providing medical
assistance to the local peasantry. Allegedly, as a token of gratitude for
the medical help she provided, these peasants gave her works by Lissitzky,
Kliun, Exter, and Tatlin. Where did the peasants
get these works from? Lissitzky, Suetin, and Chashnik, had indeed
lived in Vitebsk in the early 1920s, working with Malevich. But I wouldn't
go as far as to say they were handing out their works
to the peasants. We had no evidence to work with -
only this absolutely fantastic story. However, I had the idea that it could be
verified, so I sent inquiries to the archives in these three towns, Lepiel, Chashniki,
and Ushachy, and received responses stating they had
no records about Ms Zaks. The best bit of all is the story
of Leonid Zaks’s uncle Moses. According to Mr Zaks's account, his uncle
Moses left for the front in 1941 and disappeared. He reappeared
in 1955, arriving in the USSR as an American businessman who helped Soviet companies procure supplies from the USA. Not many
Americans penetrated the Iron Curtain and crossed the borders
of the Soviet Union in 1955. Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs
responded to us quite quickly. They checked their archives and informed
us that no-one named Moses Zaks had crossed the border of the Soviet Union
[during that time]. But the story of Moses Zaks didn't end there. Moses Zaks allegedly exported
two containers worth of art with permission from the Soviet
customs authorities. Researching the circumstances of Zaks
allegedly exporting such a huge quantity of artworks, we conducted investigations
in the Moscow archives. There are simply no records relating
to Moses Zaks. What do we have? There is an important
document... a letter allegedly received by Mr Zaks. I will produce it now, because it is
from an important state institution, the National Museum of History
and Culture of Belarus. This letter has a reference number,
and it reads: "Dear Leonid [Zaks]! I hereby inform you
that in the 1980s the museum intended to acquire a part
of the Poleshko family collection. In connection with this, museum
employees held numerous consultations with the Poleshko family heirs. During these consultations, it was also
established that a part of the Poleshko family's collection
was sold to your relative, Anna Zaks. According to the museum records, this took place in Minsk and Vitebsk around 1945. I asked the museum whether they
issued this document. Here is the response I received from
its deputy director Nina Kolymago: "Such a letter has not been found
in the museum archive. We also inform you that the numbering
of outgoing letters for the year 2008 didn't use the letter M." This means that by all parameters,
this letter is fake. Documents of this kind were attached
to items exhibited in the Orlando gallery. We have examined the entire provenance
of the Zaks collection, and every element of this provenance is unsubstantiated;
rather, we can refute it. Here we have a classic provenance myth. Furthermore - and this is also important, considering current trends.
We need to do a chemical analysis. Zaks would present buyers with reports from a lab in Germany
confirming the pigments and other materials match those used in Lissitzky’s lifetime. But this alone isn't enough
to prove the painting is a genuine Lissitzky. So we are going to get some more analysis
done in an independent lab. [TECHNICAL ANALYSIS] I'm Dr Jileene Nadolny, I'm the director of the UK branch
of Art Discovery here in London, and we've been working with looking
at Russian avant-garde forgeries for the last 12 years since
the business was founded. My name is Denis and I'm
the director of Hephaestus Analytical, and we specialise in developing technologies
to eliminate forgery from the art market. So we hope that A.I becomes a scalable solution that together with connoisseurship,
together with chemical analysis, is able to eliminate the vast majority
of forgeries from the market. One of the problems that's commonly seen, the word forgery
gets tossed around all the time, and it makes it sound very cloak and dagger,
very criminal, very intentional. And sometimes it is. In other cases, it's not so criminal,
it's not so intentional. It's more a case of things get misattributed
because artists had followers, artists had students. On the market, that's often fitting them into
the biggest name possible. So anything that looks vaguely like a famous artist will be categorised
as that famous artist's work. And that's part of our job is to give information
that can help make those distinctions. So essentially what the machine
is able to do is find the digital fingerprint of an artist because it's looking for all of these
variables that are, and stay consistent throughout an artist's body of work, be it the brush size, the pressure
with which certain brushstrokes are applied, the colours that are used, the spacing
in between compositional elements, all of those things, the machine can see
and can analyse across the training set. So what we're going to do is use a high resolution image of the subject's
painting, run it through the machine, through the various algorithms that we have
that allow it to be compared to a body of 20 original bonefide Lissitzkys
that we know are real. If that painting fits inside
that cloud, inside that contour, we can say with 99% confidence
that the painting is authentic. If it's outside of that cloud,
we can be fairly confident that the painting is a forgery. So when looking at this painting,
one thing we're going to want to look at is the signature, because signatures
are always important in both real and authentic works, sometimes
even more than in authentic works. You want to have a signature
or an inscription because you want to lead the viewer
into thinking what you're looking at. So here it looks very much like
this signature was put on at the same time as the paint. It kind of intermingles
with the underlying paint. So you see a little bit of mixing going on. No signs at all that it’s later editions. Looking at the painting, we found
a whole range of pigments that would have been perfectly acceptable
for Lissitzky’s time, it was an oil paint,
so superficially the object looked good for that first level check. Now we should be able to get a result... and the results are in. That's interesting. Immediately with the UV light,
what we found down the microscope were these these fragments of fibers
embedded in the surface. Let's see if I can pull them up. Okay, so if you look here... When you're working with material, there's always environmental
things that interact with the paint. It's, you know, people, people clean their brushes or people's
jumpers have fuzzy, fuzzy fibers. Yeah. If it's just on the surface, fine. But actually where you don't see it here,
it's going under the paint. It's actually stuck in. There's
another little bunch. These are all going into the surface,
they’re like little earthworms sticking their heads up out of the ground
if you think of it that way. So these particular fibers that we found in
the painting were treated with substances that were developed in the early part
of the 20th century but were really first commercialised and brought onto the market
only after the World Wars. Being able to identify
them was right there, a very hard indicator that would even stand up
where we needed to take this to court. It's like looking at something that
should have been 18th century and there's a flat screen
TV in the background. It's not possible. You can't have it. It doesn't work. So by finding them in the substance, we know
this isn't an early 20th century painting. On the simplified graph it's quite clear
that the magenta line representing the subject painting is really far away
from the expected distribution of what we'd expect
from a authentic Lissitzky. Therefore, I'm afraid the painting is a forgery. I still look the same. Beautiful. First of all, shock, anger that the parents who were genuine enthusiastic collectors
had been duped like that. The BBC asked the lab to check out another
painting belonging to Beatrice's parents. It was also part of the Zaks collection
and it was also bought from the Orlando Gallery. It was said to be by Liubov Popova,
another famous Russian modern artist. But the lab concluded it was also a forgery. It would be nice to know that the people who duped willingly
or unwillingly my parents would own up to some sort of responsibility
of taking a lot of money from my parents and giving them something that is clearly not
what they purported it to be. So I would be happy for
for that to be cleared up. Just to be fair to the memory of my parents. Now, what can be done, and is
it worth going to court? We've asked for advice from Tim Maxwell. He is a leading British lawyer
in the area of art and culture. First of all, he reminded us that
the art market is largely unregulated, so the best to protect yourself from forgeries
is to always seek advice before a purchase. Then he also reminded us
of the authenticity guarantee, which means that if you buy something
that is proven to be a fake, you can return it to the seller and be refunded. But there is also the period of limitation:
six years in the UK or ten years in Switzerland. That means that after that time you cannot
be refunded, even if you bought a fake. There are also exemptions, such as fraud. If one is defrauded, then the
limitation period starts ticking only from the moment when the victim
discovers that they have been defrauded. But this is incredibly hard to prove. And the lawyers say that in cases like this, chances for
successful court action are rather low. Zaks is a lucky man. His collection
was sold without any problems, and then it was effectively forgotten. Zaks
disappeared from the art market. Our next step was to try and find Leonid Zaks. Its pointless to try to teach him something. He can only learn from a tragedy, catharsis. I think he won't talk to you because he knows perfectly well
what you want to discuss with him, and he wants to be able
to sleep at night. We have tried to contact Mr Zaks
in many different ways, Hi Anna, this is Grigor with the BBC. Thank you so much for forwarding
my message to your father. Unfortunately, he didn't respond to me. I'm in Israel now and I would
very much like to meet him. We called him, emailed him
and sent letters through a postal service. Now we are here in Israel and we
hope to meet him here in person. Various articles dedicated to the Zaks collection
called Mr Zaks a famous Israeli art collector. So if he is indeed famous,
he must be very easy to find. We searched through the Israeli
phonebooks and databases and found only five Leonid Zaks
in all possible spellings. Hello. I would like to talk to Leonid Zaks. Leonid Zaks – doesn’t ring a bell? Two of them are already dead. One is in a critical condition. Another one is in a nursing home. So there was only one left. We paid a visit to the address. Here's a letterbox with the name Zaks on it. Can I show you the picture just in case.
Do you recognise this man... No? You don't? It's not him? A woman opened the door and
told us that Leonid Zaks living there was not the person
we were looking for and definitely not an art collector. And Israel is the place where Mr Zaks vanishes. What is there to ask Zaks about? He is
unlikely to disclose details of his operation. It would be extremely intriguing, but more
suitable for an adventure novel than an art historical study. Two weeks before the film was due to go out,
I suddenly got a message from Leonid Zaks. He said he wanted to talk. Was this finally our chance
to get the real story of the Zaks collection? Hello. Hello, Leonid Isaakovich. Hello, hello. So you have questions for me? We have a whole list of questions for you. What’s happened to the rest of your collection? There’s been no coverage and no exhibitions
for a long time. Let me tell you. Most paintings are just stuck
in storage right now. Where is the collection now? I’d rather not go into this. Where is it? I’d like to avoid this and other questions,
including questions about money. The collection is stored in a European warehouse. How do you know that these paintings are
real, and the story behind them is true? I learnt that the paintings were genuine piece
by piece, as experts studied them. My late mother… I’ve always trusted her.
She was a very honest person. At the very end of her life,
she wrote it all down. What I told you about Moses Zaks
and the whole story. But neither the facts, the archival research,
or expert opinion support your account. Well, whom should I trust, a bunch
of strangers - or my own mother? What is written is no longer a legend,
it’s a fact. An incorrect fact, perhaps, but not just
a legend or a story. Would you like to apologise to Beatrice? Her family bought two paintings
that were from your collection. They cost 400,000 Swiss francs each. How much?! 400,000 Swiss francs each. That can’t be true! We’ve got records. I got a lot less than that. I’ve never seen
that kind of money in my life. As for the lady who bought those works and
can’t sell them… I feel sorry for her. I know what it’s like. But what can I do?
I can't do anything. I think she needs to do more research.
Because one expert says one thing, and the next one says something else. She asked all the leading experts and auction
houses. Nobody wanted to touch these works. Well, they weren’t my paintings then!
My paintings were irreproachable. So no apologies, no explanation, and no new light
on the Zaks affair. It's an important and simple lesson: Russian avant-garde art is a kind of a hot
potato that's difficult to handle, and it should be treated with great care. [Museums and galleries] should do their own research before exhibiting or putting
them on sale. They're in the danger zone. We know that several works from the Zaks collection are on the market
right now being offered to private clients. That means that somebody can be paying
millions of pounds for these works. So we're often asked why bother? What's the big deal? We're looking at overpriced pieces
of art that rich people buy. So what if you're wrong? Beyond that, it goes to the public interest as well. Public money is spent to acquire
things for museums. Students go to school to learn about objects
that are held up as authentic and representative of the historic
record of a particular culture. Public money is spent hunting down art forgeries and art forgers
when they do their work. So there's so much damage that's done
that's completely away from the lives of the rich people and wasting their money, as is the common
argument why it doesn't matter. It matters to us as a culture. This is our historical record. And if we allow this to happen,
we're destroying our own past. The Minneapolis Institute of Art owns
two paintings from the Zaks collection. One is said to be a work by the
Ukrainian artist Alexandra Ekster The other is a mysterious work called the
Clockmaker by the Russian artist Ivan Kliun. For a few months we have been exchanging
emails with the Minneapolis Institute. They told us they would conduct their
own investigation into Kliun’s painting. They didn’t share their results with the BBC. But the painting has now
been removed from display, and on the institute's website, the painting is now only
attributed to Ivan Kliun. The description now includes
information from the BBC that this painting comes
from the Zaks collection. And where previously the website said the Institute
have reviewed the painting's documentation, now it stresses that the data may not have been reviewed
and may be inaccurate or incomplete. This is the painting that appeared in the
background of two recent Hollywood films. We asked the creators of both “Oppenheimer”
and “The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar” if they would like to comment. They haven't responded. Another painting from the Zaks collection
attributed to the Ukrainian artist Alexandra Ekster is in the
Cleveland Museum of Art. Its curators expressed interest
in the results of our investigation but declined to comment. We have found out that one
more Zaks collection painting is in the possession of the
Albertina Museum in Vienna. Called Genoa, it was also attributed to Ekster. The museum has told us that they
conducted their own analysis. The painting is not on display. This brings us to the third and last step in proving if a painting is real,
expert opinion. When an artwork is put on sale, it is often accompanied by certification
from museum curators or art market experts. Many paintings from the Zaks collection are accompanied by certificates confirming
their authenticity. The BBC has obtained records showing that
both museum curators and art experts help Mr Zaks promote his collection. We tried to track some of them down. Patricia Railing graduated from The Sorbonne. She heads an organization called InCoRM, established in Paris in 2007. It gathers
under its umbrella all the experts with a questionable reputation. Their [stated] mission was to protect Russian
avant-garde from falsifications. They did a very good job. The BBC has tried to interview Mrs Railing and she agreed to meet me
at the pub in East Sussex. She came to the meeting with her adult son. I asked her about what InCoRM does
and who finances the research. She allowed me to record our conversation. It is a chamber of independent individuals, historians. It never was, never was InCoRM paying
for the art historians to do expertise. Never! And InCoRM did not issue authentication
or reports or an expertise. It was entirely up to the individual art historians... It's the international chamber of Russian
avant-garde, Russian modernism. We found that many articles from
the InCoRM members substituted provenance paperwork in the catalogs
of the Gallery Orlando in Zurich. Many of these articles accompanied
works from the Zaks collection. So I asked Mrs Railing about this
collection in more detail. What do you think of the so-called Zaks collection? The Zaks collection? Well, I know he's had
work done on some works. There's a collection of documents
by various Russian art historians... I have no reason to doubt their authority... You know, their art historical authority. But have you seen any of the works? I've seen a few, but only very few. And you found them to be genuine? I had no problem with them. By the end of our conversation,
after all my questions, Mrs Railings definition of InCoRM has changed. What is the status of InCoRM now? It's basically a website. With research information,
biographies of artists, and so on. How many members do you have now? Really... It's a website.
It's really a website... So the chamber itself is not... No. And why is that, may I ask? There's nothing... When we were a chamber and we were
working together, dialoguing and so on, there was a reason to be a chamber. But with all these accusations of fakes and
slander, nobody wanted to be engaged. A couple of weeks after our meeting InCoRM
released a statement on its website. It claimed that its members
had never given certificates of authenticity for works of art. Several months before the release of this
film, the BBC has again asked Mrs Railing for an on camera interview. But our requests were never answered. The InCoRM website disappeared from
the search engines and stopped working. Mrs Railing’s personal website still lists
her as the president of this organisation. But the link doesn't work. We have managed to interview Tatiana
Kotovich, an art historian from Belarus. She wrote several articles on the history
of the Zaks collection. In her articles she mentioned Moses Zaks, the alleged
founder of the collection. As we have already shown, there is no
evidence of this in the archives. We spoke via Zoom. Mrs Kotovich was in Vitebsk. One of the collections that we studied
in this film was the Zaks collection, which originates from Belarus... I have seen this collection, I know it. What records did Mr Zaks provide you with? He gave me expert opinions. Because
the provenance of these works requires serious research.
I am not an expert in this. Moreover, I told him right away that in Belarus, finding traces from the time
of the Second World War, from before the war, and after the war,
is practically impossible because our archives were partially destroyed. I wrote about these paintings
only based on the chemical analysis from Germany and
expert opinions of the art historians whose names mean something to me. However, you did not come to definite
conclusions or judgments about its authenticity and its provenance? No. No. That's very interesting because I have seen
how your articles, translated into English, French, and so on, were used to sell works
from the Zaks collection at auctions and galleries. That's news to me, the use of my name. Nowhere did I say that I guarantee that
a work was painted by the said artist. Do you understand? Anyone who reads
Russian can see that. But my conscience is clear because
money was never involved. My expertise was never involved. So I can only shrug my shoulders
about this situation. But we can't find all the copies of those
publications and destroy them, can we? And to say, this was a mistake, excuse us,
don't use my name and my articles, because you are manipulating them.
That's impossible. It's all on the internet. Exactly! I don't know what to do
about these articles. I have to think about this. How do I prove my moral integrity?
I don't know... I don't know... You know how Justice is often pictured
blindfolded? It’s the same here: there is a bandage or perhaps a palm
of a hand through which something like a bunch of dollars can be seen. It’s not just theft or fraud. At all stages, this affair is connected
to the cultural establishment, to museums and to the media. I hope the investigation we’ve conducted
is a small but significant step towards cleaning up the market
of Russian avant-garde. It is a first step. Fundamental research lies ahead, and the
problem we are facing is much larger than the history of one collection,
the collection of Leonid Zaks. I feel a sense of inevitability. I know, I have
known this for a long time. Everybody has known for a long time.
That's why I have a sense of fatality. Everybody has known for a long time.
That's why I have a sense of fatality. To me, it's all a bit dirty to me.
And unpleasant. But I'm used to all this. I've heard so many of these legends,
you won't believe how many. Of course we should fight this. Money...
I think money is the key here. But is money as important as reputation? I don't think so. Reputation is much more important.
