When Kirsha Kaechele admitted in July 2024 that the Picasso paintings hanging in her Ladies Lounge at Hobart’s Museum of Old and New Art were forgeries she had painted herself, the confession read like performance art rather than fraud. The curator and conceptual artist – married to Mona’s billionaire owner David Walsh – had spent three years letting visitors admire the works, even fabricating a backstory involving a great-grandmother who summered with the Spanish master at a Swiss chateau. “I knew of a number of Picasso paintings I could borrow from friends,” Kaechele wrote on Mona’s blog, “but none of them were green, and I wished for the lounge to be monochrome.” The Picasso Administration was not amused. Neither, initially, were journalists from Guardian Australia.
That revelation, absurd as it appeared, was merely the most theatrical entry in a catalogue of art-world deception that has swelled dramatically in recent years. Between a $215m pan-European forgery network dismantled by Italian police in November 2024 and a New Jersey father-daughter duo who slipped more than 200 counterfeit works – including fakes attributed to Warhol, Banksy, and Picasso – into galleries and auction houses across New York between 2020 and 2025, the scale of the problem has shifted from embarrassing anecdote to systemic crisis.
The Faux-cassos of Hobart
The Mona episode deserves unpacking, not least because it collapses the boundaries between forgery, conceptual art, and institutional critique so completely that even seasoned observers struggle to categorise it.
Kaechele had created the Ladies Lounge five years earlier as a deliberately exclusionary space: only those who self-identified as women were admitted, male butlers served cocktails, and the walls displayed what appeared to be the museum’s most prized acquisitions. The controversy erupted in March 2024 when Jason Lau, a visitor from New South Wales, filed a discrimination lawsuit after being denied entry. Tasmania’s Civil and Administrative Tribunal agreed, ordering Mona to admit all genders within 28 days.
Kaechele’s response was characteristically inventive. She relocated the exhibition – Picassos and all – into a female toilet cubicle, exploiting the legal exemption that permits gender-restricted spaces in restrooms. The ruse held until journalists and the Picasso Administration began making enquiries. When confronted, Kaechele confessed: the paintings had been created nearly four years earlier, not by a long-dead master but by the curator and her manicurist’s niece. The works were subsequently removed, and in September 2024, the Supreme Court of Tasmania overturned the discrimination ruling, finding that the Ladies Lounge was legal because it promoted equal opportunity for a marginalised group.
“What made the Mona case so disorienting,” observed one art lawyer, “was that the forgeries were not concealed for financial gain in the traditional sense. They were instruments of a conceptual argument. The question of whether they constituted fraud was almost beside the point.”
An Industry Swimming in Fakes
The art market’s relationship with forgery is not new. What has changed is volume, sophistication, and the global reach of criminal networks.
Italian police confirmed in November 2024 that a pan-European operation had produced and sold more than 2,100 forged works attributed to Picasso, Banksy, Warhol, and other major names, with estimated value running to €215m. The Carabinieri art squad, working alongside the Pisa prosecutors’ office, arrested suspects across Italy, Spain, France, and Belgium. Provenance documents were traced through a string of Italian auction houses, revealing how convincingly fabricated paperwork can shepherd a fake from the back room to the sale floor.
A Guardian investigation into the Russian avant-garde market reported that as many as 95 percent of Russian modernist paintings currently in circulation may not be legitimate. Dealers described being shown warehouses stacked to the rafters with works bearing dubious attributions, their provenance stories thin fabrications designed to secure loans and auction placements. The BBC’s documentary The Zaks Affair: Anatomy of a Fake Collection, broadcast in March 2024, dissected one of the world’s largest collections of Russian and Ukrainian modernism – over 200 oil paintings attributed to El Lissitzky, Liubov Popova, and Alexandra Exter – and found growing suspicion that the provenance of the entire trove might be fabricated.
In the United States, the FBI uncovered what prosecutors described as a “prolific counterfeit art scheme” operated by Erwin Bankowski and his daughter Karolina Bankowska of New Jersey. Over five years, the pair sold more than 200 forgeries – including works presented as genuine Warhol prints and Banksy stencils – to galleries and collectors, generating at least $2m. Robert Rogal, owner of RoGallery in Long Island City, told the New York Post that Bankowska had approached him with a painting purporting to be by the optical artist Richard Anuszkiewicz, backed by a period-appropriate pegboard and bearing the artist’s distinctive block-letter signature. “She seemed very credible to me,” Rogal said. He later discovered the painting was fake after the FBI contacted him. The pair pleaded guilty and face up to 20 years in prison each.
The Science of Catching Fakes
The tools available to authenticators have improved considerably, but so has the ambition of forgers.
Forensic analysis remains the foundation. Pigment analysis can determine whether the materials in a painting were available during the artist’s lifetime; X-ray fluorescence reveals the elemental composition of underlying layers; carbon dating establishes the approximate age of organic materials. In the Tasmanian case, experts noted that the materials used in the supposed Picassos were inconsistent with those available during Pablo Picasso’s career – a classic red flag.
Increasingly, however, artificial intelligence is entering the fray. Art Recognition, a Switzerland-based company founded by Carina Popovici, has developed machine-learning models trained on databases of authenticated works. In 2024, the company scrutinised paintings attributed to Monet and Renoir listed on eBay and flagged 40 works with a “high probability” of being inauthentic. “Everything that we have analysed turns out to be not real art,” Popovici told the Guardian, describing a Monet listed for $599,000 as likely fake. “I am sure that this is just the tip of the iceberg.”
ArtDiscovery, a London- and New York-based firm, offers a proprietary system called Pictology, which isolates microscopic characteristics of brushwork – length, width, curvature, and the spatial relationships between compositional elements – to build a “visual fingerprint” of an artist’s technique. The company’s protocol combines scientific imaging (SEM-EDX, Raman spectroscopy, radiocarbon dating) with AI pattern analysis and traditional provenance research. A full authentication starts at approximately $13,500 and takes roughly four weeks.
Yet skepticism persists. Simon Gillespie, who runs an eponymous art authentication and restoration studio in London, has argued that AI should be treated as an aid rather than a replacement for human judgement. “I think of myself as a top-class surgeon,” he told ARTnews. “My subtlety of touch will always be required over AI.” The Centre for Art Law published a framework for responsible AI use in art authentication in November 2025, calling for transparency, accountability, and human-AI collaboration – principles designed to ensure that computational tools enhance rather than disrupt established practices.
The Van Gogh Precedent
One of the most significant institutional shifts in the fight against forgery has been the Van Gogh Museum’s decision to break with decades of convention. For fifty years, the Amsterdam institution – the world’s foremost authority on Van Gogh’s work – had generally avoided publicly discussing fakes, fearing that public pronouncements might encourage further fraud or embroil the museum in legal disputes.
In 2024, the museum reversed course, publishing scholarly research in The Burlington Magazine that openly identified three paintings attributed to Van Gogh as inauthentic. Among them was a painting of a peasant woman that had been authenticated by the museum before being sold by Christie’s in 2011 for nearly $1m. The research, co-written by Saskia van Oudheusden, Teio Meedendorp, and Louis van Tilborgh, downgraded works that had appeared in the definitive 1970 catalogue raisonné by Jacob-Baart de la Faille.
The decision sent a signal through the market: provenance, once established, is no longer immutable. Catalogues raisonnés, long treated as gospel, can be revised. And the institutions that underpin the art world’s trust architecture are increasingly willing to admit error.
What the Numbers Tell Us
The financial anatomy of art forgery is difficult to quantify, not least because so much of the market operates in private. But several data points illuminate the scale.
The global art market was valued at approximately $65bn in 2024, according to the Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report. When works by major names do surface legitimately – as when Picasso’s portrait of his mistress broke auction records – the sums involved underscore the incentive for forgery. Auction houses, galleries, and private dealers handle billions in annual transactions, with provenance documentation serving as the primary mechanism of trust. When that documentation fails – or is fabricated – the consequences ripple outward.
Italy’s 2024 police operation alone seized works with an estimated combined value of €215m. The Bankowski-Bankowska scheme in the United States generated at least $2m over five years. Canada’s largest art fraud investigation, centred on more than 1,500 forged works attributed to the Anishinaabe artist Norval Morrisseau, resulted in multiple convictions and is the subject of the documentary There Are No Fakes.
These are not marginal cases. They involve established auction houses – Bonhams, Phillips, and Freeman’s were among those targeted in the New Jersey scheme – and demonstrate that even experienced dealers and institutions can be deceived.
The Trust Deficit
What ultimately makes the proliferation of fakes so damaging is not the direct financial loss, though that can be substantial – recent high-profile art thefts, such as the shock theft of two masterpieces from Antwerp Museum, demonstrate how quickly cultural heritage can be compromised. It is the corrosion of trust. The art market functions on a fragile consensus: that a work attributed to a particular artist is, in fact, by that artist. When that consensus breaks down – when a painting displayed in a museum for three years turns out to be painted by the curator, when a Warhol print sold through a reputable gallery is traced to a workshop in Poland – confidence in the entire system erodes.
For collectors, the lesson is clear. Provenance research, once treated as a formality, must be rigorous and continuous. Multiple expert opinions should be sought before any acquisition of significant value. And the possibility of error, even from the most authoritative sources, must be factored into every judgement.
For galleries and museums, the stakes are higher still. The reputational damage of displaying a forgery – even one created with conceptual intent, as in the Mona case – can persist for years. The financial consequences, including the cost of authentication, legal fees, and restoration of credibility, can be severe.
And for the art world at large, the race between forger and authenticator shows no sign of slowing. AI is accelerating the battle, but it is not resolving it. Every advance in detection is met with an equal advance in fabrication. The line between genius and deception, between masterpiece and imitation, remains as thin as it has ever been – and the effort required to police it is growing more demanding by the day.
