Culture Cops In Rome To Detect Forgeries

Press, Volume CX, Issue 32308, 28 May 1970, Page 13

Culture Cops In Rome To Detect Forgeries

/Newsweek Feature Service) ROME. The Italian fruit and vegetable wholesaler had bought a collection of French paintings— Monet, Degas, Cezanne, Renoir. A steal at $50,000, he congratulated himself. But the larceny, it turned out, was on him. As the story unfolded in all too familiar headlines here the other day, the masters’ works were all found to be brilliant works of forgery. Every last brushstroke of them was a fake. The ancient and discreet art of forging art is soaring to new heights these days with rising incomes and soaring prices for art works. And nowhere is the art practised more diligently than in Italy, where it has even acquired a special dictionary entry—“industria delle croste” (or “the old daub industry”). Rome authorities, though, think they may have come up with a counter-stratagem that will at last help stamp out the fakes. A new breed of ( specially trained police has ' been assigned to infiltrate the Roman art world to track down and apprehend the forgers. The squad of 11 culture i cops ■ have all spent nine months at Rome’s Judiciary 1 Police School listening to 1 lectures by art experts and , restorers. They have taken ’ countless field trips to galleries, museums and private collections.

They have been taught to recognise newly minted ancient coins and tell the real vintage of a Roman sculpture. They can spot key stylistic subtleties in old and modem paintings. Major modern artists have received special attention because they tend to be the most enthusiastically imitated. When Filippo de Pisis died in 1956, for instance, he left behind some 18,000 paintings. Since then, no thanks to divine intervention, that number has more than doubled. Nothing New

The country, moreover, is so rife with phony paintings bearing the signatures of Giorgio de Chirico that he is said to have routinely repudiated some paintings that he actually did paint. The “industria delle croste” is nothing new in Italy, of course. In ancient Rome, artisans were adept at faking Greek statuary for the collectors of that day. But, says Inspector General Italo Campenni, who co-ordi-nates crime fighting throughout Italy, “for the last seven or eight years there has been a considerable rise in the fake art business.” And it was his office that proposed establishing the culture cops.

The cops themselves—eight officers and three non-com-missioned officers all with many years in the force—were hand-picked for the assignment on the basis of evident interest and talent in art All, in fact, are amateur artists. The cops are enthusiastic about their new assignment. “I like this work because it has an international scope,” says a 35-year-old officer with 15 years on the force. Their work is cut out for them. For one big problem in fighting forgery is that few of those who have been duped are ever willing to admit it and help the police. “The art expert would never want it to be known that he had made a mistake,” says one top police official. “The private party who buys a fake doesn’t like to come to the police because the

work will be sequestered. He tries to hold on to it, insists that it is real and then tries to recover some of his loss. Everyone involved has an interest in keeping out of the public eye.” With the new agents on the job, however, Rome’s police hope to be able to grapple with forgery closer to its source, before everyone begins to cover up. The new policemen are attempting to slip quietly, in civilian clothes, into the art world. They frequent galleries, drop in on shows and make contact with the fringes of the illegal art traffic. If all goes well, another 50 culture cops will join the present 11 after they complete a special course that begins in October. “We should have a few hundred agents all over Italy in a few years,” a police official warns.