For as long as art has commanded high prices, it has attracted forgers. In 1945, Dutch artist Han van Meegeren was arrested and charged with selling a painting by Johannes Vermeer to Nazi leader Hermann Goring. Fearing a death sentence, he shocked the art world when he admitted that the painting was a forgery, one of more than a dozen he had produced over several decades.
The ingenious forger is thought to have tricked buyers out of the equivalent of more than $30 million. In today’s globalized art market, such astronomical sums regularly change hands — sometimes for a single work — and forgeries remain a lucrative source of income for unscrupulous artists and dealers. As prices for work by Arab artists have risen over the past decade, forgers have taken notice.