Investigators such as Ebersman now abound in the art world, and many offer their services to collectors. Fees charged by these experts for an analysis can be reasonable; some charge less than $1,000. But collectors must also be willing to spend their own time to become familiar with an artist and his oeuvre. “This is really a situation of doing your homework,” Ebersman says.

TOP VIEW As art prices set new records, collectors are questioning the provenance of art and antiquities with increasing frequency. Experts urge collectors to thoroughly investigate their prospective purchases. New technologies may help streamline this process, but today these tools are mostly unavailable to individual collectors. A cottage industry of art experts has sprung up to assist in investigating questionable provenances, but even with their help, collectors still face a daunt-ing enemy in increasingly sophisticated forgers.

Most insurance company analysts stop short of label-ing a particular artwork a forgery, or burdening it with a questionable provenance. AXA, for example, will never tell a client that it believes a piece is not authentic. The company will simply decline to insure the piece, leaving the owner to guess why. “We believe we are right, but who knows?” Ebersman says. Informing a customer who has just spent money on an item that is actually of dubious value does not tend to generate a great amount of good will. While many of the large auction houses have return policies that allow a buyer to give back a piece of art that proves to be of questionable origin, they also impose strict statutes of limitations. Unfortunately for collectors, exposing a piece’s problematic provenance can take much longer than the few hours Acevedo spent researching his stolen Copley. “This can sometimes take months or even years to figure out,” he says.

James P. Wynne, a special agent with the FBI’s Major Theft Squad in New York, says most art investigations focus on theft or fraud. With­­­in those two categories, an investigation may focus on a number of scenarios, involving literally hundreds of shades of gray. After the Copley sale, both Acevedo and Stair spoke to Wynne, who was working on the case and discovered a trove of questionable art Kohn had squirreled away in his one-bedroom apart­ment,  in­­cluding an ori­g­in­al Giacometti bust. “Was he the thief, or a good-­faith purchaser?” asks Wynne. “I have my opin­­ion, but we are not done with our investigation yet.”

Lines of Defense
Although Old Masters paintings may always be difficult to adequately replicate, contemporary art, as well as prints and photographs, are much easier to fake. Even certificates of authenticity are no guarantee of a work’s veracity. In 2005, a collector purchased a drawing attributed to Picasso on bulk retailer Costco’s website for $40,000. The drawing included a certificate of authenticity signed by Picasso’s daughter. She later claimed the certificate was fake.

Today’s technology is helping investigators like Ebersman and Wynne track down problem art. At AXA, the company’s intranet computer network enables art specialists around the world to compare notes on various pieces and issue internal fraud alerts that are typically shared with law enforcement, as well as museums and trusted dealers. This eliminates the chance that a forged painting will be approved for coverage if another AXA office has previously rejected the piece. Ebersman says that over the past four years, one particular piece of questionable artwork (she declined to describe it in greater detail) has been brought to different AXA offices through various dealers in the hope that the company will eventually insure it. It apparently has amounted to a global search for a chink in AXA’s armor.

The Straus Center for Conservation at Harvard is currently testing the 32 paintings attributed to Pollock. Alex Matter discovered the “Matter Pollocks” among his late parents’ belongings in a storage shed. But the tools being used to test the paintings, including fractal geometry analysis, are not readily available to individual collectors. Indeed, Daron Manoogian, a spokesman for the Straus Center, says that even before the publicity generated by the Matter Pollocks, the institution was receiving an overabundance of inquiries from collectors asking it to authenticate their art. “We get a lot of calls from individual collectors, but we don’t really know what to tell them,” he says. “We’re a conservation and research lab, and we just can’t take on that volume. While we take on projects of different varieties, it’s usually something educational.”

Ultimately, however, experts and law enforcement officials such as Wynne remind collectors that they cannot realistically expect another person, or a piece of technology, to protect them. As with any investment, “You need to do your own due diligence, and know whom you are doing business with,” he says. While large auction houses such as Sotheby’s and Christie’s employ teams of staff to conduct routine checks and host public seminars to educate dilettantes and new collectors, forgeries continue to hamstring even the professionals. Last October, Sotheby’s pulled three Damien Hirst prints from an impending auction after suspicions arose about their authenticity. Smaller auction houses often do not possess the resources to prevent this type of problem, Stair says, further vexing collectors who frequent them. “Buying anywhere,” says Stair, who previously worked at Sotheby’s, “you have to be careful.”

Michelle Leder is the author of Financial Fine Print: Uncovering a Company’s True Value.

Additional Information
Provenance Checklist
Digital Detector