High-quality photocopiers lead to boom in fake Dalís

Finnish police said yesterday they were investigating a large-scale art fraud in which dozens of high-quality photocopies of works by artists such as Salvador Dalí were passed off as originals and sold for up to â,¬10 000 each.

A spokesperson for Helsinki police said their prime suspect was the organiser of an exhibition in the Finnish capital that claimed to display original works by Dalí and such other famous artists as Chagall, Rembrandt, Picasso and Andy Warhol.

Erkki-Juhani Minkkinen, an art dealer who has worked in the Helsinki trade for 20 years, was arrested on July 28 and held for 13 days on suspicion of fraud, forgery and copyright infringements.

Jyrki Seppala, a police spokesperson, said the city’s police had first began receiving phone calls about suspicious pictures — mainly etchings, sketches and graphics from Dalí’s later years — ”about one to two years ago”, but had been ”too busy” to investigate.

This June, when Minkkinen helped open an exhibition in commemoration of the artist’s 100th birthday in Figueres, near Barcelona, the police were deluged with calls from members of the public.

”They were saying these pic tures were too suspicious to be true,” Seppala said. ”There were many, many sets of complete works of Dalí such as The Divine Comedy and The Twelve Tribes of Israel. They were wondering how there were so many original Dalís in Finland?

”Everything was being marketed as originals. At first we thought 20% to 30% were fake, but now it looks like 70% to 80%.”

Seppala said some Dalís had been on sale for from â,¬1 900 to â,¬250 000, and one statue for â,¬450 000. ”We are not sure how many were bought in total, but have had 40 to 50 phone calls from people who have bought pictures there.”

The exhibition was closed by a police raid on June 28, beginning an investigation that now involves experts from across Europe.

Seppala said the police had moved after their museums and art expert visited the gallery and said he was ”very unsure” about the estimated 450 images. ”Now we have opened the works, we can see what they really are. Some are easy to see as fakes, while in some it is not so clear.”

Some pictures had simply been printed on new paper. ”If the sheet carries a watermark like a figure ‘8’ on its side, then it must have been made after 1980 and cannot be real.”

He added that rapidly improving technology was making it a lot easier to produce high-quality fakes. ”Most of them appear to be high-quality photocopies. You can buy a catalogue of 10 reproductions for â,¬1 600 and then ask â,¬8 000 for each copy. A colleague of mine even tried to do this at home using a computer, digital camera and good printer, just to prove how easy it was.”

Pictures of the alleged fakes have been sent to copyright experts in Paris, and the Finnish police have already received ”a lot of help” from their German counterparts.

”Ernst Schöller, who has been an art crimes specialist for 22 years, is already working in Stuttgart on a huge Dalí case,” Seppala said. ”We sent him photos and he could already tell they were fakes.”

Dalí died in 1989 of heart failure, leaving behind an extensive opus.

Minkkinen could not be reached for comment. Seppala said he had been released from custody but had been asked to surrender his passport. – Guardian Unlimited Â