UP TO half of all limited edition prints on the market are fakes, experts say. The public are being persuaded to part with thousands of pounds for works worth no more than a £5 poster.

Hundreds of thousands of fake prints by artists such as Picasso, Chagall, Miró and Dalí have flooded the market, according to Ernst Schöller, the detective who heads the Stuttgart Art and Antiques Squad.

At present, Scotland Yard is investigating four major cases involving forgeries.

The fake art market has grown rapidly since the 1980s. Herr Schöller describes it as an epidemic. “I cannot emphasise the scale of the problem enough,” he said. “The art market is without frontiers. London is one of the main markets for art, so it is also a market for the illegal trade . . . I have seen a hundred times more fakes in the last few years.”

Vernon Rapley, head of Scotland Yard’s Art and Antiques Squad, said: “You start by looking at one or two fakes and discover, by going through sales records, that many more are involved. There are many hundreds circulating round London, and that’s a cautious estimate.”

The forgers play on the public’s confusion over the use of the phrase “original work of art”. A legitimate “original” print is one in which the artist personally created the image on a zinc plate, for example, and then supervised the printing of multiple copies, usually in a numbered edition rarely exceeding 300. The plate was then generally destroyed.

With many of the counterfeits, the forger has photographed an original work of art and photomechanically transferred the negative on to a lithographic plate to make thousands of copies. Computer technology is now producing fakes that are near-perfect. The majority of fake prints are imported from Poland, Russia and the former Czechoslovakia.

Mr Rapley says that such art-related crimes are now so extensive that every county should have its own specialist squad. Germany has three, in Stuttgart, Berlin and Munich, but Britain has only one.

Herr Schöller said: “The reason the extent of the epidemic is not widely known is lack of education. If you have no police who are trained to recognise fakes, then none will be identified and there will be no apparent problem.”

Police suspect that thousands of the fakes duping the art world were produced by Hilda Amiel, a grandmother from New York who was arrested in 1993 when she was discovered with 83,000 forged prints which could have brought £325 million. She had been producing fakes for eight years before she was caught. She died before her trial could begin.

Herr Schöller said: “Imagine how many millions were manufactured in those eight years if, on one day, police were able to seize 83,000 prints.”

His force recently seized 500 Mirós, Chagalls and Picassos after a man offered four prints to an auction house in Germany.

To anyone doubting the scale of the problem, he said: “Use your common sense. Ask yourself how you can be able to buy a Miró or Picasso print in every print dealer in every city all over the world. You have 100 specialists in London and you can buy three or four in each one. How can this be? Add to that, say, 300 dealers in New York, 200 in Rome, 500 in Paris, and so on. How can you buy so many prints made in limited editions of 60, 40 years ago, unless there are large numbers of fakes around?”

Sotheby’s will no longer touch Dalí prints later than 1930 because there are so many fakes in circulation. They sell Miró aquatints from the 1960s only if there is a proper provenance. Their experts are trained to look out for slight changes in the signatures, clumsy reproductions or prints on the wrong type of paper.

Richard Ellis, director of Trace, an organisation that liaises with police forces and the art world in combating art crime, said: “Fake prints, mass-produced or in limited editions with false signatures or bogus numbering, are a problem which is spreading across the whole art market.”

He added: “I would only want to buy a print from a reputable dealer I felt confident was an expert and selling it with some form of guarantee.”

Sharon Flescher, executive director of the International Foundation for Art Research, which is associated with the Art Loss Register of stolen art in London, said: “The greater availability of sales on the internet has exacerbated an already existing problem. There are honorable and scholarly dealers, and less than scrupulous ones.”

The foundation’s files include a fake print of Dalí’s iconic painting, The Discovery of America by Christopher Columbus. Dr Flescher said: “People are not necessarily careful when they make their purchase. There are many fake prints, as well as fake paintings, of Picasso, Dalí, Chagall and Miró in particular, both because they are famous and prolific.”

Miró prints which have been forged and sold for thousands of pounds to unsuspecting buyers include Pygmées sous la Lune, 1972, Prise à L’Hameçon, 1968, and Oda a Joan Miró, 1973.

Charm of a master forger

FEW people who knew her guessed that Hilda Amiel, a grandmother from Long Island, New York, masterminded the world’s largest art counterfeiting operation (Dalya Alberge writes).

She flooded the market with thousands of “limited edition” prints by Picasso, Chagall, Miró and Dalí, selling them to dealers worldwide through her company, Original Artworks.

When police raided her warehouse, they found forgeries that included 50,000 “Dalís” and 20,000 “Mirós”. They had been produced using the same colour printing process as any magazine.

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