According to a large Berlin auction house, at least one forgery is placed on the table on average every day.

This not only gives an idea of ​​the amount of fake objects that are being smuggled into the market, but also means that many fakes are recognized, exposed and filtered out by reputable dealers.

When in-house experts check the authorship and thus authenticity, their procedure is based on material object security, provenance research and comparative style-critical analysis.

However, scammers often hand in their work just before the cut-off time.

Then there may not be enough time for intensive investigations and research.

Analyzes in art technology laboratories are particularly time-consuming.

Fakes can be unmasked there using scientific methods.

Such analyzes are only rarely commissioned by auction houses, even for valuable works, as Bassenge, Christie's, Grisebach, Karl & Faber, Ketterer and Van Ham confirm when asked.

They only commission laboratories if there are doubts about the authenticity or if questions that have arisen cannot be answered either by the auction house or by the art historians and restorers consulted.

Only Sotheby's has its own large laboratory, Orion Analytical.

However, this is not independent.

The fact that other auction houses rarely involve laboratories is understandable and surprising at the same time: the tests are time-consuming and sometimes cause high costs;

occasionally they also require an intervention in the substance of the work.

In some cases, however, it would have been better to go down the route of laboratory analysis.

After the Cologne Kunsthaus Lempertz had auctioned the oil painting "Red Picture with Horses", allegedly made in 1914 by Heinrich Campendonk, for almost 2.9 million euros in 2006, it turned out to be a forgery by Wolfgang Beltracchi.

The Doerner Institute in Munich and the Labor Art Analysis & Research in London confirmed that the picture is not genuine, since a pigment was found in the primer and other layers of paint that had only come onto the market after the work's alleged year of origin.

In addition, a historically incorrect adhesive and artificial signs of aging could be detected on the back stickers.

Lempertz had identified the picture as the original,

although there was no historical illustration and no solid evidence of provenance.

The auction house could have saved a lot of money, damage to its image and years of litigation if it had had the painting thoroughly examined before the auction.

The colleagues at the Van Ham auction house in Cologne would have been advised to carry out more detailed investigations.

After the catalog for the modern art auction was published, the company withdrew three paintings from the Hilmar Kopper collection and six works from the Gerhard Cromme collection in May, a few days before the auction.

Art historians and the police had pointed out that the works, which are said to have been created by the Russian avant-gardists Wassili Yermilow, Lyubov Popova and El Lissitzky, among others, could be forgeries.

In a press release, the auction house explained specifically about the works owned by Gerhard Cromme: “Due to the fact that this collection was delivered at short notice before it went to print, Van Ham had little time for extensive research.

However, museum exhibitions in which works are shown on loan do not offer ultimate security.

Because no museum independently carries out a material-technical examination of a loan.

In addition, museums are quite wrong when it comes to the question of the authenticity of items on loan.

This was shown by seven Max Ernst forgeries by Beltracchi, which were exhibited in at least nine international museums without the curators noticing anything.

Regarding the withdrawn images, Van Ham admitted "that none of the works should have been included in the catalog without the completion of the research and scientific study."

The auction house has thus more or less openly admitted that it has not fulfilled its duty of care.

In view of such examples, it should be recognized that