Supposed Matisse painting proves a forgery

www.tribnet.com By ALEXANDRA OLSON, Associated Press

CARACAS, Venezuela (February 1, 9:57 a.m. PST) - For more than two decades, Henri Matisse's "Odalisque in Red Pants" graced the walls of the Sofia Imber Contemporary Art Museum, helping make the museum the envy of the Latin American art world.

But for at least the past three years, the museum now says, the painting that hung in the Caracas museum wasn't a Matisse. It was a forgery.

The 1925 painting of a topless, raven-haired woman kneeling on a floor, worth about $3 million, was stolen as long as two years ago and replaced by an imitation, museum officials said this week.

Now authorities from Venezuela and four other nations are hunting for the original. And the scandal has embarrassed museum officials, who can't say how long the roughly 15,000 people who visit the museum each month have been admiring a fake Matisse.

"You can't just make the switch freely inside the museum," director Rita Salvestrini told a news conference Thursday. "There had to be inside complicity."

The painting is one of Matisse's "odalisques," paintings of Arab dancers in which he expressed his fascination with North African and Islamic culture.

The Sofia Imber museum purchased the painting from the Marlborough Gallery in New York in 1981 for more than $400,000. It had been on display ever since, except for a brief loan for a Spanish exhibition in 1997.

In November, Miami art collector Genaro Ambrosino, a Venezuela native, sent an e-mail to Salvestrini expressing indignation that he had heard the piece was up for sale.

Salvestrini quickly denied it. The painting was in the museum, she said. But on Dec. 1, experts discovered that the painting in the museum was a fake.

The Sotheby's auction house in Miami sent Salvestrini a copy of a document supposedly authorizing the painting's sale on behalf of museum founder Sofia Imber, who was forced to resign in 2001 as part of a people's "cultural revolution" by the government of President Hugo Chavez.

The document was signed by two museum employees who quit with Imber. Officials now believe it was forged.

There are notable differences between the original and the replica, which Salvestrini displayed at a news conference.

The fake has a dark shadow behind the dancer; the original doesn't. The genuine painting has seven green stripes in the lower right hand corner; the replica has six.

The museum has more than 4,000 other pieces, including other Matisses, Picassos and works by renowned Venezuelan kinetic sculptor Jesus Soto. Salvestrini insists there's no reason to suspect other pieces are fake, but she is having them examined anyway.

Investigators from Interpol, the FBI, Venezuela, Britain, Spain and France have pursued a vast array of leads, some suggesting the painting could have been stolen as far back as 1997.

The FBI suspects a Venezuelan woman who lived in Miami Beach, Fla., stored the painting at Fortress Art Storage in Miami, then smuggled it to Spain. The FBI has not named the woman.

French police are investigating leads that a collector brought it to France. The Caracas newspaper El Mundo has speculated the Matisse may have been swapped during the 1997 Spanish exhibition loan.

Wanda de Guebriant, a French Matisse expert, has told French police that a New York gallery owner told her in 2000 the painting was being offered for sale there. Investigators have refused to identify the gallery owner.

Guebriant told police that at the time she believed the one in New York must be a fake and that the original was in the Caracas museum.

In February 2001, she said, she was approached by French gallery owners saying they had been offered the painting.

"The people who knew that the piece was being circulated around the world never informed us," Salvestrini said. "The thing is, it didn't occur to anyone the piece could have been authentic."