Geert Jan Jansen

Geert Jan Jansen (born 1943) is a Dutch painter and art forger who was captured 1994.

Geert Jan Jansen was born in Waalre in the Netherlands. His engineer father was fond of art and Jansen became an art student. He befriended a US art dealer Michel Podulke who ran a gallery "Mokum" in Amsterdam and organized art shows in his gallery.

Later Jansen opened his own galleries, "Jacob" and "Raam", but was not particularly successful. When his business went badly, he decided to sign posters of Karel Appel's lithographs and sell them as originals. Later he made his first Karel Appel forgery and sold it for 2.600 guilders. Thus encouraged, he sent another forgery to London; auction house sent a photograph to Appel, who stated that is was genuine. The gouache was sold at a record price.

In 1981, Dutch police were informed about a forged Bart van der Leck painting. They searched Jansen's house in Edam but found nothing. They also found 76 forged Appel lithographs in the ceiling of a local warehouse. Nobody pressed charges. Short of evidence, the general attorney cut a deal with Jansen; he would not be charged if he would not make forgeries for three years.

In 1988, Jansen released the next batch of Appel paintings. When they were found to be forgeries, gallery owners begun to blame each other. In June 1988, police confiscated hundreds of Appel forgeries at the MAT gallery in Amsterdam. The owner of the gallery said that he had bought 100 Appel forgeries from the "Tripple Tree Gallery", who had bought them from a dealer Henk Ernste in Paris. Ernste was later arrested but the case was settled with a 5.500.000 fine. During the furor, Jansen moved from the Netherlands to France with his mistress.

In March 1994, one "Jan van den Bergen" came to the auction house Karl & Faber in Munich. He claimed to be an art gallerist from Orleans and presented his business card. With him he had a Chagall drawing, Asger Jorn gouache and Karel Appel painting. The first two had written certificates of authenticity. He wanted them to be auctioned soon and left in a hurry.

Expert Sue Cubitt of the auction house had the works examined. The Chagall certificate had a misprint and she became suspicious. Kan Nieuwenhuizen, a representative of Karel Appel, contacted the artist who said that work was his but Cubitt was still suspicious. The Chagall committee in Paris verified that the certificate was a forgery and therefore the drawing too a forgery. The same thing happened with the Asger Jorn certificate. The auction house decided to withdraw all the works from sale because it could not guarantee their authenticity. Sue Cubitt decided to inform Ernst Scholler of the Stuttgart Fine Art and Antiquities squad.

When Sue Cubitt and the police checked other auction catalogues, they noticed that various other, similar works of art had been offered for sale and discovered Van den Bergen had offered these and other works of art for sale in various auction houses around Europe. When Schöller checked the Orleans gallery address, he found that it was a mailbox cover-up; there was just a wine bottle company at that address.

The trail of false addresses and mailbox companies led Schöller and the French police to a farm in La Chaux near Poitiers. Jansen - who had used the name Van den Bergen - and his associate were arrested May 6, 1994.

When police investigated the farm, they found 1600 forged artworks. Forged artists included Cocteau, Dufy, Ferdinand Erfman, Charles Eyck, Leo Gestel, Bart van der Leck, Matisse, Miro and the most popular target of forgery, Picasso.

French police still found little leads and even their appeal through media brought no reports of forgery. Six years later they had to look for themselves and checked the auction records of a "Drouot" gallery where Jansen had traded most of his forgeries through a number of different false names. They confiscated a number of suspicious paintings and threatened their buyers with charges of complicity in the crime if they did not press charges against Jansen.

Jansen went on trial in September 2000 in Orleans. By that time, the police had found thousands of forgeries. During the trial Jansen's lawyer demanded that the works not to be destroyed in case there were real works among them. However, most of the charges were later dropped - two of the buyers disappeared - and only two remained.

Eventually Jansen was sentenced to six months imprisonment and five additional years suspended sentence. He was also exiled from France for three years. All of his works were to be destroyed. Jansen planned to appeal.

External links

* [http://www.museum-security.org/00/170.html Museumsecurity.org - "Master Forger Geert Jan Jansen on trial in France"]
* [http://www.geertjanjansen.nl Geertjanjansen.nl - " The official website of Geert Jan Jansen]